A Quarter for a Kiss Read online

  Abraham put his hand over the phone.

  “I have a man in Coral Bay,” he said. “He’ll be there in one minute.”

  Sure enough, though we had no sound feed, after about a minute we could see a police car racing up the driveway. The two men were just coming back out of the house when the car screeched to a stop and the cop jumped out. Unarmed, the men saw what was happening and ran back inside.

  Ten seconds later, the house exploded.

  This time, we didn’t hear a thing. We simply watched in silence as the structure blew into a million pieces.

  Flames shot toward the heavens and debris fell down to the ground like rain.

  Forty-Four

  The rest of the afternoon was a blur.

  Between the Coast Guard, the FBI, and the local police, the command center became a frenzied hub of activity. Outside, reporters and curious onlookers swarmed around like a throng. At the center of things, Tom and I were forced to recount our stories from the beginning, numerous times. Across the room agents ran the video and satellite loops over and over, deconstructing all that had happened. After a while I found myself numbed to the horrible sequence of events in the images that filled the screen.

  Somehow, the thought that Dianne and her family had been the target of an outside force seemed to come as a great relief to Holt and his men. The explosion at the house only served to confirm that the explosion on the boat had not been caused by them. They were at a loss, however, as to how Rushkin or his agents had managed to pull it off. No evidence had been found yet of a detonation device at either location.

  It helped matters enormously, of course, that the arrest of Merveaux at the storage facility in St. Thomas went off without a hitch. He and his bodyguard had been caught without a single shot fired, just as they were opening the door to take possession of a large storage room packed wall-to-wall with priceless artifacts.

  The fire was eventually put out at Dianne’s estate, though the entire home had been demolished. FBI agents didn’t find any remains, but I had a feeling fragments of the two men who had let greed be their demise would show up in time. There were plenty of remains at the Enigma, however, and all of the blood made for a grisly frenzy of underwater activity until the Coast Guard was able to salvage what was left.

  Back at the estate, the helicopter had been searched and was found to contain a masterpiece that had been missing for many years, a Goya that had once disappeared from a Paris museum. The agents could only speculate as to what other valuable pieces might have been destroyed in the explosion. Abraham was the most devastated about that, because it was now obvious that if Interpol had let him raid the home when he had wanted to, he could have saved the art, arrested the people, and possibly stopped the senseless death of all who had been killed.

  In the recapping of the events of the day for the hundredth time, I finally came to realize that the only person missing from this scenario was Zach. Unless he had been inside the house where we couldn’t see him, he obviously hadn’t been killed in either explosion.

  Was he the one who planted the deadly explosives? Had he been hired by Rushkin to kill Dianne? As I thought about that, an uneasy feeling settled in around my heart. We hadn’t seen Jodi since she left Miss Lucy’s with him the night before. Though there was a good chance she was now merely off working at the dig site or shopping in St. Thomas, oblivious to all of this, there was also a chance she was somewhere else, either in danger—or in cahoots with him. I tried to reach her on the phone, but she didn’t answer her cell or at the house. I told Abraham, who alerted the FBI and put his own men on the lookout for her just in case.

  Tom and I were finally released late in the afternoon. The first thing we did was call Chris Fisher, the PI in St. Thomas, and let her know that the men who beat her up had died in the explosion. She surprised me by responding with a sharp laugh.

  “So what you’re saying is they’re fish bait now?” she asked.

  “Uh, basically, yes.”

  “Well, thank you for calling and telling me, Callie,” she said emphatically, sounding greatly relieved. “Now I can rest easy. Hey, you live by the sword, you die by the sword, that’s what I always say.”

  After I hung up the phone, we got in the car and drove to Stella’s house, hoping to find Jodi there in person or, at the very least, some evidence of where she might have gone. It didn’t look to me as if she had come home at all the night before. Her room seemed the same to me as it was when I slipped into her bathroom to borrow her shampoo.

  We were finally able to reach Sandy on the phone, but she said neither Larry, Zach, nor Jodi had shown up at the dig site that day. Fawn was even a bit annoyed, she said, because Jodi had promised to take her to dinner tonight at the fancy restaurant Asolare.

  I was a bit surprised that Sandy hadn’t heard anything about what had happened.

  “A lot’s been going on today,” I said. “You don’t know about any of it?”

  “We were using some new equipment at the site that was very RF sensitive,” she said. “We had to keep all cell phones and radios turned off.”

  As simply as I could, I explained the events that had taken place. Sandy sounded stunned at the news of Larry’s death and Zach’s disappearance, but when I told her about the theft of artifacts from SPICE, her shock turned to anger.

  I assured her that the artifacts were safe and sound, but she was furious, telling me it must have been her fault they were stolen in the first place.

  “Larry tricked me,” she cried. “He said he needed access to the artifacts because he had made a mistake on some insurance tags and he needed to correct them. I didn’t want him to get in trouble with his company, so I told him where they were stored, and I loaned him the key. I even gave him the security code so he wouldn’t set off the alarm. Callie, he was my friend—it never dawned on me he was going over there to steal!”

  “He and his mother tricked a lot of people over the years,” I said. “Don’t feel bad—you were up against some real pros.”

  Later, as I thought about it, that’s what was preventing the whole puzzle from fitting together neatly in my mind. As Tom and I drove across the island toward the remains of the Streeps’ estate on the East End, we talked it through together. The part that was bothering me, I said, was that Dianne was such a pro, and yet she had made some fundamental mistakes today that had ended up costing her her life.

  “The problem with Dianne,” Tom said, “was that she possessed the one quality an NSA agent should never have.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The need for recognition, for external validation. The life of an NSA cryptologist is one of quiet, anonymous service. Conversely, here you have a woman who seems to want the world in on her secrets. She names her dogs Alice, Bob, and Eve after well-known encryption terms. She calls her boat the Enigma, for goodness’ sake, after one of the single greatest cryptographic accomplishments of all time. Why would you leave yourself open for questions by plastering the name of the thing on the side of your boat? Callie, that would be like you going around with a boat named ‘Charity Sleuth’ or something.”

  I giggled. “‘Charity Sleuth’?”

  “You know what I mean. Something that practically advertises your area of expertise when your very job depends on the fact that people not know what you do for a living. It’s nuts.”

  “I see what you mean.”

  As we drove I thought about what Tom had said, and I realized that one of the things I loved most about him was his complete humility, his very anonymity. It dawned on me that not only was his full-time job one where he received no acclaim, his foundation took that a step further, doing good for countless others without accepting a shred of recognition for himself.

  “You’re going to have to call Eli and tell him,” Tom said, interrupting my thoughts. “He needs to know Dianne is dead.”

  “I’ll do it in a little while. Right now I just want to get to the site of the explosion and have a look around.”<
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  Though we were exhausted, Tom and I both felt the need to connect in person with the site of today’s destruction. When we reached the familiar driveway out on Turtle Point, we turned onto it and headed up the long and winding road to the mountaintop estate. Concerned for Tom’s injured hands, I had offered to drive, but he insisted that he was fine. Now he steered up the difficult drive with his fingertips, making it even scarier than it needed to be!

  This place had been the focus of our entire investigation, and somehow going there in person felt incredibly surreal. As we parked the car and got out, the pungent smell of burning wood filled our nostrils. Though the fire was out, some smoke still wafted from the smoldering remains.

  There were a few agents still there working the scene. Police tape had been strung up around most of it, but they let us walk the perimeter. As we did, we admired the beauty and tranquility of the place, high above the Caribbean sea, the lush greenery a marked contrast to the scattered rubble.

  Tom and I walked down to the tennis court and stood at the tape line, looking in at the helicopter. The agents had removed the seats and stripped out most of the interior, probably hoping to find a secret storage compartment with more art in it or something. I asked Tom where he thought they had been intending to fly. He said that they probably had some prearranged rendezvous point on another island.

  “This machine could probably go two or three hundred miles before it would run out of gas. That would give them a lot of islands to choose from, all the way from the Dominican Republic to Guadeloupe. I would imagine Dianne was planning to meet them somewhere out there on her boat.”

  I tried to picture it—the two men aloft in this helicopter, Dianne and her goons on the Enigma—and then one thought struck me. What about the dogs?

  “Tom, where were the three dogs in all of this?” I asked.

  “I’m sure they blew up with the house.”

  I shook my head.

  “No, that doesn’t add up. If the dogs were here while Larry and Earl were trying to make their escape, that would mean they were planning on taking them on the helicopter with them. Wouldn’t the dogs have traveled better aboard the Enigma than on this little helicopter?”

  He thought about it.

  “Yeah, I suppose so. With that big painting in the backseat, the dogs wouldn’t have fit in there at all.”

  “So why didn’t Dianne have the dogs with her when she went to the dock? That would have been more logical. And you know she wasn’t going to just leave them behind somewhere.”

  We puzzled over the dog issue while strolling the rest of the way around the tennis court. Just a ways beyond it was a bank of shrubs, and then about 20 feet past that was the cliff where Tom had climbed up to position the transmitter box the night his hands were injured. We walked to the edge there now, looking down at the treacherous rocks that led all the way to the beach.

  “My hands hurt just looking at it,” I said, picturing him sliding down the gnarled rope. A piece of that rope still remained, caught in the crook of a rock, blowing back and forth gently in the breeze.

  “It was actually very exciting,” Tom admitted. “At least the part coming up. I never had delusions of being a field agent, but I have to say that that was some wild adrenaline kick as I was doing it!”

  He showed me where he had climbed over the top, and then he reenacted the steps he had taken to put the box in place.

  “I thought I could just put it here near the edge, but then I realized it wouldn’t be close enough to the house. I figured they had motion sensors there, so I went this way. I whacked my foot against this thing and almost dropped the box. In the end I put it over there.”

  I looked down at the thing he had tripped on, which was an odd sort of vent pipe that shot up from the ground about a foot high. Tucked discreetly behind a small bush, it was no wonder he hadn’t seen it in the dark.

  We were able to get closer to the house on this side, though the sight of it gave me a shudder. Thinking of the people who were buried somewhere among the burning pile of wood and materials made my skin crawl. We were positioned outside of where the laundry room must have been because a washing machine was still there, mostly intact, with light bulbs and laundry detergent spilled out nearby.

  “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a box of clear plastic tubular-looking things all over the ground.

  “UV Sleeves,” Tom said, tilting his head to read the side of the box. “We use those sometimes with computers. They keep the ultraviolet rays from coming out of fluorescent lights. I think museums use them too, to protect the art and artifacts.”

  We walked all the way around the back of the house, pausing to speak to two of the agents before going to the car. Our visit hadn’t accomplished anything, really, but there was a certain sad satisfaction at finally having access to a place we had previously been able to view only from afar.

  Still worried about Jodi, I tried the round of phone numbers again, all to no avail. Tom and I decided to go into town and visit some of her favorite haunts, to see if anyone had spotted her either last night or today. I called Sandy to get a list of places we should check, and she said that she and Fawn had already been thinking of doing the same thing.

  “Good. Let’s divide and conquer,” I said, not exactly eager to go barhopping. Sandy suggested that Tom and I start with Coral Bay, including a place called Skinny Legs, and another known as Shipwreck Landing. She and Fawn would go into Cruz Bay and check the places there.

  We didn’t have to work very hard at it. At the Shipwreck, a pleasant outdoor bar and restaurant overlooking the bay, the waitress knew Jodi well, and she said Jodi had been in last night around midnight with Zach and Larry and another woman who was new around town. I realized when they left Miss Lucy’s, they must have come straight here.

  “They stayed about half an hour,” the waitress told us, glancing back toward the bar, “but Larry’s date got so drunk they finally left.”

  “She seemed pretty far gone when they left Miss Lucy’s,” I told her.

  “Well, by the time they left here, she was so sloshed they practically had to carry her out.”

  “Any idea where they went next?”

  “Not a clue. Though I doubt they hit any other bars. The woman was too far gone for that.”

  I thanked her profusely for her help, and then I went back into the car and asked Tom to drive to the command center in town. An idea was bubbling just under the surface for me, and I wanted to see a replay of some of the video from today. On the way I dialed Sandy and told her that Jodi had been at the Shipwreck Landing around midnight, stayed for about half an hour, and then left.

  “You should keep asking around,” I said. “But I don’t think anyone else will have seen her.”

  Fortunately, the lights were still on when we arrived at the command center. Tom and I parked and went inside to find the technician and one other agent there, the one they called Craig. They said that the case agent, Holt, had gone over to St. Thomas to follow up on the action there.

  Much to my surprise, the technician stood and reintroduced himself to me and then to Tom, insisting that we call him by his nickname, Rig, so named because “if I got a coupla wires, I can rig anything.”

  He looked reverentially at Tom.

  “Hey, listen, man,” Rig added, “I’m sorry if I was short with you this morning. If I had known who you were and all…”

  “No problem,” Tom replied, obviously embarrassed.

  “I’m, like, a huge fan of your work. Bennett’s Theorem is so elegant, so intricately calculated and yet so simplistic in its algebraic design. It has saved me hours of work, I just can’t tell you.”

  “Oh, well, thank you,” Tom said modestly.

  I was quiet for a moment, caught up in the realization that Tom actually had a theorem named after him. Other than keeping a perfectly balanced checkbook, mathematics and I didn’t really get along. As this FBI agent nearly gushed in Tom’s presence, I was reminded of my b
oyfriend’s stature in certain circles. I was very glad this agent was a fan, in particular, since that might make him more willing to help us out.

  “Rig, we need to see some of the video from today, if we can,” I said, collecting my thoughts. “Really, starting from the beginning.”

  “No problem,” he said, popping a CD into a drive. “I just finished putting everything on disk in chronological order.”

  He sat at a computer and brought it up onto the screen while Tom and I grabbed some chairs and positioned ourselves on either side of him. I had him play the available images of Dianne at Virgin Gorda, from when she got off the ferry until she met Merveaux on the beach.

  “There,” I said finally. “Stop there.”

  He pressed a key and the image froze, showing Dianne standing there on the beach, scanning the horizon. She was looking almost directly into the camera that the FBI had had hidden on the boat.

  “Right there,” I said. “It seems like she’s looking around to make sure they aren’t being observed. But what if, instead, she’s really looking around to make sure that they are being observed?”

  “You’ve lost me,” Tom said.

  “Think about it. Hit play. Watch what she does next.”

  On the screen in front of us, Dianne and Merveaux walked to a rock and sat, facing the water.

  “For a women who knows all about security protection, she isn’t being very savvy. She knows she’s in the sight line of at least one boat. She knows she is sitting still instead of moving around. I think she knew we were there. More than that, I think she wanted us there.”

  “You’re saying we were set up?” Rig asked.

  “Play the conversation,” I told him.

  We listened to the audio between Dianne and Merveaux—crystal clear except when she told him the drop points.

  “The first will be at th…ist,” she said, and then later, “the drop will be at F twel…ake’s Pond.”

  “Watch what she does when she says those things,” I told them. “Play it again.”