Glass House (22 page)

Megan considered that. “Ironic, wouldn’t you
say?”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

“Done.”

Finn smiled, but Megan didn’t give him the
chance to enjoy any feeling of victory. They turned into the
campus, walking down streets that began to curve and cut between
the academic halls. Megan was watching the students again,
knapsacks on their backs, a bouncing purpose in their steps.

“Tell me about Chilcott.”

“I don’t know where to start,” Finn replied.
His voice was calm and level. He wasn’t worried or scared or
nervous. Nothing like that. He simply seemed at a loss.

“You said you were more than acquaintances
and less than friends,” Megan prompted. “How well do you know
him?”

“We were on the same block at Hutch. He was
there for a while before I was. I don’t know how long, couple years
at least, I suppose. Our times overlapped.” Finn was studying the
few people passing around them. He was out of the law school but
still on his home ground, and he was staying on watch for familiar
faces. “Two cells apart for part of the time, then across the block
floor for his last two months.”

“What do you know about him?”

“What do you want to know?”

“He assaulted someone?”

“At least once. The one that put him there.
If you believe what he said, there were a half dozen more on top of
it, without convictions. Maybe more than just assault, too, on two
or three occasions.”

“What do you know about the conviction?”

“Yard bragging, mostly. Chilcott told the
story a lot of times, about this girlfriend he had. He used to call
her a pretty little thing.
His
pretty little thing.”

Finn stopped checking the faces around him
just long enough to look at Megan’s. “Not too proper,” he said.
“But that’s the way Sam is. He wasn’t out to win charm awards, Ms.
Davis.”

“Megan,” she replied automatically.

Finn didn’t seem to hear it. “Anyway, Sam,
he says he was breaking it off with this girl, and he wanted
something back from her.”

“Something back?”

“A gift he’d given her, if you can believe
it.”

“What kind of gift?” Megan was thinking of
Paul McCallum’s questions about gifts Chilcott supposedly reclaimed
on Waldoch’s orders.

“Jewelry,” Finn said. “I can’t remember
what. Can’t even remember if he ever told us, though I doubt it.
The point of his story wasn’t that he was a soft-touch guy who gave
pretty little things to his pretty little thing, after all. It was
how he beat her up when she wouldn’t give it back.”

“Beat her up? Bad?”

“Bad enough to put her in a hospital for two
or three days. Bad enough to put him in a prison for a few
years.”

“This girlfriend have a name?”

“It’s a fair guess she did,” Finn replied,
“but it sure isn’t one I can recall.”

“Are you sure it
was
his
girlfriend?”

“I’m not sure of anything. Prisons aren’t
really places that are full of fact-checking on what’s said in the
yard while you’re shooting games of HORSE and killing time with
bullshit talk. You just listen to each other. You’re listening and
talking and getting through another day.”

“You say he talked about other assaults.
Maybe more than assaults, too. Tell me about those.”

“Not much to tell. The girlfriend was the
only one who came with specifics. I heard those a bunch, but the
rest was just whispers and comments. Sometimes by Sam, sometimes by
others.”

“Whispers of what?” Megan asked.

“Of beating other people up, too. Women
mainly, as I remember it. Sam had a reputation of sorts, you see. A
couple, actually. First, that he was cold as they come. Not in a
distant or mean way, just in an uncaring way.”

“And second?”

“That he had a talent for beating women.
Only he didn’t call it that. He always said it was a knack for
teaching lessons to pieces of ass.”

Hearing Finn’s statement, Megan hated
everything about Samuel Chilcott and, even by unproven connection
and implication, about Jeremy Waldoch. What Finn was saying could
be untrue. Any piece of the story could have been untrue, for that
matter – the prison whispers and comments, Finn’s reporting of
Chilcott’s words, McCallum’s questions about Chilcott’s
involvement. Any part could have been a lie that made it all
irrelevant to Waldoch. But she hated him all the same in that
moment.

“Was he telling the truth?” she asked.
“About the beatings?”

Finn answered with hesitating. “I thought
so,” he said. “I think everyone who heard it thought so, too.
Everyone I knew on that block expected Sam Chilcott to be a repeat
visitor to Hutch. Two of them thought it so much they called him
Slammer Sam one time. But only one time. Slammer Sam beat the piss
out of them, if you’ll excuse the term. Not in any way you could
see, though. He was good that way.”

“How’d he get out, if he’s doing that
inside?”

Finn smiled. “They only add the time if they
know,” he said. “And no one knew.”

Megan was trying to work all the timelines
in her head. Kathy Landry’s attorney suggested Chilcott went to
Hutch because he assaulted a former DMW employee, a woman. That
woman was an unknown, a figure Megan heard about only in the
deposition, in the vaguest terms.

After that assault, Chilcott went to Hutch
for a few years. Finn knew him there and heard the story about the
girl Chilcott beat up. Then, if McCallum’s questions were right,
Chilcott got out and, at some point, went to Landry and demanded a
return of the earrings Waldoch gave her.

In between the first woman and Kathy Landry
was Lora Alexander, the plaintiff in the earlier case Megan
handled. Alexander kept her jewelry for a time but lost her case.
She also ended up as a mention by Landry’s counsel, which meant she
lost her life on top of it.

And where was Chilcott in all that?

“Lora Alexander,” Megan said. She’d been
staring at the ground without realizing it. She looked up at
Finn.

“Nice name,” he said. “No idea who she
is.”

“Then you wouldn’t know if Samuel Chilcott
happens to know who she is, either.”

“No clue.”

“Did he ever tell you about his work? What
he did before prison?”

“Nothing.”

“No names. No jobs. No,
I used to crack
heads for…
?”

“None of the above.” Finn was shaking his
head.

“He ever mention Jeremy Waldoch?”

“I don’t remember it. I wasn’t taking notes,
though, so it’s possible, I guess.”

“I need to find Chilcott,” Megan said then.
“And I’m afraid you’re the one who can help me. Can you do
that?”

Finn wasn’t looking for familiar faces
anymore. They had looped around a block and started back, and the
people were mainly gone. Those who passed them now went unnoticed
as he gave an answer different from the one it looked like he
wanted to give.

“Yeah,” he said. “I can find him for
you.”

Megan pressed a little more. “Can you go
with me to see him?” she said, then went on before he could answer.
“I need to see someone else, too, someone who might know a few
other things, but I’d like … I mean, I’m hoping you could also
help me talk to Chilcott.”

Finn turned up another sidewalk. “A
recommendation?” he said. “A license and cleaned-up paper?” His
back was to her, and Megan couldn’t see how he was saying it. She
couldn’t tell his reaction by the words alone. “Hardly seems
enough. But you say someone was killed?”

“Yes.”

“One of those women you just mentioned?”

“Lora Alexander.”

“And Chilcott. Finding him might help show
who did this?”

“I think so,” Megan said quietly.

“I’ll go,” Finn told her. “Call me
tomorrow.” He rattled off a phone number, and Megan found a pen and
a slip of paper from her purse. She scribbled the number down, then
watched him head toward the school.

Peter’s Pence

The estate north of Cape Town once belonged
to a member of South Africa’s Parliament. The old Parliament.
Pre-1994, pre-Mandela, pre-everything that had changed South Africa
from the way the wealthy and powerful whites in the country once
thought it always would be but wasn’t.

The estate had belonged to one of the people
who fled. In the legislature, the assemblyman had railed against
Botha’s changes in South Africa’s political system, against the
dismantlement of apartheid, against the loss of authority that
everyone believed would follow. After losing those fights, he
changed whatever financial accounts still remained in South
Africa – most were long moved to European banks, but he
relocated the rest in ’93 – and he found a tidy little place
in Shropshire, England.

He sold the South African estate at a price
that was typical of the fire sale mentality of the day. Arthur
Ariacht lived there now, and it was a home befitting the owner of
Ariacht diamond mines.

Everything was beautiful – the grounds,
the living quarters, the views. The estate was verdant and
rambling, with a sight of the ocean to one side and hills that were
dotted with wine grapes on the other. An old, spacious house, with
clay tile floors, dark oil-stained wood trims, brilliantly white
stucco walls, and cavernous rooms that opened to the sun through
wide and tall windows. Imported trees and lush grasses that were
maintained next to natural African savannah and fed by irrigation.
Two lighted tennis courts and two pools, one long and narrow for
laps, the other shallow and broad, with a hot pool squared in the
corner for socializing.

The grounds were meticulously maintained.
The staff and maintenance people – a butler and two cooks, a
handful of gardeners who worked flower beds that exuded a perpetual
sweetness to the air, a mechanic, a pilot and driver – lived
on site, along with seven permanent security personnel and another
half dozen that were part-time.

Access was restricted. A gatehouse rose at
the end of the driveway leading to the colonnaded face of the main
house, with an orange- and white-striped arm that lowered to block
the road. An unfailingly polite man would greet anyone who drove up
to the lowered arm, would kindly ask who they were and if they were
expected, and would just as kindly ask anyone not on the necessary
lists to please turn around in the circle just beyond the gate.
They could leave the premises, he would explain, or he would call
the local SAPS station – the Police Service, he duly advised,
had a reporting time of six minutes, and they would come by
helicopter if need be.

The guard had an alarm button he could press
to warn the house if someone made their way past. In fact, there
were two of those buttons – one in the gatehouse itself, with
a matching one on a palm-sized transmitter he always kept in his
pocket.

One press, and alarms would go on in the
guesthouse where the security personnel stayed, and through the
radio transmitters that anyone on duty had to carry. Two presses,
and the alarms in the main house itself would trigger, blaring and
flashing lights to alert the residents that someone had come
through that security might not be able to handle.

The man at the gate in the early evening
never got the chance to use those buttons. He was dead before he
recognized the need.

The security guard had turned the first car
around as they’d expected and planned. The driver had smiled at the
greeting and lifted a map. He’d asked for directions to
Leipoldtsville, on the coast, pointing a finger at the map and
staring at the guard, who remained resolutely at the lift point for
the gate.

The guard shook his head. He apologized and
told the man he’d have to leave, and the man swore softly but
without menace in return.

The gate lifted, and the car drove through
and circled in the roundabout to emerge from the other side. The
gate came down.

He should have watched more closely, hand on
his sidearm. With all his training and the years he’d worked at the
estate, both before and after Ariacht spent some of his diamond
money to steal it away from the former assemblyman, the guard knew
he should watch the car make the half-circle and depart from the
other side of the gatehouse.

That’s what he normally would have done.
Make sure the car’s gone, because if it doesn’t exit, the alarm has
to be triggered.

But there was already another one
coming.

He raised a hand to stop it and watched as
it did. Its headlights shone on him, and the last light of the set
sun was shining on it, painting a purple-orange stripe along the
car’s roof.

The driver’s window came down, and the
guard, again without leaving his place, asked if he could help.
While he bent ever so slightly to speak to the driver, he couldn’t
see the car he’d let through before. It had made most of the
half-circle, but it wasn’t yet gone. It was stopped, instead, its
front end angled perfectly to allow the driver a clean line to the
back of the guard’s head.

It took only a single shot. There was the
muted, coughing clap of the pistol’s suppressed muzzle. The guard’s
head jerked as though slapped at the back, and the man fell to the
ground. A flow of blood started to pool beneath him.

The men in the cars quickly collected the
guard’s body, wrapping a ready towel around his head and dragging
him into the gatehouse. They crammed him under the small desk,
positioning a stool in front of it. A man was posted on the stool,
his weight holding the seat down and the body in against the
wall.

Despite the gruesome thing at his feet, he
set to work immediately, tapping at a keyboard in front of him as
he studied the blue-white glow of four monitors mounted on the
gatehouse wall. They showed images from two dozen security cameras
placed around the estate, with each monitor showing an image from
one assigned camera, then switching to the next after a four-second
view.