In the Company of Liars (4 page)

She smiles at him. “You want to see the statuette?”

Ogren does a double-take, suddenly perks up. “The—what are you talking about?”

“The statuette,” she says. “The little trophy. The award from the manufacturers' association. You always thought she used it to kill Sam Dil—”

Ogren steps toward her. “You have it? It was here in her house?”

Jane McCoy gestures behind her. “She had it in her office upstairs.”

“That's not possible.” The prosecutor squints. “She moved it there, maybe.”

“Exactly,” Jane agrees. “She had buried it somewhere initially. You can tell because there's some dirt on it. But there's some blood on it, too, and we're getting prints off it. I assume it's the murder weapon. We've inventoried it. We'll make it available to you guys.”

Roger Ogren is speechless. It is confirmation that he never had. A murder weapon that had never been found. McCoy wonders if there was any residual doubt in the prosecutor's mind, any lingering question of whether he was accusing the right person. If so, the murder weapon, in the home of the accused, should erase that doubt.

“This was her way of pleading guilty,” McCoy tells him. “Before she went, she wanted the record clear, I guess.”

Ogren nods aimlessly, his eyes unfocused. “And what about the gun?”

“A revolver. Serial numbers scratched. She must have bought it on the street.”

Ogren stares at her.
Weird
, he must be thinking. “Okay. I'll give you a call,” he says. “I think we would like that statuette, actually.”

“Sure. Call me.”

He turns to leave but stops, looks back at the federal agent. “Why did you say it's your fault? Her killing herself?”

She makes a face. “I was squeezing her. Maybe too hard.”

Ogren gives her a look of compromise. Squeezing is something any prosecutor can understand. No one ever knows how much pressure is just right.

“You got what you wanted, Roger. Justice was served.”

He laughs. A bitter chuckle. “This wouldn't have happened if she weren't out on bail,” he says. “She couldn't have gotten a gun and she couldn't have killed herself.”

McCoy lifts her shoulders. “Hey, you wanted her dead, she's dead.”

The prosecutor glares at McCoy, then turns and walks to his car. He can't deny that he was seeking the death penalty, of course, which means he cannot deny that he wanted death for Allison Pagone. But he doesn't appreciate the bluntness of McCoy's comment. As if Roger Ogren were a killer, too.

“I'll bet
he's
pissed,” Harrick says, walking up, watching Ogren leave.

“Something like that.”

They walk to their car and drive away. Once in the vehicle, Harrick, driving, casts a look at McCoy. “Something bothering you? Talk to me, Janey.”

“It looked too clean,” she says. “There's such a thing as looking too much like a suicide.”

“Oh, come on.” Owen Harrick shrugs. He was a city cop for eight years. He's witnessed a lot more suicide scenes than Jane McCoy.

“A bathtub?” McCoy asks.

“It's private,” Harrick answers. “She wanted intimacy. It's also easier to clean up.”

“Oh, she didn't want to mess up the house?” McCoy looks at her partner. “She's worried about resale value?”

“It's the house she raised her daughter in. She cares about how it looks. You're thinking way too hard on this. It's a suicide, Jane. She thought about it first, is all. People do plan suicides.”

McCoy is silent.

“She killed Sam Dillon,” Harrick continues, turning a corner and leaving the sight line of Allison Pagone's home. “She killed him and she felt remorse. That works for me.”

“I hope so.” McCoy's head falls back against the head cushion. It will be another sleepless night for her.

The small turn of his head, as if his attention were diverted. The set of his jaw, the clenching of his teeth. The line of his mouth turned, ever so slightly, from a smile to something more primitive, almost a snarl but not so prominent. A stolen moment, an entirely private moment in public, a stolen glance among a roomful of people, intended for private consumption.

Thursday, February fifth of this year. A cocktail party thrown by Dillon & Becker, Sam's lobbying firm, an annual party for clients in the city's offices. Hors d'oeuvres passed by servants in tuxedos, soft classical music playing from speakers in the corners.

The Look, Allison calls it, though she has never spoken of such things aloud, except to Sam. A look of pure, unadulterated lust, a passion that drives men to do things they should not do, the most primitive of emotions. She watches everything about Sam—how he holds his breath, moves his eyes up and down her body—trying to imagine exactly what
it is that Sam is imagining, because Allison has no experience with such things, has never seen this look from her husband in the twenty years they were married.

She freezes that image in her mind. She is not sure why. Maybe because it was one of the last pictures that she has of Sam—he was dead two days later—or maybe because it is so staggering to think how far things have fallen.

Allison Pagone sits on the wine-colored couch in the den. The memories always flood back, no matter how fleetingly, when she sits here. Memories of her childhood. She remembers when she was fifteen, when she had a party while her parents were out, a bottle of red wine spilled on the couch, her enormous relief when the wine blended in with the color. Another memory: She was six, sleeping on the couch because she had wet her bed, worrying about her parents' reaction, then her mother's soothing hand running through her hair as she woke up the next morning.

She thinks of her daughter, Jessica, and the torment she must be feeling right now, her mother standing trial for murder. And she will not be acquitted. Jessica has read the stories, watched the television coverage, despite the judge's instructions to the contrary. Regardless of whether she is a witness, nobody is going to tell a young woman she cannot read the cold accounts of her mother's crime in the paper.

Allison has watched her daughter age over the last three months. Twenty years old, she is in many ways still a girl, but these events have changed that. Allison is to blame, and she can do nothing about it.

She picks up the phone on the coffee table. She dials Mat Pagone's office. She checks her watch. It is past nine o'clock in the evening.

She gets his voice mail. She holds her breath and waits for the beep. She looks at the piece of paper in front of her. They spelled his name wrong. It should be Mat with one t, short for
Mateo
.

“Mat, I know you're not going to get this until tomorrow morning. I'm sorry. For everything. I also want you to listen carefully. Jessica is going to need you now more than ever. You are going to have to love her for both of us. You have to be strong for her. You have to do whatever you can to be there for her. You—you have to—promise—”

She takes a deep breath. “Mat, don't say a word to the FBI. They don't have anything on you. You hear me? They don't have anything. Just keep your mouth shut. You can't help me now so don't make this worse and talk to them. And take—take good care of our—”

Her voice cuts off. She lets out a low wail. She hangs up the phone quietly and puts her face in her hands, ignoring the man seated across from her.

“That was very good, Allison. Now just one more.”

Allison looks up at the man, then inhales deeply, composes herself. This is the end now, she knows it. She picks up the phone and dials the numbers, reading them off the business card.

You have reached Special Agent Jane McCoy . . .

She waits for the beep and reads from the paper. “Jane McCoy, this is Allison Pagone. I want you to know that I will not be used. I will not let you rip the last shreds of dignity from my family. You have
me.
It's over for me. If you have a hint of decency in you, you will not deny my daughter both of her parents. I want you to know that you can't toy with people's lives like this. I won't let you turn me against my family. Your little plan didn't work. So live with
that.
”

She hangs up the phone and looks up at the man sitting on the ottoman opposite her, training a revolver on her. He is dark in every way—Middle Eastern with jet-black hair, dark eyes, a menacing smile, the way he can look pleasant during all of this.

“Excellent,” the man says. “Your flair for drama has paid off.”

“You said you'd leave,” says Allison. “I did what you wanted.”

The man stands but keeps the firearm directed at Allison. “Please stand up,” he says.

A
n hour later. Ram Haroon checks his watch. It is after 11:45 at night. He looks at Allison Pagone, lying in the bathtub, motionless. He looks over the scene. He is reluctant to go back into the bathroom, to step on the tile, so he leans in from his spot in the bedroom. The scene looks entirely clean. Nothing has been disturbed. There is no reason to suspect that this was anything other than a suicide.

He walks to the study and unzips his gym bag. The statuette—it's more like a trophy—is wrapped in plastic. He sets it on the desk near her computer and leaves it in the plastic, still covered with the dirt from behind the grocery store, where it was buried.

Perfect. Better than a suicide note confessing to the murder. This is the proof, the trophy used to bludgeon Sam Dillon in February.

He walks back through the house, careful not to change anything. If the light was on, it stays on; nothing can be altered. If the timing of her death were ever fixed by the authorities, and someone saw a light turn off afterward, it would ruin the impression.

He walks down the basement stairs. He came in through a basement window and returns to it now, jumps back up onto the sill. Once out, he sets the window back into place as if he never were there. He makes it through the backyard, over the fence, into the neighbor's yard. He walks to his car and begins to drive without hitting his headlights.

He looks at his watch. It is exactly two minutes before midnight, before Wednesday. He wonders when she will be found. Some time tomorrow morning, because her trial will resume and she will not show. Someone will rush to
her door. Maybe the federal agent whom Allison called—McCoy—panicking.

He picks up his cell phone and hits a speed button. “Done,” he says, and hangs up.

He has to get home now. Final exams start in a couple of weeks and he's fallen behind.

R
am Haroon already jogged today, so he is annoyed that he has to don the outfit and run again, at the ungodly hour of eleven at night. He is surprised to find that he's not alone out here, that a few other lunatics are running in the cool air. There is a path that winds around a park near the university, a one-mile loop that begins—and ends—at a marker with a couple of benches and a drinking fountain made of stone.

A runner is kneeling near the fountain, tying a shoe. Ram can hardly make the runner out in the darkness but there's no doubt. The runner stands and stretches, then starts down the path, presumably for another mile, though Ram is sure that his contact will veer off to a nearby car.

Left in the runner's wake, on the grass, is an envelope. Ram does not immediately rush over to it, because as long as no other runner approaches, there is no need to act with such swiftness. After a moment of stretching, he makes his way over to the drinking fountain and takes a sip of the icy
water. He bends down to tie a shoe that is not untied, and slips the envelope off the grass and into the pocket of his sweatpants.

He is in his student dormitory thirty minutes later. Student housing might not have been the wisest choice, because the courts in America have allowed law enforcement more freedom to search school-subsidized facilities, on the theory that students have a diminished expectation of privacy in government-provided housing. But it made sense, in the end. First, because he lacks the money for a nicer place in the city, but more importantly, because he wants to fit in. He wants nothing out of the ordinary. Besides, there's nothing for them to find in this room.

Except this envelope. He opens it and reads:

Sorry for the short notice. We have had a tremendous break. The FBI is pressing her for information about Operation Public Trust. They want her to provide information that she very much does not want to provide. She is tough but not when it comes to her family. She is at the breaking point. No need to give too many details. The FBI has put her in a corner. I believe she is contemplating this herself. She will do anything to protect her family. I am sure of this. But we cannot assume she will save us the trouble and take her own life.

Do it Tuesday night. The FBI is coming back to her on Wednesday. MUST BE TUESDAY NIGHT. I have included two scripts. She should make these two phone calls. I leave it to you whether you can force her to do this. Your decision. If you can get her to cooperate, you will convince the whole world that she did this to herself. I think she will make these calls willingly, because she will want to say these things, anyway. I leave that to you.

I assume you have the trophy now. It might make sense for you to leave it at her house. People would see her guilt.

This has always been your idea, not mine. I still
believe it is too risky. But if you insist on doing this, now is the time.

I must warn you, if there is the slightest hint that this has not worked out to our satisfaction, WE will be the ones who walk away.

Ram Haroon rereads the note, then looks at the other sheet of paper. It is a script of what Allison Pagone is supposed to say. The first phone call will be to Mateo, her ex-husband.
Don't say a word to the FBI
and words to that effect.

The second phone call will be to an FBI agent named Jane McCoy. Haroon does not know all the details, but he can gather enough from the script:
Your plan didn't work. Live with that.
Vague without more context, but Haroon understands well enough. The FBI is trying to make the ex-husband talk to save the ex-wife, and the ex-wife, by taking her own life, removes the FBI's leverage.

Excellent. Better than a suicide note, especially the call to the agent, McCoy—blaming her for placing Allison in this corner. A plausible explanation for why Allison Pagone would choose to take her own life.

Yes. This is the perfect cross of the final t, the final jagged piece of a difficult puzzle. It must be a part of this plan.

And he has no doubt that he will be able to persuade Allison Pagone to go along.