Multiple Exposure A Sophie Medina Mystery (17 page)

“How did she end up at the river?” I asked.

“Right now we don’t know. What I want to know is who was with her,” Bolton said. “Do either of you know if she had a regular boyfriend? The guy she left the party with last night was someone new, right?”

Luke nodded. “No regular boyfriend, but a lot of guys had crushes on her, older men mostly. She sang at the Goodnight Club a couple nights a week. There was always someone buying her drinks between sets.”

“Would that include you?” Bolton asked.

“I lost my wife of eighteen years to cancer two years ago, Detective Bolton. Ali was a sweet kid and I went to hear her sing a couple of times after I hired her, but that’s as far as it went.” Luke’s face had turned red and his voice was tight with anger.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Bolton said, pulling out the notebook and writing “Goodnight Club” in it. “But we need to cover all the bases, rule people out.”

We had stopped near a small parking lot that looked like overflow parking for the Jefferson and Mason memorials. In front of us was a large marble urn with an outstretched eagle carved on it. A tarnished plaque had an inscription in Spanish and a marker read
CUBAN FRIENDSHIP URN
. I wondered who had chosen this out-of-the-way spot to commemorate the U.S. friendship, such as it was, with Cuba.

“Okay, let’s cross the street,” Bolton said.

“She was found here?” I said. “By the bridge?”

Bolton nodded. “A fisherman found her. You don’t want to know the details.”

Luke and I exchanged glances. He looked like he was about to be sick.

A police officer in high shiny boots and a bright orange safety vest stepped into Ohio Drive and stopped a silver Hyundai so we could cross. Between the road and the river was an area about ten feet wide of broken paving stones interspersed with tall weeds. We had to take a few steps down a slope to get to the dirt path that ran along the river. A low guardrail reinforced by chain-link wire provided minimal safety against falling in—it wouldn’t take much to hop over it—and a brown-and-white National Park Service sign said
PLEASE WATCH YOUR STEP
.

Maybe this had been an accident, a lark that had gone completely wrong. Ali and her date had been sitting on that railing, talking and kissing and clowning around. I could see her doing it: pretty, flirty Ali courting the daredevil thrill that comes with the youthful certainty of immortality. Somehow she’d lost her balance and fallen into the river. Maybe the guy tried to save her, but he couldn’t. Then he panicked and fled.

Couldn’t it have happened like that?

Luke braced himself as we knelt and Bolton unzipped the body bag, exposing Ali’s face, just down to her neckline. The minute I saw her, that tangled tumble of long dark hair, all makeup stripped away so she looked even more vulnerable and childlike, I knew her death had been violent and that she had fought for life.

“It’s her,” Luke said, rising quickly and walking over to where he could lean over the railing by himself.

I made the sign of the cross and heard Luke retching a few yards away.

“Did she suffer?” I asked. I was sure she did, but I needed Bolton to say she hadn’t.

“I don’t know.” Bolton zipped up the body bag with the tenderness of a parent covering a sleeping child and said, “Was there something you wanted to say earlier?”

I nodded. “Luke doesn’t know this.”

We stood up and walked away from the bridge to where the branches of a weeping willow screened us like a pale green filigree curtain. I told him about Ali eavesdropping on my conversation with Arkady Vasiliev and the possibility that she’d walked by one or both of the men I’d overheard discussing a plot to assassinate a Russian who was coming to D.C. I left Scott Hathaway out of it, but I ended by telling him about my talk with Napoleon Duval this morning. Bolton furiously wrote all of it down in his notebook. As soon as I mentioned Duval, his head snapped up.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he said. “This is a hell of a mess. You know how I can reach Special Agent Duval?”

His card was still in my jeans pocket. I pulled it out and Bolton copied down the information he needed.

“Do you know for a fact that she ran into one of the guys you heard talking in that conference room?” he asked.

“No. She was in a rush to leave so she said we’d talk about it in the morning,” I said, and at that moment I wanted to join Luke at that railing. “Now we’ll never know.”

Bolton tapped his pen on his notebook and leaned in close. I smelled cigarette smoke on his breath and the faint vinegary tang of sweat mingled with dust and heat and weariness.

“Well, I guess I’ll be talking to Agent Duval. Then maybe you and I’ll have a chat again. I have a feeling we’re not done.” He angled his head in the direction of the bridge. “Here comes your friend.”

Luke looked ashen faced as he joined us. “Sorry. That was tough to take.”

“You two are free to go.” Bolton gave me a bland look. “If I need to talk to you, I’ll be in touch. And call me if you think of anything else.” He pulled his wallet from his back pocket and gave us each a business card. Mine had a smudged thumbprint on it. “Thanks for your time.”

Then he walked over to where Ali lay a few feet away in that body bag like a fallen angel.

She had died in a part of Washington where they put the neglected and forgotten monuments like the Cuban Friendship Urn and the George Mason Memorial. If she had screamed or cried out for help—even with that powerful voice of hers—no one had heard her and come to her rescue as the Potomac swept her away, claiming her in its swift, deadly current.

11

Luke and I went back to the studio. Katya Gordon had sent an e-mail asking when she’d be able to review the reception photos, and we still had pictures that needed editing. Not only that, but now Bolton wanted a set as well and told Luke the sooner he could have it, the better.

Neither Luke nor I could get our heads wrapped around work except for one thing: Since the photographs were in chronological order, we were editing the last pictures of the evening. A lot of guests had departed, but Ali’s mystery man should have been hanging around.

“I give up,” Luke said finally. I’d moved my laptop into his office and was sitting at his desk, across from him. “We don’t have a clue who we’re looking for—young, old, tall, short, Russian, American. Ali had very catholic taste in men. All they needed was a Y chromosome. I saw her with guys at the Goodnight Club old enough to be her grandfather . . . old enough to be
my
grandfather.”

“Well, this guy had to be someone without a date,” I said. “Which ought to narrow it down.”

“You see any likely candidates in these photos?”

“I don’t know. Everyone or no one.”

Luke ran his hands through his hair and blew out a weary breath. “It’s coming on four o’clock. If you want to take off, go ahead. We’re done for the day. I’ll post the pictures to our website and give Seth, Moses, and Katya their password so they have access. I probably ought to call Seth anyway, tell him about Ali. He shouldn’t find out by seeing it on the news.”

“Are you going to say anything to him about Napoleon Duval, tell him about the other meeting last night?” The question slipped out before I realized it and suddenly the air in the room was as thick as smoke.

God, wasn’t Nick right? If you don’t know, you don’t have to lie. I was growing so tired and confused by all the stories I had to keep straight, the secrets I couldn’t divulge. Was Luke going to pick up on my tiny slipup? He knew about only one meeting in the conference room: the conversation I’d overheard between the Russian and the American.

What would he say now if he knew what I’d told Bolton down by the river, about the second meeting, the one between Arkady Vasiliev and me, how Ali had stumbled into the middle of it, and my slowly blooming fear that something had happened last night—maybe she’d said something to the wrong person—that might have cost her life?

Luke held my gaze for a long time while he considered my question, and I wished I could read minds. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to mention anything,” he said at last. “Seth and Roxanne Hathaway are really close. I just . . . don’t want to go there. If Duval finds out something, he can handle it.”

I closed my laptop and hoped he didn’t notice my relief. “That sounds like a good idea. I guess I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Actually,” he said, “why don’t we just meet at Hillwood, say around eleven? Katya Gordon’s talk doesn’t begin until noon, so that ought to give us plenty of time to get squared away.”

“Sure,” I said. “See you there.”

Hillwood was a jewellike museum set on twenty-five acres of land near Rock Creek Park in northwest D.C. The estate, with its acres of manicured gardens, included a Georgian-style mansion, a dacha, a rustic log cabin, a visitor center, a greenhouse, a café, and a pet cemetery. It had been the home of the Post Cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, who had been a passionate collector of Russian imperial art. During the 1930s she lived in Moscow with her third husband, who was the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, where she, like Armand Hammer, took advantage of Joseph Stalin’s need to raise money for his cash-strapped country by selling paintings, icons, porcelain, and other valuable items that once belonged to the Romanovs. By the time Marjorie Merriweather Post died in 1973, she had acquired the largest collection of Romanov treasures and imperial art outside Russia—including two Fabergé eggs given by Nicholas II to his mother, Maria Feodorovna. As a Russian art scholar, Katya Gordon had been invited to discuss the lost Romanov treasures on display at the National Gallery and we had been hired to photograph her talk and a VIP reception in the gardens afterward—more photos for the coffee table book on what they were calling “the Vasiliev Collection.”

I went back to my desk and packed up my cameras and laptop. As I was leaving, I stopped in Luke’s doorway. “Are you going to be all right? What are you going to do after you’re done here?”

He looked up. “Have a liquid dinner at the Goodnight Club in honor of Ali.”

It sounded like he meant it. “Luke—”

He waved a hand. “Don’t worry. I won’t do anything stupid, if that’s what you’re thinking. But if you want to come by, I’ll probably be there for a while.”

It was a backhanded invitation, not really a date.

“Thanks,” I said. “I think I’m just going to go back to the apartment and get some sleep.”

“That’s probably a good idea. See you tomorrow, Sophie.”

*

It didn’t take long to get back to the Roosevelt. I left the Vespa in the parking lot and, because the elevator was waiting when I walked through the back door, I took it rather than the stairs, as I usually did.

I hardly ever ran into anyone on my floor, but as I stepped off the elevator, I saw a repairman—medium height, medium build, white shirt with a logo on the breast pocket, navy trousers, small black satchel, and a baseball cap pulled low so it shielded his face—walking down the hall. It took a split second before I realized he must have come from my apartment or my neighbor’s across the hall doing whatever he’d been doing.

I hadn’t called anyone to fix anything.

“Excuse me,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

He didn’t look up, just spun around and ran for the fire exit at the other end of the hall. I was right behind him, but he had a good head start and I was carrying my equipment. By the time I made it down the two flights of stairs, he was gone. I took a guess he’d chosen the rear door since it was the nearest exit, but when I stepped into the parking lot, there was no sign of him.

I ran inside to the lobby. If he’d used the main door, he would have walked by the front desk. The assistant day manager, a motherly soul who projected an air of brisk efficiency and liked you to think of the Roosevelt as your home away from home and its staff as your extended family, looked up from a computer.

“Did a man come through here and go out the front door just now?” I asked.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t see anyone, dear,” she said. “I had to step into the office for a moment. Is there a problem?”

Dammit, he was definitely gone for good.

“Did you send a repairman to my apartment or my neighbor’s apartment this afternoon?”

Her face creased into a worried frown and she put on a pair of red cat-eye glasses that were hanging around her neck on a beaded lanyard. She picked up a ring binder with a handmade
Visitor’s Log
label on it. “It’s Ms. . . . Medina, isn’t it? 2F?”

“Yes.”

She skimmed the first page. “Let’s see . . . we had a plumber in earlier to take care of a leak on the seventh floor and someone came by to fix a computer in 3A. They both signed out.”

“I see.”

“You know, dear, a number of new guests have moved in over the past few days. Maybe you just didn’t recognize one of your neighbors.”

“Maybe.” I felt the itchy urgent need to get upstairs to my apartment. He was no neighbor. “Thanks.”

I took the elevator one more time. He was gone, long gone, and there wouldn’t be anyone waiting for me, lurking behind a curtain or hiding in the bathroom, like
Psycho
in reverse. Still, my palms were clammy as I fished my key from my pocket. At least he’d locked the door, but only the bottom lock, not the dead bolt. I pushed it open and the memory of walking into our cottage in London the night Nick vanished flooded through me with such fierce intensity I grabbed the doorjamb and clung to it.

Nothing could have been worse than the scene I found that awful night, the trail of blood and the upended furniture, but this had its own stamp of violation, as unexpected and shocking as a hard slap across the face. As soon as I walked in I could tell he’d gone through the desk in the living room. The top drawer wasn’t completely closed and the shade on the desk lamp was askew.

My brain switched to automatic pilot, as it had done that night in London. The first thing I needed to do was check my expensive cameras and my equipment, which could be sold on the street in a heartbeat and I’d never see any of it again. A Leica M7 and Hasselblad H2F, each worth thousands, and the irreplaceable specialty lenses my grandfather had given me were the obvious items to steal. Value: priceless. I kept them in two locked cases in the bedroom closet, along with my other gear.