Naked Came The Phoenix (28 page)

The library was so still the air reverberated, even the whispers of the fireplace seemed to pause. Into this hush dropped a name.

"Ondine."

Caroline must have made some sound, some protest, because Lauren looked up and smiled, tears quivering unshed. King David was holding her hand.

"It's a cycle, isn't it? My baby, too, was put up for adoption. Claudia's sister agreed to take me back, more or less permanently, but she couldn't handle a baby as well. Ondine was removed from me when she was two days old, and I never knew what happened to her. All I knew was that my baby was a girl and that she had a birthmark on her face, although the doctor said it would fade when she grew. On her eighteenth birthday we both registered to have our records released, but even then it took us years to find each other, the records were so confused. She was so beautiful." And then she wept.

The DEA agent cleared his throat, to take the room's attention off the weeping woman. Caroline's eyes, however, remained on the actress. Her sister.

"About three years ago, we became aware of another figure on the scene, directing Claudia and Raoul. A silent partner, with authority but working through a lawyer in Atlanta. Christopher Lund came into it around then, too, a clever young man with a growing appetite for money. There were several questionable deaths connected with the spa: two accidental deaths of the possessors of large estates; one due to a heart condition exacerbated by the extreme diet and exercise program assigned here; and the hit-and-run killing of a wealthy man about to divorce his wife (nothing was proved against her because she had an alibi). There were even a couple of late-term miscarriages that might or might not have been induced. Nothing we could pin down, except that the deaths all involved hefty inheritances or life insurance policies for their grateful families." (Such as Leticia Finnerman, Vince thought, of Newton, Massachusetts, killed by a brake failure on her way home. The macabre humor of that collection of falsified records in the conference room closet under the label "Dead Files." Typical of the criminal mind, so sure that no one would catch on.)

"So you get the idea. A lot of greedy and hard-to-prove illegalities, most of which were arranged by a known blackmailer. We're talking major income and influence. So when Ondine threatened to interfere with Chris Lund, that threatened the business's smooth running. The cold, mathematical logic of the psychopath: Lund was necessary, Ondine was a danger to Lund, therefore Ondine had to be removed.

"In truth, the deaths connected to the spa all seem to have been directed by a party other than Claudia and Raoul de Vries, a party concealed behind an Atlanta law firm, whose financial records are being subpoenaed and will, I have no doubt, reveal payments from a number of names close to the dead. And I'm very sorry to have to say this publicly, Mrs. Blessing, but we believe that person to be Hilda Finch. She was the one out to take over the operation as a whole. She was the one on hand to wrest power from the other surviving member of the triumvirate, Raoul de Vries. She seems to have had contact with family members of several of the spa clients who died under dubious circumstances. And certainly the only prints on the shelf unit that killed Ondine were hers, along with those of Karen McElroy, which belonged there."

Douglas tightened the grip on his wife's hand, but Caroline was beyond sorrow. The daughter of a smiling psychopath, she said to herself. That is what I am. Maybe she would feel sorrow later, when the numbness had passed, sorrow and guilt and revulsion against the blood that moved through her veins.

Emilio-hard to think of him as that other name-was going on, but Caroline heard only a part of it. Peddling influence, setting up a distribution network for their cocaine operation, and blackmail, that pool ever widening: business as usual for Claudia, only more so. Then he was saying something about a key.

"-on Ondine's body. Hilda obviously didn't know that Ondine had the thing, or she'd have retrieved it, but the key seems to have passed through several hands before the girl got it. Howard Fondulac's fingerprints were on it, so Ondine may have been given it by him, or maybe she found it when she was trying to get him untangled from the Pilates machine.

"I doubt we'll ever be certain. I do know that Ondine told David she would see him in his cabin tonight. I assume she would have given him the key then, to give to Lauren, whom Ondine did not wish to be seen with too often. Ondine knew that Lauren was looking for the key to a safe and thought this might be it; she had no way of knowing that David had an interest in the contents of that safe as well."

"But did she
know
?" Caroline interrupted. "Did Ondine know that her mother was…?"

"Lauren told her the first night. They pretended to be strangers whenever there was a chance someone might overhear, but, yes, she knew where she came from."

That was who she'd seen with the model, Caroline realized, on the other side of the moonlit lake. Laughing or sobbing-or, more likely, both. Which also meant that if Lauren Sullivan was Hilda Finch's other, illegitimate daughter, Caroline had spent the first evening here in friendly conversation with her own niece. Those unexpected sparks of sympathy she'd felt for the achingly pretty younger woman were facilitated by blood ties. A spasm of grief took her, and she missed Emilio's next words, until:

"-Finch looks to me a fairly pure example of a sociopathic personality. Without a conscience, her concern for others a learned facade, her only interests self-serving. I haven't had a chance to interview her fully, of course, but I did ask her if she knew she'd killed her granddaughter in Ondine. She did not. There seems to have been a lot that Claudia kept from her silent partner-it was, as I said, more a triumvirate than a partnership. Claudia and Raoul, with the newcomer Hilda Finch anonymous behind the lawyer; all three jostling for power, attempting blackmail to keep the others under control, making temporary alliances against the third, aiming for domination. It is the reason a number of you were brought here, so that Claudia could assemble her victims in a bid for power against the others. Once Hilda Finch revealed herself, warfare was open-with knowledge as the weapon. One of them would feed another information to undermine the third. Hilda, for example, told Raoul about a secret compartment in Mrs. Blessing's cello case; Claudia told Hilda about Raoul's felony record. Raoul may have told Hilda that Claudia had a safe, or Hilda may have figured it out on her own. In either case, Hilda did not know where it was at first, nor did she have the key. In the case of Ondine, it is possible that Claudia herself didn't know the identity of Ondine's mother, since she had not been involved in that adoption procedure. At any rate, Hilda's reaction, when I told her, was chiefly exasperation: She'd been overjoyed to discover that Lauren was hers, not from any maternal urge but because it would be a coup for the spa."

(Vince elbowed his assistant. "I toldja, didn't I? Anyone that didn't care about her own daughter had to be dangerous?" Mike LeMat nodded.)

"Her chief regret for Ondine's death was, I quote, 'Just imagine what I could have done with this place if I'd had both of them.'"

Caroline couldn't even wince. She'd known it was coming, had known since hearing of Hilda's hidden partnership with Claudia that her mother was not just impossible, she was downright evil. Looking back, Hilda must have known that Douglas was being blackmailed, and by what means, yet she had made no move to tell him the truth, to free him from the appalling images in his mind, to free Caroline to be happy in her marriage once again. Caroline studied her hands, feeling every eye in the room on her, the daughter, born to and raised by a creature like that. Only from Douglas did she feel empathy-Douglas and, oddly enough, King David. She straightened her spine and lifted her eyes to meet the tattooed gaze squarely: She did not want this disturbing man's pity.

"The key Ondine found opened one of Claudia's two safes. The one it fit was cleverly hidden inside a storage cupboard in the corner of the conference room Detective Toscana has been using. The other, the reason Claudia de Vries was in the bathhouse at that hour of the night, was in a very clever compartment beneath one of the mud baths. That safe had a combination lock. When we emptied the mud bath, we found the keys to the bathhouse door-you may have seen how heavily locked she kept that building-but not the safe key. That is because Claudia's killer knew there was a safe and recognized the key for what it was. However, either the killer knew as well that the safe was in the conference room and therefore inaccessible until the police cleared out, or else made the mistake of murdering Claudia before finding out where the safe was. Hanging onto the key would have been dangerous-if the police did a complete search of the grounds and found it, they'd know it had something to do with Claudia's death-so the killer gave it to Howard Fondulac. He was a drunk, but he wasn't stupid; he knew that he was being set up to take the fall and in fact told Detective Toscana as much, but he couldn't very well reveal the details without giving away his own illegal activities.

"The only person who fits into this combination of inside knowledge and incomplete details is Hilda Finch. She gave Howard the key, knowing that eventually she could get the location of the safe out of Raoul, but in the end, Raoul did not know his wife had a second safe. The one in the conference room did contain a great deal of moderately secret material, but it was primarily a decoy. The bathhouse safe was where Claudia kept her real treasures-blackmail evidence and correspondence going back more than twenty years: letters, bank statements, blood tests, records of drunk-driving and prostitution arrests for dozens of people. And by the way, the material in both has been seized, but it will remain confidential. You have my word on that, any of you who might be concerned."

Phyllis Talmadge made a small noise and slumped into her chair, causing those around her to speculate what sort of document bearing her name might be inside one of those safes.

"Anybody got a cigarette?" Phyllis asked the room at large. When no one reached for a pack, she sighed gustily. "You know, until three days ago, I hadn't smoked in nearly twenty years. How's that for a health spa?"

(So much for the psychic's testimony that she'd smelled cigarettes before she was conked and thrown in the lake, Vince thought grumpily, leaving his packet firmly in his pocket. She'd been sucking mints to hide not booze but smokes.)

"So," Emilio was finishing up, "you understand why I have told you rather more than I would normally have done, by means of asking you to keep the gossip to a minimum. The press outside does not know of the familial links between several of the famous individuals here, and although the right to privacy is generally regarded in this country as a mild jest, I appeal to you to grant it to those who have already suffered enough. I leave it to your sense of honor. Of course," he added, his voice and eyes going hard as diamonds, "I need hardly add that if I am aware of a leak originating in this room, the DEA will be most attentive to the individual involved, for a long, long time. Thank you for your time, and now I think Detective Toscana will need to take yet another set of statements from a number of you."

Close on to midnight, there was no one else in the swimming pool. When Caroline had first stood with that once again pristine stretch of blue water at her feet she had nearly drawn back: It would be a long time before she was entirely comfortable with solitude, and the locked door to the ominous mud room still bore the police seal. But Douglas offered to stay with her, to float around quietly at the other side of the pool. That compromise reassured her, and the strong, steady laps she had swum in the silky water soothed her further. Soon, very soon, she would have to approach Doug with the offer to free him from marriage to a psychopath's daughter-ironic, really, considering his own efforts in practically the same cause. But not now, not here; it was more than time for a small fraction of the relaxation and ease she had come here to find.

When the three figures at the far end of the echoing, chlorine-scented room caught her eye, she was startled, but not badly so, and although she glanced to the side to make certain that Douglas was there (and he was, standing protectively upright in the hip-deep water), she put her head down and continued her measured strokes to the end, where she surfaced to prop her arms on the rim of the pool.

"We need to talk with you, Caroline." It was, strangely, King David who spoke, not the beautiful DEA agent whom she had decided had to be the rock star's lover. She looked from Emilio to Lauren Sullivan, then dropped back underwater to swim to the side and pull herself out. Retrieving her terry cloth robe from the bench, she belted it on and swept her wet hair back from her face.

"About what?" About how devastating it was to have a mother who murdered and blackmailed and God knew what else without a qualm? About the link she had to this stunning red-haired woman before her, a link neither of them could mention without drawing forth the deep shame of being birthed by Hilda Finch? About how miserable and lost she felt, with only Douglas left to her? And how being faced with the larger-than-life trio of a seven-figure actress, a drop-dead-gorgeous bodybuilder, and a six-foot-four rock singer with black and green hair, tattooed eyes, and more sheer animal magnetism than Mick Jagger (all three of them, moreover, fully dressed, and in clothing so expensive it showed no sign of the long day behind them) made her feel like a low-rent cockroach? The three of them presented a united front, linked together in a bond that Caroline did not fully understand and felt that she personally would never again know. She faced them with her chin up. "You want to talk to me about what?"

The tattooed eyes gave a quick sideways glance to where Douglas stood. Doug Blessing, whose own looks and charisma faded in their presence as a star in daylight. She held out one hand to her husband, her eyes defiantly on those of the rocker, who nodded and waited until Douglas had sloshed from the pool and joined them.