Someone Must Die (10 page)

C
HAPTER
16

Diana watched Jonathan pour her a brandy and one for himself. Then he took off his overcoat and sat down beside her on the white-leather sofa.

Her hands trembled as she held the snifter.

“My poor darling.” Jonathan got up, went into the bedroom, and came back with a crocheted afghan Diana had never seen. As he wrapped it around her shoulders, she wondered whether his dead wife had made it. “I should have come sooner,” he said. “There was no need for you to try to deal with this by yourself.”

The lenses on his horn-rim glasses were scratched and pockmarked with age. He was still wearing his suit jacket, though he had loosened his tie. Blue-and-gray stripes.

It was one of the ties she had bought him for the judgeship interviews, because all his old ties were too wide and out of fashion.

He had laughed when she’d given him the box of ties.
Thank you, my darling,
he’d said.
But this is where we draw the line in you trying to change me.

And she had replied,
I would never dream of changing you. I love you, even if you are hopelessly outdated.

“Someone wants me to kill you,” she said softly.

He blinked his hazel eyes rapidly and frowned.

“There was a note,” she said. “Someone left it in a greeting card at my house this afternoon. It said that Ethan would be returned unharmed if I killed you.”

“Good God. Have you shown it to the FBI?”

She shook her head. “It said not to tell the authorities or they would kill Ethan.”

His eyes wandered around the room, though he didn’t seem to be looking at anything. His face was paler than usual, the freckles more pronounced. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said finally. “I can understand there are people who would want me dead, but why involve you and Ethan? Why not assassinate me directly?”

She took a sip of brandy, hoping the burn would deaden her nerves. “The only explanation that makes sense is that I’m the primary target. Someone wants to hurt me as deeply as they can by forcing me to choose between two people I love.”

He stared at his glass. Age spots covered his hands, and a few golden hairs grew between his knuckles, which were knobby from arthritis. “Do you think it’s the Coles?”

“Possibly,” she said.

“But how do they know about Ethan? Or about me?”

“They could have been stalking me. Maybe they’ve been watching my house and saw Ethan arrive. And they could have read about our engagement in the profiles that came out after you became a contender for the Supreme Court nomination.” She took another drink. “But there are others who may have motives against both of us.”

“But you just said you believe you’re the extorters’ target.”

“
Primary
target. We shouldn’t rule out that they may also want to eliminate you.”

“True,” he said. “So who might be out to get both of us?”

“The Simmers?”

He raised an eyebrow. “You think they have some grudge against me?”

“You may be a threat to them if you get the nomination.”

Jonathan nodded. “Of course. Baer Business Machines would be hurt by my policy on large corporate mergers.”

She stared at the three crimson paperweights on the coffee table. “But then, there’s also Larry,” she said.

“Your ex-husband? I never got the impression from you that he was vindictive or even jealous.”

“Aubrey believes he could be manipulated by his girlfriend.”

“So Aubrey knows about the note?”

“Yes.”

“I’m glad you haven’t been dealing with this alone,” he said. “And now you have me as well.” He reached over and squeezed her shoulder. “So why do you believe Larry and his girlfriend may be involved?”

“I don’t know very much about Star, which means anything’s possible.”

“And Larry?” His face was full of concern, even though his own life was being threatened. She had to tell him.

“I’m worried this may relate to something that happened back when I was in college,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“April Fool.” She barely managed to get the words out before her throat closed up.

Even after all these years, she couldn’t talk about it, but she didn’t have to.

Jonathan’s eyes widened behind his glasses. He knew the reference to April 1, 1970, the day of the explosion. For anyone who had attended Barnard College and Columbia University back then, April Fools’ Day would never again be thought of as a day for playing silly pranks.

She waited for him to confront her, to ask what she could possibly have done more than forty-five years ago that someone would try to threaten her over today. But Jonathan finished his drink, then went to the bar to refill his glass.

He stood there looking out the sliding glass door, his face thoughtful, as though he were weighing legal arguments. And a ghost passed through her.

What if he knew?

Jonathan had been at Columbia Law at the time. He could have known people, maybe even had some personal connection to April Fool. Some hurt he had hidden from her, waiting for the right moment to mete out revenge. This entire, terrible situation might be his doing.

Was Jonathan her enemy?

No. It wasn’t possible. She would have known if he’d been deceiving her.

Besides, Jonathan would never turn on her. And setting up an ultimatum that involved his own death made no sense. She wasn’t thinking clearly. Fear for Ethan and lack of sleep were making her paranoid.

Jonathan returned to the sofa, sat beside her, and reached for her hand. “You’re still cold.” He ran his fingers against her cheek. “You know I love you very much. If there’s something in your past, I don’t care about it.”

She shivered.

He adjusted the afghan around her shoulders. “You believe me, darling, don’t you?”

“Of course,” she said, then quickly looked away.

C
HAPTER
17

Aubrey left her mother’s car in the dark driveway near the two black sedans, then went in the front door, half expecting Smolleck to be standing in the foyer, arms folded in front of his too-stylish suit, with a “gotcha” expression on his face.

But no one was there.

She listened for sounds coming from the back of the house. No phones were ringing, but the tip calls were probably being routed to the command post the Simmers had established over at the Ritz.

It was almost nine thirty, over thirty hours since Ethan had gone missing. Thirty hours! Because of the ransom note, she believed he was alive, but that didn’t mean he was in a safe place. He was just a little boy. She hoped he wasn’t frightened.

Only a few months ago, Ethan had spent the night at her Providence apartment while Kevin and Kim attended a gala in Newport. Jackson had gone off somewhere for the night, so she and Ethan wouldn’t have to contend with a “third wheel,” or so Jackson had said. Aubrey now realized what he’d really been up to.

She and Ethan had been propped up against pillows in her bed, watching a movie about a kid who was trying to outsmart a couple of bad guys. At one point, the little boy hid in the back of his parents’ car. The bad guys looked for the boy in the car, but didn’t notice him hidden beneath a dog carrier that was wedged behind the driver’s seat.

Ethan had been delighted that the boy had outfoxed them, but later that night, he awoke from a nightmare about the movie and cried for his mother. Aubrey had comforted him, telling him the little boy was safe and that he had been very brave—just like Ethan.

Was someone comforting her nephew tonight when he cried for his mother?

She hurried upstairs. After checking and finding her mother hadn’t gotten back from Jonathan’s, she went to her own room and got out her laptop.

She had a lot to do.

There was a message and attachment from Smolleck. It had been sent to everyone in her family. Smolleck had written:

Please review the attached photos, paying particular attention to people in the background. Let me know if you recognize anyone.

So he had followed up on her suggestion. Her respect for him edged upward. She opened the attachment. There were six photos, taken at the carnival, probably with her mother’s iPhone.

Ethan, in his sky-blue T-shirt with a jumping dolphin, was in all of them.

She enlarged each photo and studied the people in the background crowds, one by one. No one familiar, but she also checked to see whether anyone happened to be looking at Ethan or otherwise appeared suspicious.

She examined the last photo, the selfie of Ethan and Mama.

A woman was standing by a booth facing the camera. She appeared to be frowning at Ethan.

Aubrey enlarged her face until it began to get blurry, then she brought it back into focus. The woman had a pronounced chin, was wearing large sunglasses, and had her wild dark hair pulled back from her face. She looked to be around forty and had something above her bowed lip—a mole or a pimple—Aubrey couldn’t tell.

She checked for the woman in the other photos, but couldn’t find her. Then, she noticed something else—a man who didn’t look like someone who went to carnivals. He was in another photo as well. He was large and muscled, with tattoo sleeves covering both arms. Aubrey enlarged the photo. The tattoos appeared to be of intertwining snakes. The man had a scraggly reddish beard, shaved head, and he wore dark glasses. He was probably in his thirties. And while he wasn’t looking at Ethan, it was suspicious that he was in two photos taken at two different places in the carnival. He could have been one of the carnival workers the FBI was checking out, but she’d make sure Smolleck knew about him.

She replied to his message:

Don’t recognize anyone, but check out woman in Photo 6—dark hair, sunglasses and mole above lip—who’s looking in Ethan’s direction. Also bulky, bearded man with tattoo sleeves in Photos 1 and 5. Carny worker?

She hesitated. Smolleck was doing his job, even being responsive to her suggestions. She needed to stop reacting to him as if he were the enemy.

She added:
Thanks for forwarding photos
, pressed “Send,” and leaned back in her desk chair.

Her eyes settled on her snow globes. Two children pulling a sled, a mother and daughter in a forest of snow-covered fir trees, a family having a snowball fight.

When Aubrey had pressed her father for answers at the time-share, he’d angrily pointed a finger at Mama. She recognized the bullying technique. Her father was hiding something. Why else would he have become so defensive when she’d asked him about politics and Columbia?

Yet, she couldn’t imagine the man who had held her close as he guided her down a ski trail, when she’d been too scared to go by herself, being involved with the kidnapping of his own grandson.

Unless someone else was calling the shots.

And the woman, who had beguiled him from day one, was a likely candidate.

Star Matin.

When Aubrey had first met her, Star had introduced herself, pronouncing her surname like the French word for “morning,” and Aubrey had thought it was spelled “Matanne.” She’d since learned otherwise.

She entered “Star Matin” in Google search and had only a few hits, all having to do with Star’s jewelry business. She followed each link and finally found a write-up in a small magazine called
Southern Comfort
. The article was an old one, from ten years ago, before Star had become involved with Aubrey’s father.

Star Matin was born a southern belle in Charleston. To please her parents, she wore frilly dresses, learned how to curtsy, and didn’t drink too much at her debutante ball, when what she really wanted to be was a tomboy. She studied art at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, then worked in advertising and marketing before going off on her own and creating her own line of stunning jewelry, The Star Collection, which can be found right here in Buckhead, where for the last ten years, Star has had her own boutique in the upscale shopping mall of Peachtree Shoppes. As Star says, “I always thought I wanted to be a tomboy, but the truth is I love being a girl!”

A puff piece without much content, but it was consistent with what Aubrey knew. She looked for images and found a couple of photos of Star at various events with Aubrey’s father. She returned to her original search and hunted for older links, but there was nothing.

It was time to check into her father’s background. Maybe she’d find some answers to her growing list of questions.

Why hadn’t he taken the polygraph? Why was Smolleck asking about his political views and his time at Columbia University? And had her father known Jonathan in the past?

She would start with what she knew and build out from there.

Her dad had been an undergraduate at Columbia from 1967 to 1971.

Her mother had attended Barnard, its sister school, from 1969 to 1973.

Aubrey went online to see whether she could access either of their college yearbooks, but they were password-protected, so she tried a different tack. She recalled her parents had met in ’69, so she googled “Columbia University 1969” to get a sense of what was happening at that time.

Articles with references to student protests and strikes popped up. She already knew a little about this period—the unpopular Vietnam War, opposition to the draft, racial tensions, the emergence of the hippie culture, and flamboyant drug use.

She clicked on a link to a YouTube video—a documentary made in 1969 of a student strike and university takeover. She watched it, taken aback by the anger of the fist-shaking students that had been captured on the choppy black-and-white film.

Rebellion and activism were completely alien to her experiences as an undergraduate at Brown, and now in graduate school. Her college years had been about getting good grades and studying under respected professors. But these Columbia students, led by a group called SDS, or Students for a Democratic Society, as the narrator explained, were at war against the university’s administration. They claimed that Columbia University was hooked into serving big corporations that were financing the war machine. Companies whose CEOs were either on Columbia’s board of trustees or providing substantial endowments to the university, like Lockheed, General Dynamics, CBS, and Baer Business Machines.

Aubrey paused the documentary. She hadn’t realized there had been a link between Prudence’s family business and Columbia, but it wasn’t a surprise. BBM was one of the most powerful corporations in the country. They probably had their fingers in lots of pies, even back in 1969.

She did a search of Columbia’s board of trustees and found that Emmet Baer, founder of BBM, had been on the board from 1965 through 1970.

Kevin once mentioned that Prudence had wanted him and Kim to name their son Emmet after her grandfather, but for once Kim had sided with Kevin, and they had agreed on Ethan. But Aubrey couldn’t imagine what Emmet Baer being on Columbia’s board might have to do with Ethan’s kidnapping.

She returned to the documentary and continued watching the jerky footage of student protestors capturing five university buildings, then barricading themselves in against the police.

Her parents had both been at Columbia during this radical period, but Aubrey had told Smolleck her parents were not political people. Her father’s reaction tonight suggested she may have been mistaken. She searched for her mother and father in the documentary, trying to match the long-haired students to what she imagined her parents might have looked like then, but if they had been there that day, Aubrey couldn’t identify them.

She googled “Larry or Lawrence Lynd” and “Columbia University,” which returned a number of references in recent bios of him being a graduate of Columbia. She narrowed the search, including “1969” and “1970.” Nothing came up.

If her father had been involved with any student activism, he hadn’t been very visible.

Then she googled “Diana Hartfeld” and “Diana Lynd,” since her mother had married her sophomore year, and first “Columbia,” then “Barnard.”

Nothing on her mother, either.

She searched for “Larry Lynd and Jonathan Woodward,” but came up with no hits on the two of them together.

Then something else crossed her mind. Smolleck had brought up the accident her mother had been injured in, as though that were somehow connected to Ethan’s disappearance.

She googled “Accident, Columbia University, 1969.”

No specific hits, but on WikiCU, the wiki site for Columbia University, there was a list of notable incidents in 1969. Protests, students seizing university buildings, the elimination of ROTC from campus, and more references to the SDS organization. She clicked on WikiCU’s link to 1970 and skimmed the entries, stopping on one that caught her eye:

Revolutionary student group Stormdrain accidentally blows up its headquarters in brownstone.

Aubrey followed a link to the article. A black-and-white photo taken at night showed several police standing in front of a row of brick townhouses. Barricades and rubble lined the street, but most noteworthy was the black, gaping space between two stately brick brownstones. The building between them had been leveled.

The caption below the photo read: S
ITE OF
M
ORNINGSIDE
H
EIGHTS
B
ROWNSTONE
T
HAT
B
LEW
U
P
A
PRIL
1970, K
ILLING
F
OUR
, I
NCLUDING
T
HREE
C
OLUMBIA
U
NIVERSITY
S
TUDENTS
.

Could this be the accident her mother was in?

Do they hide things from you?
Smolleck had asked.

Aubrey hadn’t responded, disturbed by the answer that came to mind.

Yes
, they did hide things.

But she was as much at fault. She had never asked her parents about their past, sensing the topic was off-limits. She had grown up trying not to rock the boat because she knew her parents’ marriage wasn’t entirely stable. Then, eight years ago, after Dad left and the boat had capsized, she had felt an even greater need to protect her mother by not wading into treacherous waters.

But those days were over. Aubrey had questions only Mama could answer, and she would ask them. Even if they finally caused the boat to sink.