The Rich and the Dead (31 page)

She now knew that Alexei wasn't the killer, and that Chase, the ringleader of the society, was Effie's lover. But what were Effie and Chase fighting about? And why did Effie think she had to keep their relationship a secret?

Lila sighed. Effie was such a puzzle. For every true thing that could be said about her, the exact opposite could also be true. She was cunning, yet ditzy. She was generous, yet thoughtless. She seemed like an open book, yet Lila was slowly realizing that she barely knew her.

Was her dad really being investigated by the SEC, or was that just another lie? Lila was 100 percent sure that Winston Webster was never indicted by the SEC for investor fraud. That juicy fact would've been revealed during her investigation into the murder of his daughter. So either the truth about Webster's thievery was buried or he had been able to dig himself out of whatever financial pit he had found himself in. Or, Lila wondered, was that story all a lie, something Effie came up with in order to hide the truth about what had really upset her that night at the Fisher Island Club?

Lila finished her drink, then went back to the kitchen for a refill. The accumulating futility of her investigation over the course of so many of her days and weeks and months was wearing her down.

Whatever the truth was, Lila knew for sure that Effie was unraveling. She said she loved Chase, but they were obviously on the rocks. It sounded as if he was threatening to kick her out of the Janus Society, which clearly meant a great deal to her. And if the story about her father was true, then Effie was also living in fear that he might go to prison, stripping Effie of both her wealth and her reputation, transforming her overnight from princess to pariah.

It seemed like Effie would do anything to keep her world from crumbling. Maybe, Lila realized with a shock, kill for it.

Was it possible? Could Effie be the Star Island killer? In all her years of investigating the case, Lila had never truly considered that one of the victims could also be the perpetrator of the crime. The gunshot wounds and forensic evidence at the crime scene had never led her in that direction. But what if she'd had it wrong all along? What if one of the Janus Society members was the murderer?

The society operated in total secrecy. Every person that Lila had interviewed who had connections to the twelve dead stated that they had had no awareness of any of the victims' involvement with it. And no one had known about the secret meeting at Chase's Star Island estate except, of course, the members themselves.

So what happened? If Effie or another of the club members was the killer, then what went wrong?

The bourbon had begun to catch up with Lila, and she felt simultaneously heavy and light, exhausted and exhilarated. Her thoughts drifted away from the case and toward Dylan. Just as she was telling herself to concentrate her mind on finding the Star Island killer, her hand picked up her phone and dialed him.

From the sound of his voice, her call had pulled him out of a profoundly deep sleep. She looked at the clock. It was 3:23. She hadn't realized it was so late.

“Camilla?” Dylan said, his voice shifting instantly from sleepy to worried. “What time is it? Is everything okay?”

“I woke you,” Lila said. Only once she heard Dylan's sober voice did she realize just how drunk she was.

“Are you okay?” he asked, still concerned.

“I'm fine.” She paused. “I just needed to hear your voice. It's been a very long day.”

“You sound strange.” He paused, and Lila could hear him getting out of bed. “I'm coming over.”

“You don't have to.”

“I know I don't have to. I want to. I'll be there in fifteen minutes.”

True to his word, in fifteen minutes Dylan was at her door, in her arms, in her bed. As he removed her robe, she saw his eyes linger over the scraped flesh on her knees and hands. But he didn't ask her what had happened, just leaned over her body, gently kissing around the edges of her cuts, while she lay back, running her hand over his back, wondering how, amid all her bad luck, she had had the fortune to meet such a man.

But he will be taken away from me,
she said to herself. In less than two weeks, life as they both knew it would be over. Her love for Dylan wasn't a blessing. If anything, it was just one more heartbreak waiting to swallow her up.

Dylan looked at her. “What's wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “I was only thinking how happy I am to have met you. It's just—” She paused, needing to swallow the truth that she couldn't share. “I wish it had happened at a different time.”

He pressed his lips to hers.

“I was thinking the same thing today. I wish I could've met you years ago. My life maybe could've been different. Better.”

This made Lila laugh despite her sadness. “Your life is perfect. How could I make it better?”

“I told you. Things . . . aren't always what they look like from the outside.” Dylan's face grew grave. He continued, “There are things I've done that I'm not proud of. Decisions I made when I was younger. Things I would never do today.”

She took his beautiful, melancholy face in her hands. She realized he was lost, just like she was. But now they had found each other.

After they made love, Dylan fell into a deep sleep, but Lila was wide awake. She had made up her mind. She didn't want to give in to fate anymore. Why must she always follow the rules? Where had that gotten her?

Well,
she thought,
not any longer.

She cared more about the man she loved than any warnings from Teddy about changing the shape of the universe. Hadn't her very presence here in the past already changed the course of the future? She had befriended Effie, fallen in love with Dylan, held Frederic Sandoval as he took his last few breaths. She had certainly left some kind of mark. How much risk was there in making sure that Dylan wasn't shot?

The truth was, whatever the answer, she didn't care. Some things were worth the risk.

Before Dylan left Lila's place late Friday morning, she made him promise that they would go for a long sail on the day he was supposed to be shot. The fates be damned. Together, they'd outrun destiny and create a new future.

CHAPTER 34

N
OW THAT
E
FFIE
had become her primary suspect, Lila decided to start with a thorough search of her house. During the daylight hours, the doors to Effie's estate were typically unlocked. Even if she wasn't home, at least one of the several people tasked with caring for both the property and its mistress was working busily on something.

When Lila entered the kitchen on Friday morning, one of Effie's cooks was at the counter, feeding heaps of kale into a riotously noisy juicer.

“Is Effie in?” Lila shouted over the ruckus. The woman turned toward Lila and shook her head no while she continued to fuel the machine with vegetables.

“Miss Effie is out shopping. She'll be back later,” the cook shouted.

“I have to borrow something from upstairs,” Lila said, pointing at the ceiling as if the noise of the juicer made gesturing a necessity. The cook shrugged and turned back to her duties.

Lila had been in Effie's master suite plenty of times, but never alone. As she took a step inside, she quickly locked the door behind her, then flipped a switch on the wall that brought blackout curtains automatically down on the windows. She turned the lights on and began her search. If someone stumbled upon her surreptitious snooping, she knew she'd have no credible excuse. She would have to work quickly, quietly, and diligently.

Effie's room struck Lila as what a young girl's fantasy of an adult bedroom might look like. Large windows overlooking the ocean and the cityscape of Miami took up two sides of the bedroom. There was a small sitting area, with European furniture that had been reupholstered in animal print fabrics. The chairs and the side tables were so delicate-looking that it seemed as if a heavy gaze would crumple them. And on the west wall sat Effie's most prized possession, a sofa created by Salvador Dalí, which, with its bright pink cushions and dual arched back, was meant to resemble Mae West's lips. Only five had been made by the artist, and Effie had one of them.

Lila's first stop was the closet, though it wasn't so much a closet as an expansive, bright room that resembled an incredibly chic boutique. The all-white space was punctuated by a custom-made hot pink sofa and a pink pony-hair area rug. Her hundreds of shoes took up one entire wall, while the rest was devoted to her enviable wardrobe.

Lila began searching the various drawers, finding only piles of sunglasses, cashmere everything, and an incredibly extensive collection of lingerie. Running her hands through a bunch of silk slips, Lila jumped when she touched something metallic.
A gun,
Lila thought, but it was only a thin gold vibrator. She turned it on, turned it off, and placed it back in the drawer where she had found it.

She searched the bathroom, examining shelves upon shelves of creams, unguents, and ointments from all over the world that promised to keep time at bay, but found nothing. Then she moved to the two antique mirrored bedside tables that flanked the bed, opening each drawer and giving every object a thorough once-over. There was nothing besides a silk sleep mask, a bottle of Ambien, and a cream that, according to the label, was for the “décolletage.” Still nothing.

But years of experience as a detective had given Lila a pretty sharp instinct. She moved the side table to see if there was anything between it and the wall, and bingo: there in the floor was a barely perceptible change in the wood grain. She felt around the edges of the area and, after some experimenting, found that when she pressed on one of the corners, a secret door popped open.

The hidden compartment contained a Wilson Combat customized .45 handgun with a titanium suppressor, built to muffle the sound of a gunshot, along with several boxes of ammo. “Bingo,” Lila whispered. This wasn't a weapon that someone like Effie might have for self-defense. Lila had seen a gun of this make only once, when she found it in the dead hand of one of the Mexican cartels' most notorious assassins.

“What in the world are you up to, Effie Webster?” Lila whispered.

Time was ticking. Every minute she was in this room by herself, Lila risked being discovered. She returned the gun to its home and moved the table back to its proper place. At that moment, she spotted Effie's laptop sitting atop a bunch of art books on an antique bookshelf. In less than a few minutes, Lila had copied the entirety of Effie's computer onto the external hard drive she'd used to do the same thing to Javier.

A moment later, the blinds were up, the door was unlocked, and Lila was bounding down the stairs with one of Effie's L'Wren Scott cocktail dresses held high in her right hand as her cover, just in case Effie asked why she'd been in her bedroom without her.

Now Lila knew that, this whole time, she'd been living in a hornet's nest. She needed to be more careful than ever. As Lila was walking back to the guesthouse, she couldn't help feel, amid the shock, that she had been completely betrayed by a woman she had come to think of as a friend.

L
ATER THAT EVENING
, Lila sat on the couch with her feet up and a glass of white wine within arm's reach, sifting carefully through the contents of Effie's hard drive. Everything appeared fairly normal until she encountered a number of files that were under the same type of military-grade data encryption that she had found on Javier Martinez's computer. She wondered if all of the members of the Janus Society had their data protected to this extent.

Just as she had done before, Lila sent the files to Shadow, the hacker. Within two hours, he had cracked the data protection.

There was a long correspondence between Effie and someone who called himself “the Facilitator.” The Facilitator had sent Effie daily in-depth reports on the comings and goings of a person identified only as “the Target.” The information reminded Lila of the surveillance she'd found of Sandoval on Javier's computer.