Viking Bay (22 page)

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Kay and Eli didn't speak during the cab ride to the charter jet terminal at JFK. They sat in the backseat, as far away from each other as they could get. She didn't know what Eli was thinking about—and she didn't feel like asking him. She figured he was sulking because she still hadn't apologized for suspecting him. When she'd asked him to accompany her to D.C. to help Callahan, all he'd said was “Yeah, okay.”

Kay didn't know what to do about him. She was still attracted to him. And now that she was sure that he hadn't killed Ara Khan, she knew if she wanted to rekindle what they once had she was going to have to apologize for ever having doubted him. And maybe a simple apology wouldn't be enough. But right now wasn't the right time to decide anything. They didn't speak on the short flight on the chartered jet to D.C., either. Kay was asleep before the jet taxied out onto the runway.

Callahan was waiting for them in his office. He wasn't dressed in one of his wrinkled gray suits, but instead wore baggy blue jeans and a Notre Dame sweatshirt so faded from repeated washings you could barely read the name of the school. He was, however, wearing the same battered loafers he usually wore with his suits, this time sans socks. His ankles were the color of skim milk and looked like they might be swollen.

“Well, we really fucked this up” were his first words to Eli and Kay after they took a seat on the brown couch in front of his desk.

Kay almost said:
What do you mean
we
,
white man
—but didn't see the point.

“I now have all the proof I need that Anna and Nathan Sterling conspired to kill the Khans, so now it's just a matter of finding Anna and taking care of Sterling.”

“What proof do you have?” Kay said. “All we found in New York was Finley's corpse, and we didn't find any connection to Mercer.”

Callahan lit a cigarette, ignoring the look of displeasure on Hamilton's face. “Mercer ditching her surveillance team was all the proof I needed. The fact that Finley, one of the few people who could have helped her pull this off, is killed at the same time she disappears . . . Well, I don't need anything else. I told you before that I wasn't looking for evidence that would stand up in court.”

“But we don't know that she personally killed Finley,” Kay said. “Maybe she has someone helping her.”

“I don't think so. Anna wouldn't have wanted any more partners, and she was in New York tonight.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I've been busy while you were in New York not finding anything. I had Homeland check flights to see if she flew to New York, and also asked them to check surveillance cameras in Penn Station in case she took the train.”

“How did you get Homeland to do that for you?” Kay asked.

“Don't ask me questions like that, Hamilton. Anyway, Mercer took the five o'clock Amtrak to New York and arrived there at seven forty-five. She didn't buy the ticket under her own name, so I don't know what name she's using, but the cameras in Penn Station saw her getting off the train. Which means she was in New York before you found Finley's body.”

“Do you have any idea where she might be right now?” Kay asked.

“No. I had Homeland check passenger manifests for flights leaving New York, and she wasn't on any of them—at least, not using her own name. The problem is, she could easily get a fake ID. TSA has her photo and is looking at surveillance footage in the New York airports, but it's
probably going to be hours before I hear back from them. And for all I know, she didn't take a plane out of New York. Maybe she rented a car and drove into Canada. She could be anywhere.”

“And the proof that she was working with Sterling?” Kay said.

“Like I told you, after Mercer's surveillance team discovered they were following the wrong woman, I sent guys over to her house. One of the first things they found, in addition to Scarlett's corpse—I still can't believe she did that—was a burner cell phone under her bed. Now, her bedroom was a mess, clothes strewn all over the place, like she went home and rushed around like crazy, packing as fast as she could to get away, and while she was doing all this rushing around, the phone fell out of a pocket or something and got kicked under the bed.

“But I know that's bullshit. I know she didn't panic. She sat in her office for an hour after I last talked to her, and she made the arrangement with the hooker to drive her car south a month ago. I think she left the phone there on purpose.”

“So what's the significance of the phone?” Kay asked.

“There was only one number in the contacts list, and according to the cell phone provider, that phone is currently in Fairmount, West Virginia, where Sterling lives. That's good enough for me.”

“The phone could belong to someone working for Sterling,” Kay said. “You know, someone else who lives in Fairmount.” She was starting to sound like a defense lawyer, which wasn't a role she normally assumed.

“It's Sterling's,” Callahan said.

“Well, you could prove that by calling the phone number. If Sterling answers, you say you dialed the wrong number. But that way you'll know for sure it's Sterling.”

“I don't want to do that,” Callahan said. “If Sterling gets a wrong-number call to a number that only Mercer had, he'll get suspicious. I don't want to give him any advance notice that I'm coming after him.”

“Why do you think Mercer left the phone where you could find it?” Kay asked.

Callahan shrugged. “I don't know for sure, but my guess is that Anna was
giving
me Sterling. I think she just wants him gone so he can't cause her any problems in the future. She knows I'm not going to take anyone to court, and she also knows what will happen to Sterling if I'm convinced he was involved.”

“Won't she be worried that Sterling will confess?”

“No. She knows I don't need a confession from Sterling to know she's guilty. And she won't be worried at all about Sterling knowing where she is, because I'm positive she never told him where she was going. I think she just views Sterling as a loose end, and she wants me to snip it off for her.”

“So what do you intend to do to Sterling?” Kay asked.

“What the hell do you think I'm going to do?” Callahan said. There was no twinkle in his eyes.

“How are we going to find Anna?” Dolan asked, switching the discussion away from Callahan's plans for Nathan Sterling.

“I don't know,” Callahan said. “What I do know is that she's got some sort of bulletproof ID and we're not going to find her using credit-card purchases or passenger manifests or cell phones or anything simple like that.”

“How much money do you think she has?” Dolan asked.

“My guess is at least half of the fifty million,” Callahan said. “She would have been forced to share some with Sterling and Finley, but no way would she have given them more than half. So let's assume twenty-five to thirty million. That amount isn't enough for her to make the Forbes 400 list, but it's enough for her to lead a very comfortable life.”

“But what would she do?” Kay said. “Raise Arabian stallions? Collect Fabergé eggs?”

Callahan stubbed out the cigarette he'd been smoking. “That's
actually a good question,” he said, “and probably the way we're going to find her. And the answer is: She'll shop and pamper herself.”

“Shop?” Kay said.

“Yeah. I don't know if you ever noticed, but Anna dresses very well. Then there's her house; you need to go look at her house. It's not that big, but it's magnificent, and as far as I know, it was the only hobby she ever had. After she bought the place, she had it completely remodeled and she didn't scrimp. Granite countertops, hardwood floors, fancy rugs, good artwork, top-of-the-line appliances. She
loved
that house, and when she wasn't working, she used to go to estate sales to find bargains.”

“Besides clothes and her home, is there anything else?” Kay asked. “Expensive cars? Jewelry? Will she contact her family or a boyfriend?”

“Not cars,” Callahan said. “Anna drove a used Mercedes, and with twenty-five million she'll buy a new car, most likely another Mercedes or something similar. But she's never really cared about cars; she'll get something respectable, but not a Ferrari. As for her family, the only family she has is her sister and an aunt in Raleigh, and she's never been close to either of them. When Anna told Henry she was going to see her wacky sister in Wilmington, I should have stopped her right then.

“I also know she doesn't have a boyfriend. Every once in a while, I get a massage. I don't do it very often, but sometimes I feel like having someone pummel my muscles and rub my back, and every five or six months I'll get one. That's Anna and sex. Every once in a while, she gets the urge and has sex with someone, but she doesn't do it frequently and she has no interest whatsoever in having a sloppy man clutter up her beautiful home. Companionship is not a priority for her.”

“How would you know about her sex life?” Kay asked.

Now the twinkle was back in Callahan's eyes. “We used to talk about our love lives sometimes, mostly bitching that neither one of us really had one. Although, come to think of it, in the last year Anna hasn't been all that forthcoming about who she's been screwing.

“Anyway, to get back to how we'll find her, it won't be because she contacts her sister or tries to hook up with an old lover. As for jewelry, she likes jewelry, just like she likes clothes, but she can't afford to be a regular customer at Harry Winston's with only twenty-five or thirty mil in the bank. She'll buy nice earrings and other doodads, but nothing so outrageous that one of her purchases will make the news.

“But we may find her because she likes to be pampered. At least once a month, she'd go to a place here in D.C. to get spa treatments. You know, massages, facials, the whole package. She's been doing that the last five years, maybe thinking after she turned forty she needed the facials. I think she'll spend a lot of time at spas.”

Callahan reached into a drawer on the lower right-hand side of his desk and pulled out a bottle of Courvoisier. “Anyone want a drink?” he asked. Dolan and Kay both shook their heads. Callahan filled half a coffee cup with the brandy.

“So here's what I think she's going to do,” Callahan said. “She's going to settle in some foreign country, buy a nice house, and spend a lot of time remodeling it and filling it with nice things. She'll buy expensive clothes, spend time in spas, and take vacations to sunny spots when she has the urge.”

“Why are you so sure she'll pick a foreign country?” Kay asked.

“Because that will make it harder for me to find her. Here in the U.S., I have a lot of pull with federal law-enforcement agencies. I don't have that kind of pull overseas.”

“Then where do you think she'll move to?” Kay asked. “Someplace where we don't have an extradition treaty?”

“No. She knows I'm not going to try to extradite her, and most places where we don't have extradition treaties aren't really all that nice. Plus, you usually end up paying some government bagman to leave you alone. Then there's the language problem. She speaks passable French, but she isn't really fluent in the language. She's not like you when it comes to languages. I think she'll pick someplace in Europe, England
or Ireland, maybe Switzerland. She won't go to the Orient, because she'd be afraid she might stand out as a rich white woman. And because she's a bit of a bigot. She won't pick Australia because it's too remote, and Canada is too close to the U.S. So I'm guessing an English-speaking country in Europe so she'll be able to take shopping trips to Paris or Berlin and go to the Costa del Sol when she wants to sit on the beach.

“And one other thing,” Callahan said. “I think she's going to get plastic surgery to change her appearance. She's not going to spend the rest of her life hiding inside a house like bin Laden. She'll want to be free to move about and not worry about her face being spotted on some surveillance camera.”

“Maybe we can find her that way,” Kay said. “You know, distribute pictures of her current face to likely doctors.”

“I doubt that will work,” Eli said. “I mean, we could mail her picture to every plastic surgeon in the world, but those people tend to treat patient confidentiality rather seriously. The other thing is, unless Anna's dumber than I think she is, she won't pick a plastic surgeon in the country where she's living or using her bottom-line ID.”

“We could offer a reward,” Kay said. “A million bucks to the doctor who'll give her up.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Eli said, “but I doubt that will work if she picks a reputable doctor, and she will. She's not going to have her face cut on by a second-rate surgeon, and a first-rate surgeon probably makes more than a million a year.”

“Not to mention,” Callahan said, “that I've already pissed away fifty million dollars and I don't feel like pissing away any more.”

Callahan rubbed a hand over his doughy, pale face and said, “Look. I'm beat. I've been up all night and so have you guys. Go home and get some sleep, and we'll meet back here at three p.m.”

“I'm not sure I'll be coming back,” Dolan said.

“Aw, come on, Eli,” Callahan said. “I'm sorry I doubted you. Okay?
What do I have to do to get you to forgive me? Get down on my knees? Plus, Mercer tried to set you up. Don't you want some payback?”

“I haven't decided,” Dolan said, and walked out of Callahan's office.

“He'll come around,” Callahan said to Kay.

Kay didn't say anything, but now she was thinking that maybe she didn't care if he came back. What did it take for the guy to get over a little mistake? Well, maybe not a
little
mistake, but still a mistake. Like Callahan had said, did they have to get down on their knees and beg? Well, she wasn't getting down on her knees for anyone.