Dead File (24 page)

Kendyl had badgered him to take her to a party. See the damn new year in, as if his wife hadn’t just died under suspicious circumstances, as if the whole frigging world didn’t know about it, as if he and Kendyl were just your everyday couple. What was wrong with that woman? She carried on as if everything were normal and the Sandie Schaeffer night from hell had never happened.

The events of that night kept replaying in his mind like some recurring Stygian nightmare. He and Kendyl were in the office. It was almost midnight. They had thoroughly raked through Gillian’s files without finding the formula, and he was giving up. His wife must have kept it somewhere else. He would come across it somewhere, he was sure, just not tonight. Carter had switched off the overhead lights, locked the doors to both the inner office and Sandie’s room, and he and Kendyl had gone back to their own suite to pick up their coats and Kendyl’s purse.

They’d been there for just a few minutes when Kendyl heard the noise. Heels clicking on the marble tiles, coming down the hall, then stopping at the suite next door. Kendyl had beckoned to Carter, her finger to her lips. They stood still and listened. Someone was going into Gillian’s suite.

Quickly, Carter went back into his inner office and opened the paneling that revealed the bank of monitors—to Kendyl’s astonishment; she’d followed him in. Ignoring her, he focused on the two screens that displayed Gillian’s office suite. And watched Sandie Schaeffer look around the room, let herself into the inner office, put her purse down on Gillian’s desk, and begin a thorough search there.

“What the hell—?”
Kendyl started in a whisper before Carter shushed her. And the two watched, silently. Sandie Schaeffer on the video screen doing exactly what
they
had just done, poring through Gillian’s files.

To conduct this covert hunt during these unlikely hours, Sandie had to be looking for something that was very important to her, Carter figured. The formula. Had to be. If Gillian had been conducting tests on her father’s glaucoma formula, Sandie could have found out. She was Gillian’s assistant and her father’s daughter—if she’d managed to see analysis reports, she would know what she was looking at.

Even if Sandie was in the dark about the testing, the papers indicated that Schaeffer had not yet been paid for his formulation—he’d only had Gillian’s letter of intent. Just as Carter had done, Sandie might also be taking this first opportunity after the crime-scene tape was pulled to get inside the suite and search for the formula to protect her father. She wouldn’t want him to lose his intellectual property to the Rose company without compensation, and she probably suspected that could easily happen in the shuffle now that Gillian was dead. In fact, Sandie wouldn’t know if she even had a job for much longer.

While Sandie Schaeffer methodically searched Gillian’s office, Carter had sat and watched her on the monitors. He’d figured he might as well see if the woman had any better luck than he and Kendyl had.

Kendyl wasn’t dumb. Carter knew she had to be aware that they were probably searching for the same thing, and that it wasn’t some papers that would most likely prove worthless in the end. Nobody put forth this kind of effort to find some inconsequential research that was done just as a favor to a small pharmacist. Not Carter. And not Sandie Schaeffer. Kendyl wouldn’t have known what the grail was, but, like him, she had to realize that it must be something very valuable. That was the night Kendyl learned too much, the night Kendyl Scott had become dangerous.

When he watched Sandie discover the formula tacked behind Gillian’s desk drawer, he made his move. Following the contingency plan he’d come up with over the hours, he sent Kendyl next door to scare her into giving it up. He’d given Kendyl his oversized Burberry raincoat to wear, which hung almost to the floor on her. The ski mask was an improvisation—Carter left ski gear in his closet all through ski season. A wealthy friend of his was known to call at the last minute on any given Friday to say he’d just decided to take his jet to Aspen for the weekend, did Carter want to join him at his tony lodge on Red Mountain? And Carter was always prepared to go, with skis and poles, boots, ski pants, parka, sweaters, the works. And the ski mask, the black wool hat with the eye slits that pulled down over his face for blizzard skiing.

And he gave Kendyl the blue steel Glock he kept locked in his desk drawer. Just to scare Sandie with, he told her—it wasn’t loaded.

He wanted that formula.

And he got it.

Carter didn’t open the envelope in Kendyl’s presence. An envelope retrieved at a very high cost. “For God’s sake, what
is
it?” she’d demanded to know. “Exactly what I told you,” he’d said, “a formula that’s most likely worthless.” Kendyl would have translated that to mean it was none of her business. And she knew better than to ask him again. In fact, in view of what had happened in Sandie Schaeffer’s office, she’d told him, she didn’t
want
to know.

When he later examined the contents of that envelope, he did indeed find the formula inside, along with the name of the independent laboratory that had been working with it. In the days following, he visited that lab, examined their data, and authorized the techs to continue on the path Gillian had outlined, but now, with the death of his wife and partner, they were to send their work product and bills directly to him.

Upon careful study of the complex research, Carter learned what his wife had been holding out on him: a truly golden egg. The data told him exactly what BriteEyes was, and what it did. BriteEyes, in the form of an eyedrop, actually changed the color of a person’s eyes for just a few hours, and with no harmful side effects. Extraordinary. A cosmetic breakthrough. Women would go crazy for it. So would men. Teenagers would be all over it. It was a slam dunk.

In the notes he’d found in the safety-deposit box, Gillian had proposed that the product be marketed in packaging of three small vials of drops that would change consumers’ eyes to three different colors, colors like hot pink, vibrant purple, fiery orange, indigo blue, silver or gold, fire-engine red, even jet black. With just a couple of drops in each eye, people would have eyes to match their outfits, or their moods. Gillian had preliminarily costed the product out to sell for $29.95 per package. Brilliant.

Carter could already envision the publicity this product would generate, the
free
publicity. Newspaper headlines, talk shows, cable channels, MTV sessions,
People
magazine,
New York
magazine,
Us Weekly,
even
Time
and
Newsweek.
Why, this stuff would make the
cover
of
Time.
It would be a veritable gold mine. A lucrative, ingenious, breakthrough cosmetic eye-color product.

And now it was his. All he had to do was continue the work on it and exercise the letter of intent with pharmacist William Schaeffer. He had no doubt that he could make the deal with Schaeffer. Knowing his wife, and the secrecy with which she’d developed this product, he was sure Schaeffer had no idea what it was he had to sell.

Sandie Schaeffer somehow recognized who shot her that night—Carter had seen and heard her gasp on the monitor. But her doctor reported that his patient was suffering from a form of trauma-induced selective amnesia; she’d blocked out everything that had happened in the entire, disastrous sequence of events from the minute she’d found Gillian dead on her office floor.

Carter hoped his luck would hold. He was pretty sure no one knew where he and Kendyl had been that night. He’d sweated it big time, but twelve days had gone by. If they’d found out, the cops would have been all over his case by now. Of course they’d questioned him as to his whereabouts that night. He was home, he’d said. Alone. Went to bed early. And was back in the office at seven-thirty in the morning, as usual. They couldn’t prove that any of it wasn’t true. And they had never asked Kendyl anything at all.

Had he and Kendyl left the building that night, they’d have been nailed by the guards. Like Goodman Penthe, who spent Gillian’s last night on earth with her. Carter had just found that out today on the morning news. The sonofabitch.
Poor
sonofabitch, Carter thought with a smirk—Goodie was on the hot seat now. But Carter and Kendyl were home free.

Unless Kendyl ever opened her mouth.

He decided to give her the damned diamond ring.

47

T
en minutes to nine. After a pleasant hour at the Schaeffer cottage in the Palisades, Sandie’s father had left to go back to his drugstore and Maxi had come home. Settling in for her own little private celebration, she’d cracked a split of California red, figuring she might as well stay with wine. Curled up on the couch in her study, garbed in a comfy gray-and-white-striped Tommy Hilfiger nightshirt, her bare feet tucked beneath her, she was watching the hordes of celebrants gathered in New York’s Times Square, live, and waiting with them for the silver ball to drop in ten minutes. She didn’t plan to stay up until midnight to see the new year in on the West Coast; although tomorrow would be a holiday for most people, for her it was a workday. She would watch the festivities on New York time, finish her wine, and crash early.

She yawned.
Exciting, my life,
she thought, but smiled. She wouldn’t change places with anybody. Okay, maybe Jennifer Aniston.

Her phone rang, and she jumped. Picking up, she answered with “Happy New Year, whoever you are.”

“Maxi! What are you doing home? Shouldn’t you be at a party?”

Richard!
“I’m partying with my dog,” she squeaked, nearly choking on her wine.

“Tell Yukon I said Happy New Year.”

“Richard says Happy New Year, Yuke,” she said to her party mate, bending down to ruffle his neck. “He says ‘Back atcha, Richard,’ ” she said into the phone.

“Tell him I’m going to bring him an etzem lekelev from Israel.”

“A
what?
”

“A dog bone. I’ve been studying my Hebrew.”

“When are you leaving?”

“In the morning. El Al at nine.”

“Excited?”

“Yes and no.” She didn’t have to ask him to explain that.

“So … where are you now?”

“In a rowdy bar in SoHo. On my cell phone. Wanna welcome the new year in with me?”

“Um … okay. Sure. Why aren’t you in Times Square?” And don’t you have a date on New Year’s Eve? she didn’t say.

“I took my mom to a party, a bunch of her pals. They’re in a townhouse up the street, wearing paper hats and blowing noise-makers, and they definitely didn’t need me, so I ducked out to see if I could find you.”

“I hear it’s snowing back there—”

“Little flurries. But it’s building.”

“New York is wonderful?”

“New York is always wonderful. I called your mother and dad and wished them Happy New Year. Told Max I was wearing one of his classy jackets.”

When Richard had saved Maxi’s life back in October, a bulletproof vest had saved his own skin, but his Giorgio Armani jacket, the only one he owned, was slashed in tatters by an unhinged killer. Grateful, her parents had invited him to come home with her for Thanksgiving dinner, and her dad had taken him to Giorgio Armani on Madison Avenue the next day and bought him three new jackets.

“They adore you,” she told him. She fervently hoped that he wouldn’t read into that statement that Brigitte and Maxwell Poole would actually like her to marry him and have his babies.

“We’re lucky we have our folks,” was all he said. Then, “It’s almost midnight here, Maxi.”

“I’m watching Times Square—it’s on live. I’ll turn up the volume so you can hear.”

“It’s on in this bar, too,” Richard said.

“Nine, eight, seven . . .” they counted down in unison.

“Happy New Year, Maxi. I miss you.”

“Safe trip, Richard,” she said. “And … uh … me too.”

48

N
ew Year’s Day. Always an impossibly slow news day. Even the crooks and felons have hangovers. Maxi sat in the newsroom with Wendy, perusing the wires, surfing the Net, trying to dig up something happening somewhere.

Word was buzzing around the newsroom that this would be Rob Reordan’s last week at the station. Evidently he and the company had agreed to disagree on a new contract, and, according to the newsroom grapevine, an official memo would be released later today announcing that the legendary anchor was moving on to other pursuits.

The joke was the company shouldn’t bother putting out memos. The entire staff always knew everything that was about to happen within these walls well before its official release, so posting the information was a waste of time, a waste of effort, and a waste of paper. This was an organization of three hundred news gatherers, after all—you could count on
somebody
to get the advance scoop.

“Rob Reordan has other pursuits?” Wendy wondered aloud, dripping sarcasm. “He’s a hundred.”

“You know that’s what they always write.” Maxi said. “Boilerplate text that’s code for dumping someone. As in, ‘He/she is moving on to other pursuits.’ ‘He/she wants to spend more time with family.’ ”

“How about, ‘He/she is going into independent production.’ Or, ‘wants to spend time giving back now,’ ” Wendy put in. “I always love that one.”

The two were astonished to see Rob Reordan come into the newsroom. No one ever saw him in the building at ten in the morning. Since everybody was plugged into the gossip about him, the business-as-usual babble hushed when he walked in. Nor did anyone look up at him. So he knew they knew.

Rob strode over to Wendy’s computer station. “Maxi, got a minute to talk?” he asked.

“Happy New Year, Rob,” Maxi offered brightly, then wished she hadn’t. Rob’s face was pasty and drawn, actually looking his eighty-three years. Or maybe she’d never really seen him in daylight without his makeup.

“You too,” he said. Then, “Hi, Wendy.”

“Hello, Rob,” Wendy returned glumly, making a disgruntled mental note that this was the first time Rob Reordan had been civil to her in years.

“So, Maxi, can I talk to you for a minute?” Rob reiterated. It was obvious that he didn’t want to talk in the open newsroom, so Maxi led him back to her office and closed the door behind them.