Lion and lamb, p.9
Lion & Lamb, page 9
“We’ve all had bad nights at the poker table,” Cooper said, pretending like he was hearing this for the first time.
“You don’t understand. I’m talking epic losses in Atlantic City. To the point that he started stealing from the Hughes household.”
“Damn,” Cooper said, wondering how long he should feign shock before urging the lawyer inside the house.
The tendons in Lisa’s neck were standing out; she was clearly exasperated. “Don’t you get it? This is the whole case right here. It was an inside job, engineered by Roy Nguyen. What’s more valuable than a Super Bowl ring? Forget that—what’s more valuable than Archie Hughes’s Super Bowl ring?”
“You really think Chef Roy would kill a legend for a hunk of gold?”
“No. I think it was a heist that went horribly wrong, and for some reason, the Philly cops are super-eager to pin it on my client.”
“Speaking of…”
Letting the lawyer delay things had obviously been a mistake, because here was Francine, perfectly coiffed and handcuffed, being led by Detective Mickey Bernstein down her own neatly manicured garden path, lush even in January.
Chapter 37
REPORT TO C. LAMB BY V. SUAREZ
Wednesday, January 26
(Sent with encryption and red-flagged, with delivery confirmation)
You’re going to want to read these two documents right away, boss—but let me walk you through them. I yanked them from the police servers just a few minutes ago.
The first document is the full report on the gun the police found at the Hughes home. Ballistics has positively linked the weapon to the bullet in Archie’s body. Nothing shocking there. I scanned it for obvious mistakes or technical missteps, but it looks solid; I’m confident this is the murder weapon.
The second document, however…now, this one took a little more digging because someone tried to erase it earlier today. But I saved the doc, and I’ve authenticated it. Hang on to your hat, but the murder weapon? It’s been in police evidence before.
That’s right. The gun that was used to murder Archie Hughes spent the past six years in police-evidence lockup. I don’t know when it was removed from the evidence room or who checked it out. Give me some time. But the attached should be enough to make it clear that someone who had access to the evidence room was involved in this murder.
Chapter 38
Transcript of encrypted message exchange between Veena Lion and Janie Hall
JANIE HALL: OMG.
VEENA LION: You know I hate that, Janie. Skip the drama and just tell me what you found.
HALL: Sorry, V. Mistook you for a human being for a moment there. Human beings, as you may recall, enjoy a dramatic buildup to earth-shattering developments in an ongoing case.
LION: Hate sarcasm even more than dramatic buildups.
HALL: You’re no fun. Anyway, guess who lives in a penthouse apartment she can’t possibly afford on the salary she earns as a high-profile yet humble nanny?
LION: Maya Rain.
HALL: Like I said, you’re no fun. Anyway, I’m kind of shocked here. Based on your notes, she seemed so nice. So normal. And now she’s a murder suspect!
LION: Nice and normal on the surface. But it’s a carefully constructed surface, although it would probably fool the casual investigator. I need to break through all of that.
HALL: What do you need? Deep backgrounding? Dark-web stuff?
LION: The layout of that fancy penthouse.
Chapter 39
9:16 a.m.
“CAN I help you, miss?”
“I’m sorry, could you please just hold this?”
Veena Lion was awkwardly juggling her phone, a legal pad, a fine-tipped black marker, a large cup of coffee from La Colombe, and a mixed bunch of gerbera daisies she’d picked up at a stand on Eighteenth Street.
The overload was intentional. She had just stepped inside the swank lobby of 10 Rittenhouse, and the doorman was trained to help. This would make them instant collaborators. Possibly even allies.
The doorman carefully stabilized the coffee, then held the bouquet of flowers as Veena organized the rest of her supplies. The nervous energy radiating from her movements made the doorman all the more eager to put her at ease.
“It’s okay, miss,” he purred. “Take your time.”
“Thank you so much…Curt,” she said, reading his name tag.
“No worries at all, we’ve all had those days,” Curt replied. “Who are you here to see?”
“My friend Yvette Rivera,” Veena half lied. “I thought I’d surprise her with flowers and a Fishtown medium roast.”
Veena did have a friend—well, a former client—who lived at 10 Rittenhouse, an ex-lawyer who was a coffee junkie and loved houseplants, even though none of them lasted long in her care.
“Oh, gosh, Ms. Yvette is out of the country at the moment! Though I know she’d appreciate those gifts.”
“Oh,” Veena said, pretending to be completely flustered by this information. In fact, she knew Yvette Rivera was in the Caribbean for the month; Janie Hall had double-checked. “Do you, by any chance, like Fishtown medium roast?”
“Never had it, but a hot cup sounds really good right now.”
“With my compliments,” she said, gesturing to the cup already in his hand. “The flowers too. I’m actually allergic.”
“Wow, really? Thanks, Miss…”
“Veena Lion, and it’s my pleasure. My father worked in a building like this many years ago.” Veena’s father had done no such thing. “The people you must see…”
Curt the doorman was sipping the hot coffee and nodding along. Within two minutes, a friendship had been cemented. Now they were just two friends chatting.
“You’d better believe it,” Curt said. “Fanciest address in town.”
“Yvette told me she’d seen everybody—Patti LaBelle, M. Night, even Kobe now and again.”
Curt made an awkward sign of the cross, coffee cup in hand. “God rest his soul.” But then he got an impish gleam in his eye. “And speaking of, you know who else I saw a lot of not too long ago?”
Veena leaned forward as if ready to receive nuclear secrets. “Who?”
“Archie Hughes.”
“Really,” Veena said, feigning astonishment. “Oh my God. That’s incredible.”
“I know! Look, I’m not supposed to talk about the comings and goings of residents or their guests, but he’s pretty hard to forget. Especially with what’s going on right now. You been following the news?”
“Such a shame. That family’s already been through a lot.”
Some sources required a team of horses to drag even basic information from their mouths. Curt was not that kind of source. He was positively gushing, and it was clear he had been dying to tell someone, anyone, about his personal connection to the murdered football legend. This segued into a story about the last time he’d seen Archie Hughes play at the Linc and what they’d cooked at the tailgate party outside the stadium, but Veena was here only for confirmation that Archie Hughes had regularly visited 10 Rittenhouse—a luxury residence well out of the financial reach of most nannies.
As Curt held forth on how to cook beer brats on a portable grill without drying them out, Veena scanned the control desk of the lobby. She finally found what she’d been looking for.
“I hate to ask you this, Curt, but would it be okay if I used the ladies’?”
Of course it was not a problem. They were friends, weren’t they?
Chapter 40
THE HALL to the restrooms also led to the elevator bank. Veena knew this from a glance at the floor plan behind Curt’s desk. She rode a car down to the subterranean garage and hoped that Curt would be too entranced by the gerbera daisies to notice her in the security camera’s feed.
At least not until she confirmed something important.
The garage floor was so immaculate, you could picnic on it. Bentleys and BMWs and Audis filled about half the spaces, and carpeted walkways guided residents from their vehicles to the elevator banks. But only the rare few had access to what Veena had spotted at the lobby control desk: a private elevator leading to the penthouse.
“She can come and go as she pleases,” Veena mumbled to herself. “Any visitor she wants can go up without being seen.”
Awfully nice setup for a nanny from West Virginia, recruited straight out of Villanova. Definitely not everyone’s grad-school experience in the City of Brotherly Love. So who’s paying your bills, Ms. Rain? And what are you giving them in return? Surely it was something more than helpful parenting tips.
Physical spaces always helped Veena put herself in the minds of her quarries. She saw what they saw, felt the same ground under her shoes, took in the same smells. Janie liked to poke fun at Veena’s slightly mystical approach, but it worked. As long as you had uninterrupted time to—
“Excuse me,” an irritated voice said, breaking the spell. “What are you doing? You can’t be down here!”
“Of course I can,” Veena replied even before she turned around to see a tall security guard moving quickly toward her. He was trying to use his size to appear menacing. His hand even hovered near his belt, within reach of a pepper-spray canister. Veena knew she could easily outrun him if it came to that. The man’s bulk would slow him down.
Not that she would give him the pleasure of a pursuit.
“How did you even get down here? You can’t reach this level without an ID. Let me see yours.”
Veena evaluated the man (according to his name tag, his name was Vincent—of course it was) and instantly clocked him as an extreme law-and-order type. The usual avenues of the law were most likely closed to this clod, so he had channeled all that misplaced ambition into this job. And ooh, was he itching to use that pepper spray.
“Vincent,” she said, “let me stop you right there. I have an important message from the DA for you.”
The man blinked. “For me? Seriously?”
Veena nodded, reached slowly into her pocket, and took out a business card embossed in blue and gold—official city colors—with the name of her sometime employer. The security guard took the business card and examined it with the same reverence a woman would give her best friend’s engagement ring.
“What’s the message from DA Mostel?” Vincent asked, astonished at this turn of events.
“He said to tell you to go away.”
To Vincent’s credit, he did as he was told.
Chapter 41
11:00 a.m.
IF HIS job didn’t depend on his being online, Victor Suarez would never go online.
As it was, Victor left zero traces of himself on the internet. As far as the web was concerned, he had never been born.
He could not understand people who left pieces of their lives all over the place (on Facebook, in Google searches, in countless smartphone apps) for practically anyone to pick up. Did they also leave their doors unlocked and their windows wide open? It was the same thing to Victor.
But most people went through life assuming that whatever personal information they released to their banks (or their favorite online retailers or even their local pizza shops) would be guarded by the employees of those institutions with their lives. The truth was, most organizations’ internet security wasn’t worth a damn. And the few companies that actually bothered…well, they didn’t bother to stay current. State-of-the-art cybersecurity ate into profits, after all.
Lunacy.
Victor poured himself another extra-large mug of strong black coffee—he was trying to graduate from Diet Coke—and spent an hour doing a deep dive into all things Hughes family.
He skipped the online troll stuff. That was basically useless. Anyone with an internet connection could have an opinion about anything; opinions were as common as hydrogen atoms.
No, what Victor loved were the document trails, the paperwork backdrop of the universe: Legal agreements nobody bothered to read. Direct messages that senders assumed were private. Interoffice memos that meant nothing to most people in the outside world…except Victor, who would put them aside until he found the place where each one fit.
All the information on everyone was out there. Sometimes it was in bits and pieces, like a shredded document. You just needed the mental tape and stamina to put it back together again.
Like the Google Maps search Francine had run on her phone a month ago, directions to a modest building in Center City, Philadelphia.
The address felt random until Victor realized it was the office of the city’s top divorce lawyer, Charles “Chuck” Castrina. From there, it took only a few minutes to figure out the full story. Francine Pearl Hughes had officially retained Castrina’s services that very day. Victor’s boss, Cooper Lamb, was going to turn cartwheels.
Victor took another slug of coffee, thinking, Not the same as Diet Coke, not even close, and kept digging.
Now here was something interesting—the people trashing Francine were not the usual online trolls. These were high-end trolls. Online gamblers, mostly high rollers and whales, all of whom were none too pleased about the postponed NFC championship game. They felt like the rules had been changed; this was not the same bet it had been just a few days ago.
Conspiracy theories were abundant. Many centered on the excesses of the Eagles’ father-and-son owners. And quite a lot of them linked Archie Hughes’s murder to someone trying to influence the outcome of the game and, possibly, the Super Bowl. Victor believed some of the theories in these private posts; these were people with real money on the line.
Still, there was no smoking gun—nothing concrete to share with Cooper yet.
But Victor continued to dig. He put on another pot of coffee but made a mental note to restock his minifridge with Diet Coke. He could handle only so much coffee.
Chapter 42
12:13 p.m.
“I CAN be there by four,” Cooper told the annoying jerk on the other end of the line.
“As I told you, there are no appointments available today,” said the annoying jerk, who was somehow employed by the top divorce lawyer in the City of Brotherly Love despite being an annoying jerk. “Or for the remainder of the week.”
“And as I told you, this is a professional matter, not a personal one,” Cooper said. “I don’t need a divorce lawyer. I’m already happily divorced.”
“Doesn’t change the fact that there are no appointments available.”
“Tell him it’s Cooper Lamb. Chuck knows me!”
“Chuck knows a lot of people.”
“Do you realize how disrespectful you’re being?”
“I think I’m being extremely respectful of my boss’s time.”
Ordinarily, Cooper Lamb would opt for the dripping-with-honey approach. Kindness and flattery—maybe even a harmless bribe—worked most of the time. But ten seconds into the phone conversation, Cooper had known he was up against a different type of gatekeeper. One who’d been hired because he was a sadist who took great delight in swatting away all potential distractions.
“Let me guess,” Cooper said. “You’re a UPenn grad. You’ve got that Ivy League arrogance about you.”
“Insulting me won’t magically open a time slot.”
“No, but it might make you realize how much you don’t want me showing up uninvited at your office at four p.m.”
“Is that a threat?”
“You catch on quick! You are a UPenn grad!”
“No, but I am a former Temple running back, and I will happily escort you to the sidewalk if you even dream of showing up here without an appointment. In fact, I hope you do. Then I could skip my evening workout.”
Cooper liked this guy. Of course, the dude was still an annoying jerk. But the ex-jock’s passion for quick, insulting responses was admirable. Few people took such joy in their work. Even fewer threatened physical violence so eagerly.
“Listen, Mr. Temple Owl, I’ve gotta go pick my kids up from school. And they get cranky if I don’t take them for a snack right away. But you’ll be seeing me at four p.m.”
“Looking forward to it, Mr. Lamb. I suspect it’s been a while since anyone kicked your ass.”
“You’d be surprised,” Cooper replied. “Do you want me to get you anything from Reading Terminal while I’m there? Maybe a cannoli?”
“I don’t want a cannoli.”
“Who the hell would turn down a free Termini Brothers cannoli? There’s something seriously wrong with you. See you at four.”
The annoyance spiked in the assistant’s voice: “Don’t you d—”
Chapter 43
COOPER LAMB gave his best bloodcurdling Bela Lugosi impression: “Hello, children of the night.”
“It’s three o’clock, Dad,” said Cooper Jr., hurling his overloaded schoolbag into the back of the car.
“Excellent point. Who’s hungry for a midafternoon snack?”
“I’m guessing you are,” Ariel Lamb said.
“Okay, you talked me into it. Though let’s make it Italian pastries at Reading Terminal, since I don’t have much time and I have to take you home to your mother and then slingshot back to see a divorce lawyer over at Eighteenth and Market.”
“Why do you need to see a divorce lawyer? You and Mom are already divorced.”
Cooper exhaled and leaned back in the driver’s seat. “So that’s why she’s been so distant lately.”
“Dad!” Cooper Jr. exclaimed.
“I kid, and you children know that. Your mother is so amazing, we practically didn’t need a lawyer when we parted ways.”
“Is that why she owns the house now?”
This was the problem with raising smart, independent-minded children: They knew exactly where to slide the shiv between your ribs.
“Like I said, the woman is amazing.”
Transcript of conversation between Cooper Lamb and Prentiss Walsh, executive assistant to divorce attorney Charles Castrina
