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We drove in silence, and I was struck by how very different these men were from Frankie. Betsy’s boyfriend was a charlatan, a weak fellow who pretended to be a player. He wasn’t: he was a banker who was in over his head. There was a reason he was told to keep an eye on a thirteen-year-old girl while the big guns had come to the BP to retrieve me. And, clearly, he hadn’t even done that right: Marisa had managed to send me a mayday.
It was Betsy who broke the silence when she said, “You’re not going to kill us. You can’t have another body. You already have four.”
I looked at her. I had no idea what she’d been going through, but clearly the furnace had burnished the steel that once had been my reckless badass of a sibling. It had resurrected her. She had a bruise on her face, but otherwise didn’t seem injured.
“Only three in the U.S.,” Rory said. “And we know the Morleys were suicides. And the third was likely a suicide. Or an accident. Or, sure, maybe a murder. If that’s the case, then Crissy here seems the most likely culprit.”
You can’t pin that on me, I thought. But they could. And they might.
* * *
I had never been to Frankie Limback’s home. I was relieved we were here and not in the middle of nowhere. I made a decision as we were sliding to a stop in his driveway: as we all emerged from the vehicle, I would pull the gun from my purse and tell Rory to drop his. I wasn’t sure I could pull the trigger, but this had to stop. Unfortunately, as I was unfastening my seat belt, he grabbed my purse. I tried to grab it back, murmuring something incomprehensible about how a lady needs her handbag, but he felt the weight and then his fingers ran like spider legs over the Glock, and he hit me hard on the jaw, my teeth knocking together and the pain shooting up to my ear.
“Fucking Christ, you thought you were going to shoot me? My God, you’re a bitch,” he said, and he pulled out my gun and stared at it as if he didn’t already have one just like it in his hand. Then Damon opened the door and Rory shoved me from the vehicle, and I fell on my side onto the asphalt driveway.
“We’re going to go inside, and I am going to aim your very own gun—this one—at a thirteen-year-old girl, and you are going to tell me everything Yevgeny Orlov told you. We are going to go over every minute you two spent together, second by second. And if I sniff the teeniest aroma of bullshit in anything you say, I will shoot her.”
“You won’t shoot a child,” I said.
“How the hell do you know I won’t? You know nothing about me.”
From the black pavement, which felt like hot sand, I nodded. “You’re right,” I agreed. “I don’t know you.”
“Get up,” he commanded, and so I did. I saw the sleeve on my blouse had ripped and my elbow was bleeding. I glanced at Betsy. I saw in her face that she believed Rory was capable of anything—but I saw also in those beryl-blue eyes a crescent of absolute, unfettered rage.
I heard the car and the craziness in the driveway, and I went to see what was going on. But already Lara Kozlov was coming outside to get me, and the congresswoman and her guard—or whatever he was—were leaving out the back and heading down the path that led to Lara’s house, and they were moving pretty damn fast. Schweiker, despite her acorn “paramilitary” beret, didn’t want to be around to see whatever was going to happen next. Lara handed me a shirt and said I should come inside.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Betsy
She threw her arms around her daughter, and then took a step back, her hands on Marisa’s shoulders, and studied her. She was wearing a T-shirt over her bathing suit and was unharmed. Then Betsy pulled the girl to her once again and would have held her like that a long while, but Lara Kozlov herded them to the couch, telling them to sit there beside Crissy. The woman handed Betsy a tissue and she blew her nose, and then used the sleeves of her shirt to dry her face: she hadn’t wept—she was too angry to sob—but her eyes had grown filmy with relief that Marisa was alive. She looked up at Frankie, furious, appalled by his woeful, hangdog mien. She counted eight of them in his living room, including herself. There was her sister, Marisa, and the quintet from Futurium—Frankie, Lara, Rory, Damon, and that thug with a beard who’d held her hostage last night. Other than Lara, who sat in a chair opposite the three Dowlings, the Futurium contingent remained on its feet. That meant the four men were standing, and the four women were seated. Betsy was unsure what to make of that. On the coffee table was a glass vase with a replica of Georgia O’Keeffe’s stunning green-and-white orchid that hung at MoMA.
“Should I get Tony on the line?” Damon was asking. “He could FaceTime with us.”
“No need,” Rory said.
“I’m bleeding on the couch. My elbow,” Crissy said to no one in particular, sounding a little stunned, and Betsy expected someone to do something—even if it was as simple as Lara standing up and giving her sister a Kleenex, too—but it was as if Crissy had spoken from space.
“So, we have the Princess of Las Vegas,” Rory went on. “We have her sister, we have her niece. Whole goddamn royal family. You know, don’t you, some people think you were the last person to see Yevgeny Orlov alive—and most of them are with the LVPD?”
“I wasn’t,” said Crissy. “Whichever one of you killed him was.”
“Tell us how you met.”
“We met on the casino floor.”
“He hit on you?”
“He did.”
“Date, time?”
“I don’t know the exact date. I’d have to look at a calendar. It was August. It was after my second show.”
Rory said, “You have the chance to go home in forty-five minutes. Maybe an hour. But you need to be totally candid about Orlov. No bullshit. Not one word.”
Betsy watched her sister rub at the blood on her elbow. “Crissy,” she began, unsure how far she was going, but incapable of watching this in silence, “you can’t trust them. Anything you tell them they’ll use against you.”
