A key turned in the lock. She leaned around the flowers and saw Fernando. His new eggplant-colored suit matched his mended glasses. He beamed, showing off his smile. His chipped tooth had been repaired.
“A pair of familiar gentlemen delivered me new keys this morning,” he said. He embraced her, smacking kisses over her head. “Your new shampoo smells amazing.”
“I know,” she said, leaning her ear to his chest.
“Look at this place.”
“Iknow.”
“You’ll destroy it within a week.”
“I know.”
They fell onto the couch, and she squirmed into the nook under his arm. “We need to check on Verena. Considering what happened to us, who knows what Weiss did to her. She said something last night, but I can’t remember what. Something about Weiss.”
“Same—I remember she saidsomething, but not what,” he said.“I called Blanc de Noir from a pay phone, put on my best affluent-straight-guy voice, and booked an appointment with Verena for tonight. Said I had unique tastes and needed a woman who could handle an intense evening. Tried to sound subtly psychopathic. It should work. She’ll meet me at the Leo Grand.”
“Why there?”
“It’s across the street from the police station. We have to convince her to talk to them.”
— 47 —Siebenundvierzig
Bureaucracy remained, as ever, the greatest kink of the Viennese. They’d received the Goldfinch family’s financial records, and Andreas had received a formal complaint for his behavior at the wedding.
It was late. The office was empty. Even Beate was home in bed. Andreas had nothing to go on, and no one to grumble at about it. The chief wanted this case not only swept under a rug but hidden beneath a loose floorboard in an abandoned house in the mountains.
Andreas’s desk was barricaded by a makeshift cubicle built of document boxes, inside of which he sat, hunched over Frau Doktor Doktor’s bank statements.
He used to love numbers.
The zeros bled together, painting a portrait of a woman with too much of her husband’s cash to burn. He suspected something was off about them. Beate had disagreed, so he was sorting through statements alone, off the clock. The chief said the department didn’t have resources to hire anyone. If only Sterling were there—she’d probably had an affair with some forensic accountant who’d taught her a few things.
“If only Sterling were here,” he muttered, shocked he’d said it aloud.
He hummed along to the opera playing in his earbud, but even Callisto Pallavicini’s virtuoso voice failed to soothe him. He aligned page corners of a finished stack, preparing to add them to the tower beside him, and muttered, “So.”
His tired eyes caught something on the first page. He set them back down, and pulled his lamp closer. Among endless deposits and charges, most in the thousands, a small fee stood out. Fifty euros. Withdrawn from an ATM on January 3, a week or so before the murders, at four a.m. What was Frau Doktor Doktor Goldfinch doing out so late?
The ATM was on Kärtnerstrasse. He googled the address and saw it was beside the Loos Bar. So maybe she was out having a drink. It was a fancy place, but still, she didn’t strike him as the type. He calculated. Fifty euros was about the cost of two martinis and a tip, but they took cards. Only reason she’d pay cash was to avoid a paper trail.
He saw that the next morning, Frau Doktor Doktor Goldfinch withdrew five thousand euros in person at 9:01. Right when the bank opened. She must have been tired, since she’d been out until the wee hours the night before. But why carry the burden of a gin hangover while trudging to the bank? You could do everything online these days. To anyone else, the five thousand would look like nothing. But to Andreas, it looked like a down payment.
He’d learned a lot of things in his time on the force, and the most disappointing was how little a hit man cost. The going rate for an assassination was a pittance. For a no-name, the deed could be done for ten thousand. For anyone recognizable, there was a celebrity surcharge of about forty thousand. Thirty-five, if you got a bargain. Goldfinch’s bank receipts listed countless charges for well over thatamount. She’d bought purses that cost more. But chances were, she’d paid cash for this.
The statement told him a story, and that five-thousand-euro withdrawal read likeOnce upon a time. A hushed conversation, a deal discussed, two martinis and an initial payment made in cash. Maybe to that sleazy bartender Harry. He’d never liked how she looked at Sterling. Yes, five thousand seemed like a reasonable down payment for a hit man.
He grabbed the next stack. A few days before the murder were more withdrawals. Three times 9,999, just under the minimum required for banks to file paperwork about the transaction. All made in person. On camera. So, 34,997 euros for a contract killing. And he could prove it was her.
But who was she trying to take out? Not her son, she was obsessed with him. Too obsessed. Had Mama Goldfinch killed Hedy out of jealousy? And he thought his mother nagging him to find a wife was bad.
To him, the series of numbers might as well have been printed in blood. But to everyone else, they’d be nothing more than a hunch. Like the one that had been gripping his gut since he met Frau Doktor Fucking Doktor Goldfinch. The woman was hiding something. Why else had they cleaned out David’s offices? Yet somehow, the only person his chief had seen fit to write up was Andreas.
His phone rang. The front desk.
“There’s a woman asking for you, sir. I’m guessing it’s a personal visit,” said the officer, nervous.
“Why?” ask Andreas.
