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Now that Hurley was calm, Bernstein wasn’t going to wait for his friend to inflame him again. “Thank you. We’ll get right on it.”
“Victor is a big guy . . . impossible to miss. Just do what he says and everything will
be fine.” Hurley stood and placed his hand on Jones’s shoulder. “Brian . . . you’re not a bad guy . . . you’re just self-righteous. You think you’re the only noble man in the game.” Hurley shook his head. “Trust me, it’s a little more complicated than that.”
CHAPTER 16
LITTLE yellow flags littered the grassy area across the street from the hotel. Commandant Neville had received the call shortly after 10:00 a.m. She’d already showered and was lounging with her husband and two kids. She’d given up on going to church with two kids in diapers, so Sunday mornings were spent on the floor of their tiny flat. She and her husband tried to simultaneously read the papers and keep the kids occupied with an endless stream of irritating shows that supposedly were going to make Marc, who was two and a half, and Agatha, who was nine months, the smartest kids of their generation. Neville didn’t actually believe it, but she was all for anything that kept them occupied for more than ten minutes. When the call came, she put on a white shirt, black slacks, black pumps, and a gray trench coat. Knowing the cameras would be following her every move, she even put on a dab of makeup and bushed out her short black hair.
A vivid, low fall sun sparkled off the Seine. Neville’s eyes were concealed by a stylish pair of oversized Chanel sunglasses that covered nearly a third of her face. She wore them as much to shield her from the bright sun as to shield her from the prying eyes of the reporters. She had yet to hold a press conference, and she didn’t want them reading anything into her expressions until she was ready. She stood in the middle of the area and tried to make sense of it all. The reporters were back, thick as summer flies, shouting questions and snapping photos and in general being their irritating selves. In addition to the press, there were hundreds if not thousands of curious onlookers who couldn’t resist the morbid pull of the crime scene.
Neville kept her concern beneath a placid mask. She’d learned over the years that it was best to look serious at murder scenes—even angry could work, but it was never okay to laugh or be caught joking with other officers. The investigation, only in its second day, was becoming something of a mess. These little yellow flags, for instance, had only been placed this morning. The entire area from river to street was now blocked off with bands of crime scene tape and another ten officers to make sure nothing was tampered with. Neville thought it was a waste of manpower, but her superiors had insisted. The problem, she knew, was that this entire space had been crowded with people the day before. They had stepped all over the evidence and if this ever got to court it would be all but useless. She did, however, gain something very important—a new angle.
Neville looked back at the hotel and the balcony outside Tarek’s suite. She chided herself for not expanding the perimeter right away, but as her boss had explained, the amount of evidence in the hotel itself was overwhelming. Nine bodies, shell casings and slugs everywhere, and then on top of that they’d found the room with all of the surveillance equipment. They still didn’t have that one quite figured out. No one on the hotel staff remembered any security for the Libyan oil minister. They had over fifteen statements from employees saying Tarek had arrived with a single assistant. That assistant was now unavailable for comment, securely locked behind the gates of the Libyan Embassy.
The tough one to stomach for Neville was that she had more than thirty officers assigned to the case, and she had only learned of the spent shell casings that were strewn about the sidewalk and gutter in front of the hotel the previous evening. The press might eat her alive for that one. She went back to the crime scene, examined the casings, and wondered how many had been crushed, kicked, and taken during the course of the long day. They were more or less spread out under the suite’s balcony. The logical assumption was that either someone had stood on Tarek’s balcony and fired into his room, or someone had stood on his balcony and fired at someone or something down on the street.
She went up to the suite, stood on the balcony, and looked into the room. The wall directly in front of her was untouched, whereas the wall to her right was pocked with bullet holes. Turning toward the river, she looked down at the sidewalk where the shell casings had been found and imagined firing a weapon. After a long moment of reflection she ordered her deputy Martin Simon to rope off the area, bring in the metal detectors, and begin the search for 9mm slugs.
Neville then went home full of self-recrimination for the mishap. She had allowed herself to be sucked into the most plausible theory—that one man, or several men, had killed Tarek, the prostitute, the supposed bodyguards, and then two guests and a hotel worker on his way out the back door. In barely a day’s time it was all falling apart. The Libyans were so far refusing to talk, saying only that the four men were there to protect their oil minister. As a police officer, Neville despised being lied to, and like most cops, she had a very well-tuned BS detector. The four dead men were not bodyguards. They might have been sent to keep an eye on Tarek, but they most certainly were not bodyguards. She would have to ask around, but to the best of her knowledge, she’d never heard of bodyguards using silenced weapons.
Neville ignored the reporters who were yelling her name, instead choosing to act as if the pattern of little yellow flags would give her a glimpse into how to solve the crime of the century. Martin Simon approached from behind and called out her name. When Neville turned, she could tell by the open-eyed expression on his face that the case was about to take another turn.
“What’s up?”
“Let’s take a walk.” Simon glanced back toward the hotel. “There’s something interesting you should see.”
Neville fell into step with the red-haired Simon. Although he was two years older than her, his red hair and freckles made him look as if he were ten years her junior. When they were clear of the throngs of reporters and onlookers, she said, “Please tell me we didn’t find another body.”
Simon laughed. “No more bodies. I think nine is enough.”
“Then you’ve solved the crime for us?”
Simon shook his head as they entered the lobby. “No, but I think I’ve found something that is going to upset you.”
She pulled off her sunglasses and placed them in her purse. The hotel staff watched them with understandable anxiety. More than half of their guests had checked out and future reservations were being canceled at a quick clip. Neville felt bad for them. They were overworked and stressed and this thing was far from over. Every single one of them, whether they had been on duty or not, would be interviewed at least twice more. It was an avenue that had to be pursued for two reasons. Either one of the employees had seen something without realizing it, or one of them was involved in giving the killer or killers information about Tarek’s comings and goings.
They entered the elevator, and when the doors were closed, Simon said, “I couldn’t sleep last night.”
“That’s because you drink too much coffee,” Neville said in a matter-of-fact tone.
“Don’t start, boss,” he said as he watched the brass arrow move from left to right, ticking out their ascent. “While I was lying awake staring at the water marks on my ceiling, I asked myself why someone would stand on the balcony and shoot toward the street and the river.”
“And?”
“The nine-millimeter casings we found on the street match the ones that were scattered all around Tarek’s suite, and in the hallway, and the ones found by the body at the back door.”
The elevator stopped at the top floor and the doors opened. Neville exited first. “So you think they were fired by one of our Libyan bodyguards.”
“Maybe . . . but for the moment, I’m more interested in who was being shot at than who was doing the firing.”
Neville’s thin lips pinched to the left in an expression that told Simon she wasn’t following his line of reasoning.
Simon stopped walking in the middle of the hall and acted as if he was holding a gun. “If I’m standing on the balcony and firing at someone below, why am I firing at them, and how did they get there?”
> Neville shook her head abruptly as if she was trying to clear her thoughts. “What are you talking about?”
“Somebody, or several people, killed those bodyguards, and then they had to get out of the hotel. We jumped to the conclusion that the same person or persons killed Tarek, the prostitute, the bodyguards, then killed the two guests and the worker.”
