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As Bree walked back toward the van she’d rented, she found herself suddenly trembling with adrenaline and on the verge of hyperventilating.Who was shooting in there? The sheikh’s bodyguards? The two mobsters?
She sat in the back of the van, forcing herself to breathe deep and slow, until she heard Luster talking over the receiver again. She crossed to it as the fashion designer said, “Brad, I so need to get out of here. I’m feeling claustrophobic and nauseous.”
Jenkins, sounding equally shaken, said, “You heard them, Phillip. Stay where we are until we’re told we’re good to leave.”
“I’m good right now!” Luster shot back.
Bree texted him:I’m in the van again. I can hear you. I know this is rough, but tell me what you see.
In a wavering voice a few moments later, Luster said, “There are at least nine people we can see dead in here. Paula’s one of them. So is Ari Bernstein, the hedge-fund hack. They’re on their backs about twenty feet from us. Both were shot between the eyes. And Brad’s contact, Victor, is dead, along with a woman I don’t know next to him. I don’t recognize the others, but one looks like a sheikh of some sort. There are two men dead near him and two others by the bar that someone said were known mobsters.”
Ivanovic and Flynn!Bree thought. She texted:Did you see the shooters?
“One,” Luster said. “He was near Paula and Ari, wearing aSaint Laurent tux from two seasons ago and a shirt with no bow tie. About five eight. Hundred and fifty pounds. Short, bristly, salt-and-pepper hair, unattractive face, unassuming manner. But he looked very fit, like a gymnast, so he held my attention more than several glances. Then I noticed he was playing with this metal cylinder thing in his left hand. It was maybe five inches long, two inches around, with buttons and glass lenses at both ends. Like a mini-telescope?”
“A mini-telescope?”
“Whatever,” Luster said. “It doesn’t matter what it was because Fit Guy closed his eyes then. His right hand went to his pants pocket and came out with a pistol so small, I wasn’t sure if I was seeing things. Then the lights went out and everyone around me was groaning and laughing, even Brad, and I was thinking I was wrong about the gun. But then I saw this, like, green cyclops eye hovering near Paula and Ari, and the shooting and the screaming started.”
CHAPTER 51
Washington, DC
MY FLIGHT FROM CHARLESTONlanded at Reagan National around midnight. I felt wrung out as I walked through the largely empty terminal, still trying to decide if there was enough evidence to warrant further investigation into Suzanne Liu’s allegations against Thomas Tull.
Then I heard and saw CNN broadcasting on an overhead TV at one of the gates.
Footage showed cruisers with their lights flashing and crying people coming out of a huge brownstone; the banner read: deadly attack at fashion exec’s manhattan home. The wordsfashion execstopped me in my tracks.
Bree’s case is about some fashion bigwig, isn’t it?
It was only then that I realized I’d been so tired, I had not turned on my phone after landing. I turned it on, half listening to a reporter saying that as many as eleven people might havedied inside a home belonging to Paula Watkins, number two at fashion giant Duchaine.
My phone began to blow up with texts from Bree.
I needed to read only one:Call ASAP. All hell has broken loose and I may need an attorney.
Bree answered on the second ring. “Alex?”
“Right here, baby,” I said. “Are you okay? Where are you?”
“I’m fine and I just got back to my hotel.”
“Were you at the party that was attacked?”
“Outside it,” she said and told me everything that had occurred that evening from her perspective as well as necessary background about the sex-trafficking and slavery allegations she’d been investigating along with NYPD detective Salazar.
“Is she keeping you in the loop?”
“As much as she can,” Bree said. “Her superiors were not happy to hear she was listening in on a questionable wiretap with a private detective who was thrown out of Frances Duchaine’s house by Paula Watkins a few days before.”
I started toward the airport exit again. “Which is why you need an attorney?”
“Just being cautious. Elena’s working on retaining one for me as we speak. NYPD wants me in for questioning first thing in the morning.”
“What’s Elena saying?”
“She’s as stunned as I am. But given the sex-trafficking allegations, the mobsters, and the sheikh, she also thinks it’s not wildly out of the blue for there to have been an attack like this.”
