After the Darkness

"Daddeeee."

"You gotta watch this, man, it's all over the news."

Mitch hung up and started running to his car. He had to get to a TV.

A woman ran after him. "Sir? Excuse me. Sir!"

Mitch turned around.

The woman pointed to Celeste, sitting forlornly on the stationary swing. Mitch had forgotten all about her.

JOHN MERRIVALE WAS LATE. HE HATED being late. Hurrying into his office, he sat down and started pulling open drawers, looking for papers while his computer fired up.

"You all right, John?" Harry Bain put his head around the door.

"F-fine, thank you. Sorry I'm late in this morning. The p-press keep badgering me for a statement about Maria Preston."

"Poor woman. Terrible thing. You expect car bombs in Beirut or Gaza, but not in Sag Harbor. She was a friend of yours, wasn't she?"

John looked irritated. "No, not really. Her husband was a c-c-colleague. But the media hear the word Quorum and I'm their f-first call. I wish to God they'd leave me be."

Harry Bain frowned. It seemed an oddly detached, clinical response to such an awful tragedy. But then he never had figured out John Merrivale. He let it go.

"Are you still all set for Mustique?"

"Of course."

The task force had discovered that one of Lenny's family trusts, Brookstein Dependents in Guernsey, had made a number of payments to a financier called Jacob Rees. The FBI was interested in what had become of that money, but so far Mr. Rees's business managers in New York had been less than cooperative. John Merrivale was planning a surprise visit to the great man's Mustique estate. Jake Rees's mansion was less than a mile down the beach from Lenny's own (now seized) compound, and the two men had once vacationed together.

"I guess if you have to spend years of your life chasing a money trail, there are worse places to go, right?"

John forced a smile. "I suppose there are..."

"How long do you think you'll be gone?"

"A day or so, I hope. It may take longer if Jake's not immediately r-receptive."

"Well, if you need any help, you know where I am." Harry Bain walked back to his own office. John Merrivale breathed a sigh of relief.

You're in the home stretch now, John. The hard part is over.

It was all coming together at last. Grace was back behind bars. Whispers had already started around the office that the bureau was growing tired of throwing good money after bad and that Harry Bain's Quorum task force might soon be quietly disbanded. John had suffered a terrible moment of panic last week when the prospect of exposure had suddenly loomed from a most unexpected quarter. But now that, too, was over.

In a few days, he'd be on an airplane.

At last.

THE MARIA PRESTON MURDER CASE HAD been given to an old rival of Mitch's from his own precinct, an overweight family man in his fifties named Donald Falke. With his tonsure of white hair, big belly and full, salt-and-pepper beard, Detective Falke's nickname on the force was Santa. Not that Don's cases called for much ho-ho-ho-ing. An NYPD lifer, Don Falke specialized in Mob killings.

He told Mitch, "The media's getting folks all stirred up about terrorism. It's bullshit. If this was a terror attack, I'm Dolly Parton. This wasn't al-Qaeda. It was Al Capone. It's got Mafia written all over it."

"What makes you so sure?"

Don Falke's eyes narrowed. "Experience. What makes you so interested? This ain't your case, Connors."

"What if it wasn't a Mob hit? What if Maria Preston knew something? Something about Quorum, maybe. Something important enough to make someone want to kill her."

"We looked into all that," said Don dismissively. "This had nothing to do with Quorum, okay? Definitively. Someone didn't kill her; this was a sophisticated car bomb, not a knife or a gun. It's a classic Casa Nostra MO."

"Do you know who invented the car bomb, Don?"

Falke rolled his eyes. "I don't got time for a history lesson, Connors. I have a murder to solve. Now if you'll excuse me..."

"It was a guy named Buda. Mario Buda. He was an Italian anarchist back in 1920."

"What'd I tell you? Italian."

"It was a hot day in September..."

"Jesus, Mitch."

"...this guy, Buda, parks his horse and wagon on the corner of Wall Street and Broad, across the street from J. P. Morgan's offices. He gets out and wanders into the crowd. Twelve o'clock, all the bankers are heading out for lunch, right? You can hear the bells of Trinity Church ringing."

"Very poetic."

"Then boom, the horse and cart are blown to bits. It's mayhem, dead bodies everywhere, rubble, shrapnel. Right on Wall Street. Nineteen twenty. Two hundred people were wounded. Forty killed. Not including old J.P. himself, I might add. He was the intended target, but he was in Scotland at the time."

Don Falke had humored him long enough. "Where are you going with this, Mitch?"

"The car bomb was invented by one lone, ignorant immigrant with a grudge against rich Wall Street bankers."

"So?"

"So it was a hundred-odd years ago, but the principle's the same. Why does this have to be Mafia? Any idiot with a grudge could have strapped some Semtex to that car. Some fruit loop might have linked Maria in his addled brain with Quorum or Lenny Brookstein."

Don Falke laughed. "Dubray's right. You are obsessed. This doesn't have a fuckin' thing to do with Lenny Brookstein, okay? I think you need to go and lie down."

"I want to interview Andrew Preston."

Donald Falke finally lost his temper. "Over my dead body. Now you listen to me, Connors. Stay the fuck away from my case. I'm serious."

"Why, Don? Are you worried I might uncover something inconvenient?"

"If I hear you've been within ten miles of Andrew Preston, I'm going to go to Dubray and he is going to fire your ass. Drop it."

Drop it. Mitch was starting to feel like a naughty Labrador retriever with his jaws around some other dog's stick. He left Donald Falke's office and walked straight to his car.

IT HAD BEEN A MONTH SINCE Mitch last visited the Prestons' midtown apartment. He remembered it as an expensive piece of real estate, an enormous five-bedroom pad in a tony, well-maintained building. But what had struck him most about it was how little it struck him. Everything about Andrew and Maria's home was bland, from the nondescript street outside to the dutifully tasteful cream-and-brown decor inside. Mitch couldn't imagine having that much money to spend and wasting it on something so safe. Maria Preston had been an irritating woman. Mitch loathed drama queens. But at least she'd had some color to her. Some life. She must have felt entombed in that apartment. As if she'd been cut and pasted into a page from the Pottery Barn catalog, laminated for all eternity onto a cream B&B Italia sofa and left there to rot.

Turning onto the Prestons' block, Mitch slowed. Uniformed beat cops were in the process of having the street cordoned off. Mitch pulled up at the same time as two ambulances and a fleet of squad cars.

"What's with the circus? What's going on?" He flashed his badge.

"It's Maria Preston's husband, sir."

"What about him?"

"Looks like he hanged himself, sir. About an hour ago. They're cutting him down now."