Bombshell

“I’m going to thump Marvin’s head, not telling me what was going to happen.”

“I’m surprised it did happen, actually,” Savich called back. “We’ll have these bozos out of here in a minute.” He looked back at her again.

Of course there were always worries, but why say that to Ms. Lilly, particularly after half a dozen cop cars arrived and there were endless explanations and reassurances that the FBI had things under control. Savich assigned an agent to each wounded man and watched the EMTs load them into the ambulances with the cops looking on. He turned to see Sherlock touching his coat sleeve. “What was on that phone you found in the kid’s pocket?”

“A phone number. The area code includes Maestro. Let me calm Ms. Lilly while you check this out. Then we’ll call Ruth.”

He wondered how he was going to soothe Ms. Lilly’s feathers, and not just figuratively, he noticed, since she was wearing two peacock feathers stuck in her big chignon, her signature ’do. She stood waiting for him.

Savich didn’t have a chance to call Ruth. His cell sang out Billy Ocean’s “When the Going Gets Tough.” It was Melissa Ivy. He smiled at Ms. Lilly. “My sincere apologies, Ms. Lilly. I’ve got to take this call, but to make it up to you, I’ll play one night for free.”

She tapped a stiletto heel in the snow. “Only one night? What do you think I am, pretty boy? As easy as those baby bangers you took down here?”

“All right, two nights, for free.”

She smiled at him and patted his cheek, pulled the coat around her, and tottered back through the snow and into the club, headed back to her game of Texas Hold ’Em with people who should know better than to sit across a table from her with money.

“Savich here, Ms. Ivy. What’s happening?”

“Agent Savich, I was listening on my computer to one of my music CDs I like that Peter had put together for me just a few days ago—you know, to help me feel better. I normally play it on my CD player, but this time I played it on my computer, and I noticed the last file on it was a video of some kind. When I played it, I saw it was Mr. Hart in his study, talking on the phone. I think it’s the video from that surveillance disk you were looking for.”

He would have rubbed his hands together after hearing that, but his cell rang again, almost immediately. It was Dane Carver calling from the emergency room at Washington Memorial. The Latino Dane had shot in the shoulder who’d been lying with his eyes closed, moaning on a gurney in an ER cubicle, had suddenly reared up, grabbed a scalpel from a tray near his gurney, and sliced his own throat before Dane could even register what he’d done. “My fault, Savich, my fault. It happened too fast—and the blood, I didn’t realize how much blood there was in a single human body, and it fountained out all over everything, including me.”

“Tie the other one down, Dane.”

“Already done. Ollie will keep on him, you can count on that, and if anyone can get him to talk, it’s Ollie.”

Savich said, “Ollie’s good, but you’re better, Dane. Go get yourself cleaned up and deal with this, all right? You get anything out of him, you got a week’s vacation in the Virgin Islands.”

Savich heard an attempt at a laugh. Good, maybe the thought of sun and sand with his wife, Nick, would get Dane focused again.

Washington, D.C.

Tuesday night

It was close to midnight when Savich and Sherlock drove to Melissa Ivy’s apartment through the steady veil of snow. There was only the occasional car on the road, so it took only eleven minutes. They’d both been tired from the adrenaline rush from the Bonhomie Club, but no longer. It was Sherlock who knocked on Melissa’s door.

The door whipped open, and Melissa’s face was manic with excitement. She was wearing cat pajamas and big fuzzy slippers, and she was waving a disk at them. “I found it! I found it!”

In a moment, she’d slipped the disk into her computer and they were looking at her computer screen, waiting for it to boot. As she worked the mouse to click the commands, she said, “I usually listen to music on my iPod, but this time I was on my computer doing a class assignment and I loaded in this disk that Peter had burned for me to listen to his favorite music. That’s when I noticed there’s an extra file on the disk that doesn’t play on my CD player, a video file. Take a look.”

And there it was, a video file from the surveillance system at the Harts’ house.

They watched Wakefield Hart seated at his desk in his study on his cell phone. Both his voice and the picture were sharp and clear. “Yes, Raj.”