She barely looked at her notes; she could have shot it down blindfolded. ‘There were eighteen men on duty that night.’ She laid out mugshots of them all; more than a few gorillas in their ranks.
‘Like many people in that business, some of them weren’t good men, but that wasn’t important: they were not allowed to patrol the grounds. They had to stay in the security posts, monitor their TV screens and only leave in groups of six with a supervisor if the perimeter was breached.
‘All the posts were under camera surveillance,’ she continued. ‘The recordings show nobody left any of them for an hour either side of Mr Dodge’s death. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but the security team are clean.’
‘You’re not disappointing me,’ I lied. ‘I’m just trying to get to the truth. Yes, the guards may be clean – unless the tapes or disks were doctored.’ I was grabbing at anything I could lay a hand to, but I tried to carry it off with a certain panache.
‘They’re disks,’ said Cumali, not buying the panache or much of anything else. ‘They’ve been checked. All of them have embedded code, which means, if you edit them, it shows up immediately. I’m told it’s the same system used at the White House.’
She was right about that, and the beauty of the security precautions at the French House was that the wealthy people in residence had total freedom. They weren’t under constant surveillance – which probably meant a great deal to rich dilettantes using drugs – but nobody could enter the grounds without being observed and challenged. The occupants were probably as safe as they would be anywhere in the world.
‘What about motive?’ I said, trying not to show it was just another flip of the card, another roll of the dice.
‘The wife, of course. The dead man had no siblings, his parents were dead and she was the only heir. Her name is Cameron.’ She slid a photo across the desk.
Cameron – photographed in long shot and looking at the camera – had it all going on. She was in her mid-twenties – tall and elegant, a cool haughtiness that you usually only find in models and those who are truly beautiful. According to the State Department report, she had been working as a ‘personal shopper’ at the Prada store on Fifth Avenue when she met him. It figured – how else was a chick from nowhere going to meet a young billionaire? At the laundromat?
‘How long had they been married?’ I asked, still looking at Cameron’s face. She was that kind of woman.
‘Eight months.’
I stared at Cumali for a beat. ‘Eight months and a billion-dollar payout – that sounds like quite a motive to me.’
The cop shook her head. Why wasn’t I surprised? ‘From 8 p.m. she was in her husband’s helicopter with four other partygoers – visiting a series of clubs along the coast. We’ve seen the CCTV footage from all of them – every minute was accounted for.’
I could imagine it – other revellers arriving at dance clubs in Porsches, BMWs and perhaps a few Ferraris. Then she turns up with her posse in a Bell JetRanger. It’s hard to beat a billion dollars.
‘Okay – say she’s clear,’ I theorized. ‘She got someone to do it for her.’
‘Who? They knew a few people – other rich couples who’d sailed down from Monaco and St Tropez – and they met some foreigners here. Acquaintances, really. We interviewed them all, but there wasn’t anybody you could remotely think was acting on her behalf.’
‘A hired hand,’ I threw back. ‘A paid killer.’
She laughed – but not because she found it funny. ‘How do you find someone like that?’ she demanded. ‘Not a bungling lowlife but some top-class assassin? Somebody who won’t take the deposit and just walk away? Anyway, you’ve still got the problem that he was alone on the estate.’
‘A billion dollars, though,’ I said, more to myself than her, ‘that’s a helluva lot of money.’
‘What is it with Americans?’ she asked with contempt. ‘Why do you automatically think of killing? If she wanted money – a few million would be enough – why wouldn’t she just divorce him?’
I was tired, I was frustrated, I was desperately worried about trying to pump air into an investigation that kept deflating. But mostly I was sick of the woman and her attitude to me and my country. I wanted to round on her, I wanted to pay out on her own failings, I wanted to ask about the drug trade and the new Silk Road and genocide against the Kurds and anything else I could lay a hand to, but I reined it in – I had to, for the greater good, and all that.