I knew that ticket was going to come back to haunt me.
“You try to create a story with this bullshit about your airplane being sabotaged, you shoot up your own cottage—and then, once you’ve created this story, you kill Jonathan Liu, too. You do it just like you did with Mommy. Gunshot, staged as a suicide.”
“No.”
“Then you run to Ellis Burk and tell him your sob story, and to make it look real, you even have your friends shoot at you in Ellis’s presence so he can corroborate your story. I mean, you have more money than God, Ben. You can hire whoever you want for whatever you want.”
She walks over to me. “The problem is, you killed Detective Burk in the process. And I’m not letting you walk away from that.”
“I didn’t kill anybody.”
“Sure you did, Ben. And you killed Jonathan Liu, too.”
“No.”
She looks at me like she knows something I don’t. I have a feeling I know what that is.
Larkin says, “Why did we find your fingerprint on the computer mouse in Jonathan Liu’s bedroom?”
I place my hands flat on the table as the room begins to spin. I should have seen this coming.
We interrupt this program to bring you a breaking report. Benjamin Casper has been set up!
They knew I’d be at Diana’s place when they killed her. They knew I’d go looking for Jonathan Liu, so they made sure I found him dead. And they killed him the same way as my mother was killed.
And then I made it easier for them. I made myself visible at Diana’s. And I rooted around Jonathan Liu’s bedroom and left a print on his computer mouse, of all things.
I’ve been playing into their hands all along. And I don’t even know who “they” are.
Liz Larkin moves in on me, a predator approaching its wounded prey. “It’s just a matter of time before I can prove all this,” she says to me. “And then I’m going to hand you over to the feds, who’ll hit you with a federal murder charge and stick a paralyzing agent through your veins. Your days are numbered, my friend.”
Her words echo in a room that shrinks by the second. Whoever they are, they’re doing their utmost to kill me. And now, even if I survive, it will just prove that I’m guilty.
They’ve got me either way.
Chapter 51
The bar is dark and hazy, just the way I want it. Just the way I need it. I’m tucked in a corner booth of a swanky lounge, but I’d rather not say which one; I’d rather not say where. For all I know, whoever’s chasing me hasn’t just tapped into my cell phone—they’re reading my thoughts, too.
I mean, they’ve managed to predict my movements, and they’ve managed to be in several places at once. And I think there’s more than one “they.” There’s the “they” who have unloaded assault weapons at me on three different occasions and sabotaged my plane. And there’s the “they” who accosted me in the Wisconsin airport bathroom, who—as Liz Larkin so eloquently pointed out—could have easily killed me instead of kneeing me in the balls and leaving me with a stern warning.
I take a sip of the Scotch and let the hot, bitter medicine warm my throat. I’m too sleep-deprived to drink very much without passing out, but my nerves are jangling and I need a brief respite. I look around at the crowd in this place—mostly people my age, dressed fashionably, worried about little in the world at the moment except enjoying the soft jazz and getting in someone’s pants later—and then look up at the television screen mounted over the bar.
On the screen are President Blake Francis, First Lady Libby Rose Francis, and Bono, the singer from U2. They are behind a podium somewhere, and though the sound is turned down, I imagine they’re talking about world debt or world peace or some global assistance initiative. President Francis has never been the most generous president in terms of third-world philanthropy, but it’s good optics to share a stage with Bono, and the president has always been about good optics.
Same for his wife, Libby Rose Francis, who seems to relish the spotlight a lot more than she relishes her husband. I always made their marriage as one of convenience; she was a wealthy heiress who wanted to marry a future president, and he was a future president who wanted to be bankrolled by a wealthy heiress. They’re affectionate enough in public, and everyone’s so plastic on camera that you can never really tell, but I never made them for lovebirds. Ron and Nancy they ain’t.
Snowflake, the Secret Service calls her. I don’t know why they make their code names public, but they do. The president is Spider. That name kind of suits him. But Snowflake for the First Lady? Well, they have the temperature about right. I’d go with Icicle for a more accurate description.