She sighed, focused, and began again.
One: a possibly innocent man was in prison, charged with a capital crime.
Two: his brother, long thought dead, had resurfaced, kidnapped a woman with apparently no connection to anything, stolen the world’s most valuable diamond collection… and then destroyed it. Why?
Three—
A knock on the door interrupted her.
Hayward had asked her secretary to make sure she was not disturbed, and she struggled with a momentary anger that shocked her with its intensity. She brought herself back under control and said coldly, “Come in.”
The door opened slowly, tentatively—and there stood Vincent D’Agosta.
There was a brief moment of frozen stasis.
“Laura,” D’Agosta began. Then he fell silent.
She maintained an utter coolness even as she felt the color mounting in her face. For a moment, she could think of nothing to say except “Please sit down.”
She watched him enter the office and take a seat, crushing with ruthless efficiency the emotions that welled up inside her. He was surprisingly trim and reasonably well dressed in a suit and a twenty-dollar sidewalk tie, his thinning hair combed back.
The moment of awkward silence lengthened.
“So… How’s everything?” D’Agosta asked.
“Fine. You?”
“My disciplinary trial is scheduled for early April.”
“Good.”
“Good? If they find me guilty, there goes my career, pension, benefits—everything.”
“I meant, it will be good to have it over with,” she said tersely. Is that what he’d come here to do—complain? She waited for him to get to the point.
“Look, Laura: first, I just want to tell you something.”
“Which is?”
She could see him struggling. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry. I know I hurt you, I know you think I treated you like dirt… I wish I knew how to make it up.”
Hayward waited.
“At the time, I thought, I really thought, I was doing the right thing. Trying to protect you, keep you safe from Diogenes. I thought that by moving out I could keep the heat off you. I just didn’t figure on how it would look to you… I was winging it. Things were happening fast and I didn’t have time to work everything out. But I’ve had plenty of time to think about it since. I know that I looked like a cold bastard, walking out on you with no explanation. It must have seemed like I didn’t trust you. But that wasn’t it at all.”
He hesitated, chewing his lip as if working up to something. “Listen,” he began again. “I really want us to get back together. I still care about you. I know we can work this out…”
His voice trailed off miserably. Hayward waited him out.
“Anyway, I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”
“Consider it said.”
Another excruciating silence.
“Is there anything else?” Hayward asked.
D’Agosta shifted uncomfortably. Slats of sunlight came in through the blinds, striping his suit.
“Well, I heard…”
“What did you hear?”
“That you were still looking into the Pendergast case.”
“Really?” she said coolly.
“Yeah. From a guy I know, works for Singleton.” He shifted again. “When I heard that, it gave me hope. Hope that maybe I could still help you. There are things that I didn’t tell you before, things that I felt sure you wouldn’t believe. But if you’re really still on the case, after all that’s happened… well, I thought maybe you should hear some of these things. To, you know, give you as much ammunition as possible.”
Hayward kept her face neutral, not willing to give him anything but a thunderous silence. He was looking older, a little drawn, but his clothes were new and his shirt was well ironed. She wondered, briefly and searingly, who was taking care of him. Finally she said, “The case is settled.”
“Officially, yeah. But this friend said that you were—”
“I don’t know what you heard, and I don’t give a damn. You should know better than to listen to departmental gossip from so-called friends.”
“But, Laura—”
“Refer to me as Captain Hayward, please.”
Another silence.
“Look, this whole thing—the killings, the diamond theft, the kidnapping—was all orchestrated by Diogenes. All of it. It was his master plan. He played everyone like a violin. He murdered those people, then framed Pendergast for it. He stole the diamonds, kidnapped Viola Maskelene—”
“You’ve told me all this before.”
“Yes, but here’s something you don’t know, something I never told you—”