Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [139]
“You going to call the police?” Stephanie asked.
“At this point, that is not an option.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because there comes a time in business and commerce when somebody backs you into a corner and you find yourself forced to do something you never would have done under normal circumstances, something you don’t want to do but which needs doing. I’ve found myself in that predicament several times in my career. Unfortunately, I’m in that predicament right now. You two shouldn’t be here. I don’t know what all you’ve found while you’ve been poking around, but we can’t afford to take a chance you’ve uncovered any of our trade secrets. It wouldn’t be fair to the people who work here.”
“Let me get this right,” I said. “You’re going to kill us because you want to be fair to the people who work here?”
“Don’t be twisting this all around. You people are the ones who made the mistake. Breaking and entering, I think it’s called. It’s a form of sabotage. Espionage, you might even call it. You’ve heard of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. No different. The work we’re doing here has implications for national security.”
His voice was soothing. It was hard to believe he had a gun and was saying what he was saying. The man who is about to kill you is supposed to be a maniac, not someone with the demeanor of a shy pizza delivery boy.
Stephanie must have heard him in the hallway while I was in the shower. I could visualize the scenario. She would have had time to warn me or shut the vault door, probably not both. She must have found the syringe inside the vault while I was in the shower. I wondered what was in it.
Showing up Monday morning to an office redecorated in blood and brains wasn’t going to please DiMaggio, especially if the blood and brains belonged to her niece. Tonight Donovan’s job was to get rid of us with the least amount of disruption to the office surroundings.
Maybe I was guessing, but his look wasn’t one of moral quandary; it was more that of a man facing a conundrum: how to get these two yokels outside, dead, and into the trunk of his car with a minimum of fuss.
Donovan scratched the tip of his nose with the barrel of his chrome semiautomatic, pondering, looking us over, checking out Stephanie. I didn’t know anything about guns, but his looked well oiled and cared for, like something he might use to take down bull elephants when he wasn’t bumping off burglars.
“How did you find us?” Stephanie asked.
“The building’s got a silent alarm. All the key officers are automatically notified.”
“You all drive in together?” I asked.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? If we had some witnesses.”
He looked at me meaningfully, and his tone began to take on a hard edge. He was working himself up to this. I could see in his eyes behind those wire-rimmed glasses that he was trying to steel himself to the task at hand. At the commune once I’d watched my father butcher a live chicken. He’d made the same shift in attitude right before he picked up the chicken by its legs, laid its neck across a block of wood, and swung a hatchet down hard.
“You killed Achara, didn’t you?” I said.
“You think because I’m standing here with a gun I’m the bad guy? Don’t get confused. You broke in. You snooped through our building. I saw the offices downstairs that you ransacked. You’re the ones who did this to yourselves. Don’t be blaming it on me.”
“Achara did that to herself, too?”
“Not me. You burned your house down.”
“You’re going to kill us, Donovan, at least have the balls not to lie while you’re doing it.”
He considered just long enough to give me a glimmer of hope that maybe he wasn’t going to kill us. It didn’t last long. “Okay. That’s fair. I killed her. I poured gas around your living room. I thought you were inside. I thought it was over right there.”
That he was willing to admit culpability in the burning of my home meant he thought we weren’t going to tell anybody. That we were as good as dead already. I said, “Three years ago you flew to Tennessee pretending