The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [131]
Doris Carabello’s fingerprints were on the photo of Kyle also. The two sets of prints—hers and Alex’s—similarly lent themselves to several different explanations. Narimanov wanted Alex to sell me on the Saudi data. White would have instructed Doris to pressure Alex, but Alex’s trading indiscretions at Torino were years past, potentially difficult to prove in retrospect and certainly outside any statute of limitations. It’s possible that Doris gave him the photo as a threat, to underscore the viciousness of the people she represented. Or that Alex guessed at Doris’s involvement in Kyle’s death and demanded information about Kyle as the price of his cooperation. He knew how badly my family needed closure. Or maybe Doris shared the photo with him to remind him of his own complicity in my son’s murder, and to drive home the leverage she had over him. What seems certain is that Alex, consumed by guilt, wrote the anonymous e-mail to Reggie and then committed suicide two days later.
I rinsed and racked my lunch dishes in the kitchen and then built a small fire in the living room fireplace. I fed the card and the photograph into the flame individually, stirring the ash to make sure they burned completely. Clifford White was dead. Doris Carabello and Karl Mohler had vanished, presumably victims of Narimanov’s ruthless tidiness. Alex’s true role in Kyle’s death would likely never be known, unless he’d confessed more to his father in his letter than Walter had revealed. In retrospect, I couldn’t help wondering if a confession might not have been responsible for Walter’s abrupt change of heart toward me. Walter was ruthless to the core, but even he would have been shocked to learn that Alex had played a role in my son’s death.
Regardless, I didn’t plan to ask any more questions. It was time to move on: The Alex I wanted to remember was the friend I’d had before the pride and greed of his father’s milieu had destroyed him, not the shattered wreck who might have betrayed me. Amy had captured my feelings when I told her that Claire, Kate, and I were moving to California to start over: “That’s good,” she whispered, hugging me tight. “Let the dead bury the dead. Matthew eight: twenty-two.”
“Amen,” I’d murmured back. “Amen.”
I was setting one of the corner posts when I glanced up and noticed a distant dust trail moving toward me. It was late afternoon; the wind had risen, but it was still hot. I put away my tools, wiped sweat from my brow, and squatted down in the shade of the barn to wait. A white Toyota Land Cruiser pulled up a few minutes later. Ari was driving, Shimon in the front passenger seat. They both got out and looked around, their eyes masked by sunglasses. My muscles protested as I stood up.
“What do you do for water?” Shimon asked.
“You’re a farmer?”
“More than you.” He snorted. “I grew up on a kibbutz.”
“There’s a big lake a mile east that feeds an aquifer directly under our property. I had a study done before I bought the place. Water’s never been a problem here, even in drought years.”
“It’s lovely,” Ari said approvingly. “Mazel tov.”
“Thanks. You want something to drink?”
Shimon shook his head, arms folded.
“What we’d like is to know why we’re here.”
“Unfinished business,” I said easily, not having expected any pleasantries. “You disappeared without telling me how you fixed Senator Simpson.”
The senator had held a press conference the