The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [78]
“Just to be clear, how sophisticated do you have to be to do something like this?”
She shrugged.
“It’s like a lot of things in the tech world—simple in concept but tough to get right. I could probably do it if I had enough time, but whenever you monkey around with hardware at the BIOS level, or try to get different systems to communicate, you’re going to have a million tiny problems to work through. Whoever did this seems to have gotten everything right, so I’m guessing they’re experienced.”
Her mention of experience brought Frick and Frack to mind again. But if Walter had been monitoring my conversations and my e-mail, he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Alex had introduced me to Theresa Roxas. My head ached. I was missing something big—nobody would have gone to these lengths on a whim. There had to be some deeper pattern to events that I wasn’t perceiving.
“Is that everything?” I asked.
“You were expecting more?”
We shared a weak smile.
“How much of this have you told your mother?”
“Nothing yet. She went to bed early. She seemed upset.”
“I tried to get her to open up to me about San Francisco.”
“And?”
“And it’s complicated.” I slapped my knees with both hands, attempting to project more confidence than I felt. “We can talk about that later. Come on. It’s time to go.”
“Go where?”
“To pick up your mother and move to a hotel until we figure out what’s going on. Someone’s already broken into our apartment once. I don’t want to take any chances.”
She nodded, her face troubled.
“There actually is one more thing. This probably isn’t the right time, but I’d like to ask you about it.”
“Shoot.”
“These past couple of days, I’ve felt there was something important you weren’t telling me. That’s the other reason I thought maybe you were spying on me—because I had the sense you were keeping a secret. Is there anything else I should know?”
She looked at me searchingly.
“Kate …” I said, unsure how to begin.
She gasped, a hand flying to her face.
“It’s about Kyle, isn’t it?”
I wrapped an arm around her and gently lifted her upright.
“It’s nothing definitive. Let’s go find your mother. I’ll tell you everything on the way.”
26
Kate ran down the location of Claire’s charity event while I threw on some old jeans and a pair of ratty tennis shoes, mindful of her caution about listening devices. The breakfast was at the Parker Meridien hotel, on West Fifty-seventh Street. I brought her up to speed on everything I’d been doing with Reggie as we rode downtown in a cab, again omitting the beating I’d given Vinny. Like Claire, Kate wept when I told her what the e-mail Reggie received had said.
The ride to the hotel took us about fifteen minutes. Kate went hunting for Claire in the hotel’s reception rooms while I used a lobby pay phone to try Reggie’s numbers. Both his office and cell kicked to voice mail. Recounting the morning’s events to his machine, I felt my rage mounting again. Forget the eavesdropping—someone had broken into my home. I asked Reggie if he could enlist some forensics guys to dust for fingerprints and do whatever else they did. I wanted to catch whoever it had been, and to make sure they paid the price.
The Meridien was a good hotel, and convenient, so I booked a suite for the week, assuming that would give us enough time to have our apartment swept clean and figure out what had been going on. Kate showed up with her mother as I was pocketing the plastic room keys. Claire had dressed more Park Avenue than Upper West Side for the benefit, in a navy dress, black pumps, and a wide, black, patent-leather belt. Her hair was loose around her shoulders. She looked young, and vulnerable, and frightened. I reached for her hand. She took it and clung tight.
Our rooms were too contemporary for my taste, with odd inversely colored photographs of flowers on the walls, but they were also airy and light, with rooftop views of the southern skyline. We settled at an asymmetric breakfast table beneath an oversized close-up of a pale green