The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [91]
“He won’t tell me.”
“So, make him.”
I didn’t have to ask what she meant. Kate was biting her lip, looking troubled.
“No. Gallegos is innocent. Even if I could make him talk, he’d likely only give us another Venezuelan. And we don’t want that guy. We want the guy behind him, the person who was pulling the strings.”
“We start with whoever Gallegos gives us and work our way up the line,” Claire insisted.
“How? These people are diplomats, Claire. Whoever leaned on Gallegos probably isn’t even in America.” I shook my head. “There’s a better way.”
“The bribe,” Kate said. “The one that Carlos turned down.”
“Right. The bribe was shares in an undervalued oil company. I make it even money that I tumbled onto the scam somehow and started asking questions. We need to go through my old files and see what pops out. If we can figure out which oil company it was, I might be able to follow the money back to the source.”
Claire nodded hesitantly and then glanced at our chart on the wall.
“You suspect that Simpson used Theresa Roxas to get the Saudi data to you. Does that make him the source?”
I rubbed my neck, trying to imagine why Simpson would have been bribing Venezuelan diplomats.
“No idea.”
“And what about Alex?”
“What about him?”
“He lied to you about knowing Theresa Roxas,” she said, her face hard. “Does that tell us anything?”
“Only that someone leaned on him as well,” I answered, feeling pained. “But I have to believe he would have come clean with me if he’d been able to establish that the Saudi information was false. He was a friend.”
“Is that why Rashid was killed?” Kate asked. “To prevent him from telling you the truth?”
“Maybe,” I said, beginning to feel overwhelmed again. The more we learned, the more complicated things got. “Or to prevent him from telling me something about Carlos Munoz’s murder, or Kyle’s kidnapping, or something else we haven’t figured out yet.”
“We need to think more about this Saudi connection,” Kate insisted. “We need to figure out …”
Reggie walked back into the room and cleared his throat, his expression grim.
“I have some news,” he said. “It’s not good.”
Claire and Kate rose simultaneously and came to me. I put an arm around each and pulled them tight.
“The call I just took was from the guy leading the search team in Staten Island. He got lucky and bumped into a couple of old-timers who like to fish out that way. They knew exactly where Vinny’s boss had been dumping cars. Search team pulled the BMW out of the water about an hour and a half ago.”
“And?” Claire asked breathlessly.
“And there were human remains in the trunk.”
Kate buried her face in my shoulder, and I felt Claire trembling.
“Were they able to make an identification?”
“Take a day or two for dental,” Reggie answered. “But the remains were wrapped in a Gore-Tex coat, and the coat held up well. Technicians rinsed it off and found a name written in the lining. Your name, Mark. I’m sorry.”
Three Days Later
31
We buried Kyle on Monday morning, at a cemetery half an hour north of the city. The grave we’d picked out sat on a flat shelf at the top of a long rise, with views of the Long Island Sound over the bare branches of a grove of maples below. A local minister conducted an open-air service beneath a cloudless sky, an ocean breeze carrying the smell of salt. It seemed like a good place to lay our child to rest.
Afterward, everyone wanted to shake our hands and express their condolences. I was surprised by how many people came. The Times had run a small story on Sunday that included the details, and we’d invited some family and friends, but I hadn’t expected much of a crowd. In the end, though, more than a hundred people turned out—neighbors, colleagues, even one of the Columbia kids who’d helped me post flyers all those years ago. And there was at least a dozen wreaths. I was relieved to see that one was from Mariano Gallegos. Given everything that had happened, I’d been worried about him.
“Who’s that?” Kate whispered, when there were only a handful of people