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  Still, Bryers had no intention of having an affair with his client’s wife. Yes, he looked forward to seeing her and considered her a friend, but he was bought as a basketball coach and didn’t let his mind go beyond that.

  Then one night when he was staying for the weekend in the guesthouse, and after a couple glasses of wine, he decided to go for a midnight skinny-dip in the pool. The Constantines were out, so he thought he was safe, but they’d returned home early and the lights in the front of the house had gone on. He was about to get out of the pool and make a dash for the guesthouse when suddenly the quiet of the night was shattered by the sound of Wellington shouting in a drunken rage at his wife.

  Hanging on to the edge of the pool, Bryers cringed as his client cursed Clare, slurring his words but not the viciousness. “You whore! Shoving your tits in every man’s face!”

  “Wellington, please, you bought me this dress. You asked me to wear it and said I looked good when we left the house,” Clare pleaded.

  “I didn’t say flirt with anybody with a dick the whole dinner!” There was the sound of a slap, and Clare cried out in pain.

  “Wellington, please. I won’t wear it again. I was just trying to be nice to people and make you happy.”

  “Bitch! Whore! Slut!” Each word was accompanied by the sound of a slap, then of a struggle.

  Bryers felt his own anger boil up inside of him. Whatever Clare had done to anger her husband, and he doubted it was anything much, no woman deserved to be hit and abused. He had decided to intervene, when suddenly all went quiet. Wondering if Constantine had knocked his wife unconscious, or worse, Bryers swam to the far end of the dark pool, intending to get dressed and investigate. Then the house’s glass door opened. Clare walked out into the moonlight, wearing the low-cut, ­apparently offending dress. Before he could let her know he was there, she reached up and slid the straps off her shoulders and let the dress fall to the ground. She stood for a moment in the moonlight in her bra and panties, and then they, too, were off. She dove into the pool.

  When she came up about ten yards from him, he could hear her crying. “Um, sorry, but I should let you know I’m in here, too,” he said quietly.

  Clare gasped but then relaxed when she recognized him and swam toward him. “You heard?”

  “I couldn’t help it. I, um, thought you’d be gone longer. Are you all right?” he asked, acutely aware that a beautiful, nude—and married—woman was standing in the water just a few feet away. Even though the water was up to her shoulders, he was aware of her curves in the lunar light.

  “Yes,” she said, and made a poor attempt at a laugh. “Wellington had a little too much to drink. He gets jealous for no reason.” She stopped and then sobbed. “No. I’m not all right.”

  The next thing he knew, Clare was in his arms, her head pressed against his chest as she cried softly. “I, um . . .” he began to say, but then aware of his body’s response to the feel of her skin on his, he tried to press her away. But she clung to him even more, and then she was kissing him and he was kissing her back.

  “Your husband,” he managed to blurt out.

  “He’s passed out,” she replied. “When he gets drunk like this, he hits me around, and that seems to work like a sleeping pill. He’ll be out until noon.”

  “He hits you often?”

  “Yes, but I don’t want to talk about it,” Clare said, then she looked like she might cry again. “Don’t you like me?”

  “I like you very much, it’s just . . .”

  “It’s just nothing,” she responded, and kissed him again. “I need you to make love to me. Please, I need to feel that someone cares about me, even if it’s just for tonight.”

  “I care,” he said. “I have for a while, and it’s more than just for tonight.”

  The affair had grown from two lonely people finding solace in each other to a loving couple wanting to get married. They’d been careful to wait until her husband was out of town, or else they’d met at his place in Brooklyn. But as the weeks became months, Bryers’s conscience troubled him more and more. He didn’t want to take the man’s money while cuckolding him and told Clare he was going to quit. But she’d reacted with both fear and desperation. “He’ll suspect the reason,” she wept, “and I’ll never get to see you.”

  Even after he argued that he’d just tell Constantine that he was too busy, and they’d still find time to be together, she’d pleaded with him. That was the first time he asked her to divorce her husband and marry him. “We need to do this the right way,” he’d said. But she balked over her son.

  “He’s getting tired of me,” Clare had said of her husband. “I know he is. He’ll want a divorce and then we’ll be free. I just need him to reach this decision on his own. He won’t even want Tommy when he has the next trophy wife.”

  So for a time, Bryers had been willing to wait. But lately he’d noticed more bruises, and she’d told him just the night before that her husband seemed more on edge than usual. “I think something went wrong with one of his business deals,” she’d said when they were lying in bed in his apartment. “I went to his library to ask him about something this morning. I just got to the door and I heard him talking to someone on the telephone about a meeting in Istanbul. I didn’t think anything of it, but when he saw me standing in the doorway, he got really angry. He screamed at me to get out and close the door. He was nice to me afterward and said he’d just had some business deals fall through and didn’t mean to take it out on me, but I could tell he was just saying that.”

  Now today there was a fresh bruise on her arm. “I don’t think he’d do anything to me,” Bryers said, though he really wasn’t so sure, especially when he thought about Fitzsimmons. Still, he was done seeing her abused. “How many more times is he going to hit or kick you before he does real damage? It’s time to leave him. If he tries to stop you or threaten you in any way, we have the photographs of your bruises and can go to the police. I have an old school chum, Butch Karp, who’s the district attorney over in Manhattan. He’s not afraid of anybody; he’d know what to do.”

  Clare put her book down and got up. “I don’t want to talk about it right now,” she said. “I think Wellington’s suspicious and watching us. I’m going to fix lunch. Come on in and I’ll make you a tuna sandwich.”

  “Sounds good,” he said. “I want to get a few more laps in first if that’s okay?”

  “Sure, it will take me fifteen anyway.”

  Bryers finished his laps and climbed out of the pool and walked over to the area where Wellington Constantine had been sitting. There was a stand with fresh towels, and he grabbed one.

  As he was drying off, he wandered over to where Constantine’s notebook was still open on the table next to the lounge. Absently, he glanced down at the page.

  “You shouldn’t be looking at that!”

  The panicked tone in Clare’s voice behind him made him jump. “Caught me being snoopy, I guess,” he said with an embarrassed laugh. “Is Wellington writing a book?”

  “Not that I know of,” Clare said. “Why do you say that?”

  “Looks like he’s working on a thriller.” He nodded at the notebook. “Pretty dramatic stuff.” He bent over and read from the page. “Listen to this: ‘We were lucky our friend in the WH got wind of the raid or the MIRAGE files might have stayed in the wrong hands. Stupid for al Taizi to keep a record.’ And then it goes on, ‘Col. S and the Russian bitch are threats and need to be eliminated starting today.’ What do you make of that? Sounds like a spy novel.”

  “All I know is that he considers his notebooks to be very personal,” she said. “He told me never to touch them or look in them. He’s got hundreds of them on the shelf in his library. I think he’d be really upset if he knew you were looking at that.”

  Bryers shrugged. “It’s none of my business anyway. What have you got there?”

 
Clare held up two plates, each with a sandwich. “Let’s eat.”

  “Sure, I’ve got to go use the bathroom real quick. Didn’t want to pee in the pool.”

  “Too much information.” Clare laughed. “Okay, be quick about it. And wash your hands!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Bryers said, walking into the house.

  The hallway to the guest bathroom went past Constantine’s library, where he’d once sat and talked about coaching the man’s son. As he approached the room, he saw that the door was half open and heard Constantine’s angry voice.

  “I don’t care what it takes!” He was apparently speaking to someone on the telephone. “You get your ass down there and make sure that shit Mueller keeps his damn mouth shut. Tell him you’ll represent him in court; say we’ll get him off and double what he was being paid. . . . What’s that? . . . Just say Moore was acting on his own and that we’ll deal with him. Tell him whatever you need to, but make sure he keeps his damn mouth shut!”

  Bryers froze. He didn’t know what to think. Then Fitzsimmons spoke. “There’s a call on the secure line. It’s the White House. Want to take it?”

  “Of course I’ll take it, you moron,” Wellington answered, then apparently took the call. “Yeah, it’s me.” He was quiet for a moment, then shouted, “Don’t threaten me, you bitch. I put you and your boss where you are. We wouldn’t be in this mess if he’d made sure those files got handed over to me right away. Who were those guys in Iraq? You don’t know? You work for the most powerful man in the world and you don’t know who was on that operation? Well, they almost fucked up MIRAGE, and it still might be, so I’d suggest you find out.”

  Bryers was suddenly aware of footsteps approaching the door from inside the library. He knew he was about to get caught eavesdropping by Fitzsimmons, and the thought made him afraid. But instead, the door was closed.

  Returning to the pool, Bryers accepted his sandwich from Clare. “You’ll never guess what I just heard,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You know that novel I thought Wellington was working on? I don’t think it’s fiction.”

  7

  KARP SHOOK HIS HEAD AS he leaned back in the chair and looked across his desk at the woman on the other side. “How is it that you always seem to end up in the middle of things?” he asked.

  Ariadne Stupenagel shrugged. “Just lucky, I guess,” she answered, though there was no humor in her eyes. She hung her head. “Mick Swindells was a friend of mine. I’ve known . . . I knew . . . him for a long time. We were the Three Musketeers, me, Mick, and Sam Allen. Now two of them are gone, and I think there’s a connection.”

  As Stupenagel buried her face in her hands and stifled a sob, Karp pushed a box of tissues toward her. “I’m sorry, Ariadne. I know they both meant a lot to you,” he said, glancing at Clay Fulton, who sat in a leather chair over near the wall that housed Karp’s extensive book collection. “You’re sure you’re up to this? We can do it some other time.”

  Waiting for Stupenagel to pull herself together, Karp thought about their long association, which for many years had bordered on the typical love-hate relationship between a district attorney and a hard-charging member of the media. They’d tangled plenty. She’d want information and he wouldn’t give it to her; or she’d write a story that he thought might mess up a case, and they’d have words. But she was one of the best at what she did, and in spite of her zeal to get out in front of her colleagues to be first with the “scoop,” she also had ethics and would hold a story if convinced that it might damage a case or a suspect’s right to a fair trial.

  Karp stood up and looked out the window of his office eight floors above Centre Street in the Criminal Courts Building. Down below, the sidewalks were teeming with tourists, businesspeople, couriers, vendors, the homeless, criminals, and saints—a microcosm of Gotham’s population all sweating together on a hot, humid afternoon while traffic on the streets honked, screeched, and crept along. It was the day after the shooting in Central Park and he wondered how many had even paid attention to the news.

  Shootings were such an everyday occurrence that the media reported them as frequently as they talked about the weather. But this one was certainly different. A colonel in the Army gunned down by a former soldier; a brave witness killed by a bullet from an off-duty detective’s gun as the witness tried to stop the gunman; the detective, whom the press was hailing as a hero, wounded in an exchange of gunfire.

  Karp glanced over at Fulton, who was deep in thought. Fulton had interviewed the wounded detective, Ted Moore, that morning and then called Karp.

  “He took a bullet in the leg, but not too bad. They sent him home already; that’s where I talked to him. We only got a couple of minutes because he was pretty out of it from the painkillers,” Fulton had reported. “He said he just happened to be walking past the picnic when he saw Mueller walking toward the colonel. Said the guy seemed agitated, so he kept his eye on him, saw them argue, and the gun came out and the colonel got shot. Moore went for his own gun and fired. Poor guy’s pretty shook up about the witness who took his first shot, but it was a bang-bang sort of thing. Probably why he hesitated and Mueller got the drop on him.”

  “Before Moore shot, did he tell Mueller to drop his weapon?” Karp asked.

  “Apparently wasn’t time,” Fulton said. “He said he thought Mueller was going to start shooting indiscriminately.”

  “What do we know about Moore?”

  “Clean record,” Fulton replied. “His dad was a lifer and retired from the Three-Four Precinct in Washington Heights. Still lives with his parents up there. Apparently does pretty well for himself working off duty; drives a nice car, has a boat in the driveway.”

  “You’ve done some digging,” Karp noted.

  “You asked me to look into him,” Fulton said with a smile. “Mine is not to question why . . . You buying Mueller’s story about Moore being dirty?”

  “I’m not buying anything at the moment,” Karp had responded. “There’s just something nagging at me about this one, including who’s representing him. I wish we could have talked to him before counsel attached.”

  After Karp got Mueller to surrender the day before, he’d walked back out of the park and instructed Ewin to drive him downtown to the Criminal Courts Building at 100 Centre Street. A towering gray monolith, the courts building housed the District Attorney’s Office and the grand jury rooms, as well as the trial courts, judges’ robing rooms and chambers, Legal Aid offices, and Departments of Correction and Probation headquarters.

  Karp was waiting for Mueller to get booked and be made available to interview when he got a call from Kenny Katz, whom he’d asked to monitor the process.

  Katz was angry. “He barely got in the door at The Tombs when an attorney was waiting for him, demanding that he be allowed to speak to Mueller,” Karp’s young protégé said. “He was yelling about Mueller’s Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights being violated and causing quite the scene.”

  “That was fast,” Karp replied. “Who was the lawyer?”

  “Get this, Robert LeJeune III,” Katz practically spat.

  “One of the most expensive—and least ethical, I might add—criminal defense lawyers in the state of New York tore his ­thousand-dollar-an-hour ego away from the Hillcrest Country Club to represent a Central Park shooter?” Karp said.

  “Yeah, and the intake guys got so flummoxed that they gave him five minutes with Mueller, and by the time he got done, our suspect was invoking his right to remain silent,” Katz replied.

  “What in the hell?” Karp said, along with a few other choice words. “I guess LeJeune was watching the news, but . . .”

  “He says he’s working pro bono for some group called American Vets with PTSD and that he was notified by them.”

  “Never heard of American Vets with PTSD.”

  “Neither have I, and I know about a lot
of these veterans’ groups. Some are better than others. PTSD is a real thing for guys who’ve been in-country; I’ve had some counseling myself,” Katz said. “But this is a new one on me. I’ll ask around, see if they’re legit. But it looks like we’re not going to get a statement out of Mueller.”

  So all they had out of Mueller were the statements he’d made to Karp at the zoo. He knew LeJeune would probably try to suppress them, saying that his client had been in “constructive custody” knowing he was surrounded and in effect under arrest. But that was why Karp had told him he had a right to an attorney and the right to remain silent. He’d made sure that he later took a statement at the DAO from Ann Franklin, the hostage, to back him up on that.

  Something’s just not adding up about this, Karp thought as he turned back to Stupenagel, who was dabbing at the mascara that had run down her cheeks while looking in a hand mirror. She finished and looked up at him. “I’m good,” she said.

  Karp sat on the corner of his desk. “Okay, tell me what’s going on here. What were you doing in Central Park talking to the victim five minutes before he gets shot and a gun battle erupts?”

  Stupenagel looked at the yellow legal pad on the desk. “Are you taking notes?”

  “Not right now. I just want to hear what you have to say.” Karp didn’t elaborate that any notes he took from a witness would have to be turned over to the defense attorney at trial. If she’d been a hostile witness, or the defendant, he would have conducted an in-depth Q&A with a court-certified stenographer present. But Stupenagel was a friendly witness, so all he’d written on the pad was that he was meeting with her and that Fulton was present.

  Stupenagel nodded, but added, “Butch, I understand I’m a witness, and I want to cooperate. Mick Swindells was a friend of mine, and I’ll do whatever I can to put his killer away. But I’m still a journalist and I promised certain people confidentiality and I can’t break that without their permission.”