CHAPTER SIX
That night for the first time in months, Kate had the dream.
The dream differed sometimes in details, but the major points were always the same.
Kate was sleeping in bed, sometimes in her apartment, sometimes at her mother’s home, sometimes in her childhood home.
She would hear footsteps approaching the door, sometimes the front door, sometimes the bedroom door.
She never saw the individual approaching the door, and when the stranger spoke, he did so in a voice too low for her to identify him.
But she knew who it was. It was the same person it had been since she first had the dream. Elijah Cox whispered to her, quoting scripture, asking—no, demanding—that she let him in, that she fulfills her purpose.
She never opened the door, but tonight, she approached it. She laid her hand on the handle, screaming silently at herself to stop, don’t, go back to sleep, don’t let him in!
She turned the handle. The door opened.
“Kate!”
Kate shot out of bed, screaming and flailing. Her hands fell against a muscular chest, and Marcus caught her hands. “Oh, God, Kate, I’m sorry. I tried calling, but I think you left your phone on vibrate, and you didn’t answer when I knocked.”
Kate blinked, staring wildly at Marcus. She looked at her phone and saw two missed calls. She also saw that it was five-twenty in the morning.
She hadn’t meant to sleep. She wanted to work through the night on the cipher, but her eyelids were drooping badly, and at one o’clock, she’d given up and headed to the bedroom for a quick nap.
She took a deep breath, pulled her hands free, and glared at him. “I’m fine. What is it? Do you have something?” She frowned. “Have you been working all night?”
He grinned. “A suspect. And yes, I’ve been working all night, and with good results.
Getting verifiable information on a lot of those names is gonna be a crapshoot because of how well lawyered-up people are.
We have the records, but they can just claim the Carltons are lying and deny ever being there, so—”
“Marcus…”
“Right. Sorry. We have a name. A good one.”
“I sure would love to hear it,” Kate said, fighting for patience.
“Graham Sterling.”
He beamed at Kate, who took another deep breath and asked, “Who?”
“Divorce lawyer. Very prominent one. In demand. He filed a lawsuit against the Carltons three months ago claiming that they ruined his own marriage.”
Kate frowned. “You can sue people for that?”
“Not successfully. The judge threw the case out before he even heard it. But he tried.”
He grinned at her again, apparently waiting for some reaction from her that he wasn't getting yet. Kate rubbed her eyes. "Okay, Marcus, I was just woken violently from a nightmare. My head's spinning. Give me the bullet points and try to do it in a straightforward fashion."
“Right. Get dressed. I’ll tell you on the drive to Sterling’s office.”
“His office? This early?”
"According to Carlton's file, his wife mentioned that he liked to start work no later than five in the morning."
“Got it. Okay, I’ll throw something on.”
Ten minutes later, she was dressed and in the passenger seat of the FBI sedan Marcus had borrowed to drive from the Miami field office to the hotel. Marcus was in the middle of a tale of intrigue that would have made for excellent dramatic television.
“So, Graham’s wife, or rather ex-wife Ginger—yes, that’s her real name.”
“Riveting,” Kate interjected.
“She attended one of the Carlton parties last year. Not a swinger party. Apparently not all parties involve orgies. This one was just a ‘networking’ party.”
Kate frowned. “Why did you put air quotes around networking?”
“Because we’ve also been talking to more of the servants at the Carlton house, ones with more tenure than Yesenia Lopez.
Apparently, the swinger thing is only a small part of what the Carltons do.
The romantic connections were their real hobby, specifically helping people dissatisfied with their marriages find people with whom they would be more satisfied. ”
“Got it. So those connections they tracked. It wasn’t for blackmail. They were leads for people who might be interested in their real product.”
“Exactly. Well, sort of. It wasn’t exactly formalized.
” Kate frowned at him, and he said, “Right. Pertinent points. Ginger attended a party and met a guy. Mike Howard. They hit it off. Really well. Next thing you know, Ginger’s leaving Graham.
Runs away with this new guy. Completely blindsides her divorce attorney husband. ”
“And Graham blames the Carltons.”
“Loudly and publicly. Before, during, and after the failed lawsuit, he ranted and raved about how enablers were as guilty as adulterers and deserved punishment. Called them criminals. Called them evil. Called them… wait for it.”
“I really would rather not wait.”
“Lawbreakers.”
Kate’s eyes widened. “Ah. Sounds promising.”
“Sure does.”
Marcus pulled into the parking lot of an office tower with the name of Sterling and Little, LLP on the sign. “Sterling has a reputation for being the early bird. Let’s go see if we can get the worm.”
They entered the building and found no receptionist at the desk. At five-forty in the morning, the offices weren’t actually open. That would hopefully give them a chance to speak to Mr. Sterling uninterrupted.
The lobby was decorated with shimmering abstract art installations, including the ubiquitous fountain formed of a series of triangles offset so the water flowed from the points of each triangle before reaching the center of an angular-petaled steel flower.
Similarly sharp artworks occupied the hallway the elevator opened into, and when they came to the wide double doors that led into the partner’s offices, they saw two statues of angularly shaped people, one woman (identifiable by the knife-edged breasts) and one man.
They stared at each other across the expanse, apparently meant to represent people separating.
Or at odds. Or staring wistfully at each other and wondering what might have been.
It was hard to tell exactly what the point of the sculptures was.
They walked in, and a balding man in his early fifties with a portly frame and small, beady blue eyes frowned at them from inside the open door of the office to the left. “Excuse me? These offices are…” His voice trailed off when Marcus and Kate showed him their badges.
“Graham Sterling?” Kate asked.
“That’s me. What the hell’s going on?”
“We’d like to talk to you about Richard and Vanessa Carlton,” Kate said, entering the office without asking. “Do you have a minute?”
Graham laughed. “Right. Okay.” He flipped his hands. “Sure. I have a minute.”
“Thank you, kindly,” Marcus said.
Neither agent took a seat. Graham didn’t offer, nor did he rise from his richly upholstered high-backed leather chair.
“Your ex-wife, Ginger Howard, met her current husband at one of the Carlton’s parties,” Kate said. “That correct?”
“It is. And I’ll save you some time and tell you that yes, I did pursue legal action against the Carltons for knowingly and maliciously manipulating Ginger into hating me and pursuing a relationship with their friend Michael Howard.”
“And why would they do that?” Kate asked.
“Because I represented the spouses of several others manipulated into infidelity by them and won successful judgments for them.”
Another piece of the puzzle clicked into place. “I see. So, the Carltons were angry because you were making it unprofitable to cheat.”
“That’s an inexact way to put it but not inaccurate.”
“What’s a more exact way to put it?”
Graham folded fat fingers and rested them on his prodigious gut.
“The Carltons sell real estate. Anyone worth their salt in real estate will tell you it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.
This is especially true when the real estate you sell is in other countries, and you're selling it to people who are using it for the purpose of circumventing employment laws by outsourcing to places with less stringent protections for workers. "
Kate regretted asking him to explain further. Graham was obviously someone who loved hearing himself talk. Kate had a feeling that had contributed as much to the end of his marriage as the Carltons.
“The Carltons pursued connections with potential clients by doing what they were good at.”
“Which was?”
“Determining sexual compatibility and aligning people with individuals who pleased them.”
Kate laughed. She didn’t like doing that in front of a suspect, especially not in the middle of an interrogation, but come on. “Really? So, they broke up marriages by figuring out the kind of sex people liked and using that for… Real estate?”
Graham’s expression didn’t change. “Yes.”
“How?”
“Like I said, they hooked people up. Trust me, agent, when you find the perfect person, the one who does everything you want, enjoys doing everything you want, needs to do everything you want, loves it when you feel more pleasure than you’ve ever felt in your life—”
“We get the picture,” Marcus interrupted, making no effort to hide his scorn.
Graham grinned at him. Apparently, he enjoyed making people uncomfortable. "My point is that when someone has the power to make your wildest dreams come true, you don't let that go. That's why drug addicts will sell their souls to get their next hit."
Kate wasn’t sure she believed that powerful people would compromise that power for a good lay, at least not knowingly, but she believed that the Carltons would gather evidence of certain events and use it for blackmail.
“So, in your case, the Carltons used their exceptional erotic power to drive your wife into the arms of Mike Howard because you were making people leery of seeking out their services, meaning they couldn’t sell land and couldn’t make money. ”
“Precisely.”
“That seems like a stretch.”
“It did to me as well. Until it worked on my wife.”
Kate and Marcus shared a glance.
“Marriage is pretty important to you, isn’t it?”
Graham rolled his eyes. “Honesty is important to me. If Ginger had come to me and said, ‘Hey, I’m done with you; I really want to fuck this other guy, so can we get divorced?’ I would have happily signed the paperwork. Well, not happily, but you get the point.”
“So, you were angry.”
“Of course. But not enough to kill them.”
Kate decided it was time to broach the elephant in the room. “What do you know about Elijah Cox?”
She watched Graham’s face carefully. He frowned. “Cox. The priest guy who burnt those people in Maine?”
His confusion seemed genuine, but he recognized the name. “Yes. Him.”
“He’s in prison, right?”
“Yes.”
“So how could he have killed anyone?”
“Have you talked to him lately?” Marcus asked.
“I haven’t talked to him at all,” Graham replied. “What the hell is this? Do you think I’m some sort of disciple of his?”
“Are you?”
“No!”
His indignation and shock also seemed genuine. Kate’s confidence that Cox was behind this string of killings waned. That didn’t mean Graham wasn’t their killer, though. “Can you confirm your whereabouts for the night before last?”
“Yes. I was home. With my girlfriend.”
Kate lifted an eyebrow. “Your girlfriend? You moved on pretty fast after your wife dumped you, huh?”
Marcus flinched, and Kate realized what she’d said. Her blood drained to her feet. She wanted to apologize, to tell him that the two of them were different, but she couldn’t say that in front of a suspect.
Damn it. Way to put your goddamned foot in your mouth, Kate.
“Yes,” Graham replied, untroubled by Kate’s question.
“After it became clear that Ginger wasn’t going to return to me, I allowed myself time to grieve the marriage, then moved on.
I would be lying if I said I was sorry that the Carltons are dead, but I wouldn’t throw my own life away to kill them.
Besides,” he waved his hands in front of his girthy form.
“Do I look like I’m up for the task of murdering people? ”
“I’ve learned that physical shape rarely matters,” Kate said. “If someone wants someone else dead badly enough, they’ll find a way.”
Graham shrugged. “Well, I’m not sure what to tell you. I didn’t kill them. My girlfriend can confirm that I was with her the entire night.” Petty triumph flashed across his face. “Ginger may have preferred another, but Honey is quite satisfied with my performance.”
“I’m sure she is,” Marcus said drily. “Do us a favor and don’t leave town, all right?”
“As a litigator, I feel I should remind you that you don’t have the right to ask me that. However, I have no intention of leaving the area anytime soon. Should you feel a need to talk to me again, you can find me here every morning saves for Wednesdays and Saturdays.”
“Thank you, Mr. Sterling,” Kate said. “You’ve given us a lot to think about.”
In the car, Kate addressed the enormous elephant in the room. “Hey, Marcus, what I said back there… I was just trying to get a rise out of him. Get him to admit something.”
“It’s fine,” he said tersely. “I’m going to head back to the field office and keep digging through the guest list. I’ll catch a bus, and you can keep the car.
Why don’t you verify Sterling’s alibi, and if it checks out, keep working on the cipher?
We’ll call each other if we come up with something. ”
Kate nodded. “All right.”
He looked at her and sighed. "Don't worry about it okay? Seriously. It's no big deal. You and I aren't the same thing as Graham and his girlfriend. I know that."
Kate tried to be encouraged, but she could hear the tension in Marcus’s voice. At least a part of him was stung by Kate’s observation about Graham moving fast. He was moving fast too. He hadn’t even divorced his wife yet. The two of them were breaking the seventh commandment, strictly speaking.
“I think that there might be more to the Carltons than meets the eye,” Marcus said. “That’s why I want to keep working on the list. I’m not trying to get away from you.”
“All right,” she said again. She smiled at him to show she meant it.
“Cool.”
She wasn’t exactly placated, but she realized there was nothing to be gained by agonizing over this anymore. If they needed to have a longer conversation about it, they could have it once the case was solved.
She didn’t believe Graham was right about the Carltons using these planned liaisons as some sort of business tool, but there was mounting evidence to suggest that the Carltons did, in fact, specialize in facilitating adultery.
If that was the case, it made them the perfect targets for the latest commandment killer.
The question was: who would they target next?