Part 9 Imposters
IMPOSTERS
Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.
– Charlie Munger
Jane Street
West Village, Manhattan
28 December, 1910 hours
About an hour later, the cab dropped Audrey, Heidi and me off at a four-storey brownstone on a cute street in the West Village.
(The brownstone was owned by a friend of Heidi’s named Leaf. I know, weird name. Quite a few of Heidi’s friends have weird names. Leaf was heavily involved in SafeNewHomeUSA, the charity Heidi supported, since she herself had escaped from an abusive relationship years before.
Now, she was doing great. Leaf made millions of dollars as a dominatrix on OnlyFans, which was how she could afford a brownstone in the West Village.
If you can find your niche, OnlyFans can be very lucrative.
In any case, this was where Heidi had been staying since Christmas Eve and it had been Leaf who had lent her the pistol.)
We hurried inside.
Shortly after, I was sitting in Leaf’s (lovely) living room with Heidi and Audrey. Leaf was out at dinner in the nearby Meatpacking District.
Audrey was freshly showered and wearing some Christmas-themed flannelette pyjamas owned by Leaf. She sipped hot tea from a mug.
She was pale, still recovering from being shot a week ago.
‘How are you feeling?’ I asked.
She grimaced, then showed us the bandage on her stomach. ‘Getting shot sucks, but it coulda been worse.’
‘I’m pretty sure those masked men in the trucks came for you because of the QuantumSpeed-7 chip,’ I said. ‘You took the chip to the covered bridge at the cemetery for the drop. What happened to it?’
‘The cemetery . . .’ Audrey said, remembering. ‘That fucking asshole . . .’
‘Which asshole?’ Heidi asked.
‘That Chinese detective, Xiao,’ Audrey spat.
‘Xiao?’ I said. ‘After the military drone shot you, I found him giving you CPR.’
‘Xiao wasn’t giving me CPR,’ Audrey said. ‘He wasn’t trying to save my life. Even though I’d been fucking shot by the drone, he was going through my purse and pockets, trying to find the QuantumSpeed-7 chip. That whole drop at the bridge was a set up.’
There were those words again: set up.
It was starting to look as if everything that had happened on December 21st had been smoke and mirrors.
‘So, what happened to the chip?’ I asked. ‘Xiao clearly didn’t find it.’
‘No-one found it. Not even my fellow agents at the FBI.’ Audrey gave me a weak but satisfied grin. ‘Because of you.’
‘Me?’
Audrey lifted up the plastic bag she’d retrieved from the ambulance earlier, the one containing her clothes and personal effects.
She reached in and extracted her belt from it.
It was the black leather belt I’d given her last Christmas, the one with the rectangular silver buckle. Since Audrey had been wearing an FBI windbreaker on December 21st, I hadn’t noticed she’d been wearing the belt that day.
‘I don’t get it,’ Heidi said.
But I did.
Audrey clicked open the folding front panel of the buckle, revealing the secret compartment inside it.
And there, in the shallow compartment, was the QuantumSpeed-7 chip.
‘Sam, what in God’s name is going on?’ Audrey asked.
‘Let’s just say a lot’s happened while you’ve been unconscious.’
I quickly told her about everything that had occurred since she’d been shot.
About Merritt Garrett killing the Grandmaster.
About Trey Hooper stealing my idea about Yasmina Ivanova’s little girl being in the garbage chute and how he’d then found her, garnering his own hero moment which he’d embellished in all the media coverage that’d ensued.
About Yasmina being linked to the Grandmaster.
Then Yasmina protesting her innocence and hiring me to prove it.
About the Russian mob at Coney Island and how they said the Grandmaster had also been set up.
About the superintendent at 59West, Lenny Grossman, who I suspected had been impersonated on December 21st.
‘It doesn’t add up yet,’ I concluded. ‘None of it. Yasmina, the Grandmaster, the Russians, Sleepy Hollow, the QuantumSpeed-7 chip. We had a crazy day at that tower, but now it’s like we have five different cases.’
‘So what do we do?’ Audrey said.
‘The question always comes back to incentive and motive: who stood to gain the most from what happened at 59West on December 21st?’ I said.
‘Someone who wanted to ruin Yasmina?’ Audrey said.
‘Only that doesn’t explain the QuantumSpeed-7 chip,’ I said.
‘Or all the riddles and deathtraps,’ Heidi said. ‘I mean, who gained anything from them? Why not just do a straightforward ransom demand? Why go to all that trouble and preparation?’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Speaking of folks who were motivated to ruin Yasmina, what did you find out about Shelby Cox?’
Heidi flipped open her notebook. ‘Yeah, so I managed to meet with Shelby and her daughter, Cassandra, this morning. Also spoke on the phone to the hot young nanny Aristo knocked up, Madison Barnes.’
‘And?’
‘Shelby’s been living her best life far away from Aristo King. Doesn’t miss him at all. Richer than Croesus, thanks to her excellent pre-nup. Got a whole new friend group in Vail.’
‘How did she feel about the fact her son Ajax died on December 21st? He fell down the side of the building,’ I said.
Heidi shrugged. ‘Ajax was tight with his father; worked with him at one of his businesses. Shelby didn’t approve, so she wasn’t really close with Ajax.
She also thought he took too many drugs and partied too much.
She said and I quote: “Ajax made his choices. It was those choices that put him in 59West on that day.”’
‘Cold,’ I said. ‘You believe her?’
‘Actually, I do,’ Heidi said.
I trusted Heidi’s instincts. She could see through people very well.
‘What about the daughter, Cassandra? How’s she faring after being rescued by Merritt Garrett from the side of the tower?’
‘Now, that girl is a fucking piece of work,’ Heidi said. ‘The dumbest, most vacuous, self-centred, attention-seeking spoilt brat I’ve ever seen. When I met her, she was, let’s say, rather distracted.’
‘With grief?’
‘Fuck no, with trying to secure a book deal, TV interviews and new endorsements for her social media. She’s milking that day at the tower for all it’s worth. Didn’t you see her after Ajax’s funeral?
‘Oh, and by the way, she got her personal assistant to write her eulogy using AI. Seriously, she bragged about that,’ Heidi said.
‘She even said she didn’t like Ajax much anyway; she resented sharing her social media celebrity status with him because she felt she did all the work.
Sam, if that shallow-ass bimbo is behind all this, then I’ll suck dick every day for a month. ’
(Whoa. That was Heidi’s greatest insult. Heidi is 100 percent lesbian. She’d rather die than give a man oral sex.)
‘And the nanny?’ I said. ‘The one who lived on the 44th floor with her illegitimate son to Aristo King?’
‘Yeah, Madison Barnes, Maddie to her friends. 23 years old, got pregnant to Aristo when she was 18. Didn’t waste any time on that front.’
I recalled the furious look in Yasmina’s eyes when the subject of the nanny had come up on both December 21st and at Rikers Island.
Her husband had been banging the nanny while Yasmina had been pregnant with their second child, their daughter, Katya.
Heidi said, ‘In short, young Maddie had a plan and executed it with laser focus: get a job babysitting Aristo King’s kids, sleep with Aristo King, get pregnant to Aristo King, get set for life.
Not a complex plan, but one that pretty young things have been doing for centuries with unfaithful wealthy men. ’
Heidi shrugged. ‘Basically, she’s a very uncomplicated gold--digger, Maddie.
I don’t see her as a suspect here. She’s not smart enough to pose as a victim; she’s also just not the type to risk her own life.
If anything, I see her as an unwitting participant in the plan to make it look like Yasmina Ivanova did it all. ’
‘Hmmm.’ I pulled out my notepad and crossed off some names on the diagram I’d made:
We were running out of connections. The only three names not crossed off were Aristo King, his first wife, Winnie Tan, and the sauna guy.
‘And the first wife never even met Yasmina before the 21st, right?’ I said. ‘I can understand the second wife, Shelby, disliking Yasmina, but there’s little reason for the first wife to hate the third wife.’
Heidi said, ‘Like a lot of first wives, it seems that Winnie Tan is now on pretty good terms with her ex-husband. She’s even helping him host a fundraising event on New Year’s Eve to honour Ajax and to launch his new foundation for the families of the law enforcement people who died on December 21: a cocktail party for some of their richest friends.
Since Aristo’s penthouse at 59West is unavailable, Winnie’s letting him use her 77th-floor condo in the nearby Steinway Tower for it.
Cassandra was invited but Shelby wasn’t. ’
‘What about King himself?’ I said. ‘This whole thing has been something of an image reset for him.’
‘He wouldn’t be the first guy to frame an inconvenient wife,’ Heidi said. ‘But do you really think he’d do that?’
‘Right now, I don’t know what to think. I’m clearly missing something,’ I said. ‘It just doesn’t make—’
A buzzing sound cut me off.
Someone’s phone.
It was Audrey’s. She looked at the caller ID.
‘Damn, it’s Trey.’
She clicked on the answer button and put the call on speaker.
‘Audrey, where the hell are you?’ Special Agent Hooper’s voice said.
‘Somewhere safe, Trey,’ Audrey said.
‘You’re hurt. Let us come get you. Bring you in to FBI headquarters down at Federal Plaza. That’s the safest place for you.’
‘The last time the FBI guarded me, it didn’t turn out to be very safe, Trey.’
‘You’re with him, aren’t you? That four-eyed geek, Speedman?’ (127.)
‘Right now, I feel safer with Sam than I do with the whole Bureau.’
(I smiled a little at that.)
‘What about the chip? The QuantumSpeed-7?’
‘What about it?’
‘It’s important, Audrey. A top-secret piece of national security tech. Do you have it?’
‘I know where it is,’ Audrey said evenly. ‘Now, you tell me something: who attacked our motorcade on the parkway?’