Final Option

from?”
    “I give up, where?”
    “According to Carl Savage, Hexter was trading for himself in the name of Deodar Commodities. Deodar was just a shell company of Hexter’s, a mechanism for hiding money from Pamela. My theory is that someone at Hexter Commodities found out about it and was blackmailing him. It just must have gone wrong somehow.”
    “But then you’d expect it to be the blackmailer who ended up dead, not Hexter.”
    “That’s one of the details I haven’t worked out yet. But I do know one thing. Ruskowski’s solution only takes into account one part of the problem.”
     
    I spent Sunday evening alone, sitting in the rounded sun parlor of my apartment. When I first moved in with Claudia we lived on one of the safest blocks in Chicago. Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor, made his home in the high-rise across the street, and a police cruiser was stationed permanently outside his front door. After Washington suffered a fatal heart attack our little corner of Hyde Park slid back into the urban ooze from which it had briefly been wrested.
    I sat for hours at the window, slowly drinking the better part of a bottle of red wine while I tried to sort out the events of the preceding week. On the table in the living room there were a dozen yellow roses jammed into a mayonnaise jar filled with water. Claudia had left the card lying next to them. It read: “You’re wonderful—Jeff.”
    I watched the street theater playing itself out beyond the window as I strung together what I knew about Bart Hexter’s death. Ruskowski assumed that when you stripped everything else away, Bart Hexter’s murder was about sex. But there is a saying that businessmen are doomed to have their most interesting exploits measured by accountants. I was pretty sure that when you came right down to it, Hexter’s murder would come down to a matter of dollars and cents. The trouble was, no matter how I juggled the profit and loss statement of Hexter’s death, nothing I came up with came close to comparing to Ruskowski’s case against Pamela Hexter.
     
    When I arrived at Hexter Commodities on Monday I was surprised to find a bearded young man in a grotty flannel shirt and jeans sitting at Bart Hexter’s desk with his eyes glued to the computer screen.
    “Oh, gosh. You’re here already,” he blurted, looking up when I entered. “Professor Hexter said he was going to be using this room for a meeting, but I must have lost track of time. I’ll be out of your way in a minute.“
    “Thanks,” I said, extending my hand. “I’m Kate Millholland.”
    “I’m Kurt Loovis. I’m one of Dr. Hexter’s Ph.D. students. You know this real futures stuff is far out. Exploring new frontiers,” he laughed nervously as he gathered up his papers. “Going where no mathematician has ever gone before.”
    Barton Jr. arrived a few minutes after his graduate student had cleared out. He looked rumpled but relaxed. His eyes, I noticed, traveled immediately from the price board in the boardroom to the Quotron screen in the office.
    “Did you meet the guy who was working in here?” asked Barton as his eyes followed the screen.
    “Yes. He introduced himself.”
    “He’s one of my research assistants. He’s going to take a year’s leave of absence with me. We’re going to see if we can start applying what we know about chaos theory to developing a technical trading strategy for Hexter Commodities.”
    “That’s great,” I said. “I know you’re busy, but I just wanted to fill you in on my discussion with Torey Lloyd.”
    “Who?”
    “The young woman who claims to have been having a relationship with your father.”
    “Oh, God, yes. With everything else she just slipped my mind. That’s a sad commentary on things.“
    “There’s no question that she and your father had a relationship that had been going on for almost three years.”
    “So you think he was really buying the apartment for her? I don’t know why not. When Dad did something, he did it big.”
    “Yes. I think he was buying the apartment for the two of them. I paused and took a breath, “I don’t want you to hear this from someone else. Friday night, before he came home for dinner, he stopped at Torey’s apartment and told her that he was leaving your mother and asked her to marry him.”
    “That can’t be true. She’s making that part up.”
    “He gave her an engagement ring from Tiffany’s. Ruskowski checked it out.”
    Barton let out a