I, Alex Cross

tape recorder and set it down. "Who were the men in the car? Let’s start there."
    "I have no idea," she said. "I never saw them before in my life." I believed her.
    "What did they want? What did they say?"
    Here she paused. I had the sense she might be ready to bury Nicholson, but it wasn’t a corner she would turn all at once. "You know, I warned him something like this could happen."
    "Something like what, Mara?" Sampson asked. "Be a little more specific."
    "He’s been blackmailing clients of the club. It was supposed to be our ’new-life money.’ That’s what Tony always called it. Some new life, right?" She gestured around the room. "
This
is it?"
    "What about names? Dead names, made-up ones, whatever you heard. What do you know about the people he was blackmailing?"
    Mara Kelly was warming to this, and as she did, her tone got more bitter and sarcastic. "I know that he always covered his bases. Both sides of the aisle. That way, if anyone talks, everyone loses. And if anything happened to Tony, I was supposed to blow the whole thing wide open." She sat back and crossed her slender arms. "That was the idea, anyway. That was the threat he made to the dumbasses he was blackmailing for getting a little nookie."
    "And everyone paid up?" Sampson asked her.
    Her eyes traveled around the room again like she couldn’t believe she was here, that it had all come to this.
    "Well, if that was true, we wouldn’t be having this conversation now, would we?"

Chapter 64

    IT DIDN’T TAKE long for Tony Nicholson to start talking a blue streak about the club and the blackmail scheme after that. I’d seen it so many times before, the way suspects will start competing with each other once they sense the ground is shifting. To hear him tell it, Mara Kelly had set up the entire back end: Asian underground banking, public key cryptography — everything they needed to stay out of reach for as long as they had.
    "Why do you think they came after her too?" he kept asking us. "Don’t be fooled by the pretty face. That bitch isn’t nearly as stupid as she appears."
    I guess you could say those two were no longer an item. Now things might get interesting.
    Nicholson had been sitting on the same rickety folding chair for hours, with his injured leg stuck out to the side in an immobilizer. From the twisted look on his face, he was coming due for a pain pill.
    "Okay," I said. "That’s a start, Tony. Now let’s talk about the real reason we’re here."
    I took out a file and started laying photos on the table. "Timothy O’Neill, Katherine Tennancour, Renata Cruz, Caroline Cross."
    There was a moment of genuine surprise on his face — but just a moment. Nicholson was cool under fire. "What about them?"
    "They all worked for you."
    "It’s possible," he said. "A lot of people work for me."
    "It wasn’t a question." I pointed at Caroline’s picture. "She was found mutilated beyond recognition. Did you catch that on camera too, Nicholson?"
    "I seriously don’t know what you’re talking about. I have no idea what you’re getting at. Try making sense when you bother to open your mouth."
    "How did she die?"
    Something seemed to click suddenly, like a spark in Nicholson’s eyes. He looked down at the picture and then back up at me.
    "You said Caroline Cross? That’s your name, isn’t it?" When I didn’t answer, his mouth spread into a grin. "Excuse me, Detective, but I think maybe you’re in over your head."
    "I got up very fast. If the table hadn’t been bolted to the floor, I might have pinned Nicholson to the far wall with it.
    But Sampson got to him first. He shot around the table and pulled the chair right out from under him. Nicholson flopped onto the floor like a caught fish.
    He started to scream. "My leg! My goddamn leg! You bastards! I’ll sue you both!"
    Sampson didn’t seem to hear. "You know Virginia’s a death penalty state, right?"
    "What is this, Abu fucking Ghraib? Get the hell away from me!" Nicholson gritted his teeth and pounded the floor. "I didn’t kill anyone!"
    "But you know who did," I shouted back.
    "If I had anything to trade, don’t you think I’d use it? Help me up, you stupid assholes! Help me up, here. Hey!
Hey!
"
    We walked out instead. And while we were at it, we took the chairs with us.

Chapter 65

    FOUR HOURS LATER, in the name of "coming clean" and telling us what he knew, and most of all, getting the best deal he possibly could, Nicholson offered up access to a safe-deposit box in