“You’ve been threatened by a state police captain and assaulted by three casino hoods, and you barely escaped being killed by the people who murdered that sixteen-year-old girl,” said Lauren. “You’re not going up there alone.”

  We stared fiercely across the kitchen nook at each other.

  I leaned across and kissed her. There was a tenderness to it very different from the passion we had shared. When I pulled away, her incomparable green eyes looked at me steadily.

  “You have a good mind, Jake,” she said. “Flexible, solid, even imaginative. But you can be so stupid.”

  “Excellent analysis, but right now they don’t know I’ve connected Diana Larrimore to both Deborah and Cheryl Larsen. This is a chance for me to confront her with what we know and maybe get her to flip before we go to the police.”

  “Why would she do that? She’s obviously procuring these girls for whoever is running the show.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, remembering her showing me the Spanish Timbrado birds. “She’s strange … maybe I can get her to feel some guilt, maybe convince her that if she cooperates, a judge might go easier on her.”

  “Why can’t we go to the police now?”

  “For one thing, we have no evidence that Cheryl Larsen was actually murdered or even criminally assaulted like Deborah Chapman. And the DA’s office of jurisdiction in the Larsen case is in the pockets of the bad guys. At least one senior state police investigator is connected to the people running the casino and is definitely dirty. Going to the police would only give them time to cover their tracks.”

  “I’m going with you,” she repeated.

  “If a problem did come up, I’d only be worried about you, and that would make my chances worse.”

  “So it could be dangerous,” she came back, as if she had finally extracted the truth from a hostile witness.

  “That’s not what I said,” I said lamely.

  In the end, we agreed we would head up there together but that she would stay in the pickup in a safe place nearby while I went to confront Diana Larrimore. We would be connected by our cell phones with an open line.

  “Do you have any tools in the apartment?”

  “What kind of tools?”

  “What I might need to jimmy a window.”

  She showed me the deep drawer in her library/office that contained her hand tools. I pulled out a hammer, the largest screwdriver, a box cutter, and a roll of duct tape.

  She took a few minutes in the bedroom to put on a long-sleeved black shirt, black jeans, and black hiking shoes. I was still wearing the navy sweater and black slacks from the trip to Oneida, with my black army raincoat. My old field jacket was in the truck in case it got colder.

  “I’m ready,” she said.

  There was very little traffic on the roads and highways as we approached the Capitol District around Albany. It was almost two in the morning by the time we reached Kinderhook, and I drove very slowly through the sleeping village in case a local cop had set up a radar trap to add to the village coffers.

  We passed by the darkened home of Martin Van Buren, and he too was sleeping.

  When we came up on Diana Larrimore’s two-story carriage house, I saw a single light through the curtains of an upstairs window and kept going. A quarter mile farther on, I came to a packed-dirt cow path on the right that led into a pasture. I slowed down, turned in, and stopped about fifty yards along the path.

  “I’m going to walk back,” I said, checking my pencil flashlight to make sure it was fully charged.

  Lauren called me on my cell, and I answered it.

  “I’ll keep this line open and on speaker so you hear whatever happens when I get in there. If I run into trouble, hang up and call 911.”

  She nodded before leaning over to give me a light peck on the mouth.

  It was a clear night, and I slowly crossed the pasture in the pale glow of the distant stars. The field ran within a couple hundred yards of the carriage house, and I covered the rest of the way through a band of spruce trees that hugged the edge of the highway. A toad began croaking when I passed a small pond.

  Coming out of the tree line, I looked up at the crest of the slope above the carriage house to the shadowy outline of the colonial-style mansion I had seen during my first visit. It looked dark up there, but the place was too big and too far away to know for sure.

  Diana Larrimore’s silver Volvo SUV was parked in the space near the small barn behind the carriage house. The white brick house was completely dark except for the narrow band of light coming through the curtains of a room on the second floor. I hadn’t been upstairs on my first visit, but I assumed it was one of the bedrooms.

  I tried to remember if there had been a burglar alarm system, and gave up. All I remembered for the most part was her enormity. I decided not to try the front door. If there was an alarm system, that would be its first defense.

  Slipping around the side of the house, I approached the casement windows of the office where we had met and talked. The curtains were drawn back, and after looking through the windows, I could see by the light of a live computer screen at one of the work stations that the room was empty. The casement windows were locked.

  The next sets of windows were locked too. The oven light on a stove revealed a kitchen, also empty. I came to the windows of the room I remembered housed her Spanish Timbrado birds.

  One of the two casement windows was cracked open a few inches. Behind it was a window screen. The room was too dark to see anything. Swinging open the window to its farthest point, I removed the box cutter from my pocket and slit the screen around the edges.

  Pulling it free, I took out my pencil flashlight, pointed it inside the room, and turned it on for three seconds. The cage I had seen on the last visit still housed the birds and they appeared to be asleep.

  Diana had said they were bred for their singing and something about the fact that they didn’t like male birds or want to be handled. Climbing through the window, I sent a silent message that I wasn’t planning to touch them. They slept on.

  Opening the door into the hallway, I could see the faint light at the top of the stairs to the second floor. The staircase steps were covered by a thick woolen carpet runner, and I made no noise going up.

  At the top, I paused to look around. There were four rooms along the hallway. Three of them were dark, their doors wide open. The fourth was the room that gave off the light we had seen from the road. Its door was open too.

  I moved slowly down the hallway until I was able to peer around the frame. The room was empty. It was clearly Diana Larrimore’s bedroom. The bed was enormous, two queen-size mattresses joined together to make something Paul Bunyan would have found comfortable.

  But it was what was on the walls that stunned me, what she woke up looking at every morning and what she went to sleep looking at every night. I recalled Deborah Chapman’s mother, in her living room, showing me the scrapbook that recorded all the triumphs in Deborah’s young life, from girlhood to Carnegie Hall.

  Diana Larrimore’s scrapbook was mounted on almost every square inch of wall space in her bedroom. Directly above the headboard of her massive sleeping area was the same blown-up photograph I had first seen in her downstairs office of a carefree, angelic young woman in front of the entrance to the Louvre Museum in Paris.

  Looking at it closely, I saw that she was probably around Deborah Chapman’s age when it was taken, and she was stunningly beautiful in an all-American, blonde and blue-eyed way, with a swimmer’s body and the same innocent smile as Deborah’s.

  One wall displayed the visual echoes of her childhood, from impossibly cute as a toddler and being held by an older man who looked like Fred Rogers, to another sitting on the back of a gigantic turtle at the age of ten or eleven, and then her as a young teen on a Chris-Craft lake boat holding up a rainbow trout. It was a fairy-tale wall of cherished childhood memories.

  The wall opposite the bed was covered with pictures of her at the piano, a lot of pianos—Steinway grands, baby grands, harpsichords, and uprights. The venues ranged from playing at home in a concert setting to being in front of a full symphony orchestra. In none of the photographs did she look older than sixteen or seventeen.

  I wondered where she might be. The rest of the house was empty, but her car was parked outside in the same spot as when I’d last visited. My only guess was that she might be up at the big house on the crest of the hill.

  I went back downstairs and climbed out the same window I had used to get in.

  The birds didn’t wake up to give me a parting coo. Outside, I held my cell phone to my ear.

  “Are you there?” I whispered.

  “I’m here,” Lauren replied softly, “and just about to go crazy from worry. What’s happening?”

  “The carriage house is empty, but her car is here. I’m thinking she might be up at the mansion.”

  “There’s no way you’re going up there,” she whispered. “Come back here right now.”

  Her advice made sense. For all we knew, there could be a dozen people or more up there. We needed to regroup and figure out another plan. I was about to tell her I was coming when I heard a fragmentary chord of music. I waited a few seconds and heard it again. It wasn’t coming from inside the carriage house, and we were too far away from the mansion.

  “I hear something,” I whispered to Lauren. “I’m going to check it out.”

  Aside from the light breeze riffling the branches of the trees in the yard, it was intensely quiet. The thin strain of the music seemed to be coming from behind the carriage house, and I slowly moved closer to it through the darkness.

  It was stronger now, and I realized it was coming from the small wooden barn where her car was parked. The barn was two stories high, with red clapboard walls and a cupola at the center peak of the roof.

  It had two massive doors on the side facing the carriage house, and as I came closer, I saw that another vehicle was parked next to the Volvo. I first smelled freshly cut grass and then made out an old tractor with a brush mower attachment, covered with mown hay.

  The music was louder now and definitely coming from inside the old barn. It was a piano, and the piece was recognizable even to me: Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

  The two massive doors that had once served horse carriages were sealed tight, and I couldn’t see any light around the edges. I walked around to the side and found a window, but it was covered from inside by solid shutters.

  Farther along, I came to a smaller door that was latched shut. It didn’t fit tightly, and through the crack between the door and the frame, I could see a section of the barn’s interior, including a kerosene lantern sitting on top of a large, iron-strapped wooden barrel. I pushed the door farther open.

  Old leather harness tack was hanging from pegs along one wall. In what were once horse stalls, a 1950s vintage two-seater Thunderbird was up on concrete blocks, the red chassis covered with bird droppings.

  The sound of the piano was now pure. I had never heard the Moonlight Sonata so movingly played, and wondered if it was a radio performance or something recorded on Diana’s high-end audio equipment. It made no sense for someone to be performing it in the barn.

  I slowly shoved the door all the way open and stepped inside. Although the horses were long gone, there was a lingering animal smell in the dusty earth, mingled with the pungent odors of bird offal, baled hay, and fertilizer.

  The other horse stalls were now storage areas for tools, coils of rope, and wooden bins. In the pale glow of the single kerosene lantern, I finally saw what was producing the music in the main section of the barn.

  Standing halfway into one of the box stalls was a baby grand piano. Unlike the vintage Thunderbird, the piano looked to be in superb condition. A blue canvas tarp had been covering it, and the ends of the tarp hung loose along the sides.

  What looked like a cobbler’s workbench was facing the piano, and sitting on it was Diana Larrimore. Her fingers were creating the hauntingly beautiful sound. Her gift for the piano was stunning.

  Even more stunning—she was naked. In the subdued illumination from the kerosene lamp, I didn’t take it in at first. It was only when I was closer that the reality of it hit me.

  I came toward the piano from the left, near a box stall choked with old garden rakes, hoes, and shovels. Oblivious to me, Diana faced forward, her eyes closed as her fingers danced across the keys. A magnum bottle of Moet et Chandon champagne sat on the cobbler’s bench next to her. About two inches were left at the bottom of the bottle.

  “Can you hear this?” I whispered into my cell phone.

  “Moonlight Sonata,” said Lauren softly. “What’s going on?”

  It was impossible to describe what I was looking at. Instead, I gently touched Diana’s left shoulder. Her eyes opened, and she turned to take me in. Tears were streaming down her face in rivulets and dripping onto her breasts and massive stomach. Otherwise, there was no visible reaction to me.

  “I was the youngest person to ever perform at the Philharmonie de Paris,” she said, slurring the words while she continued to play. “I was sixteen years old when I was invited to perform at the home of the world’s most prestigious symphony orchestra.”

  I sensed she had a lot more to say. All I had to do was stand there and listen.

  “They said I was going to be the female Van Cliburn. He won the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow,” she said. “I might have too.”

  The end of the piece was only moments away, and I didn’t want to do anything to spoil the mood and stop her from talking. I hoped that Lauren was ready to write down anything important.

  “Instead, I became Deborah Chapman.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked gently.

  “We had the same coming-out party … the same debutante’s ball … the sweet release … with the same official presenter violating us … me at sixteen in Paris, Deborah here in New York … and the others too. I’m like the Timbrados now. I never want to be touched again.”

  Her faraway eyes came up to meet mine. Through the tears, I could see the beauty that had once been hers when the world was at her doorstep. Somehow, the champagne didn’t seem to affect the quality of her play. Her fingers continued to manipulate the keys, immune to her emotion. .

  “They worship virgins, you know … until we’re no longer virgins.”

  “Who, Diana?” I asked as the haunting melody neared the end.

  “All of them … but he rules.”

  “The man who abducted and raped you in Paris?”

  She continued to play the final notes and said, “He spent his life searching for the next adventure … sailing the world, the perfect orgasm, the meaning of life. He never found what he was searching for, and all he had left was boredom. He found a cure for the boredom … and I found the essence of guilt. It kills the light.”

  Her drunken rambling was making less and less sense.

  “But why would you become his procurer?”

  “Have you ever been a victim?” she said, as if that somehow explained it.

  “Who is in the cult? Who is the leader?

  The sonata came to an end, and there was silence. She held up the magnum bottle of Moet et Chandon and finished the champagne in a few swallows.

  “Ahh, the little black book … my little black book,” she said with a grotesque smile. Pointing at her head, she said, “It’s in here and … in there.” Her eyes drifted down to the discarded pile of clothing lying on the dirt floor of the barn.

  “I’ll help you find the cure for guilt,” I said. “It’s called justice. Tell me the names of the men in the cult.”

  “Justice,” said a deep voice behind me. “How about revenge, asshole?”

  35

  Frank Bull was standing a few feet inside the same door I had used. He was wearing a belted, purple silk bathrobe that came down to his thighs, and cushioned slippers. He was holding a gun in his hand. It looked like a Colt .45.

  Art Hirka stood alongside him. Unlike Bull, he apparently hadn’t been asleep and wore a checkered flannel shirt over green corduroy pants and work boots.

  Without his cowboy hat, I saw he was almost bald, with a thin fringe of gray hair at the temples. Although he wasn’t in uniform, he was carrying the same Colt Python .357 magnum I had last seen in his studded leather holster.

  “Tank Cantrell,” said Hirka with a beefy grin. “Like I told you … you shoulda stuck to football.”

  I was still holding the cell phone at my side in my left hand and let it drop to the barn floor behind the cobbler’s bench. Diana Larrimore watched it fall, but her eyes were still glazed with drink.

  “Don’t call 911,” I said loudly.

  Frank Bull burst out laughing.

  “We’ll call 911 when you’re dead, pal.”

  I knew that with Hirka there, a 911 call from Lauren would only bring a squad car with a local cop or a deputy sheriff. Hirka would claim to be a guest of the owner and take over the investigation into my death.

  “It’s a good thing Art here likes to hang out at my country place and enjoys monitoring our infrared security cameras,” said Bull. “You never know what’s going to show up. This is a real gift.”

  Keeping his .357 pointed at me, Hirka walked over to us. Looking down at Diana Larrimore in disgust, he parted my jacket with his left hand and removed my gun from its shoulder holster. He walked back to Bull and handed it to him. Bull put it in a pocket of his silk bathrobe.

  “Wait outside Art … expect two,” said Bull.

  Hirka nodded and left, closing the door behind him.

  “No witnesses, Frank? I thought you’d be proud of your personal executions,” I said as he came slowly toward us.

  “Recognize this piece?” he said.

  He held the gun out, open handed.

  “My .45?”

  “See, you killed her with it,” he said, glancing at Diana Larrimore. “Just like you killed that little slut of Georgie’s in the trailer.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “And then you killed yourself out of guilt,” he said.

  “And then Captain Hirka just happened to show up,” I said.

 

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