staring out onto the busy street below, while a conference call plodded
forward on the speaker phone.
Dan Kirksen walked in the door, his stiff bow tie and crisp shirt
concealing a slender jogger’s body. Kirksen was the firm’s managing
partner. He had unwavering control over everyone in the place except
Sandy Lord. And now perhaps Jack Graham.
Lord glanced at him with uninterested eyes. Kirksen sat down and waited
patiently until the conference call participants said their good-byes.
Lord clicked the phone off and sat down in his chair. Leaning back, he
eyed the ceiling and lit up. Kirksen, a health fanatic, inched back from
the desk.
“You want something?” Lord’s eyes had finally come to rest on Kirksen’s
lean, hairless face. The man consistently controlled a shade under six
hundred thousand in business, which guaranteed him a long, secure home
at PS&L, but those numbers were chickenshit to Lord and he did nothing
to hide his dislike of the firm’s managing partner.
“We were wondering how the lunch went.”
“You can handle the softballs. I don’t have time to play fucking
softball.”
“We had heard unsettling rumors, and then with Alvis having to be
terminated when Ms. Baldwin called.”
Lord waved a hand through the air. “That’s taken care of.
He loves us, he’s staying. And I wasted two hours.”
“The amount of money at stake, Sandy, we, we all felt it would be
better, it would convey the strongest possible impression if you-2′
“Yeah. I understand the numbers, Kirksen, better than you, I understand
the numbers. Okay? Now, Jacky boy is staying put. With luck he might
double his fishing line in ten years, and we can all retire early.” Lord
looked over at Kirksen, who seemed to grow smaller and smaller under the
big man’s gaze. “He’s got balls, you know. More balls than any of my
other partners.”
Kirksen winced.
“In fact, I kind of like the kid.” Lord stood up and moved over to the
window, where he watched a procession of preschoolers attached together
with rope cross the street ten stories below.
“Then I can report a positive to the committee?”
“You can report any goddamn thing you like. Just remember one thing:
don’t you boys ever bother me with one of these things again, unless
it’s really, really important, you understand me?”
Lord glanced once more at Kirksen and then his eyes returned to the
window. Sullivan still had not called. That was not good. He could see
his country slipping away, like the little bodies disappearing around
the corner. Gone.
“Thank you, Sandy.”
“Yeah.
CHAPTER NINE
WALTER SULLIVAN STARED AT THE FACE, OR WHAT WAS left of it. The exposed
foot showed the official morgue toe tag. While his entourage waited
outside, he quietly sat alone with her. The identification had already
been formally made.
The police had gone off to update their records, the reporters to file
their stories. But Walter Sullivan, one of the most powerful men of his
era, who had made money from nearly everything he had touched since he
was fourteen, now suddenly found himself bereft of energy, of any will
whatsoever.
The press had had a field day with him and Christy after his marriage of
forty-seven years had ended in the death of his first wife. But at
almost eighty years old, he had just wanted something young and alive.
After so much death, he had wanted something that would most certainly
outlive him.
With close friends and loved ones dying around him, he had passed his
tolerance level as a mourner. Growing old was not easy, even for the
very rich.
But Christy Sullivan had not survived him. And he was trying to do
something about that. it was fortunate that he largely ignorant of what
lay ahead for the remains of his not in the least ate wife. it was a
necessary process that was ed to comfort the victim’s family.
oon as Walter Sullivan left the room, a technician would enter and wheel
the late Mrs. Sullivan into the autopsy room. There she would be weighed
and have her height confirmed. She would be photographed, first fully
clothed, and -rayed and fingerprinted. A corn then in the nude. Then X