Tell No One
“Can you tell me when he booked the flight?”
“Three days ago.”
Dimonte leapt on that one. “Beck planned to run. Son of a bitch.”
Carlson shook his head. “No.”
“How do you figure?”
“We’ve been assuming that he killed Rebecca Schayes to shut her up,” Carlson explained. “But if you’re going to leave the country, why bother? Why take the risk of waiting three days and trying to get away with another murder?”
Stone shook his head. “You’re overthinking this one, Nick.”
“We’re missing something,” Carlson insisted. “Why did he all of a sudden decide to run in the first place?”
“Because we were onto him.”
“We weren’t onto him three days ago.”
“Maybe he knew it was a matter of time.”
Carlson frowned some more.
Dimonte turned to Krinsky. “This is a waste of time. Let’s get the hell out of here.” He looked at Carlson. “We’ll leave a couple of uniforms around just in case.”
Carlson nodded, only half listening. When they left, he asked Emily, “Was he traveling with anyone?”
Emily hit some keys. “It was a solo booking.”
“How did he book it? In person? On the phone? Did he go through a travel agency?”
She clicked the keys again. “It wasn’t through a travel agency. That much I can tell you because we’d have a marking to pay a commission. The reservation was made directly with British Airways.”
No help there. “How did he pay?”
“Credit card.”
“May I have the number, please?”
She gave it to him. He passed it over to Stone. Stone shook his head. “Not one of his cards. At least, not one we know about.”
“Check it out,” Carlson said.
Stone’s cell phone was already in his hand. He nodded and pressed the keypad.
Carlson rubbed his chin. “You said he booked his flight three days ago.”
“That’s correct.”
“Do you know what time he booked it?”
“Actually yes. The computer stamps it in. Six-fourteen in the P.M.”
Carlson nodded. “Okay, great. Can you tell me if anyone else booked at around the same time?”
Emily thought about it. “I’ve never tried that,” she said. “Hold on a moment, let me see something.” She typed. She waited. She typed some more. She waited. “The computer won’t sort by booking date.”
“But the information is in there?”
“Yes. Wait, hold up.” Her fingers started clacking again. “I can paste the information onto a spreadsheet. We can put fifty bookings per screen. It will make it faster.”
The first group of fifty had a married couple who booked the same day but hours earlier. Useless. The second group had none. In the third group, however, they hit bingo.
“Lisa Sherman,” Emily pronounced. “Her flight was booked the same day, eight minutes later.”
It didn’t mean anything on its own, of course, but Carlson felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
“Oh, this is interesting,” Emily added.
“What?”
“Her seat assignment.”
“What about it?”
“She was scheduled to sit next to David Beck. Row sixteen, seats E and F.”
He felt the jolt. “Has she checked in?”
More typing. The screen cleared. Another came up. “As a matter of fact, she has. She’s probably boarding as we speak.”
She adjusted her purse strap and stood. Her step was brisk, her head high. She still had the glasses and the wig and implants. So did the photograph of Lisa Sherman in her passport.
She was four gates away when she heard a snippet of the CNN report. She stopped short. A man wheeling an industrial-size piece of carry-on ran into her. He made a rude hand gesture as though she’d cut him off on a freeway. She ignored him and kept her eyes on the screen.
The anchorwoman was doing the report. In the right-hand corner of the screen was a photograph of her old friend Rebecca Schayes side by side with an image of … of Beck.
She hurried closer to the screen. Under the images in a bloodred font were the words Death in the Darkroom.
“… David Beck, suspected in the slaying. But is that the only crime they believe he’s committed? CNN’s Jack Turner has more.”
The anchorwoman disappeared. In her place, two men with NYPD windbreakers rolled out a black body bag on a stretcher. She recognized the building at once and almost gasped. Eight years. Eight years had passed, but Rebecca still had her studio in the same location.
A man’s voice, presumably Jack Turner’s, began his report: “It’s a twisted tale, this murder of one of New York’s hottest fashion photographers. Rebecca Schayes was found dead in her darkroom, shot twice in the head at close range.” They flashed a photograph of Rebecca smiling brightly. “The suspect is her longtime friend, Dr. David Beck, an uptown pediatrician.” Now Beck’s image, no smile, lit up the screen. She almost fell over.
“Dr. Beck narrowly escaped arrest earlier today after assaulting a police officer. He is still at large and assumed armed and dangerous. If you have any information on his whereabouts …” A phone number appeared in yellow. Jack Turner read out the number before continuing.
“But what has given this story an added twist are the leaks coming out of Manhattan’s Federal Building. Presumably, Dr. Beck has been linked to the murder of two men whose bodies were recently unearthed in Pennsylvania, not far from where Dr. Beck’s family has a summer residence. And the biggest shocker of all: Dr. David Beck is also a suspect in the eight-year-old slaying of his wife, Elizabeth.”
Á photograph of a woman she barely recognized popped up. She suddenly felt naked, cornered. Her image vanished as they went back to the anchorwoman, who said, “Jack, wasn’t it believed that Elizabeth Beck was the victim of serial killer Elroy ‘KillRoy’ Kellerton?”
“That’s correct, Terese. Authorities aren’t doing much talking right now, and officials deny the reports. But the leaks are coming to us from very reliable sources.”
“Do the police have a motive, Jack?”
“We haven’t heard one yet. There has been some speculation that there may have been a love triangle here. Ms. Schayes was married to a Gary Lamont, who remains in seclusion. But that’s little more than conjecture at this point.”