My phone went off. It was Megan. I stepped behind a rack of paperbacks, where I could still keep an eye on Ross.

“I thought maybe you’d decided to take the rest of the day off,” I said.

“I got caught up in some stuff. The Spicer investigation was a bust. The top brass has been reading us the riot act. I’m sorry. Where are you now?”

“I’m at Kennedy. Alan Ross is waiting for Tracy Jacobs.”

“I got your message. What’s the story with Alan Ross?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out. You know who Tracy Jacobs is, don’t you?”

“Tracy Jacobs the actress? What does she have to do with anything?”

“She’s the person who called Fox and Riddick and put the squeeze on for Fox to fess up to his affair with Cynthia. She was sleeping with Fox’s driver. Except the thing is, he swears the information about Cynthia didn’t come from him. I believe him.”

“Why is Alan Ross meeting Tracy Jacobs at the airport?”

“I don’t know. Would you like me to go over and ask him?”

“No. Where’s she coming from?”

“Paris. She’s been catching up on her culture.”

“What do you think’s going on?”

“I don’t know. Except that Alan Ross called me into his office two days ago and gave me an envelope full of money. He wanted me to look into the Burrell and Riddick murders. In fact, he wanted me to tell him how you were faring on them.”

“Me?”

“The police. He wanted progress reports.”

The line was silent for a few seconds. “Listen. When she shows up, I want you to keep a tail on them. Call me as they’re heading back to the city.”

“What if they don’t go back to the city? There are plenty of no-tell motels between here and there.”

“You think they’re lovers?”

“It was suggested to me that this might be the case. I don’t know what they are. Except that Mr. Ross seems to have set Ms. Jacobs up pretty nicely. He’s the one who got her the Century City gig. I think we’d like to find out why he did that.”

“Shit. Okay. Wherever they go, stay with them. Let me know what’s going on.”

I broke the connection. Ross was still seated in the plastic chair. I checked my watch. Plenty of time. Going back outside, I waited a few minutes in the taxi line and caught a cab. When I told him I only wanted to go over to the car-rental lot, he tried to dump me. I pulled enough bills from my wallet to convince him not to. There was a longer line than I’d anticipated at the rental desk, and by the time I got my car and was driving into the short-term lot, Tracy Jacobs’s flight was-unless things had changed-on the ground. I located Alan Ross’s car and pulled into a nearby slot. The wait was shorter than I’d expected, maybe fifteen minutes. Ross appeared, rolling a small suitcase behind him. Next to him was a woman who was not dressed for a snowstorm. She was holding a magazine over her head. They reached Ross’s car, and he opened the passenger door. The woman got in. Ross moved around to the trunk and put the suitcase in. Before closing the trunk, he removed his overcoat. Reaching into the trunk, he pulled out something that I couldn’t see. It went into the folds of his coat. Before he yanked open the driver’s door, he paused and looked around. His eyes moved right past where I was parked. I was too far away to get a true read of his expression. He got into the car, started it and backed up. This brought the car closer to mine. Just as the car shuddered into forward, the trunk rose slowly and the brake lights came on. Ross got back out and came around to shut the trunk, this time making certain it was secure. He looked around again. This time I could see the look on his face. Let’s just say this: I was glad I would be on the man’s tail.

43

THE CONDITIONS ON the Long Island Expressway degenerated the farther east Alan Ross traveled. By the time he was approaching Melville, they were near whiteout. Tractor trailers were pulled over and parked along the sides of the highway, as were dozens of passenger cars and SUVs. Every few miles, a vehicle had run off into the median strip and remained there, the taillights blinking an anemic pink. From the swirling white haze in Ross’s rearview mirror, the occasional snowplow materialized. Pellets of salt rattled against the side of his car as the plows overtook and passed him.

Ross was perspiring like a man in the desert. His head was aching from the strain of squinting into the white wall in front of him. What he wanted was silence, some time to think. But this wasn’t likely, not with the hyperactive actress seated next to him. You’d have thought the woman had invented Paris. She wouldn’t shut up about it. Ross couldn’t count how many times he had been to Paris. Dozens? By the time this ride was finished, Tracy Jacobs might well have managed to ruin the city for him forever.

Ross was maintaining an achingly slow speed. He was not going to run the risk of either being pulled over by the police or sliding off the road like the half-dozen or so cars he had already passed. If there was one thing to be said for doing all this in a snowstorm, it was that the snow rendered Ross’s car virtually invisible. That part’s good, he thought. In a way, you really couldn’t ask for better. Not only here on the damnable LIE, but later, once they’d arrived at their destination, invisibility would be a wonderful advantage. Ross smiled to himself. It spoke to his sense of perfection. All he wanted at this point, his single goal, was to make all his problems and headaches disappear. Like a polar bear in a snowstorm. It’s there and it’s not there all at the same time. Now you see it, now you don’t.

He glanced over at Tracy Jacobs. She was in the middle of telling him everything he didn’t need to hear about the Musée d’Orsay, but noticing him looking at her, she came up for air. Would wonders never cease?

“You look happy all of a sudden. What are you smiling about?”

“I love hearing your stories,” Ross said suavely. “It’s nice to see a girl who can get all excited like that. It’s so nice you’re not jaded.”

Tracy flashed her huge smile. “Do you know what I thought when I was looking at the Mona Lisa? I mean the Mona Lisa.”

“Tell me.”

“I was thinking, and I’m serious about this, I said to myself, ‘Alan Ross is the man responsible for this.’”

Ross demurred. “Don’t you mean Leonardo da Vinci?”

Tracy laughed. God, that laugh. Try as they might, the vocal coaches for Century City hadn’t made a whole lot of progress on that horrific laugh.

“Alan, you know what I mean. Not just Paris. The whole thing. Everything. It’s true. I owe you my entire life.”

Alan Ross turned his attention back to the slick roadway. Yes, you do, dear, he thought. That’s exactly right.

44

MEGAN GOT THE CALL from Fritz as she was clearing the snow off her windshield.

“They’re heading out onto the Island. I remember Robin telling me that Ross and his wife have a place out in the Hamptons somewhere. That’s my guess.”

“The Hamptons? In this weather?”

Megan looked up and saw Brian McKinney coming out of the precinct house. She turned her back on him. The interrogation of Bruce Spicer had been a fiasco. If Spicer bellowed “Whore!” at Megan once, he’d bellowed it a dozen times. McKinney and a few of the others had found the whole Bruce Spicer show vastly amusing, crowding around the one-way window outside the box to watch Spicer heap his verbal abuses on Megan. The interrogation had gone nowhere, except round and round. Megan knew she might have handled Spicer better, but her mind had been elsewhere.

Malone was asking her a question, but the connection was breaking up.

“Say it again, Fritz. I couldn’t hear you.”

“…get the address…Hamptons. That way…follow him.”

“What?”

“Ross’s address.”