the piece of metal.
Ernestine’s voice came abruptly out of the darkness. ‘Tha’s enough. Leave her alone.’
‘Ernie, I’m bleedin’. I’m gonna fix her –’
‘Do what the fuck I tell you.’
There was a long silence. Tracy heard the two women moving back to their bunks, breathing hard. Tracy lay there, tensed, ready for their next move.
Ernestine Littlechap said, ‘You got guts, baby.’
Tracy was silent.
‘You didn’t sing to the warden.’ Ernestine laughed softly in the darkness. ‘If you had, you’d be dead meat.’
Tracy believed her.
‘Why di’n’ you let the warden move you to another cell?’
So she even knew about that. ‘I wanted to come back here.’
‘Yeah? What fo’?’ There was a puzzled note in Ernestine Littlechap’s voice.
This was the moment Tracy had been waiting for. ‘You’re going to help me escape.’
A matron came up to Tracy and announced, ‘You got a visitor, Whitney.’
Tracy looked at her in surprise. ‘A visitor?’ Who could it be? And suddenly she knew. Charles. He had come after all. But he was too late. He had not been there when she so desperately needed him. Well, I’ll never need him again. Or anyone else.
Tracy followed the matron down the corridor to the visitors’ room.
Tracy stepped inside.
A total stranger was seated at a small wooden table. He was one of the most unattractive men Tracy had ever seen. He was short, with a bloated, androgynous body, a long, pinched-in nose, and a small, bitter mouth. He had a high, bulging forehead and intense brown eyes, magnified by the thick lenses of his glasses.
He did not rise. ‘My name is Daniel Cooper. The warden gave me permission to speak to you.’
‘About what?’ Tracy asked suspiciously.
‘I’m an investigator for IIPA – the International Insurance Protection Association. One of our clients insured the Renoir that was stolen from Mr Joseph Romano.’
Tracy drew a deep breath. ‘I can’t help you. I didn’t steal it.’ She started for the door.
Cooper’s next words stopped her. ‘I know that.’
Tracy turned and looked at him, wary, every sense alert.
‘No one stole it. You were framed, Miss Whitney.’
Slowly, Tracy sank into a chair.
Daniel Cooper’s involvement with the case had begun three weeks earlier when he had been summoned to the office of his superior, J. J. Reynolds, at IIPA headquarters in Manhattan.
‘I’ve got an assignment for you, Dan,’ Reynolds said.
Daniel Cooper loathed being called Dan.
‘I’ll make this brief.’ Reynolds intended to make it brief because Cooper made him nervous. In truth, Cooper made everyone in the organization nervous. He was a strange man – weird, was how many described him. Daniel Cooper kept entirely to himself. No one knew where he lived, whether he was married or had children. He socialized with no one, and never attended office parties or office meetings. He was a loner, and the only reason Reynolds tolerated him was because the man was a goddamned genius. He was a bulldog, with a computer for a brain. Daniel Cooper was single-handedly responsible for recovering more stolen merchandise, and exposing more insurance frauds, than all the other investigators put together. Reynolds just wished he knew what the hell Cooper was all about. Merely sitting across from the man with those fanatical brown eyes staring at him made him uneasy. Reynolds said, ‘One of our client companies insured a painting for half a million dollars and –’
‘The Renoir. New Orleans. Joe Romano. A woman named Tracy Whitney was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years. The painting hasn’t been recovered.’
The son of a bitch! Reynolds thought. If it were anyone else, I’d think he was showing off. ‘That’s right,’ Reynolds acknowledged grudgingly. ‘The Whitney woman has stashed that painting away somewhere, and we want it back. Go to it.’
Cooper turned and left the office without a word. Watching him leave, J. J. Reynolds thought, not for the first time, Someday I’m going to find out what makes that bastard tick.
Cooper walked through the office, where fifty employees were working side by side, programming computers, typing reports, answering telephones. It was bedlam.
As Cooper passed a desk, a colleague said, ‘I hear you got the Romano assignment. Lucky you. New Orleans is –’
Cooper walked by without replying. Why couldn’t they leave him alone? That was all he asked of anybody, but they were always pestering him with their nosey overtures.
It had become a game in the office. They were determined to break through his mysterious reserve and find out who he really was.
‘What are you doing for dinner Friday night, Dan …?’
‘If you’re not married, Sarah and I know a wonderful girl, Dan …?’
Couldn’t they see he did not need any of them – didn’t want any of them?
‘Come on, it’s only for a drink …’
But Daniel Cooper knew what that could lead to. An innocent drink could lead to dinner, and a dinner could start friendships, and friendships could lead to confidences. Too dangerous.
Daniel Cooper lived in mortal terror that one day someone would learn about his past. Let the dead past bury its dead was a lie. The dead never stayed buried. Every two or three years one of the scandal sheets would dig up the old scandal, and Daniel Cooper would disappear for several days. Those were the only times he ever got drunk.
Daniel Cooper could have kept a psychiatrist busy full-time had he been able to expose his emotions, but he could never bring himself to speak of the past to anyone. The one piece of physical evidence that he retained from that terrible day long ago was a faded, yellowed newspaper clipping, safely locked away in his room, where no one could ever find it. He looked at it from time to time as a punishment, but every word in the article was emblazoned on his mind.
He showered or bathed at least three times a day, but never felt clean. He firmly believed in hell and hell’s fire, and he knew his only salvation on earth was expiation, atonement. He had tried to join the New York police force, but when he had failed the physical because he was four inches too short, he had become a private investigator. He thought of himself as a hunter, tracking down those who broke the law. He was the vengeance of God, the instrument that brought down God’s wrath on the heads of wrongdoers. It was the only way he could atone for the past, and prepare himself for eternity.
He wondered if there was time to take a shower before he caught his plane.
Daniel Cooper’s first stop was New Orleans. He spent five days in the city, and before he was through, he knew everything he needed to know about Joe Romano, Anthony Orsatti, Perry Pope and Judge Henry Lawrence. Cooper read the transcripts of Tracy Whitney’s court hearing and sentencing. He interviewed Lieutenant Miller and learned about the suicide of Tracy Whitney’s mother. He talked to Otto Schmidt and found out how Whitney’s company had been stripped. During all these meetings, Daniel Cooper made not one note, yet he could have recited every conversation verbatim. He was 99 percent sure that Tracy Whitney was an innocent victim, but to Daniel Cooper, those were unacceptable odds. He flew to Philadelphia and talked to Clarence Desmond,