Money to Burn

“Why didn’t you go to the D.A.?”

“We would have. Except that…”

“He killed himself.”

“Yes,” said Eric. “No one saw it coming. But he took his own life.”

“McVee blames Ivy for that?”

Eric gave me a sobering look. “He sure as hell doesn’t blame himself.”

I was well aware that Marcus McVee had committed suicide. I’d seen the newspaper photographs of his Maserati parked on the waterfront in the Hamptons. I’d read the story of his body slumped over in the front seat, an empty liter of tequila on the floor and a half-empty bottle of Vicodin on the seat beside him. The autopsy confirmed that he’d washed down at least two dozen 500 milligram pills with the tequila. I was also aware-firsthand-of how the loss of his only son had changed the old man, turning Kyle McVee from simply aggressive to outright ruthless on Wall Street. But I’d had no idea how ruthless.

“So long as Ivy was alive,” said Eric, “no one she loved was safe. We spoke on the phone on your wedding day. She told me about the SUV that ran you off the road. And the hired thug who roughed you up at the FTAA riot in Miami.”

“I don’t understand. Usually when the mob or someone like that goes after your family, isn’t it because they want you to pay them money, or because they want you to forget that you were a witness to a crime? They want you to do something. What is it that McVee wanted Ivy to do?”

“Suffer,” said Eric. “McVee was in agony over the death of his son. He wanted Ivy to agonize with the fear of something terrible happening to someone she loved-namely, you or her mother. So his thugs played with you. Ran you off the road with an SUV. Roughed you up in Miami. She knew eventually McVee would get bored with the game and step things up.”

“Or maybe not,” I said. “The flaming envelope was more of the same, four years later.”

“But he will tire of it-this we knew four years ago. Then he would kill Ivy. Or maybe he would kill you or her mother, let Ivy live with the sense of loss that she had forced him to live with. The SUV ru

It was starting to make sense. But not entirely.

“You’re the guy who hired Ivy,” I said. “Why would McVee want her blood but not yours?”

“I guess he decided to wait for the right time and hit me where it really hurt. He brought down Saxton Silvers-assassinated it, in plain English, with his short selling.”

“But he hasn’t put you in the poorhouse. You still have WhiteSands. There has to be more to this.”

Our eyes locked-but not in an adversarial way. It was more like two men coming to an understanding that something needed to be said-probably should have been said a long time ago-and that things would never be the same between them once it was out there.

Eric crossed the dining room to the doorway and checked the hallway, making sure that Olivia was not on her way back from the restroom. Then he closed the door, and the expression on his face was about as serious as I’d ever seen.

“I never wanted to be the one to tell you this, Michael. But it’s time you knew the God’s honest truth about that woman you married.”

59

IVY HEARD IT ALL-EVERYTHING ERIC VOLKE TOLD MICHAEL IN THE seeming privacy of the WhiteSands’ corporate dining room.

Ian Burn heard it, too.

He dimmed the LCD on Ivy’s cell to conserve the battery. Her speakerphone function was still activated, however, relaying every word that was uttered within range of the cell that Ivy had given Michael outside the emergency room in North Bergen. Ivy hadn’t morphed into one of those smartphone-aholics who carried both a BlackBerry and an iPhone in her purse. It was simply a matter of survival. When you spent every day of your life on the run, the thought of being trapped in a church or other hiding place with a cell that said No service was enough to make you carry two devices-each with a different provider.

“Very impressive,” said Burn, admiring the technology. “A master smart phone programmed for remote activation of the speakerphone on a slave cell that goes everywhere Michael goes. And they have no idea that as long as the phone has a battery in it, we can hear every word they’re saying, even though it’s just sitting there. I have to confess,” said Burn, “your spyware is every bit as good as mine.”

The white commercial van was parked less than a mile from WhiteSands’ headquarters, and Ivy was alone with Burn in the rear cargo compartment.

“It’s really pretty basic,” said Ivy.

And it wasn’t just about eavesdropping. Ivy’s spyware also had GPS tracking capability, enabling the master to follow the slave wherever the slave took his cell. Tracking Michael all the way from North Bergen to Somerset County had been a snap. It was so reliable that Burn had even felt comfortable stopping on the way for food. He was finishing off the last of the hand-stretched naan, a round flatbread that was a staple in northern India, but in the United States was mainly for rich folks who shopped in trendy grocery stores in places like Somerset County.

“What are you going to do with me?” asked Ivy.

She was seated on the metal floor of the van, her back to the side panel. Her jaw felt slightly out of alignment from the left cross that Burn had delivered, and her ribs were still sore from the takedown to the pavement in the hospital parking lot. She worked at the plastic handcuffs that fastened her wrists behind her back, but there was no slack whatsoever.

“What do you think I’m going to do?” said Burn.

She knew his reputation, but she didn’t let her mind go there.

“Let’s put it this way,” he said in an icy tone. “You will wish you really had been lost at sea and eaten by sharks.”

Ivy was silent. There was nothing she could say. She should never have gone back toward the hospital in search of Michael. She should have kept ru

Suddenly, her mother’s voice was on the speaker. Olivia obviously had no idea that her words were being picked up by Michael’s cell and transmitted from the corporate dining room to Ivy’s phone a mile away.

“We’d better get going,” Ivy heard her mother say.

Burn also heard. “Let’s do what Mamma says,” he said to Ivy.

One last time, Burn checked the tension on the cuffs behind Ivy’s back. Satisfied, he moved to the van’s cockpit, placed Ivy’s phone on the dash, and climbed behind the wheel.

“We’ll see you all there,” he said as he turned the ignition.