Ted says, ‘I doubt it. Why would she do something like that?’ He thinks for a moment and says, ‘There are probably ways to break in and disable the alarm if you know how. John mightknow how or know the right people.’ He pauses. ‘He told me he learned a lot in prison– and he said it almost as a threat.’
‘Or it could have been Ramirez. He could have planted the cameras and sent the texts. He keeps acting like he knows something. What if it’s him? Oh, God. We’re going to be arrested!’
‘Jill, calm down,’ Ted says.
But she doesn’t. ‘We probably gave him the idea, when we reacted to the suggestion of cameras on the boat!’
‘If it was him, and he was going to arrest us, he would have done it by now,’ Ted tells her firmly. ‘I think this is about blackmail. And I think John Burnley is behind it.’
She looks back at him, trying to breathe. ‘Maybe Ramirez wants to blackmail us.’ Her voice rises. ‘He hates us, you can tell. He probably hates us because we’re wealthy and he isn’t.’
Ted runs a hand anxiously through his hair. ‘Maybe. I suppose it’s possible.’
A sudden thought occurs to her. ‘What if it’s Min?’
‘Min?’
‘She must know how much money you’re getting– and she was so weird to us yesterday, at the memorial. And she’s angry about the money you lost her.’
He shakes his head, looking at her. ‘I doubt it. I think it’s John Burnley.’
‘So what do we do now?’ She’s afraid; she wants to know who they’re dealing with. Before they discovered the cameras yesterday, they were going to change her phone number and hope their tormentor went away. But it’s different now. ‘What do we do about my phone?’ They can’t just shut off communications, Jill thinks, not with what this person knows about them.
‘I think we have to leave your phone as it is and wait for instructions,’ Ted says. ‘There must be a demand coming.’
‘So we just wait.’
He nods, lowers his voice. ‘We have to find out who’s behind it somehow.’
‘What if they want us to pay in Bitcoin or something? And we can never find out who it is?’ She doesn’t wait for him to answer. ‘And then it will never stop, will it? They’ll ask for more and more until we don’t have anything left! We’ll lose everything!’ She’s shouting at him now. ‘Oh god, why did we ever do this?’
He moves to take her in his arms, but she thrusts him away. She doesn’t want him right now. She’s beginning to realize that this is all his fault. If he weren’t such a fuckup financially, they never would have had to kill Greg in the first place. He’s made a murderer out of her. And if he’d been smart enough to check about cameras on the boat beforehand, Ramirez wouldn’t be onto them, wouldn’t have gone around sowing suspicion. She deeply regrets the bargain she’s made.
Ted feels the sting when his wife pushes him away; she has never done that before. For a moment, his eyes blur. He did this for her. Everything he does, he does for her. She is the love of his life, and now he fears that this will destroy them. He can’t let that happen. He has to make this right. He has to figure out who is behind this and get rid of them. She’s right– blackmailers never stop. So he will have to put a stop to it. He won’t involve her this time, he’ll do it himself.
This has all become god-awfully messy, but he’s not about to throw up his hands. That’s not who he is. Not any more. Heis someone who acts boldly, even ruthlessly, to solve problems; he has discovered that there is a streak of steel running through him after all.
His wife is angry; he just has to fix this. But right now, she’s unravelling in front of him. He thought she was tougher than this. But they are both still learning about each other. ‘I’m going out,’ he says.
‘Where?’
‘I’m going to talk to John.’ She looks back at him, frightened. ‘Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing,’ he says.
As he steps out of the house, he calls Burnley’s number. It’s on the card he’d given him when he visited Ted’s office, and somehow Ted had shoved it in his wallet. When he calls him, John will have his new cell number, but maybe that’s okay. If John is stupid enough to start sending texts again to this phone, Ted will know it’s him. He doesn’t think John is that stupid.
‘John Burnley,’ the familiar, confident voice comes down the line.
‘It’s Ted Westcott,’ he says. ‘Can we get together and talk?’
‘All right,’ John says after a pause. ‘Why don’t we meet at the pond in Central Park, where we spoke last time.’
‘I’ll be there in an hour,’ he says.
‘Fine.’
Ted disconnects and takes the subway. At the end of the ride, he climbs the steps up out of the station and soon enters the park. It’s a cold, grey day, quite different from the last time he met John here. There are fewer people around, and that’s just as well, Ted thinks. He makes his way slowly around the pond to the meeting spot. There are no children sailing their toy boats today. Fora moment he feels nostalgic for his childhood, when everything was simpler. When he’d always assumed he’d have all his needs met, without having to worry about it or work too hard. It hasn’t turned out that way. Ted doesn’t feel the buoyant satisfaction he felt the last time he was here either. He’d stood in this spot, tall, with his shoulders squared, and felt like he’d bested his older brother at last, come out on top, once and for all, when Burnley had shown up unexpectedly, like a bad smell. Like an omen.
If John Burnley is behind this, he will kill him.
