8

Two hours later and still no word from the police. At least Jill and our kids were safe at school. I had to take a meeting.

This conference room was called the “living room” because of its faux antique wainscoting and green and rose floral couches. Vanessa Barksdale, my boss, sat opposite Jim Poderovsky at the pearl-inlaid table. She was barely five feet tall and, as usual, draped in pearls. Maybe it was Jim’s husky body, or the fake Louis XIV chair, but that morning she reminded me of a blonde child queen. A queen who was the best schmoozer I’d ever worked with. She remembered the names of every client, their children and their grandchildren. She knew what schools they attended, what they liked to do for entertainment, and who had decorated their houses. I’m sure she also knew about Jim’s father and his reputed mob connections. But Jim didn’t let his family tarnish him. He never even brought up their names. And I wasn’t about to hold his father against him.

I sat next to her and tried to smile away the night before. “So nice to see you again,” I said to Jim.

Jim’s big body seemed taut, even as he rested his loafers on the table’s paw legs. He wore a suit rather than his usual khakis and polo shirt. Even his smile looked strained. As he rambled on about his latest safari, Vanessa’s eyes widened and narrowed. Her face crinkled as her voice bubbled into a laugh. She was reeling him in. I wondered what the prize was.

She poured coffee from the silver tea set. “So how’s Cheryl?” she said.

Jim examined his coffee cup as if evaluating the bone china. He sipped and slowly set the cup in the saucer. “She’s in Hawaii with Megan.” Megan was his young daughter.

“I’m so jealous,” Vanessa said.

That was misdirection. Vanessa knew as well as I did that Jim’s pause before answering hinted at something. Four weeks earlier he’d brought his new estate planning attorney to the bank—without Cheryl, his wife of six years. She’d always joined the meetings. Then Jim wanted to sell some nicely performing apartment buildings, despite having no apparent need for cash. I thought about the Four Ds that made our chief credit officer twitch: drugs, dementia, death, and divorce.

Jim jerked forward and the wooden chair groaned. “You know, I think you shouldn’t need Cheryl to sign on the loans anymore. I mean, look at my track record.”

He was getting divorced. I was sure of it. Jim must have just found out that Cheryl wouldn’t guarantee any more of his business loans. The issue was how, after the carnage from the settlement, he’d repay our line of credit. Cheryl would hire a pit bull lawyer and Jim might no longer own any assets that he could sell to repay us. That’s why we had to keep her on the hook for the loan.

I should have spewed out some vague words about lending principles and fanatical banking regulators. But I was so frazzled I couldn’t muster the energy. I had to get back to my office to be available for the police.

Vanessa picked up a coaster. Apparently deep in thought, she fondled our gold-pillared emblem. “Well, maybe we could manage something.”

Heat crept up my cheeks. There were lots of financial numbers I could massage—debt ratios, historical income, recurring cash flow, even what we count as liquidity. But releasing a wife from a loan guarantee? I forced myself to take a deep breath. There are few things that will cut short a career faster than publicly contradicting your boss. Now was not the time to get fired.

Vanessa sculpted her hair, as if further pondering Jim’s request, and said, “William, why don’t you talk with Chad about this?”

Chad, whom we called Chad the Impaler, was our chief credit officer. I knew what he would say. Are you crazy? He’s getting a divorce.

I tried to be diplomatic. “Chad is going to have a few questions,” I said.

Her miniature hands set down the coaster. She gave me an icy blue stare: Don’t you dare screw this up.

Jim didn’t need his mob-boss father to push through his deals. He could set up his ambushes all by himself. The real reason for this meeting was to get Cheryl’s name off the guarantee. Jim had invited Vanessa, the relentless business developer, so I couldn’t say no. My hands squeezed the sides of the fake antique chair. I tried to cover up my annoyance with a smile. Unsuccessfully.

Vanessa rose. “We’ll find a way to get this done,” she said and looked at me.

Jim’s whole body seemed to sink into his grin. “Of course you will.”

Our chairman evaluated Vanessa based on how many new loans she put on the books—not their quality. If this one went bad, I’d take the fall, not her.

A thought flashed in my mind. I almost laughed. Just a few words, that was all I needed to end this farce. Guess who my dad is.

We dropped off Jim with Tom Mullen so Jim could pretend to be interested in Tom’s investment strategy. If another bank offered to remove Cheryl’s name from the guarantee, Jim would move those investments out the next day.

But I had more important things to worry me. I returned to my desk. Officer Mortimer of the San Diego Police had left a message that they couldn’t see me until tomorrow. “Now listen,” he’d said. “We’ll have a patrol car drive by your house a few times tonight. If you see anything that doesn’t look right, you call 911.”

I collapsed in my chair and grabbed my phone without any idea who to call. 911?

None of the Preying Hands’ victims ever managed to dial 911. They’d never seen him coming. He purchased the chloroform illegally years before and stored it in steel drums we thought were full of photography chemicals. When those women awakened, he told them what he was going to do. “Once she’s bound, I never lie to her,” he confided to the prison psychologists.

Despite his moniker, he didn’t like to use his own hands. A ligature offered more control. He gently wrapped something personal around their necks like a stocking or belt or bra—once, a taffeta dress. Eleven pounds of pressure on the carotid artery rendered a person unconscious in ten seconds. He was so precise that fractured hyoids or broken necks never disfigured his victims.

When Jeff Nelson, the journalist, interviewed him in prison, Harvey Dean Kogan said he loved the colors in their faces as they died: azure, light sky, cobalt blue, and even indigo. Capillaries burst in pinpoint splashes of red on their eyelids or cheeks. The jagged petechiae in their irises were like fireworks as their eyes faded and the last bit of breath sighed away.

But the Preying Hands’ real joy came after death. He lingered for up to five hours in the victim’s apartment or house, draining the body in a bathtub, measuring and sawing off appendages. He carefully cut so the ligature marks on their necks wouldn’t show. If the hem­orrhages had been massive, he covered them up with the victim’s own makeup. An hour or more could be spent just on lighting. He had to get just the right angles and intensity, sometimes using windows or shaded lamps or, once, covering a handheld flash with a white shirt to soften the intensity. Most of the time he’d already composed the scene in his mind and had picked out the props. But each element had to be arranged at just the right angle. He claimed to experience a kind of bliss while he created his shot. “All your senses jingle and jangle,” he said. Afterward he prolonged the ecstasy in the darkroom of his photo shed. “That’s when I truly possess her.”

The rest of the morning I stewed over the night before and searched the internet. Harvey Dean Kogan’s fans liked to brag. But there were scores of sites and thousands of acolytes. I got through a third of them and still found no mention of us. By lunchtime my stomach was so pent up that eating was impossible. I took a walk outside by the fake pond. I didn’t feel any better when I returned.

A message from Vanessa was waiting for me. She wanted a chat in her office—not a good omen. When I got there, she asked me to close the door. I sat in front of her desk. I felt like a kid in the principal’s office.

“What’s wrong with Poderovsky?” she said.

I was sick of tiptoeing around her. “He’s getting divorced.”

Her nostrils pinched. “You don’t know that. There’s absolutely no reason to even bring that up.”

“Come on, Vanessa. Chad will be all over this.”

Her small face sagged into a frown that combined disappointment and resolution. “Then you have to convince the Credit department that it’s not an issue. That’s your job, you know.”

The rumor was that the chairman had given Vanessa a year to boost loan growth. By the time this deal blew up, her fingerprints would have disappeared. “William brought in that dog,” she’d say. “Didn’t he know what kind of reputation that family has?”

Vanessa sighed and stared at the antique shelves that held books like A Winning Team and Where is Your Value?

“A divorce is the first thing Chad will suspect,” I said.

A tight white line encircled her mouth. The pearl bracelet rattled. “William, Charles only wants people who can make this bank grow.”

Vanessa liked to pretend that Charles was making the threats. Our chairman ran our bank according to two immutable formulas: Loan Growth and Return on Equity. Anyone who didn’t make both equations hum was shoved to the street.

“My numbers are above plan,” I said.

She shook her head sadly. “Our employees need to perform way beyond plan. Like Bob Morgan. That’s who your model should be.”

I was so tired the words came out before I could stop myself. “Bullshit Bob?”

She drew back and frowned at my indiscretion. “Charles is going to make him an SVP.”

Senior Vice President Bob. One of the unpleasant truths in banking is that expertise is cheap. Only people who make sales get promoted. And Bob could sell anything to anyone.

Vanessa leaned as far forward over the desk as her petite frame permitted. “I know you can do this. I tell Charles you’ve started executing all the right strategies.”

That was supposed to intimidate me: my boss having to defend me to the chairman. But after the night before, her threats no longer made me wince. “I appreciate you looking out for me,” I said.

Vanessa always offered a carrot after she pressured someone. Today she volunteered to transfer some of her clients to me. “Just get Poderovsky done,” she said.

I wasn’t immune to bribery—I needed the loan volume. And if Poderovsky’s loan went belly up because of the divorce? That was several paychecks and maybe a bonus into the future. I just needed time. Time to find this freak.

“My clients will be glad they finally have someone competent covering them,” she said.

Instead of her? I couldn’t even respond to that kind of false modesty.

“You always behave like the perfect banker, don’t you?” she added. “But toeing the line isn’t going to get you noticed here. You have to push the limits. I think you’re capable of much more.”

All CEOs squeezed their reports. But Vanessa was a master. Sometimes her words were as dense and multilayered as haiku. You’d leave her office feeling both supported and afraid. I sometimes wondered what she was like at home. She’d exiled her daughter to boarding school but her husband often showed up at the bank. Bernie was technically an accountant. At social events he stood silently beside her. It was only when he slipped over to the bar that I got a taste of his wit. “She’s given me an extra foot of leash tonight,” he once told me, his eyes expanding mischievously. “No choker if I’m good.”

Vanessa was staring at me. “Is there something going on in your life?”

How did she know? I shook my head too hard. “I just didn’t sleep well,” I said. At least that was true.

“I know you’ll be smart about this.” She reached for the phone and fiddled with some papers. I was dismissed. As I left her office, she yelled, “Harry. How are you?”

A year earlier, at my interview, Vanessa had nodded and exclaimed at each of my morsels of insight. At the time I was toiling seventy hours a week at a mega-bank and her words had resonated for days. “No bus lines in front of our tellers,” she’d said. “When clients come into our office, the first thing they get is a smile.” I soon discovered that smiles were a kind of language to Vanessa. They could radiate delight and laughter, or disapproval and menace. She’d gaze at clients as if they were the most interesting people in the world. But when an employee displeased her, her eyes hardened and her smile became as sharp as a knife.

I returned to my office and closed the door. I sat and let the exhaustion pour through me. A message blinked on my phone. Reluctantly I hit the replay button and braced for the electronically disguised voice. But the caller was Lawrence Massy, my old prospect that Bullshit Bob had been talking to. In his rich baritone, Lawrence said, “William, I’m so sorry. I thought you’d be at the meeting today.” He sighed. “Could you come out to the house tomorrow morning? I finally need to borrow some money. And William … please don’t bring Bob.”

Doctors didn’t have time for salesmen. Particularly Lawrence Massy. He wanted his banker to provide quick diagnoses and prescriptions, the same way he managed his patients. Maybe I didn’t need Poderovsky’s bad deal after all. No one was a more perfect banker for Massy than I was. I was whistling as I went through my inbox.

In the middle of the pile was a plain brown envelope with no return address. For several seconds, I didn’t touch it. Grabbing a Kleenex, I picked up the envelope and cut open the bottom edge. A photograph fell out.

I steeled myself for a picture of my family. But the photograph was a glossy black-and-white image of a can of Budweiser. This picture didn’t display any of the Preying Hands’ exquisite staging and lighting. Even the centered framing was amateurish. But I couldn’t take my eyes from the dish drainer next to the beer can. It looked like the one in our kitchen.

I grabbed my phone. Punched in the number for Jill. She was in the middle of parent-teacher conferences and her cell skipped to voicemail. “Don’t walk in the school parking lot by yourself,” I said. “Under any circumstances.”

I called the Haven, Polly’s restaurant. The hostess said Garth and Frieda were sitting at a table right in front of her. Polly was prepping in the kitchen.

My family was safe.