52

As if it wasn’t bad enough to be starving half to death and facing the Chinese water torture tomorrow, the show’s producers added insult to injury by placing Finney on a curfew. He couldn’t leave his condo between midnight and 6:00 a.m. They had electronically wired every door and window to make sure he didn’t violate his new restrictions.

“Not even to go out on my patio for a smoke?” Finney asked.

“Not even.”

Because of the curfew, Finney called an end to the nightly card game at 11:00 p.m. The Swami protested loudly since he was down several hundred dollars. Though the ante was still just one buck, the betting had loosened up toward the end of the game. Horace, who had forgotten his sunblock earlier in the day and had a nasty sunburn on his round and balding head, lost nearly four hundred—a Paradise Island record. He didn’t want to quit early either. Gus didn’t say anything, which was par for the course. Since Finney broke even, he estimated that Gus came out about six hundred ahead.

Though no real money would change hands until the week was over, Horace looked pale under his sunburn when Finney announced his total—$817 in the hole.

“Maybe we should drop the ante a bit,” the Swami suggested. “Limit the bets.” Though it seemed like a nice gesture on the surface, Finney assumed that the Swami had made the suggestion because he’d been cheating all week and felt guilty about the $552 he had made.

“Nah,” Horace said, forcing a smile. “My luck’s changing tomorrow night. I can feel it.”

“No poker tomorrow night,” the Swami said. “Chinese water torture.”

“Oh yeah,” Horace replied. “Then Thursday—our last night here. We ought to double the stakes.”

The men put away the cards and rinsed out their glasses. Both Horace and Gus had quit bringing snacks once the contestants started fasting. Horace complained about it constantly, claiming that the lack of munchies affected his concentration.

“I wanted to quit early so I could take a short hike on the beach,” Finney said to Horace. “Big day tomorrow.”

Horace had finagled the system so he had been assigned nighttime camera duty for Finney. Gus had worked out the same assignment for the Swami, thus assuring that the foursome could be together for cards every night.

Horace picked up his camera and dutifully followed Finney down to the beach. Finney grabbed a seat in one of the loungers, and Horace sat down next to him, placing his large camera on a lounger on the other side. It was a gorgeous night, with a warm and salty ocean breeze blowing in their faces, the full moon and thousands of stars reflecting in the sea.

“Beautiful night,” Finney said.

“Yep.”

“Can’t believe we’ve only got a few more days here.”

“Time flies when you’re having fun,” Horace said.

After the two men sat in silence for a while, Horace burped, reminding Finney that he hadn’t eaten in three days. Finney’s stomach had now started cramping, and he felt tired all the time. At this moment he wished he could be in bed.

“I could use a brewski and a T-bone,” Horace said. He was probably drooling, though Finney couldn’t tell in the dark. “They haven’t been feeding us worth diddly-squat since you guys stopped eating.”

“Let’s talk about something else.”

“Okay,” Horace said. Another burp. “Pizza,” he said instinctively as he tasted his own burp. Then he added, “How’s Swami doing it? It’s like he knows every card in my hand.”

The two men discussed the Swami’s probable cheating techniques as they surveyed the night sky. Finney thought about the long day tomorrow, checked his watch, and decided it was time. “Think I’ll wade out in the ocean a little,” he said.

“Suit yourself.”

Finney didn’t move for a few seconds and then turned to Horace. “Do you have access to cell phones or e-mail or even snail mail?”

Horace leaned up in his chair and looked at Finney. The pudgy little cameraman motioned toward the small of his back.

“I turned it off,” Finney said. “That’s why I made that remark about going into the ocean—so whoever’s monitoring the mike wouldn’t get suspicious.”

“I’m not sure anybody monitors it at night anyway,” Horace admitted. He leaned back in his chair again. “And the answer is no. I don’t have access to e-mail or cell phones or snail mail. The producers have cell phones and e-mail that work through that satellite uplink somehow. But they’re paranoid about the crew leaking the results. In fact, the network purposely scheduled us to shoot another two-week show on some other remote island as soon as this one is over. We don’t get back to the mainland until the final show airs.”

Finney considered this complication for a moment. Oh, well, he knew things couldn’t be that easy. Even if he could trust Horace, there was no secure way to communicate with the outside world. It’s why he had already worked through plan B. “What do you do with the raw film you shoot?” Finney asked.

Horace hesitated, and Finney could sense the little man trying to sort through his loyalties. “Uh . . . we make a first-edit pass ourselves and send any potentially good footage on to the team in the edit suite. They put the show together here on the island and then send it back to New York by satellite.”

“Have you got a lot of footage on the tape that’s in your camera right now?” Finney asked.

Horace glanced at Finney and stared for a moment, then turned back toward the night sky, his hands locked behind his head again. “Yeah. The one in there is almost full. But I’ve got another in my case. Why?”

“Just wondering,” Finney said. He closed his eyes and said a prayer. This had better work. “You a religious man?” he asked softly.

“I’ve been known to say a few prayers,” Horace admitted. “I’m pulling for you, Judge, if that’s what you want to know.”

Not exactly, Finney thought, but close enough. He leaned forward in his chair and turned toward Horace. “If I asked you to put a new tape in that camera and record something as a personal favor to me, would you do it?”

Horace furrowed his brow. “Something like what?”

“What if I just asked you to trust me?” Finney replied, his voice so low it barely carried above the sounds of the waves. “What if I said that the reason would become clear in a few minutes?”

Horace shrugged. He reached over and pulled a new tape out of his camera case. “I was thinking about changing tapes anyway,” he said.

Finney stood and walked ankle deep into the water, then turned and faced Horace. “Can you tape this?” he asked.

Still sitting in the lounger, Horace turned on his camera and blinded Finney with the bright light. “Okay, Hamlet. Just keep it PG.” The red recording light popped on.

“My name is Oliver Gradison Finney, and I swear and affirm that the testimony I’m about to give is all true under penalties of perjury.” He looked directly into the camera, knowing that Horace was probably wondering what in the world was going on. He’d find out soon enough.

“I’m about to state certain facts based on my own personal knowledge—things I have seen and heard. These facts should be enough to establish probable cause for conspiracy to commit murder. If you’re watching this tape, it most likely means that I am no longer around to testify and the conspiracy has therefore succeeded.” As Finney spoke, he watched Horace stand with the camera and move a few steps closer.

For the next several minutes, Finney recounted the facts that led to his suspicions about a murder conspiracy. He started with the details of his own cross-examination and the stunning revelation that one of the speedy-trial defendants had killed an innocent young store clerk earlier this year. That revelation had been haunting him for the past week, he admitted. He could think of little else.

Then he detailed each of his Hobie Cat conversations with Dr. Kline, recounting, as precisely as possible, her alleged conversations with Bryce McCormack. He told about the staged escape attempt on the kayak and the information discovered by Kareem on Cameron Murphy’s computer. He also relayed the background information that Hadji had pulled up on the various persons of interest. He detailed the conversations from the times when the contestants met together while pretending they were snorkeling. He even described, as best he could remember it, the looks on the faces of the other contestants when Kareem dropped his bombshell. Finney intentionally omitted any references to the secret messages he had been exchanging with Nikki.

Finney paused and took a step closer to the camera. “I hope I’m wrong about all this,” he said. “I hope this is just a very elaborate and callous ploy designed to get the contestants off focus. If so, it has worked.

“However, based on my years of analyzing and deciding conspiracies in real-life cases, this one appears authentic.” Finney swallowed and coughed to the side, then turned back to the camera. “This tape should be enough to establish probable cause for a warrant to search every square inch of Paradise Island, including all e-mails sent and received from here. I have a theory about who is behind the conspiracy but will limit this taping to the facts, rather than confuse the matter with my opinions. Motives for the conspiracy will undoubtedly be revealed if you conduct an exhaustive background search on each of the contestants as well as Cameron Murphy, Bryce McCormack, and Howard Javitts. You should pay particular attention to the religious backgrounds of those persons as well as any possible links between them and the defendants I had to release under the speedy-trial statute several years ago.

“If you’re watching this tape, it probably means you’re investigating my murder,” Finney said, smiling wryly. “So good luck.”

Horace shut off the camera and blew out a breath. “Are you serious?”

Finney just nodded.

“Unbelievable,” Horace muttered to himself. And to Finney he added, “What do we do now?”

“Let me have the tape,” Finney said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper. It contained Nikki’s e-mail and a coded letter telling her about the location of the tape. “Send this message to the e-mail address on this sheet as soon as you get off this island. Don’t try to contact this person from here, okay?”

Finney had thought long and hard about the best way to proceed. If he was the target of a vendetta killing, he didn’t want to alert the conspirators to Nikki’s involvement and force the killer to take her out as well. It seemed that every direct communication from the island was being monitored. The best he could do would be to alert Nikki to the location of the tape as soon as Horace had a chance to send this e-mail from someplace other than the island and, in the meantime, hope that Wellington had deciphered the last message.

The e-mail and tape would be necessary only in a worst-case scenario. Finney would be dead. But like Poe, perhaps he could speak from the grave.

“Send the e-mail message exactly as I have it on that page, Horace. It won’t make sense to you, but this person will figure it out.”

Horace wrinkled his face into a mask of concern. “You sure we shouldn’t just call the cops?”

“How?” Finney asked.

“Maybe I could steal somebody’s cell phone,” Horace said.

It was tempting, but Finney knew his bumbling little friend would get caught red-handed. Besides, it wasn’t necessary. “The Feds are already working on it,” Finney said.

Though he was beyond exhaustion when he returned to his condo, Finney went straight to his computer and accessed Westlaw. Because of a long afternoon court session that bled into the evening hours, a follow-up visit by the Swami, and the nightly card game, this was the first time Finney had been alone in his condo for any length of time since he sent his message to Nikki and Wellington that morning.

He didn’t want to enter new searches and run the risk of confusing Wellington, but he had to know if Wellington had deciphered the prior message. His heart raced when he pulled up the search histories, as if checking his own previous research, and noticed some new searches. Finney was confident that whoever was monitoring his computer in the control room at this hour of the night would have no idea that these searches hadn’t been entered by Finney himself.

It appeared that Wellington had used the Poe cipher, continuing the pattern of responding with the same cipher Finney had used in the original message. Finney quickly wrote down the capital letters along with a few bogus notes. He logged off the computer, and took his notes and Cross Examination book into the bathroom stall so he could decipher the message outside the presence of the cameras.

Obviously, Wellington had not yet deciphered Finney’s latest message, or he would have used the code Finney had used earlier that day. The content of Wellington’s message confirmed this. He told Finney about Murphy’s legalistic Christian father and the location of Paradise Island as determined by Preston Randolph but made no mention of Finney’s last message. Finney finished decoding the message, brushed his teeth, and returned to his bedroom. He took off his shirt and lay down on his bed to consider this new information and his next move.

He stared at the ceiling for a while, then closed his eyes to concentrate on the puzzle set before him, including the possible wording for the search requests he would use in his next message. He thought about sending that message right now but realized how suspicious that would look—logging back on to Westlaw a second time this late at night, even though tomorrow’s activities didn’t really require any research. Plus, another message now might confuse and distract Wellington. No, he would stick with the original plan and give Wellington until tomorrow morning to decipher the last message. Patience. Nothing would change between now and then.

That settled, Finney began to relax, his thoughts jumbling together until he entered that land where reality and illusion merge, engulfing Finney in a fitful dream of Chinese water torture and a hellfire preacher who resembled Charles Darwin.

Before long, Finney was snoring.