CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

In the time it took me to utter those words to Ray Hobart, the pieces came together for me.

The murders in Los Angeles, fingers severed from the hands of the victims; the case being transferred to the Organized Crime Intelligence Division; the tangled ownership of the Mandalay Plaza Hotel and the maze of unidentifiable Chinese partners. Add to that the two arson fires at Lennox Biomedical plants and the kidnap and mutilation of J.R.’s son, Randall.

“Phillip, J.R.,” I said, looking at both men in turn. “You can no longer assume that this is anything but very, very real. Your battle plan just changed.”

J.R. nodded.

“Are you following me?” I asked, driving the point home to the senior Lennox, who hadn’t seemed to hear me. “These people are not fucking around.”

It would have taken a fool not to feel the power shift inside that room, and while Hobart might be an Olympic-class asshole, he was not an idiot. To save face, he knew he needed to reassert himself in the eyes of his employer.

“Sir,” he said to Lennox, “I’m going to send Ted down to hotel security, see if they’ve got anything we can use. Video. Anything at all. I’ll talk to the manager myself. Somebody must have seen something.”

“Fine, Ray,” Lennox answered, his voice empty, vacant. “See what you can find out.”

I waited until the door closed behind Lennox’s security team before I spoke again. J.R. stood at the window, drew back the curtain and looked down at the beach where his son should have been. His face was a pallid mask of revulsion and fear.

I took a seat across from Phillip Lennox and waited until he gathered himself enough to meet my gaze.

“Tell me about the Chinese, Mr. Lennox.”

A flash of something, then it was gone. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Mr. Lennox,” I said, “with all due respect, there’s no more time for horseshit.”

He took his seat in the big chair, gave me the corporate glare, the one that was supposed to stop me in my tracks. But I didn’t work for Phillip Lennox, didn’t give a rat’s ass for his money or his power or his politics.

“You know who did this,” I said. “You’ve known from the beginning.”

Thick gray brows knit together in a frown, eyes screwed tightly shut. Lennox pulled in a deep, jagged breath. The dam of control he had fought so hard to maintain was beginning to burst.

It started with his hands, fingers quivering until full-scale tremors traveled all the way up his arms. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, stared at his shoes and looked as though he were about to be sick. His mouth hung open, like a fish on a dry pier, attempting to catch his breath.

“Are you all right?” I said. It was beginning to look like he was having a heart attack.

He nodded, wrestling with something inside of himself.

I went to the bar for a glass of water, came back quickly and pressed it into his quaking hands. He drank it down in one long pull, wiped his lips with the back of his hand and placed the glass on the table beside him.

J.R. no longer could make eye contact with his father, just kept staring out the window onto the long ribbon of sand, at the tourists laid out on hotel towels watching outrigger canoes as they sliced through rounded turquoise waves.

“Tell me what’s happening here,” I said. “Now. Before this whole thing comes apart any worse than it already has.”

Lennox raised his head finally, his expression glazed, the look of a man unacquainted with the loss of control.

“It started with the hotel,” Lennox began.

“The Mandalay Plaza?”

He nodded, locked his eyes on mine again. “You know what OPM is?”

I didn’t answer.

“Other People’s Money,” he said. “It’s how rich people get richer. Hell, Travis, your father—his father before him—they knew about OPM. They built Van de Groot Capital with it.”

“Go on,” I said.

“It’s the American way, son. You leverage other people’s risk capital, you fight tooth and nail for the project’s success, and the profits belong to all of you. Everybody wins. That’s how it’s supposed to work.”

“What does that have to do with the Mandalay?”

He focused on a spot in the air behind me. “The Mandalay Plaza was going to be my Trump Tower, the very centerpiece of the business district in Los Angeles.”

“But?”

“But the investment capital didn’t all belong to me.”

He came out of his thousand-yard stare, dropped his eyes and trapped my gaze.

“I’m a board member of IBC, the International Business Circle. It’s where I first met your brother, Valden.”

“Go on.”

“He invited me to several meetings of his YPO group . . .” Lennox batted his hand in front of him, frustrated by his own digression. “Anyway, the IBC sponsored a trip to China, just a small group of us, twelve or fifteen is all. Ever since Tiananmen Square, everybody in the business world has known that China was on the verge of making some significant changes regarding its views on capitalism and international investment. So we went over to meet with some of the prime movers in Beijing and Shanghai, met some very interesting people, in fact, people who are very much in favor of opening up their country to free enterprise.”

His face took on the familiar zealous light I’d seen before, most recently when he had given the speech at the fundraiser at his home; it was a look you might have seen in the eyes of Samuel Adams talking revolution, or Billy Graham speaking about Jesus. The fevered glow of the true believer.

“Do you have any idea how big a market that would be?” Lennox said. “There are billions of potential consumers who have never before figured into US business models. The potential impact on our economy is almost beyond imagining.”

The room was diffused with light from the window where J.R. still stood. Dust motes drifted on the chilled air while I listened to Phillip Lennox describe his fever dream.

“We spent four days there,” Lennox went on. “We met with some of the most important men in the country, men who want to create a new China. Among them was a man named Xiang Ho, the head of a conglomerate of manufacturing, mining and shipping interests based in Hong Kong. After one of our conferences, Ho took me aside and expressed an interest in investment opportunities that might exist for him in the US. He was particularly interested in doing business with a global enterprise like Lennox.”

The sentence drifted into silence. I waited, but nothing came.

“Mr. Lennox?” I prompted.

It seemed as though I had lost him to another faraway thought.

“But that had not been my purpose in going to China,” Lennox resumed abruptly. “I wasn’t there looking for investments for Lennox Biomedical. I was there to identify partners for some of my outside, personal investments.”

“Like real estate.”

“Among other things, yes. Those nights in China ran late, and our hosts were always anxious to show off what passed as sophisticated nightlife in their cities.

“In the days that followed, I became friendly with Xiang Ho and his young lieutenant and translator, Mr. Soong. Since Soong was fluent in English, it was quite natural, really. By the fourth night, we ended up staying out very late, drinking and talking and developing what seemed to be a certain amount of trust, forming the basis of a business relationship. We each talked of things that interested us, and as it turned out, Xiang Ho and I shared an interest in collecting artifacts from around the world.”

Lennox stood, thrust his hands deep in his pockets and began to pace the length of the room.

“The next night, Soong took me aside and told me, with a wink, that he knew a man who was willing to part with a very precious religious artifact—my true weakness where collecting is concerned. In fact, Soong told me, this gentleman would be most honored to know that the object would be part of a prestigious Western collection such as mine. When I finally persuaded him to tell me what it was, Soong revealed that the relic was one of the true Buddha’s teeth.”

My mind traveled back to the lighted displays in Lennox’s study.

“At the time, I laughed at the very thought of it,” he said. “Which I’m sure was very rude. Nevertheless, I really thought Soong was having me on about it. But he was quite serious, and assured me that the tooth was authentic, though the provenance was somewhat irregular, to say the least. The item, he told me, had been the subject of a complicated transaction between a rebellious Tibetan monk and some corrupt Chinese military conscripts. Regardless, I registered polite interest, and changed the subject back to more mundane matters.”

Phillip Lennox plucked the remnants of his cigar from the ashtray and tucked it between his fingers, unlit.

“About three months later, I received a package from Mr. Soong, a gift from him and his boss, Xiang Ho.”

Lennox licked his lips, looked back to the floor as if that was where his shame lay.

“I’m no virgin where gifts and business and politics are concerned, so I understood what the message was. It was an overture that they wished to do business with me.

“It was out of the question to return the tooth, not only would it have been the apex of impropriety and disrespect, but a clear message to them that I had no interest in doing any further business with them at all, and would likely kill any possibility of investments from the other Chinese I’d met on that trip. Well, that was hardly what I wanted. After all, finding new capital partners was the purpose of the IBC excursion in the first place.”

“So you offered Xiang Ho and Soong the opportunity to invest in the Mandalay Plaza with you,” I said.

He nodded, his humiliation coming to full bloom.

I glanced over at J.R. If he was listening at all to his father’s conversation with me, he showed no sign of it.

“Out of gratitude for the gift, I offered them the chance to participate in the Mandalay Plaza investment, on terms that I considered to be very reasonable. A short time later, we formed a partnership to buy the land and fund the predevelopment costs of the project.

“At that time, I had borrowed a good deal of money—to carry the project—from a bank with which I do a bit of business. Mr. Ho’s investment capital paid off those loans and created a pool of additional operating cash that we would use in order to move the hotel forward. From there, we formed some additional partnerships, some corporations, all for the purpose of completing separate and distinct aspects of the project’s construction and for setting up the management company.”

That began to explain the complicated pyramid of the hotel’s ownership structure.

“Something obviously went wrong,” I said. “What was it?”

“At first there was nothing wrong. Then, out of the blue, I was visited by a man who claimed to be an attaché of the Chinese embassy. The man represented himself to be a senior officer of what amounts to be the Chinese version of the CIA.”

J.R. allowed the curtain to fall and the room dropped back into the gloom that had characterized it since we’d arrived. He drifted over to the sofa across from his father and took a seat beside me.

Lennox looked uneasily in his son’s direction, but there was no eye contact. The atmosphere was leaden with loathing, but something inside Phillip Lennox had changed. I wasn’t sure if I was watching a metamorphosis or a meltdown.

“I’m not a man who is easily intimidated,” Phillip Lennox went on. “Nor am I easily deceived. But suffice it to say that over the course of that meeting I was convinced by the man’s story, and his none-too-subtle intimations that my new partners were deeply involved in Chinese organized crime. He showed me a document. He convinced me that it would be in my best interest if I were as sympathetic as humanly possible to my new Chinese partners.”

“Xiang Ho and Soong,” I said.

“Yes.”

His voice had grown stronger, more impassioned, as if he were delivering a keynote address. Phillip Lennox was mercurial in the extreme, with a nearly pathological need to dominate. I have developed a sincere appreciation for the delineations between good and evil, truth and obfuscation. But it was the man’s complete absence of a moral compass that disturbed me more than anything else he was saying. It was a common personality flaw among sociopaths and recidivists.

He paused to light his cigar before he went on, his head momentarily lost inside a silver cloud of smoke.

“I didn’t hear another word from them for months,” he said. “And the project continued as smoothly as one could reasonably expect. That is to say, there was a hitch here or there, but overall, it was proceeding quite nicely. So nicely, in fact, that I had begun to believe that the whole episode with the embassy man had been a misunderstanding of some kind, or even that he was an imposter, or some kind of agent provocateur acting for someone else’s interests entirely.”

J.R. shifted in his seat and rested an arm along the back of the sofa. He studied his father as though he had never seen him before.

It was then that I recognized what was happening with Phillip Lennox. I’d been here before, in interrogation rooms. Once the floodgates came open, you did everything you could not to stanch the flow, and let it all come out. There was always need behind a confession; and this was proving to be nothing short of a confession.

“So I had one of my own security men check out the Chinese attaché. My man found nothing. Not a trace. After that, I thought it best to leave things alone. Months went by without any contact outside the normal course of the project, neither side asking, or even intimating, that anything out of the ordinary had transpired—”

The suite’s phone rang loudly, interrupting Lennox, and causing J.R. to start so badly he lapsed into a coughing fit.

Logic dictated that now that Randall’s finger had been delivered, this call would be from the kidnappers. As the phone rang a second time, I quickly moved to the bedroom extension and instructed Phillip to simultaneously pick up the living room extension as I counted backward from three. He began to protest, but I cut him off.

“We do not have time to fuck around. Do what I told you.”

Lennox stood, suddenly uncertain, as the phone rang again.

“Goddamn it,” I shouted. “Pick up when I get to ‘one.’ Do it!”

Time slowed to a crawl, and the phone rang again. He shook himself from whatever had gripped him, then moved to the phone beside the couch.

Both our hands hovered over the receivers as it rang a fifth time.

“Three . . . two . . . one,” I said, and we both picked up.