The Brutal Heart Read Online Free Page A

sight.”
    I walked over and pressed my forehead against the cool glass of the patio doors. The rain was falling hard now, and the trees at the bottom of our yard were thrashing in the wind. “Thirty-four,” I said. “Mieka’s age.”
    “Too young to die,” Zack said. “Also too young to have lived the life she lived.” He moved his chair to the place beside me, and for a moment, we were silent, looking out together at the night.
    Finally, I said. “How did they connect you with this?”
    “Through one of my more egregious fuck-ups. I thought I was handling the blackmail threat exactly right. I played hardball. I told Cristal I knew she’d been taping her clients, and I wasn’t going to deal until the camera was turned off. It was in a smoke detector on her bedroom ceiling, angled to pick up the bed and a special chair she reserved for what she called boutique requests . Of course, while she was boutiquing , her camera was able to get a nice clear shot of her client.”
    “Including you?” I said.
    Zack shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know. Logic would suggest that I’d be worth taping – I have money and people know my name – but she never approached me.”
    “But the police called you . They must have found something.”
    “They did indeed. They found the camera that I so shrewdly insisted she turn off. She must have forgotten to turn it back on.”
    “So as far as the police know, you were the last one to see her alive.”
    “Right,” Zack said, “but looking on the bright side, they didn’t hear me offer her $ 10,000 for the Osler DVDS.”
    “So they don’t know about Ned’s involvement with Cristal.”
    “No, and I’d like to keep it that way.”
    “Had she agreed to take the money?”
    “I thought she had. She brought out the DVDS . I put one in the machine to make certain I wasn’t paying $ 10,000 for Bambi . I watched long enough to see what I was buying, then I took out the envelope with the cash. That’s when it got weird.”
    “Weird how?”
    “Cristal wouldn’t take the money. She said she never dreamed that Ned would commit suicide. In her words, his death was just ‘tragic collateral damage.’ ”
    “That sounds as if she had a larger agenda.”
    Zack sighed. “No flies on you, my love. I should have picked up on that myself, but at that point, Cristal started to cry. She said she knew she’d made a mistake. She’d deleted the files from the camera, but she wanted me to know she was trying to rectify what she’d done. Giving me the DVDS was the first step.”
    “Why did she care about what you thought?”
    “She’d been at Ned’s funeral. I didn’t notice her, but there were hundreds of people there. I probably wouldn’t have recognized her anyway. She’s changed her hair – it’s lighter or something. I don’t know – she just looked different. Anyway, she told me she couldn’t stop thinking about that poem I used in the eulogy. Remember? It was the one Ned e-mailed to me after 9/11.”
    “ ‘September 1, 1939,’ ” I said. “Auden really made the rounds after the World Trade Center was attacked.”
    “I don’t exactly travel in literary circles, but I must have received six copies of that poem,” Zack said. “Anyway, Cristal latched on to what I said about how Ned never let the darkness engulf him and how he believed it was our duty as human beings to show ‘an affirming flame.’ Then she announced she was going to change.” Zack pounded his palm with his fist. “It really pissed me off.”
    “Why would that piss you off?”
    “Christ, Jo. If you knew how many times I’ve had to listen to people bleat on about how sorry they are for what they’ve done, and how they’re going to reform. Usually, I just watch the clock and let them pile on the billable hours, but Cristal had driven a decent man to suicide. It was a little late for tears.”
    “Did you tell her that?”
    “Nope. I didn’t say anything. I tried to leave, but Cristal