The Body of David Hayes by Ridley Pearson Page A

something came over him, like. He pulls out his cell phone. No big deal, but something hammered him. He just stared at it, tried to pass it off, and keeled over. Dropped like a stone. Three of us here, not one of us got to him in time to catch him. Went down hard. Thunked his head pretty good.”
    “That’s the cell phone?” she asked, stepping so easily into the role of inquisitor, understanding the rush that Lou felt doing this. A blue Nokia sat on the scratched vinyl-topped table that security used for searches. Liz stepped up to the open briefcase. Papers. Pens. Several small computer disks. A laptop. A Palm Pilot device. A second cell phone: a small Motorola flip.
    Liz glanced back and forth between the two cell phones.
Two
, not one. Before she even placed the call to Lou, she knew this addition to be of significance to Tony’s heart attack. She knew it all had to do with David and his determinationto get at this money.
Tony LaRossa?
she thought in stunned disbelief.
    She caught Lou on his way back to work. He’d followed the Foreman crime scene with a meeting at the bank looking over safe-deposit logs. Speaking to Lou over the phone, she said, “We have to find Beth and the kids. Something terrible has happened.”

NINE
    LIZ CAME THROUGH THE LAROSSAS’ front door timidly,
    knowing she was on Lou’s turf, and feeling strange about it. Her job, her “assignment,” was to get Beth to talk. Lou had offered to drive Beth to the hospital, but all she would say was that Tony had told her to stay here.
    In all their years together, Liz and Lou had never crossed over like this—Lou investigating the bank; Liz walking into one of his crime scenes. That was how it felt to her: a crime scene; not Beth and Tony’s house, where she and Lou had attended a christening reception only a few months earlier. She thought of this living room the way it had been then: loud voices, laughter, beer and the smell of cigarettes on a passing suit. Kids running around in their Sunday best. Elton John on the stereo. Beth’s tight dresses that reminded Liz of Sophia Loren in an old film—much too low at the neck, tailored at the waist to cling to her swaying hips, too retro to qualify as retro, as if she shopped the Salvation Army. But Tony wasn’t much for fashion either, so that visiting them left Liz feeling as if she’d steppedinto an old black-and-white television show. The LaRossas had never left the late sixties.
    Beth and Lou occupied the room’s love seat, a plush white, fuzzy carpet spongy beneath Liz’s shoes. She saw several patrolmen gathered in the kitchen. The twins were not in sight, though a distant crying pulled Liz’s attention toward the second floor. “Who’s with the twins?” Liz asked.
    “They’re upstairs with Mary,” Beth said to Liz. Judging by Lou’s relieved expression, Liz had extricated the first words of significance.
    “They’re both okay?” Liz asked.
    “Fine,” Beth said. Dazed, she told Liz, “Tony said to stay right here.”
    Beth had been run over by the events. Her reddish, shoulder-length hair, usually worn with a severe flip and needing gobs of hairspray, hung lifeless and tangled. Her large brown eyes that typically animated her speech dimmed in a squinted, gloomy sadness. Her high cheekbones looked sunken, and her plucked eyebrows, always arched too high, lay flat behind a scowl. But nothing limited the beauty of her Italian skin. It possessed an almost artificial luminescence that knocked ten years off her thirty-eight.
    Liz couldn’t tell how long she’d been in her clothes—a white turtleneck and casual black pants with an elastic waist. It might have been all night. She had that weary look about her.
    On a nod from Lou, Liz said, “You understand that Tony collapsed, Beth? At the bank. We’d like to get you to the hospital.”
    “They said not to go anywhere. That they’d call when it was okay to leave.”
    “Who?” Boldt asked.
    “There were two of them,” Beth