Barnstable would never try to look down her dress again. Or question her about the incomplete DAX straddle, which had been more worrying, more of a problem. The pressure was off, all because of a freak sailing accident. Which brought to mind—this wasn’t the second death in her world lately, it was the third. There was the Kemper kid in New York, killed in a traffic accident that Rafe said her client Pleski was responsible for. Mister Pleski, another gem. Mister Pleski, whom she’d had drinks with a few nights ago, mainly to escape (frying pan to fire) an unwelcome conversation with Barnstable. Whose name, she now recalled, had come up in her buzzed cocktail conversation with Pleski. She’d mentioned how Barnstable had blocked the mining shares trade she had pitched to Pleski. How Barnstable had been an intrusive pain in the ass, even implied that he’d been asking questions about Pleski and the fatal Kevin Kemper accident. Which Barnstable had not been doing. That had been Rafe. Had she believed Rafe’s crazy assertion that Pleski was the kind of man who could arrange a fatal accident if it suited him? She didn’t. She hadn’t. But . . .

She sat at her desk and saw nothing in front of her, not the terminal, not her colleagues, not the infinite ticker that told her who was winning and who was losing. She saw none of it. Because Rafe had said Pleski killed people and now Barnstable was dead. And she had as good as told Pleski that Barnstable was suspicious of him. If she had said Rafe, not Barnstable, would Rafe be dead? Only if what Rafe had said was true. But that was something from a bad movie, not the real world.

But she had said Barnstable to Pleski. And Barnstable was dead.

Here

HERE

Helen Sykes wanted to hear all about Rafe’s discovery of Mayfield’s body. He was in her office again. The red balloons above the Eiffel Tower. Sykes at her desk. Frank leaning back in his chair against a side wall. The smell of bad snack room coffee and hot copying machines wafting in from the hallway. I really need to get out more, Rafe thought. Although he’d just been out and it hadn’t been pleasant. He’d never seen a dead body before. People in finance, as a rule, generally had their heart attacks when they were on vacation, not in the office. Lots of bodies got shipped home from St. Barts.

“So,” said Sykes, “what did you do then?”

“I called the police.”

“On your cell phone?”

“No. The phone on the desk.” He had stumbled through that call in his lousy French but had managed to get the point across, all the while staring at the body, at one point imagining that it moved. But it didn’t. Then looking away, at anything else, the jumble of papers on Mayfield’s desk.