The Dead Key Part 38

Iris recoiled but was backed against the counter.

He kept talking. "I was once a lot like you. Stuck in a dead-end life, looking for something better. Looking for a way out. Well, you certainly found one, didn't you?"

She had to say something if only to make him stop touching her. "Ha . . . have you been following me?" she whispered, not daring to look in his eyes.

"I'm not the only one. You've managed to p.i.s.s off a lot of people, Iris. n.o.body wanted that dead b.a.s.t.a.r.d to ever see the light of day."

"You knew h-him?"

"You could say that, but the last time I saw Bill he didn't look so . . . chewed up." He grinned at her viciously, and her stomach lurched.

"What do you want?" she whimpered.

"What does any man want?" he demanded. "I'm guessing you haven't the first clue. You probably think it's money, right?"

She stared into the vault behind him, too scared to speak.

"Wrong, Iris! Wrong!" He slammed his hand on the counter and made the metal box jump.

Iris felt it like a slap.

"Money is just a means to an end. I want something far more valuable than money. Respect. I've always wanted respect. And after all these years, I'm finally taking it. I recommend you try it sometime. Getting laid off was no picnic, right?"

Iris shook her head, watching the gun.

"Well, here's your big chance to stick it to old Wheeler but good. Chuck'll just love it. Twenty years working across the street from his retirement fund, and then in the blink of an eye it's gone." He waved the gun to the side for emphasis, then swung it back into her face.

She held up her hands reflexively. She recognized him now. He was the creepy gray-haired guy who'd winked at her getting fired earlier that day. He'd stopped her in the hall a few weeks back when she was running late. Something about the odd look in his eye had made her uncomfortable. With the gun in his hand, it was suddenly clear. He was crazy.

"Who . . . who are you?"

"Me? Oh, I'm n.o.body now. Chief financial officer of some third-rate architectural firm. That's where they stuck me to keep me quiet. You don't even know my name." He sighed. "I used to be somebody. I was practically royalty in this pathetic town. Then it all came cras.h.i.+ng down. It all came cras.h.i.+ng down because of two little s.l.u.ts just like you sneaking around, stealing keys. We lost everything! My father was too busy s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g his brains out to keep his eyes on the prize. He trusted the family business to a b.u.mbling idiot like Bill Thompson. But not to me! Some two-bit waitress was good enough to work the vault, to handle millions of dollars, but not me!"

The smell of sour whiskey burned her nose as he yelled in her face. She grimaced.

He stopped and grinned. "What, have I offended you? You don't think you're a s.l.u.t? Ha! I've seen what you do with your little friend."

He'd seen her with Nick. His teeth glinted in the fluorescent light. They were coffee stained around the edges. Seeing her shudder seemed to please him.

"'Oh G.o.d, Nick! Oh, G.o.d! Oh G.o.d!'" he called out, mimicking her voice. "You know, you really should try to play a little hard to get, Iris."

Her whole body trembled as the blood drained down to her feet. The room began to sway, and she gripped the counter. "It was you. You were following me."

"Come on, Iris, certainly you of all people know how dull work can be." He winked at her. "Besides, little valedictorian, something about the pathetic, bored look in your eye every morning you scuttled in late for work told me you were just desperate enough to go poking around this dump. And I was right. Mr. Wheeler thought you'd just keep your head down and do what you were told, like a good little engineer. That would have been smarter, Iris, admit it."

Iris felt herself nod, while she tried to focus on anything but screaming. Maybe this man was the one who told everyone at the office about her sleeping around. Maybe Nick had nothing to do with it. Her mind scrambled for something to say.

"It was you in the vault that day. Why did you leave the keys?" she asked.

"Leave the keys? Do you really think I'm that stupid? Do you?" He pressed the barrel of the gun into her chest.

"No," she whimpered.

"You just got lucky. And now you probably think you're clever because you cracked the code, right? Don't think for a minute that I couldn't have figured it out. He couldn't have, but I could, d.a.m.n it."

His finger seemed to twitch on the trigger. She had to keep him talking. "He? Who? You . . . your father? Who was he?"

"Vice president of Who the f.u.c.k Cares? He's dead. They killed him." The man stopped and picked up the brown leather book Detective McDonnell had been holding. Iris's eyes followed the gun down and caught a glimpse of the blood pooled on the floor. She sucked in a sob and shut her eyes. G.o.d help me.

"You know, he thought he was so smart. King of the boardroom! Guess he didn't realize that when he lost the keys to all that money, his golfing buddies weren't going to take it so well." He pointed the gun toward the vault. "Get in there."

Iris obeyed and scrambled away from the blood. He followed her in.

"You know, they called it a suicide, but how many suicides go to the trouble of breaking all of their own fingers before blowing their brains out, I ask you? They needed a scapegoat, someone to feed to the feds . . . They froze our a.s.sets. They auctioned off our estate. They left me with nothing and stuck me in a two-bit firm under Wheeler's thumb. They all counted me out, the b.u.mbling son, but they had no idea who they were dealing with."

He was growing more and more agitated as he talked, and Iris inched her way to the back of the vault. He stepped even closer. "Every filthy dollar they stashed in this place, I heard about it. Bill couldn't keep track of the paperwork between banging secretaries. I read the files. I was getting the old man right where I wanted him, and then those two b.i.t.c.hes came along."

"Who?" Iris breathed.

"Shut up." He pointed the gun in her face and backed her against the far wall. "Nosy b.i.t.c.hes like you are always asking questions you shouldn't and taking things you shouldn't."

He slapped her hard across the face. The force knocked her into the side wall in a white flash of pain.

"You came along and found Bill's chewed-up corpse. That nearly ruined everything. The feds almost blew the doors off this place, but Dad's old friends weren't going to let that happen. As it turns out, you did me a favor, didn't you?"

He stormed out of the vault and back to the detective's still body. He rolled him over with his foot. The detective's eyes stared upward lifelessly. Iris sank to her knees with a sob. He was really dead. There was no saving her now. The loud clank of a gun, a flashlight, a pair of handcuffs, and a key being slapped onto the counter echoed down the metal vault where she was trapped.

"I'm finally going to make one of you c.u.n.ts useful." He threw the dead key at her head. It hit her in the neck and clinked to the ground. "Get to work."

CHAPTER 73.

For the next hour, the man barked box numbers from the little brown book that had been hidden in Box 547, and Iris opened doors at gunpoint. The first box she pulled out sent her cras.h.i.+ng to the ground with one hundred pounds on her chest. The gunman leapt into the vault and yanked it off of her. He threw back the lid and laughed softly. Four gleaming gold bricks lay inside it.

He picked one up and kissed it. "Here's to commodity trading, Dad."

Giddy, he carried it out and crossed the corridor to the other vault door. "Do you have any idea what a Good Delivery bar is worth these days?"

Iris stared dumbly as he pulled a huge metal cart over from across the hall. There were three large filing cabinets stacked on its flatbed. Run, a voice in her head screamed. But by the time she'd managed to get back to her feet, the cart was blocking the vault entrance.

"Every single one of these babies can fetch over a hundred seventeen thousand dollars if you can move them."

He motioned for her to bring the other bricks over. They each weighed over twenty pounds. She carried them one at a time and deposited them into a file drawer, not saying a word.

"I see you thinking over there, Iris. You want to know why they didn't just drill the boxes open years ago. Why did they let it sit through the gold boom of the '80s, right?" He pointed the gun at her. "Right?"

She stiffened and nodded obediently.

"Why don't piranhas just devour each other in a fish tank? Huh? They're cannibals too. The answer, you twit, is politics." He grinned, pleased with himself. "The records were scrambled. If any of the families touched a drill, the others would have eaten them alive. It was a twenty-year detente. They've been waiting for each other to die. I wish I could be there to see their faces when they realize that they've been had."

Her arms went slack as he talked. She only comprehended a fraction of what he said.

Then he pointed the gun at her again. "Box 357."

The stack of gold bricks grew four at a time as she opened the doors. He seemed to enjoy watching one hundred pounds of gold fall on her. After the third box nearly broke her foot, he was howling. Iris started yanking the boxes out and dodging them as they banged to the floor as loud as gunshots, making her flinch. A few boxes were filled with cash and jewels, but most were filled with the G.o.d-awful weight of gold. Her arms grew rubbery from lifting the bars up from their containers and walking them to her captor.

The man grabbed her field bag from the corner and dumped its contents out. Her tape measure and clipboard crashed to the marble, along with Beatrice's notes. He didn't give any of it a second glance, and ordered her to dump the cash and jewelry inside the bag.

The ninth box was empty except for another red votive candle. He motioned for her to hand it over. She cringed when his hand brushed hers.

"'Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,'" he read, and then smirked. "That's good advice for you, Iris. Now where were we . . . ? 885."

Iris lost track of how much money, how many diamonds, and how much gold went through her hands. Her eyes wandered down the endless row of doors. There was no way that they could open them all before someone found them there, but that wasn't the plan. The man called another number from the book. He was only checking boxes listed in the ledger.

To keep her mind from cracking, she did the numbers in her head. If each gold brick was worth $117,000, how many bricks would it take to make a million? She could barely keep track of the keys as the gun traced her steps, but she forced her brain to keep churning.

After opening two more boxes of gold brick, she'd figured it out. It would take about eight and a half bricks to make a million dollars. There were at least forty bricks stacked inside the filing cabinets already, but the detective had said over $50 million had gone missing. That was over four hundred bricks. It could be even more. She had no idea what the price of gold was back in the 1970s.

"How? How are you going to get these out of here?" she asked, rubbing her aching arms. The cart would weigh a ton.

"Always the engineer, huh, Iris? Don't worry, the truck won't be here for at least an hour. But we'd better get moving if we're going to get these files packed up." He grinned at her.

That was how he would escape detection, she realized. Hiding the gold in file cabinets and hauling them away in another black truck. He had ordered her to lock each box back up once it was emptied. No one would know they'd even been there.

When he called Box 256, the case clipped her shoulder as she yanked it to the ground. Iris fell to her shaking knees.

The man chuckled. "Get off your a.s.s and open it!"

Inside was another red candle, along with hundreds of keys. These were the missing keys, she realized, running her hands over them. They weren't lost. Someone had hid them, just as the detective said. A slip of paper fell from the bottom of the votive as she picked it up. It was another prayer.

The man tapped his gun against the wall of the vault until she looked up. "What does it say?"

"'Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,'" she whispered.

"Ha! I wouldn't count on it. Anything else in there?"

There were two complete sets of bank keys for the deposit boxes, along with rings and rings of others. Under them she found a yellowed piece of parchment. It was part of a birth certificate. It had been ripped in half. The other half lay facedown underneath. Iris's eyes locked on the name "Beatrice Ma-" typed at the top. Beatrice? She risked a second look and saw the birth date was June 12, 1962. It was issued by Cuyahoga County.

"What do you got?" he demanded.

"Nothing. Just some junk."

Beatrice. Seeing the name gave Iris a jolt of adrenaline. It was a message.

"Hey, you're not on break. Box 933!" he barked.

Iris pulled herself back to her feet, her mind racing. "The meek shall inherit the earth" had been scrawled in Beatrice's file. Beatrice must have put it there. She had left the red candle. Beatrice had been in the vault. It was her birth certificate in Box 256. She had locked away all those keys in the same box. She had left Key 547 in Suzanne's desk. Beatrice called Suzanne to tell her about the box. Beatrice wanted it to be found.

"Beatrice," she whispered.

"What did you say?" the man demanded.

"N-nothing. I was just . . . praying."

"This isn't f.u.c.king church! We have a job to do, Miss Latch! Now get back to work." He threw a red candle at her.

It hit her hard in the arm, but Iris hardly noticed. Beatrice was the reason the vault had stayed locked. She had hid the keys. Somehow a lowly secretary had beaten the most powerful men in town. Beatrice had brought down the bank.

Iris dumped the pieces of birth certificate and the keys into the trash can he'd thrown next to her, unable to tear her eyes from the yellow paper. Beatrice was born in 1962. The pet.i.te clothes in the lost suitcase flashed in her mind. Beatrice had only been sixteen when she disappeared. Or was killed.

Killed. The thought snapped Iris out of her trance. When the filing cabinets on the cart blocking the entrance were full of gold, she would be killed. Just like the detective. The thought hit her like a bullet.

"G.o.ddammit, Iris! We're on a schedule. Box 933."

No, thought Iris. She slid Box 256 back and closed its door. Her jaw tightened as she staggered to the next lock. She wouldn't just let it happen. She stole a glance at him as he impatiently tapped his foot. He might have killed Beatrice.

Then she saw it. A key was still stuck in a hole six doors down. Detective McDonnell had said the pins might be set to break if the wrong key was forced in. That must have happened when the man in the blue s.h.i.+rt lost his keys. It had been him, she realized, looking at the gunman. He was that stupid.

She clicked past the correct key for Box 933 and grabbed a different one. She slid it into the lock and heard something tiny snap. Then the cylinder wouldn't budge. She rattled and wrenched it until she was sure the key was bent and then banged on the door.

"d.a.m.n it!"

"What? What's wrong?"

"It's stuck!" She wiggled and bent it some more. She gave it a gentle tug and bit the inside of her lip as her pulse quickened.

"Unstick it!" he yelled.

"I can't!" she yelled back, and made a show of trying.

"G.o.ddammit! I do not have time for this s.h.i.+t!" He slammed the gun onto the counter and shoved the cart of gold out of the way. Iris shrank against the wall of the vault as he pushed past her and yanked at the small piece of metal. As he wrestled with the key ring, she silently slipped out of the vault.

Iris raced through the lower lobby toward the daylight streaming down from behind the elevators. The marble staircase emerged as she rounded the corner, and she scrambled up the steps two at a time to the main entrance. She could see the street through the gla.s.s down the hall and sprinted toward the light.

She only remembered the chains on the doors when it was too late. She crashed into them and pulled at the handles frantically, screaming and banging on the gla.s.s, hoping someone might hear. The midday sun glared brightly off cars as they pa.s.sed in front of the old bank. A man was strolling across Euclid Avenue with a coffee in his hand not forty feet away.

"Help me!" she shrieked, banging on the gla.s.s. The man didn't flinch.

"There's nowhere to go, Iris!" the gunman bellowed from the stairs.

She turned and ran through another set of doors.