The Key

The Key

Jennifer Sturman

A RACHEL BENJAMIN MYSTERY

www.millsandboon.co.uk

This book is dedicated to Anne Coolidge Taylor

Thanks to Laura Langlie, Selina McLemore, Margaret Marbury and the team at Red Dress Ink for their help and advice, and to my family and friends for their encouragement and support.

Contents

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Chapter eleven

Chapter twelve

Chapter thirteen

Chapter fourteen

Chapter fifteen

Chapter sixteen

Chapter seventeen

Chapter eighteen

Chapter nineteen

Chapter twenty

Chapter twenty-one

Chapter twenty-two

Chapter twenty-three

Chapter twenty-four

Chapter twenty-five

Chapter twenty-six

Chapter twenty-seven

Chapter twenty-eight

Chapter twenty-nine

Chapter thirty

Chapter thirty-one

Chapter thirty-two

Chapter thirty-three

Chapter thirty-four

Chapter thirty-five

Chapter thirty-six

Chapter thirty-seven

chapter one

I was having my favorite type of dream, a flying dream, when the phone rang.

I opened one eye, testing to see if this was part of the dream. But in my dream the skies were blue and lit by golden sunlight. In my bedroom, it was dark, and freezing, since my new roommate liked to sleep with the windows wide open, even in March and even in Manhattan. And the phone was still ringing.

Peter mumbled something unintelligible and pulled the duvet over his head. I thought about doing the same, but surely nobody would call in the middle of the night unless it was important. I reached out for the phone.

“’lo?”

“Rachel. Glenn Gallagher here.”

This had to be a joke. “What time is it?”

“Almost six. Listen, I need you in the office. We don’t have much time to get ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“I’ll tell you when you get in. See you in an hour.”

“But it’s Satur—” I began to say before I realized I was talking to a dial tone.

I was still half-asleep, so my reaction was somewhat delayed. It was nearly five seconds before I’d collected myself sufficiently to say the only appropriate thing that could be said in such a situation.

“You asshole!”

Peter gasped and shot into a sitting position. I’d spoken more loudly than I’d intended. “And a good morning to you, too.” Even in the dark, I could make out the silhouette of his sandy hair.

“You look like Alfalfa.”

“Excuse me?”

“From The Little Rascals. You know, the one with the piece of hair that stuck straight up. He sang.”

“‘I’m in the Mood for Love.’”

“Uh-huh. He had a crush on Darla.”

“And that makes me an asshole?”

“No. Who said you were an asshole?”

“You did. Just now.”

“Oh. I wasn’t talking to you.”

“Good to know, I guess.” He settled back into the pillows and reached for me. “So who were you talking to?”

I snuggled into his embrace. Despite the Arctic chill to the room, his body radiated heat. “Glenn Gallagher. But he didn’t hear me call him an asshole. He’d already hung up.”

“Ah.”

“Yes. Ah.”

“Who’s Glenn Gallagher?”

“The new guy Stan Winslow brought in.”

“And why was he calling us in the middle of the night?” Even as I answered Peter’s question I was marveling at the unfamiliar use of “us.” I’d lived alone from the day I graduated college until the previous week, and I still wasn’t accustomed to the first person plural being applied in reference to my household. Our household.

“He said he needs me in the office. In an hour. Actually, more like fifty-five minutes at this point.”

“Do you think he knows it’s Saturday?”

“Probably.”

“And do you think he knows we were going to sleep in? And have a nice leisurely brunch and read The New York Times? And then figure out where I can put all my stuff?” Peter’s worldly belongings had arrived from San Francisco a few days ago, and stacks of unopened cardboard cartons now occupied every available square foot of the apartment.

“I doubt he gave it that much thought.”

“Why do you do this again?”

I sighed and detached myself from Peter’s arms. The rug was cold beneath my bare feet. “Because this is how you make partner at an investment bank.”

“By letting assholes order you out of bed in the wee hours on weekends?”

“If I keep it up, one day I’ll get to order other people out of bed in the wee hours on weekends.”

“Something to look forward to.”

“Go back to sleep. I’ll call you later, when I know what this is all about. Maybe I can rescue at least part of our day together.”

But I wasn’t too confident about that.

By Monday morning, the only thing I was confident about was that I wanted Glenn Gallagher dead.

My brain was fried and my thoughts scattered from too much caffeine and not enough sleep, but I did know with absolute clarity that I despised Glenn Gallagher and would be delighted to see him die a slow and painful death.

My firm, Winslow, Brown, had lured Gallagher from a competing bank six months ago, bringing him in as a senior partner and lavishing him with an enormous corner office and matching expense account. He’d been putting together leveraged buyouts for close to thirty years, and while LBOs were no longer as fashionable as they’d been in the junk-bond fueled eighties, Gallagher seemed to be doing just fine, judging by the addresses of his homes on Fifth Avenue and in Bridgehampton.

Regardless of his impressive real estate holdings, it hadn’t taken long for him to become the most hated man at Winslow, Brown—no easy feat in a place where there were a lot of hated men and even a few hated women. By the end of his first week he’d terrorized enough junior bankers to earn some interesting nicknames, including Adolf and Saddam.

Gallagher had learned late on Friday that Thunderbolt Industries, a Pittsburgh-based defense contractor, had chosen Winslow, Brown as its advisor on a management buyout. He hadn’t wasted any time scheduling a meeting with Thunderbolt’s CEO for Monday morning, which left just the weekend to get ready. Meanwhile, I wasn’t sure how my name had ended up at the top of the staffing list, but I’d lost this particular game of Russian Roulette without even realizing I was playing. I’d spent most of the past forty-eight hours in the office with Jake Channing and Mark Anders, the other unfortunates who’d been shanghaied into working on the deal.

The “team” had gathered in Gallagher’s office for a final prep session. He had called another 7:00 a.m. meeting but hadn’t sauntered in until half past, and he was now attending to a few personal matters before we began. First we were treated to a conversation, on speakerphone, between Gallagher and his lawyer regarding his ex-wife’s complaints that he was behind in child support. Gallagher earned more in a year than most people earned in a lifetime, and the fees he paid his lawyer probably far exceeded the sums he coughed up for the basic care and feeding of his daughter, but he apparently was not the sort to open his checkbook on behalf of others without the threat of legal action.

The next call was to a tailor to complain about the imperfect fit of a custom-made suit, which seemed futile, at best. Gallagher could spend every penny he made on his clothes, and he still wouldn’t be much to look at. He had the physique of a scarecrow, with stooping shoulders and sallow skin. What hair he had was a mousy shade, and the cut did nothing to disguise the way his ears stuck out.

I stole a glance at Jake, who rolled his eyes in shared exasperation. Like me, he was a vice president, although slightly more senior, and while he’d transferred only recently from the Chicago office, we’d quickly become friends. But I still hadn’t figured out how he always managed to look as if he’d just come from a GQ photo shoot. Today was no exception—his blue eyes were bright and every blond hair was in place—nobody ever would have guessed that he was running on only a few hours of sleep.

Mark, on the other hand, took nondescript to a new level: brown-haired, brown-eyed, neither short nor tall, and in no danger of being mistaken for a male model. Still, he seemed like a decent guy, unassuming and mild-mannered, and as the junior-most person on the team he’d more than pulled his weight over the hellish weekend.

Gallagher reached for one of the pencils he kept in a silver mug on his desk and rammed it into an electric pencil sharpener. He sucked on the newly sharpened point as his tailor stammered a response. Gallagher let him get a few words out before he snatched up the receiver, uttered an impressive string of expletives, and slammed the phone down.

“Where is it?” he barked.

Jake handed him a neatly bound sheaf of papers.

“This had better be an improvement over the crap you faxed me last night.”

“We’ve made a lot of progress since then,” Jake assured him. He’d worked with Gallagher before and was one of the few people around who seemed unfazed by his complete lack of interpersonal skills. I, on the other hand, was gripping my chair’s armrests so tightly my knuckles were white. In an industry notorious for badly behaved people, Gallagher was in a class by himself.

He flipped through the pages, giving an occasional grunt. The presentation was flawless—we’d double-and triple-checked every detail—but he almost seemed disappointed when he didn’t find even a single typo.

“I guess it will do,” he said grudgingly. “Now, here’s the drill. Nicholas Perry, Thunderbolt’s CEO, will be here at ten. I do the talking. You guys keep your mouths shut unless I ask you a direct question. And you’d better know every number, every fact in here, backward and forward. There’s big money riding on this. Got it?”

“Got it,” I said. “But I was wondering about something.”

Gallagher narrowed his eyes in an expression that made him look even more like a ferret. “Wondering about what?”

“Well, Thunderbolt—” I winced every time I said the word—what sort of phallo-centric moron would name a company Thunderbolt? “—just doesn’t seem like an obvious candidate for a buyout. Its revenues have been declining, and the union’s making trouble so its labor costs are likely to increase, and—”

“Your point?” asked Gallagher. “Get to the point already.”

My grip on the armrests tightened yet further. “The point is that a buyout will add a lot more debt to Thunderbolt’s balance sheet. The company’s interest payments will skyrocket, and I don’t see how it will cover them.”

An LBO is sort of like buying an apartment by making the smallest of down payments and taking out a huge mortgage, all based on the assumption that you can generate enough money renting out the apartment to cover the mortgage payments. In this case, it was unclear that you could count on the tenant paying his rent on time. Or that you’d even be able to find a tenant in the first place.

Gallagher gestured impatiently toward the dozens of Lucite deal mementos lining his credenza. “See those? Each one represents a successfully executed LBO.”

Successfully executed, maybe, but more than a couple of the Lucites bore the names of companies that no longer existed, victims of a crushing debt load.

“I’ve been in this business a long time,” he said. “I know what I’m doing. So, why don’t you do your job, and I’ll do mine?”

“I was just—”

“Enough already! Nick Perry and I go way back—I’ve known him since Princeton. This deal is ours, and I’m not going to let anything screw that up. We do the work, we collect our fees, and everybody goes home happy. Can you get that through your pretty little head?”

Unbelievable. He’d actually said, “pretty little head.”

Pick your battles. That was what my mother always told me. Good advice, certainly, but not necessarily easy to follow. I opened my mouth to speak again but he cut me off.

“Dahlia!”

Dahlia Crenshaw, Gallagher’s secretary, hurried in. “Yes, Mr. G.?”

“I need some goddamn coffee in here. Pronto.”

Dahlia did not point out that technically her workday wouldn’t begin for another hour. Nor did she point out that getting coffee was not in her job description, however politely she was asked to fetch it. Instead, she smiled sweetly. “Sure thing, Mr. G.”

Jake and I exchanged another look. Gallagher had brought Dahlia with him from his previous firm, and the office gossips were convinced that, in the tradition of bosses and secretaries throughout time, the two were having an affair. That Dahlia bore more than a slight resemblance to Jessica Simpson only helped fuel the rumors. And putting up with Gallagher, day in and day out, was just too much to ask without some fringe benefits. Not that it was clear how an illicit relationship with Gallagher would be a fringe benefit.

“We’re done here,” he announced, dismissing us with a wave of his hand. “Meet me in the conference room at ten with copies.”

I was following Jake and Mark out when I heard his voice behind me.

“Rachel, not so fast.” I turned, and Jake turned with me. “Just Rachel,” said Gallagher. He motioned for Jake to leave and shut the door, which he did, but not before shooting a commiserating glance my way.

“Courage,” he said under his breath.

Gallagher put his feet, shod in well-shined Gucci loafers, on his desk. “We need to have a little talk,” he said, rolling a pencil between his palms.

“All right,” I said in an even voice, admiring my own self control. It was probably a good thing that I was so tired; if I had more energy, I would still be too angry to speak, given his cavalier dismissal of my concerns about the deal, not to mention the “pretty little head” comment and everything that had come before it.

“This is a warning. I don’t want to hear any more crap from you. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Because if you make trouble on this, I’ll be happy to find another VP to work on the deal. I wasn’t exactly thrilled to have you on the team in the first place.” “Why’s that?” I asked. This time it was a struggle to maintain my even tone. I was one of the hardest working bankers in the department, and the other partners thought highly of me.

“I demand a lot from my teams. Girls like you—they’ve got other things going on. Work doesn’t come first for them.” The only thing missing was a lascivious up-and-down once-over, but he’d gotten that out of the way on Saturday, along with a thinly veiled and equally lascivious proposition.

I felt my shoulders stiffen. I pulled myself up to my full height, painfully conscious that this was only five feet six inches even with the aid of high-heeled pumps, and bit back a number of retorts that would put this pathetic, rodentlike excuse for a human being in his place.

Bonus, I reminded myself. Partnership.

“I don’t think you’ll have a problem with either the quality or the quantity of my work,” I said.

“As long as we understand each other.”

“We do. We definitely do.”

chapter two

T he one advantage to being among the few female bankers in the department was that I could always retreat to the ladies’ room when upset—or, in this case, enraged. It was a relatively safe place to get my emotions in check; the only other people I was likely to encounter were the administrative assistants on the floor. They were a sympathetic group, but it was still a relief to find I had the room to myself.

I ran shaking hands under cold water from the tap and bent forward to splash some onto my flaming cheeks. No matter how level I’d managed to keep my voice, my face always betrayed me. I didn’t need to look in the mirror to know that two spots of crimson were staining my usual late-winter pallor. I averted my gaze—I didn’t want to see my reflection; it would only drive home the overwhelming feeling that I was trapped, running toward a goal that proved ever more elusive. How many times had I stood before this same sink, trying to calm myself after a disappointment or confrontation?

Get a grip, I told myself. Don’t let him get to you.

But how dare he question my abilities? Much less my commitment? I’d been at it for eighty hours a week for years, but that weasel assumed, just because I was female, that I was some kind of dilettante, that I’d wandered into Winslow, Brown by accident and was sticking around on a whim. If anything, I was as ambitious as any of the men at the firm, perhaps more so—I’d dealt with so much crap— to borrow one of Gallagher’s favorite words—that I was determined to make partner, if only to prove that I was better than most of the men with whom I worked. Another few months and that partnership would be mine, or so the department head, Stan Winslow, had assured me. Not only would my income soar, I finally would be in a position to start doing things the way I wanted to do them.

I took some more deep breaths, exhaling slowly as I waited for my anger to subside and for my fantasy of beating Gallagher over the head with a blunt object to work its cathartic magic. After a minute or two, my hands were still trembling, but just a bit, and Peter’s ring shone bright and reassuring on my finger. I took a final deep breath, squared my shoulders, and headed through the door.

I crashed immediately into Dahlia Crenshaw.

“Ooof,” I said.

“Oh! I’m sorry. Are you okay?” I didn’t have time to answer before Dahlia burst into tears.

“I’m fine,” I said, leading her back into the safety of the ladies’ room. “But you’re clearly not. What’s going on?”

She sank onto one of the stools in front of the vanity. “You have to ask?”

“Gallagher?”

“I hate that man.”

“He’s a rat,” I agreed. “But you can’t let him get to you.” Easier advice to give than to take, as I well knew, but suggesting that she fantasize about beating her boss over the head with a blunt object seemed unprofessional, at best. I crossed to a stall, ripped a length of toilet paper from the roll and handed it to her. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

“Why don’t you quit?” I asked.

“I’d leave in a heartbeat if I could, but the money’s good and the firm pays for my night classes—I’m getting my nursing degree, did you know? I can’t afford to quit. After all, it’s only my pride I’m sacrificing here.” She said this with a bitter smile, and fresh tears began streaming down her cheeks, streaked with black from her running mascara.

I perched on the counter beside her. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

Dahlia shook her head. “You could kill him for me,” she joked with false bravado.

I laughed. “I’d kill him for myself. He sure hasn’t won me over. I don’t know how you can stand it.”

“I can’t,” said Dahlia in a forlorn voice, the bravado gone. She turned to the mirror and began dabbing at the tracks the tears had left. “So much for waterproof mascara.”

“No mascara could stand up to these working conditions.”

“Working for Gallagher is bad enough. But it’s even worse knowing that everybody thinks we’re having an affair.”

I felt a wave of shame wash over me. That was exactly what everybody thought, including myself until a moment ago.

I was a bad liar, so I didn’t even try to convince Dahlia that the rumors weren’t out there. “Look, people are so desperate for a bit of intrigue, they’ll believe anything. But that’s a rumor that can be squashed.”

“I hope so. I mean, it’s not like he didn’t come on to me when I first started working for him, but I nipped that right in the bud, and I’m too good at my job for him to get rid of me. But how could anyone think I’d have anything to do with him? And why does he always have to be such a jerk, yelling and obnoxious? Didn’t anyone ever teach him any manners?”

“He does seem to have missed out on the common courtesy gene. I wish I knew how to solve that one.”

“You can’t,” said Dahlia. She sighed. “Sorry to unload on you like this.”

“No problem. I’ve had a few nervous breakdowns in here, too.”

“You? Impossible. You’re always so poised. Calm, cool, and collected.”

If she only knew. “Hardly. Anyhow, are you feeling better?”

“Better? Not really. But I’ll be fine.” She dabbed at her face a final time and rose from the stool. “And I should get back. This new deal seems to have him particularly worked up. Do you know that two different people have already called from Thunderbolt for a team list?”

“They probably want to send some more materials over,” I said, but I had to stifle a groan as I followed Dahlia out the door. The last thing we needed was another influx of documents and spreadsheets. It was hard to believe it was only Monday. And it was depressing, too. An entire week ahead and not a break in sight.

Little did I know what the week held in store.

chapter three

M y own assistant, Jessica, was at her desk outside my office when I returned.

“So,” she said, “judging by the stack of stuff you left for me, I’m guessing that you were here all weekend, weren’t you?” “Yup.”

“And this was your first weekend with your new roommate, too. When are you going to get a life?”

“At this rate, never.”

“And how is Il Duce?”

“Don’t ask.”

“You’re the boss.”

“Please, no Tony Danza jokes. I’m running on empty here.”

“I had a feeling about that. I left a little fuel for you in your office.”

“You are my new best friend.”

“You might want to wait and see what I brought you before getting rid of your old best friend.”

I was incredibly lucky to have Jessica as my assistant. An aspiring actor, she was absurdly overqualified for her current job with a degree in drama from Yale, and she’d saved my skin on more than a few occasions. Unfortunately, she was also a bit of a health nut. Instead of the bagel and cream cheese I’d been hoping for, the bag she’d left on my desk contained a distressingly wholesome-looking bran muffin and some carrot juice.

I reached into the small refrigerator under my desk and pulled out a can of Diet Coke. Carrot juice just wasn’t going to cut it this morning. I picked up the phone, cradling it against my shoulder and dialing Jake’s extension with one hand while I popped open the can of soda with the other. I probably could have walked over to his office, but it was on the other side of the floor and that seemed like too much work.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey. So, are we ready?”

“I think so. Mark’s dealing with the copies.”

“He’s a machine.”

“Yes, and he’s our machine, thank God.”

“Good point.”

“So, what did Gallagher want with you?”

“Nothing much. Just to warn me to keep the thoughts in my pretty little head to myself.”

He chuckled. “Don’t let him get to you.” That seemed to be a recurring theme today.

“Who, little ole me? Worry my pretty little head with silly details about a silly ole deal?”

“Cute, Scarlett.”

I switched back to my own accent. “Let’s just say, if Gallagher suddenly dies a mysterious death—”

“We’ll know who to bring in for questioning.”

“Exactly.”

“Rachel,” he said. “Seriously. Do you want me to say something to him? Or to somebody else?” Jake had come into my office on Saturday shortly after I’d slapped Gallagher’s hand from my arm and told him that no, I had no interest in joining him for lunch at an intimate restaurant he knew nearby. I’d still been sufficiently upset that it hadn’t taken much coaxing to get the story out of me.