Karma Page 5

  It was as good a frame as he might have thought up himself. The lawyer would make the letters available to the cops. Once they suspected Leonid, they’d match his semen inside her. She would expect him to have kept the expensive jewelry. Robbery, rape, and murder, and he would have been as innocent as Joe Haller.

  I’d die for him, she’d said. She was talking about her father.

  “I been knowing about the case for days,” Kitteridge said. “The girl’s name stuck in my head, and then I remembered. Lana Parsons was the daughter of Nora Parsons. You ever hear of her?”

  “Yeah. I brought her information about her husband. She was considering a divorce.”

  “That’s right,” Kitteridge said. “But he wasn’t fooling around. He was embezzling money from their own company. They sent him to jail on the dirt you dug up.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He died in prison, didn’t he?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  LEONID BURNED the letters Lana had intended to incriminate him with.

  His work for Lana’s mother had driven the girl to murder and suicide. For a while he considered sending the photograph of Richard and his girlfriend to Lana’s mother. At least he could accomplish one thing that she intended to do. But he decided against it. Why hurt Nora when he was just as guilty?

  He kept the picture, though, in the top drawer of his desk. The shot of Richard with his hand up under the receptionist’s red dress, out on Park Avenue after a spicy Brazilian feast. Next to that he had placed an item from the New York Post. It was a thumbnail article about a prisoner on Rikers Island named Joe Haller. He’d been arrested for robbery. While waiting to stand trial he hung himself in his cell.