Free The Shadow of Your Smile by Mary Higgins Clark Page A

advance.”
    “You’ve got to be crazy,” Langdon whispered.
    “I’m not,” Sammy assured him. “I taped you the other night in thediner and I’m taping you now.” He opened his jacket and exposed the wire he had attached to his cell phone. With a slow, deliberate movement he buttoned his jacket and got up. “What you or someone you know has on me wouldn’t mean much if it came to a trial. The cops would drop that charge in a minute in exchange for this tape and the other one. Now listen real carefully. I want one million dollars, then I do the job. I’ve figured out how to make it look like a burglary gone sour. So get the money, and you can sleep at night. You have to be smart enough to know that when the job is done, I won’t be sending any tapes to the cops.”
    He got up, brushed past Langdon, and put his hand on the doorknob. “Have it by Friday,” he said, “or I go to the police myself.” He opened the door. “Thank you, Doctor,” he said, in a voice loud enough that he hoped the secretary could hear. “You’ve been a big help. Like you say, I can’t blame all my problems on my old lady. She did her best for me.”

17
 
     
    Esther Chambers had had a dismal weekend. Her visit from Thomas Desmond of the Securities and Exchange Commission and his partner had thoroughly unsettled her. When she had found them waiting for her in her lobby on Wednesday evening, she had allowed them to come up to her apartment as Desmond had requested.
    There, in the privacy of her home, he had told her that her boss had been watched for some time by the SEC and that criminal charges against him for insider trading might be forthcoming.
    He had also told her that she had been thoroughly checked and that her finances had shown that in no way was she living beyond her income, so they felt confident that she was not engaged in any illegal activities. They told her that they wanted her to work with them and provide them with information about Greg’s business dealings. They stressed that confidentiality was of the utmost importance and that she would almost certainly be called to testify before a Grand Jury.
    “I simply cannot believe that Greg Gannon would be guilty of insider trading,” she had told Desmond. “Why should he? The investment firm has always been very successful, and for years he’s received a big salary as chairman of the board of the Gannon Foundation.”
    “It’s not a case of how much he has, but how much he
wants,
”Desmond told her. “We’ve had multimillionaires who couldn’t spend all their legitimate money in a lifetime, and still they cheat. Some of them do it because it gives them a sense of power. But in the end, before they get caught, most of them are running scared.”
    Running scared.
Those words convinced Esther that it wasn’t all some kind of mistake. Greg Gannon
is
running scared, she thought.
    Desmond had not been happy to learn that she had just submitted her resignation. He’d asked her if she could rescind it, then corrected himself. “No, I don’t think that’s a good idea. My bet is that right now he’s afraid to trust anybody. He might see a sudden change of heart as a tip that we’ve approached you. You say you offered to stay for one month?”
    “Yes.”
    “Then my guess is that he’ll take you up on it. He’s in deep trouble now. One of his big tips about a merger didn’t go through at the last minute. He lost a quarter of a billion for one of his hedge funds. He won’t want to worry about breaking in someone new right now.”
    And that’s the way it’s turning out, Esther thought on Monday morning. When Greg had seen her note on Thursday morning, he had come out to her desk. “Esther, I’m not surprised that you’re ready to retire. Thirty-five years is a heck of a long time to keep working in one place. But I do want you to stay for at least one month and do the interviewing for your replacement, then when you find someone, break her in.” He