Find You First

by Linwood Barclay

“We could figure that out.”

  “Okay, so email is out. Maybe the old-fashioned way. A personal letter? Registered?”

  Dorian quickly shook her head. “Suppose it goes to the wrong person, or gets to the right house but is opened by the wrong person? Say you think you’re some kid’s dad and this letter comes along saying it’s someone else. Your wife never told you. It’s freak-out time.”

  Dorian put the iPad aside, sat down, put one leg over the other and leaned forward.

  “You know what you have to do,” she said.

  “Have someone approach them in person, on my behalf?”

  “You’re close,” she said.

  Miles furrowed his brow. “What?”

  She sighed. “It should be you.”

  “Me?”

  “I know you’re used to delegating pretty much everything, but there are some things you can’t fob off on someone else. If someone’s going to come out of the blue to tell me who my real father is, well, I think maybe it ought to be my real fucking father.”

  Miles appeared thoughtful. “Yeah.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, you’re right. I can’t ask someone else to do this.”

  Dorian nodded. “Good. Because if you were going to ask me, I’d have said no.”

  “I guess to do that you’d need to be in a higher pay grade,” Miles said, and let loose a short laugh.

  Dorian said nothing.

  “Anyway,” Miles said, “if I’m going to go face-to-face with them, I’m not sure approaching them on their home turf is best. There might be other family there. Away from home would be better. Maybe at work, or catch them on a lunch break?”

  “I think you’ll have to play each one by ear. And there’s going to be some travel involved. There’s that one woman in Paris. I can charter a private jet for those.”

  “Sure.”

  “And the closer ones, I can get Charise, seeing as how you handed the Porsche off to Gilbert.”

  “He told you?”

  “I saw him come to work in it. If you’ve got any other Porsches you’re giving away, I’d be willing to help you with that.”

  “Okay, get in touch with Charise. And of course you’ve got pictures of them all?”

  Dorian gave him a duh look.

  “If it was me,” she said, “I’d start with Chloe Swanson, the one in Providence. She’s the closest. Good way to get your feet wet. If the personal approach goes south, you fine-tune your approach before you go on to the next one.”

  “Chloe Swanson,” Miles said, more to himself than Dorian. “Have I got a surprise for you.”

  Fifteen

  New Haven, CT

  The funny thing was, Caroline had actually run into that alleged hit man one day, several months after the trial where he was found not guilty, and a few weeks before she learned about Miles’s diagnosis.

  She was at a Starbucks, paying for her caramel latte, when she turned around and bumped into a man waiting for his hot chocolate. He was tall with short brown hair, high cheekbones, a strong jaw. He was wearing a long cashmere coat and a pair of dark brown leather gloves. He looked, at a glance, like someone out of a Hugo Boss ad.

  “Sorry,” she said. “God, I nearly got some foam on you.”

  “It’s okay,” he said, rearing back, looking down at his coat. “No harm done.” He reached around her for his hot chocolate. Caroline noticed the name PETE written on the side of the paper cup.

  Pete was about to turn and head for the door when he stopped and gave Caroline another look.

  “Have we met?” he asked.

  She said, “I don’t think so,” but that was before she gave him a closer look. “Wait a minute. I think …” And then her face broke into a nervous grin. “Oh my, I do remember.”

  He grinned slyly at her. “Okay, maybe you should fill me in.”

  But she shook her head, as though she suddenly realized she was wrong. “No, no, I’m mistaken,” she said. “We haven’t met.”

  “Maybe not met, officially, but I do recognize you,” he said.

  “No, really, I—”

  He snapped his fingers with his free hand. “I know now.” He smiled. “At my trial. You’re the court stenographer.”

  Caroline swallowed, hard. “Um, that’s, I think that’s possible.” She laughed nervously. “I do believe I remember you.”

  She remembered everything about him. Especially the part where he had winked at her during the proceedings. The small, electric thrill it had given her.

  But Caroline wasn’t quite feeling that now. Right now she was feeling more like she might lose control of her bladder.

  This man was a killer.

  “I’m sorry,” the man said as if reading her thoughts. “I’ve made you ill at ease. That wasn’t my intention.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s just not every day you meet—”

  She stopped herself.

  The man smiled. “A hired killer? You do recall that I was acquitted, don’t you?”

  “Of course, yes, I remember,” Caroline said. “I suppose I should offer congratulations? I mean, it’s a little late, and it really wouldn’t have been appropriate to say anything at the time.”

  He said, “There’s a void for Hallmark to fill. ‘Congratulations on Your Acquittal.’ Or, in your case, belated congratulations.”

  Caroline’s eyes were fixed on his. There was an almost hypnotic quality about them. No, that was pushing it. But the man did have a certain charm. How did you make conversation with someone who, allegedly, had been hired to kill another man’s wife?The charges were dismissed, of course. Didn’t she have to give him the benefit of the doubt? But what about that star witness who never showed up? Did Pete here have a coworker somewhere out there who’d made that person disappear?

  And by the way, her recollection was not that his name was Pete, but something else. Was it Paul? Patrick? No, wait, it was something altogether different. Something French or Italian? No, not something foreign, but it was longer than most names. A name with a hard edge to it. Something like—

  Broderick!

  She was sure of it. So why was he telling the Starbucks barista that his name was Pete?

  All those thoughts ran through her head while she pondered what to say, but it was Pete/Broderick who came to the rescue.

  “Would you like to sit down?” he asked her.

  “Would I what?”

  “Would you like to join me?”

  Before she could think of a reason to say no, she said, “Sure. Why not.”

  He found them an empty table in the corner, very delicately cleared away some dirty cups and, with a napkin, swept some muffin crumbs off it.

  As Caroline sat down, she could feel her heart racing. What the hell am I doing? she asked herself.

  This is not a good idea.

  “It makes me crazy when people leave the table a mess,” he said. Having cleared away the crumbs, he was now wiping up a small coffee spill with a paper napkin. “That’s better.” He balled up the napkin and pitched it in a nearby garbage can.

  He sat down across from her and smiled. “It’s nice to see you again.”

  “I don’t remember your name being Pete,” she said. “It’s Broderick.”

  He smiled, pointed a finger at her. “Very good. Especially given all the names you must hear in any given week.”

  “So why …” She pointed to the cup.

  “Oh,” Broderick said, and grinned. “You’re suspecting something sinister. That I go around using a fake name. You know how much trouble baristas have with the name Broderick? Trying to write it on the paper cup? First, they’re not sure they heard you right and ask you to repeat it or spell it. Or they just scribble ‘Broad Bricks’ or, one time, ‘Broad Dick.’ I swear.”

  Caroline found herself giggling.

  “The other thing is, there’s not enough room on the cup to write my real name. Hence, Pete.”

  Caroline nodded, satisfied. “That mak
es perfect sense.”

  “You’re still with the courts, I assume? Writing everything down that the judge and the lawyers and the bad guys say?”

  “Yes.” Her voice was barely above a whisper.

  “Interesting work, I’ll bet.”

  “Some cases more so than others.” She paused. “Like yours.”

  “Mine was a good one?”

  “Uh, yeah. It sure beat the guy being sued for selling defective siding.”

  He nodded knowingly. “I guess murder is slightly more titillating.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” she said. Or did she?

  Broderick leaned in close and whispered, “If you ever get charged with murder, I highly recommend my lawyer.” He gave her arm a little squeeze.

  Caroline’s heart was jackhammering. Was it excitement, or fear? She picked up her cup and said, “I really should be going.”

  Broderick put his hand on her arm again and held it gently. “I’m sorry. Please stay. I apologize. I sometimes joke about what I was accused of when there’s nothing funny about it at all. A terrible thing, being accused of such a horrible crime.”

  Tentatively, she said, “I guess it was lucky that that witness … changed his mind about testifying.”

  “Yes,” Broderick said. “I guess he had second thoughts about lying on the stand. Perjury’s a serious offense.”

  A question about what happened to that witness was on the tip of her tongue, but she decided against asking it. Instead, she asked, “So, what … what do you do now?” She laughed nervously. “I don’t mean now, as opposed to what you were accused of doing then. I mean, what do you do? What’s your job?”

  “I’m a problem solver,” Broderick said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Exactly what I said. If you come to me with a problem, I’ll do my best to solve it for you.”

  Caroline circled the rim of her cup with her index finger. “Kind of like Denzel Washington in The Equalizer?”

  Broderick grinned, waved the question away, and asked, “You ever have problems?”

  “Sure.”

  “Name one.”

  She had to think. She got as far as “Uh, well” and then started to laugh. “It’s too silly.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “The dealership won’t fix this thing that’s wrong with my car, even though it should be under warranty. The engine’s making this funny noise, and it’s stalling half the time. They say I missed a scheduled maintenance by about a hundred miles or something, which means whatever’s wrong with the car is on me. That it’s not their fault.”

  “Where’d you get the car?” he asked.

  She told him, and added, “But that’s probably not the kind of problem you’re talking about, is it? Give me an example of a problem you’d solve.”

  Broderick thought for a moment, took a sip of his hot chocolate. “I helped in a labor negotiation one time. A furniture company, all the workers were looking to unionize and the employer felt he was being very generous with his latest offer, but the union leadership was not receptive. They were heading toward a strike, which would have been very crippling for the company. Would have hurt the workers, too. The company asked if I could intercede. I did, and everything got sorted out.”

  “How did you do it?” Caroline asked.

  Broderick smiled. “I simply talked to the interested parties. I find that people are actually quite reasonable when you present realistic alternatives to them. If you do this, this thing will happen. If you do that, that thing will happen. It helps when one of those choices comes with a level of … inconvenience. And if that doesn’t work, I employ other strategies.”

  Caroline was going to ask, then decided against it. She believed there were some things she was better off not knowing.

  Broderick had glanced down at her hand more than once. “I see you’re married. What does your husband do?”

  “He’s an accountant,” she said, unable to hide the disappointment in her voice. “For a tech firm his brother owns.”

  “Oh,” he said. “That sounds interesting.”

  “Not particularly. So, this work you do, are there others who do this, too?”

  “I know others,” he said. “We have our own network. Sometimes we team up if the job is challenging.”

  Caroline thought again about that missing witness.

  “And what are you working on right now?”

  “As it turns out,” he said, smiling, “I’m between jobs and have some free time.”

  Two days later, the service manager at the dealership where Caroline had bought her car phoned to say they were going to replace the entire engine, no charge, and they were tossing in one free car detailing per month for the next two years. It was also the first time Caroline could ever remember a car dealership sending flowers.

  Sixteen

  New York, NY

  Jeremy Pritkin never did join Nicky Bondurant in the Winnebago that night. She’d done as he’d asked and gone inside, figuring he would be along shortly and they would do what they always did, or at least some variation of it. But then he’d gotten that phone call and forgot all about her.

  The windows of the RV were cranked open, so she was able to hear the conversation, although she didn’t really have any idea what it was about. But it was clear Jeremy was upset about something, and she had the sense he was talking to a sister or a brother. She thought she’d heard the name Marissa.

  When he was done with the call, Pritkin left the office and, presumably, returned to his party.

  Nicky thought the smart thing to do was wait, at least for a little while, in case he came back. The last thing she wanted to do was make him even more disappointed with her.

  It was never a good idea to disappoint Mr. Pritkin.

  She waited for the better part of thirty minutes before deciding it was safe to leave, more than enough time to check out this new addition to Jeremy’s headquarters. What a crazy thing, putting an RV in your third-floor office. The man came across, in public, like a pretty normal guy. Well, if you defined normal as unbelievably rich and connected, outspoken and opinionated, someone who had the ear of decision makers around the globe.

  But the outside world also had glimpses of his eccentric side. The Winnebago event was only the most recent.

  Jeremy let Architectural Digest do a spread on his place in Spain, where he had a swimming pool shaped like the grill of a Rolls-Royce. And he’d once spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy some custom-made car from a TV show in the sixties—the Black Beauty or a Monkeemobile or a junky truck some hillbillies drove around in. She couldn’t remember which because she had no idea what the shows were. But when Jeremy bought it at an auction, it made the news. So now that he had it, he’d tucked it away in a garage somewhere. It wasn’t like he could actually drive the thing down Park Avenue. He spent God knew how much on a sports jacket Steve McQueen wore while driving a Mustang in some famous movie chase in San Francisco. Couldn’t wear it. Wasn’t even his size.

  So those were some of the things the public knew.

  But Jeremy Pritkin also had secrets, his love for erotic photography one of the less notable ones. Much bigger was his passion for having young girls like her available to him in his palatial New York residence.

  Nicky was not the only one. Over the years, plenty of young women had moved through here. Entertained the man of the house and his friends, then moved on to other things when they got a little older.

  She’d found it surprising, at first, that this had not become well known beyond the walls of this place, but having now spent time here, she understood. Pritkin liked to offer some of his more influential friends the fringe benefits that came with knowing him, with being part of his club of influencers. Young, shapely fringe benefits.

  Membership has its privileges.

  And once those friends had partaken of the pleasures here, the last thing they wanted to do was blab about it. They didn’t want to put themselve
s at risk of exposure. But they did more than that for good ol’ Jeremy. They ran interference for him, protected him.

  Like that old fart of a judge.

  Eeewwww.

  And the girls who’d been through here kept quiet, too. From what Nicky’d been told, several had leveraged the connections made here to go on to better things. Hotel management, personal assistants to CEOs, internships for political types in Washington. At least, those were the ones Roberta liked to talk about. Nicky’d also heard gossip about at least one who’d become a junkie and ended up on the streets of Newark, and another who just, well, one day she was there and one day she was gone. No one ever heard another thing about her.

  Nicky felt badly that she had disappointed Jeremy by raising, with a couple of the other girls here, the issue about whether what went on here was, you know, right. True, Jeremy had been good to her in many ways. He’d pulled strings to get her enrolled in a local high school even though she had no roots in the community, no family in the Big Apple.

  In the beginning, Nicky thought he’d done this out of the goodness of his heart, but it wasn’t long before he was asking her to invite friends to the brownstone. Young girls who might need a hand up, a little financial assistance, were willing to learn about the “service industry.” The services, Nicky soon realized, more often than not included keeping Mr. Pritkin and his wealthy, male friends entertained behind closed doors.

  Jeremy made it clear she needed to find just the right girls. At first, she’d thought that meant pretty. And of course, Jeremy did want her recruits to be attractive. But what he really was implying was girls who were vulnerable. Girls from low-income households, one-parent families. Girls not connected to people with any kind of pull or influence. Girls with no one to turn to for support. Girls who would be amenable to the needs of Jeremy and his acolytes in return for a life that was better than the one they currently had.

  Runaways, for example, like Nicky.

  She’d left her Norfolk home seven months earlier. Her mom had found a new boyfriend—the fourth in twelve months—and this one had moved in with them. If there was any good news, it was that this guy wasn’t an ass-grabber or anything. He left Nicky alone where that was concerned. But he ordered her around like he was her goddamn father. Pick up your room, clean the house, make dinner. Do your homework. Turn down the TV. Stop being on your phone all the time. Take those buds out of your ears.