“Excuse me?”
“I don’t need your money. I don’t want your money.”
“It’ll change your life,” Miles said.
“For better? Or maybe for worse.”
“Better.”
“You’ve got shitloads of money. Are you happy?”
“Of course I’m not happy. I’m dying.”
“How about before? Before you found out you were dying. Were you happy then?”
The question caught Miles off guard. “I don’t know that I ever thought about that.”
“It’s a simple question. Were you happy before your diagnosis? Yes or no?”
“I guess … no.”
“Well, there you go. You can take your money and shove it.” She paused, and then added, “Dad.”
Miles started to grin. It broadened, and then he started to laugh.
“You’re something else,” he said.
“You bet your ass I am,” Chloe shot back.
Chloe brought the Pacer to a brake-squealing halt in front of a modest two-story brick house. A Volkswagen Golf was parked in the driveway.
“That’s her car,” she said.
She killed the engine, which uttered a few death rattles even after she had the key in her hand. “I gotta get that looked at,” she said as she opened her door. Charise, in the limo, pulled up behind them and sat, awaiting further instructions.
Madeline was opening the front door before they’d reached it. She stepped out, tentatively at first, but when she saw Chloe her face brightened and she limped toward her, arms outstretched.
“Oh my God, it’s you!” she said, giving Chloe a hug. Chloe responded with a less enthusiastic return.
“Where’s Todd?” Madeline asked, once she’d separated herself from Chloe. “Is he with you?”
“No,” Chloe said.
“I was going to drive out there. I’ve been trying him all day.”
“When’d you last talk to him?” Miles asked.
Madeline Cox turned her head. “Who are you?”
Chloe said, “This is Miles Cookson. He’s—”
Miles shot Chloe a stern not yet stare.
“—he’s a friend,” she said.
Miles extended a hand, which Madeline took with some hesitation. Her eyes narrowed as she took him in. “Do I know you?” she asked.
“No ma’am,” he said.
“Because you look a little familiar to me, like maybe we’ve met before.”
And that was when Chloe, figuring that Madeline must have seen something of Todd in Miles, studied his face in a way she hadn’t before. She quipped, “I don’t see it.”
“Excuse me?” Madeline said.
Chloe realized she had been thinking out loud and said, “Nothing. Listen, we were hoping to find Todd here, but—”
“You’ve been to his place?”
Chloe nodded worriedly. Miles, thinking back to how the trailer had been stripped of anything personal, asked, “How long has it been since Todd lived here, Ms. Cox?”
“Almost a year,” she said dispiritedly. “He had it pretty good here, getting waited on hand and foot, but he wanted to be out on his own.” She turned to Chloe and dropped her voice to a whisper. “Did you talk to him? About what he was up to?”
“I haven’t really had that much of chance,” she said.
Now Madeline turned back to Miles. “Did she tell you how she and Todd found each other? It’s quite a story.”
Miles nodded. “I’ve heard some of it.”
“Where do you think he got off to?” Todd’s mother asked. “It’s not like he hasn’t disappeared before for a day or two, but I could always get hold of him.”
“Can you think of any place he might have gone?” Chloe asked. “Someplace he’s always wanted to go?”
She thought a moment. “Africa. He’s always wanted to see giraffes and stuff.”
Miles shook his head. No one stripped their bed clean and bleached the kitchen before going to Africa.
“Well, if you’re talking to him, or hear from him, would you have him get in touch with me?” Chloe asked.
Madeline nodded. “You all want to come in or anything?”
Chloe caught Miles’s eye, as if looking for a signal. His look said not now. Madeline noticed the shiny black vehicle parked behind the Pacer. “Whose limo is that?”
“She’s with me,” Miles said. “Chloe, a minute?”
He led her back to the Pacer, and they got in. Chloe had her phone out, as if hoping Todd would get in touch, even though they knew he’d left his phone behind. She tapped, absently, on the camera app and started up some video she’d shot at Todd’s trailer.
“That’s kind of distracting,” Miles said.
“I want to get a shot of Todd’s house. For my doc. But I just wanted to look at this again.” Miles could hear his own voice and Chloe’s coming out of the phone. It was the video she’d shot when they were in the trailer. She muted it. “So what did you want to talk about in secret?”
“Something’s off about all of this,” he said.
“Yeah, I kinda was coming to that conclusion, too,” she said, glancing occasionally at the video.
“It might be time to bring in the police, report Todd missing,” he said. “But I didn’t want to mention that in front of his mom. She doesn’t know yet about how his place was cleared out. I can’t figure out why he’d do that.”
Chloe, still looking at her phone, said, “Neither can—SHIT!”
She screamed so loud Miles felt his heart skip a beat.
“Holy fucking shit!” she said, staring at the screen.
“What?”
“Look!”
She turned the phone in his direction so he could get a good look at it. “This is from the trailer.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Fucking look at this.”
It was video Chloe took, walking down the hall, stopping at the bathroom, and finally, going into Todd’s bedroom.
“You see it?” she asked.
“See what?”
“Christ,” she said, using her finger to move the video back a few seconds. When it reached the part where she was entering the bedroom, she paused it, freezing the image.
“Now do you see it?”
“What am I looking at?”
“Right here,” she said, and pointed to the gap between the bed and the floor.
Miles squinted. When he saw it, his eyes went wide.
“Oh my God,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.
It was a hand.
Twenty-Eight
San Francisco, CA
Cheryl Howson, president and CEO of WhatsMyStory, author of the number one best seller Finding My Own Story—six weeks in the top spot on the New York Times nonfiction list—strolled into the office of her fashionable Mission District home before heading down to breakfast.
She could smell bacon.
Cheryl was strictly vegan, and breakfast for her was usually fruit and fiber, sometimes all-in-one in a smoothie, but her husband, Clifton, home this week from traveling around the world making business deals, was not, and neither was their seven-year-old daughter, Tina. So when Daddy finally had time at home, it was bacon at breakfast, burgers at lunch, and probably a T-bone for dinner. And what with Pauline, their full-time cook and housekeeper, taking a couple of days off, there was no stopping him.
Cheryl took a seat in her office and shook the mouse. The screen lit up, and she saw that she had more than a dozen emails, far too many to deal with before having her first coffee of the day. Most of them were from her assistant, who ran interference for Cheryl so she could actually do the job of running the company. But there was a request from the Wall Street Journal for a profile, a proposal from a competing firm that they share data, and some reports from her legal team about law enforcement requests to use DNA data from WhatsMyStory’s files to compare against DNA recovered from crime scenes across the country.
God, the headach
es. You started an enterprise with one simple idea—find out who you are—and before you knew it you were buried under a mountain of shit. Moral and ethical issues and lawsuits coming out your ass. Look at Zuckerberg. Started off with a site that would rate college girls as “hot or not” and now he was accused of undermining democracy on a global scale. Which he was, of course, but that was his cross to bear, not hers.
She padded downstairs in her slippers, still wearing her silk pajamas and a robe, her cell tucked into the pocket. She entered the kitchen, saw Clifton blotting the grease from the rashers of bacon, and outside, on the deck, Tina watering the flowers with a small plastic watering can.
“Good morning, Tina baby!” Cheryl said through the open door. Tina waved and went back to watering.
There was a beelike buzzing noise outside.
“What is that?” Cheryl asked.
“Someone’s playing with another one of those damn drones,” her husband said.
Cheryl looked at the bacon and inhaled. “God, that smell.”
Clifton waved a slice of bacon in the air. “You know you want it.”
She snatched the bacon from his fingers, folded it over once, and shoved it into her mouth. “Oh, sweet Jesus,” she said. “I feel like a criminal.”
“Pancakes?” Clifton asked.
“Seriously?”
“She asked and I’m delivering.”
Cheryl raised a hand, crooked her index finger, as if holding an invisible mug, and said, “What’s missing in this picture?”
Clifton grabbed a special mug with a picture of her book emblazoned on the side, filled it with black coffee, and handed it to her. Cheryl took a sip.
The outdoor buzzing persisted.
“Remind me when you fly out again?”
“Tomorrow night. Dubai.”
She sighed as she settled onto a stool at the island. “Maybe I’ll come with you. I could take up residence in the mall.”
He grinned. “You could use the break.”
“Let me think about it.”
“Don’t think long. We’ll need to get you a ticket.”
“I know, I know. There’s a few things I’d have to—oh shit.”
There was the ping of an incoming text. She reached into the pocket of her robe, pulled out her phone, thumbed the Home button. “Must be … what the …”
She suddenly looked up, then to the outside, and screamed: “Get Tina!”
Clifton said, “What?”
Cheryl pointed. “Get her! Get her inside!”
“What the hell—”
“Do it!”
Clifton ran from the house, scooped his arm around their daughter, lifting her into the air so quickly that her watering can went flying, landing in a grouping of flowers, snapping stems.
“Daddy! Stop—”
He practically threw her into the kitchen. As he let go of her she stumbled.
“The door!” Cheryl said.
Clifton slid the glass door into place and locked it without having to be told.
“You hurt my knee!” Tina said to her father.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart, I’m sorry. Your mom—your mom thought—” At which point he looked at his wife, hoping she would offer a reason for what had just happened.
“Go upstairs, Tina,” she said.
Tina was on her feet now. “I didn’t do anything wrong! Daddy made me spill—”
“Go to your room!” her mother screamed.
Tina looked ready to burst into tears as she ran from the kitchen and thumped her way up the stairs.
Clifton glared at his wife. “What the fuck is wrong with—”
She extended her arm, holding the phone so he could see. A few seconds of video was playing on the screen.
Of their house. Shot from above.
The focus was on Tina, playing in their backyard, moments earlier.
Clifton took the phone from his wife’s hand. “What the hell?”
He slid open the kitchen door again, took one step out, looked into the sky for the drone. But the buzzing had become distant. Whatever had been up there was gone.
When he stepped back inside, he looked at the phone.
“What’s this number? Who is this from?”
“I don’t know,” Cheryl whispered. “Read below the video.”
Clifton slid the picture up and saw a block of text, all caps. It read:
YOU WILL RECEIVE A LIST OF NAMES. YOU WILL SEARCH THE WHATSMYSTORY DATABASE FOR THEM. IF YOU FIND ANY OF THEM YOU WILL PERMANENTLY DELETE THEM AS WELL AS ANY DNA SAMPLES FROM THESE INDIVIDUALS. DO NOT TELL ANYONE. YOUR DAUGHTER IS VERY CUTE.
Clifton looked up.
“What the hell?” he asked.
Cheryl, her hands shaking, shook her head.
“We have to call the police,” he said, reaching for his own cell that was on the counter, next to the sink. “We’ve got to—”
Cheryl’s phone dinged again. Clifton’s eyes went down to it.
THAT WOULD BE A BAD IDEA.
His face paled. He handed the phone back to Cheryl. When she saw the words, a tiny squeak came from her throat. They scanned the kitchen, as if they might be able to spot whatever device was picking up their conversation.
“We can’t call the police,” she said, her voice down to a whisper. “They got my private number. They’re listening to us. They’re watching.”
For several seconds, neither of them spoke. Clifton broke the silence, leaning in close, his voice barely audible.
“What do you think it’s about? Who are these people they want deleted? Why would they want that? Who wants it?”
“How the fuck would I know?” she snapped.
“Hey, it’s not my company this is about. I didn’t get the text.”
She gave him a hateful stare. “You’re blaming me?”
“No, no, fuck.” He put his hands on her shoulders and brought her in close to him. He put his mouth to her ear and whispered, “What are we going to do?”
Cheryl broke free of him, picked up her phone, and hit the button to reply. She typed four words:
SEND ME THE NAMES
And hit Send.
Twenty-Nine
Fort Wayne, IN
Travis Roben visited Super Duper Comics pretty much every week, usually on his day off from restocking shelves at Walmart, but he didn’t spend much time in the superhero section. He didn’t care about any of that Avengers Marvel shit or Spider-Man or any of the Justice League crowd. He had no time for Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman (okay, maybe Wonder Woman, who was pretty fucking hot), or Flash. That stuff bored him.
He preferred offbeat graphic novels, ones where the main characters hadn’t been bitten by radioactive spiders or blasted by gamma rays or were sent to Earth to escape a planet that was about to blow up.
Travis liked stories about real people dealing with real situations. Like that epic Clyde Fans, by that Canadian graphic novelist Seth. Good old-fashioned noir stories, like the Nick Travers books by writer Ace Atkins and artist Marco Finnegan, or Louise Brooks: Detective by Rick Geary. There was that really amazing memoir, from a decade ago—which he definitely had not read at the time, when he was ten years old—about using the services of prostitutes. Paying for It, it was called, by Chester Brown. Amazing. That one hit home for Travis. While he’d never been to a hooker, he had to admit the idea had crossed his mind. To be twenty and never have had sex, and to have no likelihood of having sex, well, you wanted to at least fantasize about your options, even if you knew you’d never go that route.
Sure, he’d kissed two girls over the years. One was his cousin, and that was at her mother’s funeral. You can’t expect a lot of tongue in a situation like that. The other was when he was nine, and some bullies had pushed him and Wendy Bettelheim together behind the school and threatened them with a beating if they didn’t pucker up and kiss each other on the lips. They had never spoken of it again.
Travis knew he was a bit different. It was more
than just a nerdy interest in comic books. Lots of guys were interested in comic books and still got some action. But Travis was on the shy side, had few friends, and liked to spend most of his free time—at his parents’ home; he hadn’t quite made the leap yet—working on a graphic novel of his own.
The glasses didn’t help much, either. God, talk about going full nerd cliché. He’d asked his mom to at least get him some cooler glasses, ones that didn’t have big heavy frames that made him look like his name should be Poindexter or something. She’d said his glasses were just fine. He could see, couldn’t he? And if he wasn’t happy with his glasses, she’d told him, he could take some of his Walmart money and buy some on his own, if he had any left after his latest trip to Super Duper Comics.
Yeah, well, she had a point there, he supposed.
When he wasn’t reading his latest purchases, or working on his own graphic novel, which just happened to be about a lonely guy who still lived at home and felt belittled by his parents (“Write what you know!” all the books told him), or maybe jerking off to some online porn, he was finding out about this “incel” movement, which was pretty fucked up, but still, kind of interesting.
There were all these posts from guys who described themselves as being “involuntary celibates,” which meant that they wanted to get laid, but no women were willing to go to bed with them. Okay, so on first reading, it sounded like these guys were simply a bunch of losers, but the more Travis read about them, the better he could see their point. Suppose you did everything you could to be nice to some woman? Brought her flowers, complimented her on her appearance, asked her out for a drink. And no matter what you did, she kept saying no, she didn’t want to go out with you? Whose fault was it then? Certainly not yours. You were making the effort. If this was the kind of reaction you were getting from every woman, you had to ask yourself one question: What the hell was wrong with these women?
It made you think.
But some of these incel guys had taken it too far. Like, getting violent. Attacking women. Running down strangers with a car. That was wrong. Guys like that, they were spoiling it for the rest of the movement, giving it a bad name. Kind of like when—
“Excuse me, do you work here?”
Find You First Page 18