“I … need a minute,” he said.
He took his fists from his forehead and looked at Chloe.
“Can I call you that? Can I call you my child? Can I call you my daughter? Because … to be able to do that, to have the right to do that, don’t I have to be more than just a sperm donor?”
He was afraid he might cry. Fight this, he told himself. It’s a symptom. Don’t let it control you. Okay, one of your daughters is missing. Two of your sons are unaccounted for.
He hadn’t had a chance to so much as say hello to them yet.
“Miles, are you okay?” Chloe asked, reaching out and touching his arm.
He swallowed hard, as if that would tamp down the emotional storm. Then he attempted a nod. “Yeah.”
“I am your daughter,” she said. “You’re allowed to call me that.”
“Being a parent is a lot more than just biology,” he said.
“Yeah, well, now you’ve got a chance to make up for the other part,” she said, giving his arm a squeeze. “You need to get back on track here, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Can you answer my question?”
“Try me again.”
“The phone call. What was the phone call about?”
“It was my assistant,” he said. “She’s been gathering information for me on … the others.”
“Okay.”
Without giving her the names, he told her about the missing woman in Paris and the student believed to have perished in a fire.
The news hit Chloe harder than he expected.
“So … I’ve lost a brother and a sister? On top of Todd going missing?”
“I’m sorry,” Miles said.
“What’s happening?”
“I don’t know.”
“I mean, is it all connected? Is that what’s going on?”
“Chloe, I don’t know.”
She took her hand off his arm and her empathetic look turned severe. “So wait. Around the time you start trying to find me and my half brothers and sisters, shit starts happening?”
“It… it looks that way.”
“Nothing happens for years to any of these people, and then when you start nosing around bad stuff happens. You think that’s a coincidence?”
“I swear, Chloe, I don’t know.”
“Like, what did you do, tweet out all their names so somebody could go after them?”
He gave her a sharp look. “Don’t be ridiculous. I haven’t even told you their names. And why would anyone go after them?”
“Hey, you’re the rich, techie genius. You might be able to figure this out faster than I could. Okay, so it’s not you, but you’re not the only person who knows who all your little kidlets are, right?”
Miles considered the question. “No.”
“Who knows what you know?”
“Dorian. My assistant. She’s worked for me for years. And then there’s Heather, who does investigative work when we need it. There’s the doctor from the clinic. There could be any number of people who have the information. What are you suggesting? What if someone did know the names of the people I’m trying to make contact with? How does that connect to someone going missing, or being in a fire?”
“Hey, you’re the one who seems freaked out by it, so there’s got to be something going on in the back of your mind.”
“It’s … maybe it’s all nothing.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t think it’s nothing. And you want to know why?”
“Why?”
“Because I’m one of them. You’ve got nine people you’re trying to find. Two are missing and one’s maybe dead. That’s a third of your list, right there. So if—if—someone is going around and deliberately making this happen, when’s it going to be my turn?”
Miles gave her a look that suggested the idea had not occurred to him until she’d said it. “Christ.”
“To put it fucking mildly,” she said. “Look, you’re supposedly the guy with the big brain here, but let me toss this out.”
“Go ahead.”
“You’re planning to divide up all your money and shit between the nine of us. And like I said, I don’t need your money, but let’s put that aside. So these nine people, they all get, well, a ninth of the pot. Am I right so far?”
“Yes.”
“So, when nine goes down to six, those six end up getting way more. Right?”
“Right,” Miles said slowly.
“And if nine goes down to five, then those five end up getting more. You see where I’m going with this?”
“Chloe, you’re making huge leaps here.”
“Well, that’s easy for you to say,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not one of the nine.”
The words hit him hard. Miles felt the emotions welling up again. He didn’t want to lose it again. He struggled to stay on track.
“What you’re talking about,” he said, trying to keep his voice even, “is murder. You’re talking about someone going around murdering my … progeny. There’s no evidence, at least not in what I heard from Dorian, that suggests any of these … occurrences … are homicides.”
“That’s only because they haven’t found the bodies,” Chloe countered, almost casually.
Miles looked out his window. “What you’re saying … it’s unthinkable. But if it’s somehow true … have I somehow set the wheels in motion?”
Chloe said nothing.
“The whole reason … I set out to do this to help all of you, not to bring harm to you. Who—who would do this?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Chloe said.
Miles turned away from the window, wanting to look her in the eye as she presented her theory.
She shrugged, smiled goofily, and said, “One of us.”
“What?”
“One of the nine,” she said. “You want the whole pie, you knock off your half brothers and sisters.”
“No,” Miles said under his breath.
“One of your kids already knows about the others and is taking us out,” she said, almost cheerily. “Makes sense to me.”
“No,” he said again.
“Just so you know,” she said, reaching out and touching his arm again, “it’s not me.” She paused. “Of course, that’s what I would say, isn’t it?”
And then Miles did something neither of them expected. He laughed.
“This is the very definition of a clusterfuck,” he said. “Maybe it is you. You’re like the girl in Hanna.”
Now Chloe smiled. “I saw that movie. About the sixteen-year-old girl who’s an assassin. Yeah, okay. One of your kids just happens to have been raised to be an international killer, and now she’s killing all her half siblings. I could pull that off.”
Now they were both laughing.
Miles placed a hand on the dash to steady himself. The laughs subsided. “Oh, man, nothing about this is funny.”
Chloe shrugged. “You have to laugh sometimes.”
Once he’d composed himself, Miles took a deep breath and said, “We should get you home, and I should get back to New Haven and try to make some sense of this mess.”
“Yeah, like that’s fucking happening. If there’s a chance in a thousand that I’m right about this, you think I’m gonna go home and wait for someone to make me disappear? You may not be much of a bodyguard, but I’m sticking right by you.”
She paused, and then added, “Pops.”
Wearily, Miles nodded and said, “Got it.”
Thirty-Four
New York, NY
Nicky, increasingly, believed there was only one way this could end.
When she’d said to Roberta that Jeremy couldn’t keep her locked up in this multi-million-dollar brownstone forever, Roberta had conceded the point. What was Nicky supposed to take from that?
Was Roberta going to show up in her room one day to announce Nicky was free to go? That Jeremy’d had a change of heart, that her punishment was over, that he
was no longer concerned about what she might have overheard?
Yeah, that was going to happen.
For a while there, Nicky thought they’d try to buy her off. Offer her money, or gifts, to make her forget what she’d heard. She imagined Jeremy coming to see her and saying this whole thing had been a terrible misunderstanding, that he’d like to make it right by giving her a good-paying job in the organization, preferably someplace overseas where she’d be far, far away from any New York authorities.
And she’d go along with it, happily.
Sure, she was just a kid, but she was mature for her age, very attractive, and smarter than most girls her age. She could pass for nineteen or twenty if she had to. Old enough to be put on the payroll somewhere. Maybe train her as a future Roberta. Someone who could find more young girls to entertain Jeremy and his important friends.
But she didn’t think that was going to happen. She feared Jeremy was considering a more permanent solution. How would they do it? Put some slow-acting poison in those wonderful meals Antoine made? But she hadn’t felt even the slightest bit ill, so she’d ruled that out for now. Good thing, too, because the food was the best thing about being imprisoned here.
So, if they were going to kill her, why not just get it done? Maybe they were working up the nerve to do it. They had to figure out not only how to do it, but how to cover it up.
If Jeremy Pritkin was anything, he was a meticulous planner.
So Nicky had been thinking, I have to get the fuck out of here.
Her second-floor room was maybe twenty feet from the wide landing between two broad sets of stairs, one going down and one going up. One of Pritkin’s security goons was always there, just like there was that one day when she tried to make a break for it.
Nicky’s visitors were invariably Roberta or one of the staff bringing her a meal, or fresh bed linen or clean towels or rolls of toilet paper. Nicky was expected to change her sheets herself. She’d been instructed to strip the bed every second day and leave the sheets, along with the towels from the bathroom, piled up by the door.
Sometimes, if Roberta was feeling kindly, she’d bring Nicky a stack of reading material—Vogue, Vanity Fair, the most recent Sunday New York Times—which Nicky would devour, even the articles she wasn’t all that interested in. It helped to pass the time. She had TV, but the Wi-Fi continued to be disabled in this part of the building. That iPad they’d given her was only good for games.
One day, Nicky had tried to enlist the help of one of the housekeepers when she came to drop off sheets. The woman, named Teresa, was in her fifties, and Nicky had asked her one time where she was from—Hidalgo, in Mexico—and whether she had kids.
“Girl and a boy,” Teresa had said after she had kicked off her heels. When there was no chance they could be seen by the master of the house, the help went around in stocking feet.
Nicky asked, “How old are they? Are they in New York?”
Teresa’s daughter, who was twenty, worked in a dry cleaner’s in California. Her son was twenty-three and worked in construction in Arizona and New Mexico. Nicky had the sense no one in Teresa’s family was in America legally.
“If somebody was holding your daughter prisoner,” Nicky said, “wouldn’t you want someone to help her?”
Teresa pretended not to hear the question.
“All I’m asking you to do,” Nicky said, “is tell the police I’m here. Tell them I’m being held here against my will. Make an anonymous call.”
Teresa was putting fresh towels in the bathroom and would not look at Nicky.
“Please? I’m begging you.”
Teresa finished her duties and left without saying another word. Later that day, Roberta came and had a little chat with Nicky.
“Never put the staff in that kind of position again,” Roberta said. “Anyway, the people who work for Mr. Pritkin are very loyal.”
Not loyal, Nicky thought. More like scared shitless.
That was when Nicky upped her strategizing about how she could, on her own, draw the police or the fire department to the Pritkin brownstone. She considered starting a fire in her room, but she didn’t have any matches or a lighter or even two sticks to rub together. There was a hair dryer in the bathroom, and one day Nicky tried to heat up some shredded toilet paper to the point that it would burst into flame, but had no success. Then she thought about stuffing towels into the drains of the tub or sink and opening up the taps. But what good would a flood do, beyond pissing off Jeremy and Roberta about all the water damage she’d cause?
The room had only that one window, about two feet square, that looked out to a brick wall across the narrow alley. Some view. And this was no cheap pane of glass, either. It was thick, and embedded with what looked like chicken wire, the kind of glass they used in doors in schools. So, breaking it wasn’t an option. And even if she could smash it, what then? Could she even fit through it? And if she could, did she think she was Spider-Man? Was she going to scale the wall down to street level?
One day, while standing by the glass and straining to get a glimpse of Seventieth Street, she happened to glance down at the iPad in her hand.
She was getting a weak Wi-Fi signal.
It had to be coming from behind the brick wall on the other side of the alley.
Oh my God, she thought. If I can piggyback onto that Wi-Fi I can get a message to someone.
The Wi-Fi was tagged LOLITASPLACE. Someone named Lolita, Nicky guessed—duh—was right across the way there, behind that wall. The only problem was, Nicky needed a password to get onto Lolita’s network.
Well, gee, how hard could that be?
She tried the obvious passwords that people too stupid to remember them used. Like PASSWORD, or ABCDEFG, or 123456789, or, given that this was Lolita’s Wi-Fi, LOLITASWIFI, and LOLITASPAD. Nicky must have tried more than a hundred variations over the next couple of hours.
No joy.
“Shit, shit, shit,” she said to herself. She was about to give up when she decided to give it one more shot.
She typed in ATILOL. The name of the presumed occupant, spelled backward.
The password was accepted.
“Yes!” Nicky shrieked under her breath.
She immediately opened up Safari, Googled the home page for the New York Police Department. There was an email address! But was this iPad set up for email? Not a problem. All Nicky had to do now was set one up. Gmail, or Hotmail. She could do that in seconds, then send an email to the NYPD and help would be on the—
The door to her room burst open.
Roberta strode in, her face aflame. She ripped the iPad from Nicky’s hands, tossed it onto the carpeted floor, then drove her four-inch heel into the screen—not once but three times—shattering it.
Nicky babbled, “I wasn’t doing anything! I was just—”
And that was when Roberta slapped her across the face. No, this was more than a slap. This was an open-handed punch, and it sent Nicky reeling. She threw out a hand to brace herself as she hit the floor.
“You think we don’t know?” Roberta shrieked. “You little fucking slut!”
Nicky was on her knees, struggling to stand, when Roberta hit her again. Not across the face, but the side of her head. Harder this time. Nicky saw stars as she landed on the carpet. She burst into tears, repeatedly shouted that she was sorry, begged Roberta to stop.
That was when she realized there had to be a camera somewhere in the room. They’d been watching her all this time. Seen her excitement when she piggybacked onto someone else’s Wi-Fi.
Through her tears, Nicky saw the door was still open, and standing there was Jeremy Pritkin.
Watching.
His face was blank. Not smiling, not laughing. No indication he enjoyed watching Roberta beat Nicky, but no expression of disapproval or disappointment, either. He watched impassively, the way someone might watch another person in an act as uneventful as vacuuming or reading a book.
Pritkin looked at Nicky as though she w
ere nothing.
Finally, he spoke.
“Roberta,” he said.
Roberta gave Nicky one last withering look, then turned and left. Nicky could hear, above her own whimpering, the sound of the door’s lock being driven home.
She could hear them talking in the hall.
Nicky crawled across the carpet until she reached the door, then leaned up against it. Maybe, if Roberta was in the hall, she wasn’t, at that moment, watching Nicky on some surveillance feed.
Roberta was saying, “… indefinitely … have to do something …”
And then Pritkin replying, “… limited number of people I trust do this kind of work … currently in the field.”
“… much longer?”
“… hope not … first thing as soon as they return.”
Their voices faded away as they walked down the hall.
So, Nicky thought, there really was only one way this could end. She found little comfort in the fact that she had called it right.
Thirty-Five
Fort Wayne, IN
It was pretty unbelievable.
Travis Roben had a girlfriend. Travis Roben had a goddamn girlfriend, and her name was Sandy, and she was a real, honest-to-God female of the human species. Not a picture in a magazine, not some blow-up doll, not a video on some pornographic website, but a living, breathing person.
They’d gone for that coffee after their initial meeting in the comic book store, where Sandy had sought advice about what to get for her twelve-year-old nephew. Sandy ordered a decaf cappuccino and a biscotti while Travis went for a plain old coffee with a ton of cream and half a dozen spoonfuls of sugar because he really had no idea what the difference was between what Sandy was getting and a latte and an Americano and all those fancy coffee drinks. The truth was, Travis mostly drank Mountain Dew, and his idea of a sophisticated snack was a Hostess Sno Ball.
And he’d made a huge social blunder right from the get-go—letting Sandy pay for her own drink. Stupid stupid stupid, he told himself once they’d sat down. Smooth move, idiot.
But if Sandy had been offended, she didn’t show it. She sat right down and started talking.
About herself.
Where she was from (Spokane) and what she had taken at school (veterinarian science) and what she hoped to do with her life (not, as it turned out, become a veterinarian but teach music) and how her parents moved to Fort Wayne when she was fifteen because her dad got transferred (he was with an insurance company) and how she moved out early because her parents were not getting along and were probably going to get a divorce (oh, well, what can you do, saw it coming for years) and that she had been going out with this guy who was big into sports (hockey, mostly) but she’d kind of had it with jock types because they were so into themselves and had no idea what was going on in the world and what about you?
Find You First Page 21