“What do you mean?”
“Her being a victim? Someone emptied her bank accounts?”
“Yes, I was there when she saw her accounts. She was surprised.”
“You don’t know her like I do,” Lauren said bitterly.
Emily shrugged. “Maybe neither of us knows her.”
Now, Emily exited the subway at Ninety-Sixty Street and Central Park West, carrying Skye in her stroller up the stairs. Emily put down the stroller on the sidewalk and followed behind a stream of commuters headed home to the tall apartment buildings in the area. Emily saw a voice mail notification on her phone that had come in while she was underground. A 718 area code.
“Emily, I was hoping to speak with you,” Kathleen said in her voice mail. “I’m on Rikers now. Thank you for coming to court. I probably won’t get another call until tomorrow. I hope you can forgive me … and understand.”
Emily hung up, sad, but angry too. She didn’t know whether she could forgive Kathleen or understand. Her mind kept going in circles, trying to sort Kathleen’s lies from the truth. Kathleen had told Emily a lot of truth about herself. The DA said she’d been convicted of manslaughter. Kathleen had said she had a daughter whom she’d neglected and lost. But Kathleen had lied constantly. She was sure Kathleen had catfished her. It had to be Kathleen, not a woman named Sophie, who had lied about going to NYU, who’d posted about parties she’d never been to, who’d heard about an apartment and a job at City Hall from friends who didn’t exist.
Emily hadn’t conceded any doubt to her mother, but she wasn’t so sure that Lauren was wrong about Kathleen. Normal people weren’t that stealthy. Emily didn’t know if she would ever trust Kathleen again.
Of course, arguably, the most important thing Kathleen had done as Sophie was make opportunities available to Emily—great opportunities. Which lent credibility to the idea that Kathleen had been doing her best in a bad situation, making contact secretly when she knew Lauren wouldn’t approve.
Emily felt a weird loyalty to Kathleen, despite all her lies. Maybe, as Lauren said, Kathleen wasn’t Emily’s battle, but Emily didn’t believe she could walk away and not look back. Kathleen was her grandmother, her only grandparent. Emily had to help her if she was truly innocent.
So she decided to do her own fact-checking. If she was going to keep putting her neck out for Kathleen, Kathleen had to be worth it.
With that conclusion, her next step was clear. She’d already been warned not to turn to her contacts at City Hall or NYPD for information. She couldn’t talk to the FDNY either. That left one person. And if there was anyone who could tell her whether Kathleen’s story made any sense, it would be Hector’s cousin, Tabu.
* * *
On West Ninety-Seventh Street, Emily entered an enclave of three large residential buildings surrounding lawns, a small playground, and a dog run, all hidden behind Whole Foods and the big-box stores of Columbus Avenue. She walked down an unnamed street that was little more than an alley leading to the buildings. The yapping and barking of dogs replaced the heavy truck noise on Columbus.
Skye began arching her back in the stroller, pointing at the dog run. “Out. I want to get out! I want to see Rusty!”
“Skye, Rusty will be back this weekend. Rusty isn’t there.”
Skye began hiccupping in tears. Oh, lord, a tantrum coming. Even Hector had noticed that Skye was far less placid than usual. Emily only hoped that Skye’s fixation on Rusty would relax when she saw him this weekend, and that Skye would relax overall.
Skye’s crying became louder. Emily bent down to unstrap Skye and picked her up. She stopped near the dog park and let her look over the fence at a labradoodle playing with a pit mix. Skye sniffled in her tears.
“Look, see, Rusty isn’t here. He’ll come to our house this weekend.” Emily put up three fingers. “In three days. Show me three fingers.”
Skye held up three fingers.
“Good girl. Now let’s go see Uncle Tabu.”
Emily returned to the path to one of the thirty-story buildings, Skye holding her hand. A giant sign running vertically up its side marketed the apartments as no-fee luxury rentals. Emily knew they had originally been built as middle-class housing, back when middle-class families could afford the area. Now, unless you’d been there for decades and had one of the few rent-regulated apartments, you paid luxury prices.
Tabu had lived there only a couple of years. Emily was glad that he was apparently doing better than before.
On the ninth floor, Tabu gave Emily a bear hug. Heavyset with a beige complexion, Tabu wore thick, chocolate-brown glasses, a new addition since she’d known him—probably the computer work screwing up his eyes.
“Skye. My baby!” he exclaimed.
“Uncle Tabu,” she said, and raised her arms for him to take her. Skye often saw Tabu when she was at Hector’s mother’s house. Thankfully, Skye wasn’t so clingy that she’d refuse to go to family members. It gave Emily hope that Skye would bounce back to normal, despite the trauma of the fire.
In Tabu’s arms, Skye launched into a monologue about Rusty. She held up three fingers. “Three days,” she said triumphantly.
“Good. I’d like to meet Rusty.”
Tabu led them into his modern living room. There was no sign of computer equipment, even though his parole restrictions had expired years ago. Through the living room window, Emily saw that his apartment overlooked the brown brick of the Douglass projects, where Tabu had lived with Hector and his family. Hector’s mother had raised Tabu after both his parents died of AIDS when he was twelve. He’d been a big brother to Hector and his sisters.
Tabu followed Emily’s gaze. “You can see Auntie’s apartment from here. Right there, ninth floor. The apple don’t fall far from the tree. But in this apartment, I’ve got my own bathroom, consistent AC, no roaches, no mice, no mold. I never have to walk up nine flights because the elevator is broken, and believe it or not, the gangs stay on their side of the street. They appreciate living in a housing project in a good part of town. They’re not looking to screw that up.”
It was one of the ironies of how Manhattan had changed since Emily was a kid. People felt safe enough to pay high prices for luxury apartments across the street from public housing projects. And the Douglass projects—smack in the center of a neighborhood where apartments sold for over a million dollars—was one of the safest projects in the city.
Emily looked around the living room, with its leather couch and low coffee table. A breakfast bar separated the living room from a small kitchen off to one side. “I like this place.”
Tabu gave a grudging nod. “It’s a step up from a room in Auntie’s house, now that I can work again.” He chuckled to himself. “And I can still keep an eye on the family. A win-win.”
Family was the most important thing for Tabu. He’d been a member of Anonymous until he’d gotten busted. He’d plea-bargained because he needed to help his aunt support her kids when she was having medical problems. After jail, he was barred from the internet for the term of his parole. After that, he’d joined a security consulting firm, all transgressions forgiven.
“So, Loli, what brings you?” Tabu sat, Skye sitting between them on the couch. “If you’re here for advice about Hector, my vote is you give my young cousin another chance. You guys are meant for each other.”
Emily grimaced, feigning annoyance. “I’m not Loli anymore.” Loli was hacker slang for an underage girl. He’d been calling her that since she was sixteen, clearly to annoy her when she was young. But now it had become a nostalgic routine.
“You will always be Loli to me,” Tabu said affectionately. “But come on, what gives?”
Emily took a deep breath. “Something weird is going on with my grandmother. I need help.”
He frowned. “I didn’t know you had a grandmother.”
“I only met her recently.”
He asked, deadpan, “She need help setting up her computer?”
“Come on.”
Tabu laughed. “Okay, I’m all ears.”
“Skye, come draw at the table,” Emily said as she pulled a pad of paper and a box of crayons from the stroller pocket. The other day, Skye’s head had popped up when Emily said the word kill to Lauren. Skye was starting to understand too much and needed a distraction.
“No,” Skye said, grabbing her. Emily could see the tears welling, Skye’s chest expanding before a crying jag.
“Wait a second.” Tabu pulled an iPad and headphones from a drawer in the coffee table. “Here you go.” He instantly thumbed on a preschool video game and slipped oversized headphones on Skye’s ears. Her eyes opened wide, and she poked at a cartoon character.
“So, what’s going on?” he asked.
Emily told Tabu about the fire and the withdrawals from Kathleen’s accounts. “Is there a way to find out if she was telling the truth about being hacked? The cops aren’t going to help. They just want her in jail because it solves their arson case. Plus, she has a criminal record, so it’s killing two birds for them.”
“I hear that.” Tabu thought it over. “If the key to proving motive in a major felony case is that she had no money and burned down the building for insurance, the cops would have checked the IP address and confirmed she was the one who withdrew the funds before they busted her.” He shook his head. “I don’t know, Em.”
Emily bit her lip, thinking it through. “But is there a way that it could be made to look like it came from her computer? I know that’s farfetched, but could someone take all the money out of her accounts and make it look like she did it? Not just by hacking her bank password, but by making it look like the transactions were done from her home computer?”
Tabu leaned back and crossed his legs, his ankle resting on his thigh. “There’s guys who can penetrate the Pentagon, so of course it could be done. There’s a process, opening her portal, taking her IP address, posing as her. Anyone doing that is a real player.”
Emily inhaled, feeling the weight of that idea.
“But here’s the problem with that theory. It’s easy to disguise your IP address when you hack someone’s account. Hackers could hide their identity if they wanted to steal from her and never get caught. They don’t need to go to all that trouble, making it look like the victim was withdrawing her own money, if their goal is to avoid getting caught. So, why would a hacker with those skills waste his time doing that to your grandmother? Sorry, Loli, but if the withdrawals were from her IP address, which odds are they were, she probably did it. I can’t see anyone going to that much effort. For what?”
Emily thought back to how surprised Kathleen had been when the police said her accounts were empty. “I don’t know. I would swear she didn’t know.”
“Bottom line, Em, it would need to be an exceedingly nefarious enemy for them to have the ways, means, and desire to do it.” Tabu pulled his glasses down his nose to look at Emily over the rim. “She’s not an enemy of Putin, is she?”
CHAPTER
43
THE MAN SAT in a leather swivel chair in the back of his Mercedes van. The interior of the van resembled a private jet. High ceilings. A bar with crystal glassware. Thick carpeting. The leather seats could recline into a bed as if he were flying cross-country. He watched York Avenue through smoked-glass windows that provided an excellent one-way view. One-way was how he liked things. The most powerful figures maintained their anonymity, keeping track of others without being seen while they moved their chess pieces around the board.
It was ironic that his own blood had nearly deep-sixed that. It was also ironic that Jackson had managed to take the hush money and do the proverbial double cross. Chutzpah, the Jews called it. Cajones in Spanish. He wondered how many languages had a word for that kind of crazy balls. His family could have coined their own term for it, the trait was so common for them.
Clearly, anger had fueled Jackson in a way that greed never could. He’d had a score to settle.
The moment Jackson pulled the stunt of the century, the man had known the answer to “nature or nurture.” The need for control. The complexity of their minds. The knowledge that no one and nothing mattered more than making sure they got what they wanted. Jackson had the gene.
The nurture part that Jackson lacked was the sense of righteousness of a born-and-bred aristocrat. Jackson had been self-righteous in the whiny way of someone who lacked a complete certainty of his right to the things he demanded. Jackson had also killed himself for revenge. That was absurd; it would not have happened had he been raised to lead. Even Osama bin Laden, born to Saudi wealth, had made sure he sent other people on the suicide missions. No martyr-in-heaven bullshit for Osama, at least not on purpose. That was the memo Jackson missed.
Jackson clearly had a deep-seated inferiority complex that the man supposed resulted from the lack of a support system of others like him. Jackson hadn’t had anyone to tell him he was not only okay but superior, born to lead.
The man toggled between an all-consuming rage at what Jackson had done and a grudging respect for his ability to send a royal “fuck you.” Jackson couldn’t be part of the family, so he’d tried to blow the whole family up, figuratively speaking. The man could imagine how Jackson must have gotten stuck on the siblings and cousins he couldn’t meet once he signed the NDA and the prominent name he would never have. Of course, he could never have been allowed to stake a claim. The men of the family had a long history of rejecting love children. Paying them off was a newish phenomenon. There’d been a time when they’d sold them off. Throughout history, the bastard children had known their place.
The man was sure nothing less than a prince’s throne would have satisfied Jackson anyway. That was also a family trait. Marital problems were only one of many things that would have resulted from the secret of Jackson coming out. His siblings would have launched an internecine war. Lacking his gene, Jackson’s sister and brother were far too close to their mother, and the family’s tax evasion strategies—putting assets in the children’s names to avoid inheritance tax—would have boomeranged unacceptably on the family. But more than that, Jackson hadn’t received the proper training. He hadn’t been raised to make good use of his gift, and he hadn’t internalized the golden rule that went with it: always put the family first. There was just no guarantee he’d toe the line in times of trouble.
But now the entire family was on the line. If their connection to him ever came out, Jackson’s generation—his siblings and cousins—would be unwelcome at the drunken parties of their friends in the Hamptons. Even their Adderall dealers would cut them loose if they were the family of a terrorist. Worse still, the next generation up could kiss all their board memberships good-bye, those high-paying corporate positions bestowed upon them fresh out of school due to their family wealth and power. The family trust would keep them all fed and clothed, but not nearly in the style to which they were accustomed—especially not the children and grandchildren who came after wealth creation ceased. And for those who’d entered politics, or hoped to, which had a key role in the family’s power, that path would be as dead as Jackson’s victims. No politician would be able to accept their donations. They wouldn’t be welcome to lick envelopes for a campaign. And they certainly wouldn’t be able to run for office themselves.
The family could trace its ancestors back to twelfth-century England. Since that time, public relations specialists—at first, monks in robes—had kept the lurid details of their embarrassing family chapters from coming to light. But in the age of the internet, Jackson’s stain on the family’s reputation would make its brutal, slave-owning history pale in comparison. And, no doubt, that dark history would also be pulled into the public spotlight. They lived in an era when the lowliest members of society could send a viral tweet. That created incentive for any random asshole to dig deeper into their family history, a bread crumb trail of buried scandals spanning nine hundred years.
Still, he wasn’t overly concerned. If there was one piece of wisdom to take away
from Game of Thrones, it was that you weren’t truly rich unless you were rich with an army. And he had an army.
He saw the lawn and outline of Gracie Mansion ahead and rested his eye on the security officer who rode alongside him. Burly, moustached, an ex-cop. There were few retired cops or former military too proud to receive a generous pension supplement. Add to them mercenaries on sabbatical from private wars and the family’s hackers. And the family didn’t accept just anyone on its payroll. Full background checks on those recruited ensured they’d have something more than money on the line if they ever strayed from the path. That had been the key mistake made with Jackson—thinking money would be enough to control him. Jackson’s veins ran with pure ruthlessness, without anyone to rein him in.
A half block from Gracie Mansion, waiting for a traffic light to change, the man gave the ex-cop a slow smile. He noted the other man’s faraway eyes, probably counting Bitcoin in his head, imagining the piles of it accumulating in his dark-web account.
“So, how’d it go in court?”
The ex-cop straightened from a slouch. “A hundred grand and an ankle bracelet.”
“And if she gets out?”
“We’re already in the computers at Probation. What Probation sees, we’ll see. We’ll handle it. I doubt she’ll be getting out, though. Yesterday, a contractor who was doing work in her building hit it with a mechanic’s lien. So the title’s not free and clear for collateral.” The ex-cop smiled slyly. “A coincidence. It will take her a while to get past that. She has no other assets.”
The man looked the ex-cop in the eyes, getting a charge out of imagining Kathleen Harris’s face when she learned that she lacked assets to bail herself out. Rikers was a hellhole. Like a cat with catnip, he rolled around in the thought of her suffering there.
Kathleen Harris had lit his self-protective flame. Hatred heated and rose in his gorge whenever anyone had even a scintilla of power to hurt him. And, once lit, there was only one way to put the flame out. Kathleen Harris had become his newest project. His obsession. He would destroy her. He could barely keep from doing it himself. Yet there were rules: on U.S. soil, the army had to do the work. The most he could do was call the shots, a rousing game of high-stakes fantasy football.
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