“I think Rusty smells explosives,” Emily hissed.
As if on cue, Rusty began growling, his hackles rising. He sensed a threat now. Enough of a threat to break his training.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” Emily said, moving to help Kathleen up from the couch. “Rusty knows something. We’re getting out of here, now! Whoever Max hired probably knows they can get both of us here. We can’t wait for Carl.”
Rusty was growling, backing up from the door now.
Kathleen grimaced in pain as Emily helped her up. “We can take the stairs to the basement and go out the back.”
Rusty started barking at the door. He came back to stand in front of Emily, as if he were protecting her. He was whining toward the door again.
“I think we’re too late for the stairs,” Emily said.
“Call Carl!”
Emily looked at Rusty. “After. I think we need to go now.”
Kathleen pointed to the living room window. “The fire escape.”
Emily pulled the window open, no gate covering it. “What about Rusty?” Emily asked, her heart hammering inside her rib cage. “We can’t leave him.”
“Just help me get out the window. I can make it down the stairs myself,” Kathleen said, taking Emily’s hand. She grunted with pain and climbed out.
Grateful for every bit of deadlifting she’d done in the gym, Emily bent her knees and crouched low to pick up the seventy-pound dog. Rusty quieted now, calmly allowing himself to be moved. If he were any other dog, squirming and anxious, Emily didn’t think she’d have been able to do it. But it seemed Rusty was finally satisfied he’d been heard. Emily staggered to the window and lowered herself to sit sideways on the sill, ready to swing her leg over. But Rusty scampered out of her arms and half jumped, half fell onto the fire escape grating. He righted himself and scrambled to his feet.
Emily scanned the living room before she left. “Where’s my phone? Shit! Start down, Kathleen. I need to get my phone.” She needed to stay in contact with Carl.
“No, come now!”
Ignoring Kathleen’s objection, Emily ran a few steps back into the living room. She saw her phone on the dining room table and ran to grab it.
She heard a sound at the front door, a scrape. She paused, frozen. Someone was definitely there, and they weren’t ringing the bell.
* * *
Max leaned his backpack against the door to Kathleen’s apartment. It was ironic that he’d brought a bomb much like Jackson’s, powerful enough to obliterate several apartments. He’d always had a thing for fire and explosives. Like cousin, like cousin. He grabbed the burner phone from his pocket that would trigger the explosives.
He felt a moment of great peace, knowing he would be rid of all the complications in his life in the next few seconds. He imagined Jackson had felt that way too—except Max had no intention of dying for the cause. He had big plans for his life, something Jackson had obviously lacked or hadn’t cared enough about.
Max flipped open the cheap cell phone, ready to set the timer for forty seconds and double-time it to the stairs.
He heard a woman’s voice shout behind him, “Drop it, motherfucker! I’ll fucking kill you!”
Shit.
He glanced over his shoulder. A woman, red-faced, breathing hard. Gun out, pointed at him in a two-handed grip. Her rigid arms quivered slightly with adrenaline. Before he could fully analyze how he would handle the interruption, the stairwell door opened farther down the hall, behind her.
“FBI. Turn around. Hands up! Hands up! Put down your weapon!”
Max froze. Jesus Christ. Not looking at the cops, keeping his eyes on the apartment door with his back to them, Max heard them approach, the rustling of their clothes, weapons rising.
The woman shouted behind her at the voices, “I’m Lauren Cintron! My daughter is in there!” Her weapon clattered dully to the carpet, tossed away from her.
“Get on the ground, hands out.”
Max didn’t know whether they were talking to him or Lauren, probably both. His mind flipped through the options in an instant, his thinking preternaturally keen.
Go out like a boss with a bang? Ignite the explosives? No. He’d been saved by the family in the past. He didn’t need to die here. If he surrendered now, he pictured house arrest in the Hamptons, awaiting trial for the explosives he possessed. The charges might even be watered down to harassment. If not, he could still escape. A private jet would whisk him away to an island paradise beyond the reach of extradition. The family owned several islands of the sort. He’d made a big tactical mistake. But he did not want to die. The family would take care of this.
He looked over his shoulder at the FBI agents now. Men and women were running the long hallway toward him, spit-shouting with guns pointed at him, “Hands up, hands up!”
Lauren was crawling backward, scrambling toward the line of cops.
Max raised his hands. Turned. He saw the barrels of their guns, then their faces. A familiar face was in the crowd of agents. A tall man with glasses. He met Max’s gaze. Max felt a moment of relief, as if he were receiving a message from his family: everything would be all right. The tall agent was one of theirs.
A flash from the tall agent’s gun. An earsplitting blast. Heat seared and ripped Max’s belly. He jolted backward, flying off his feet, his back banging against the door. He looked in the direction of the tall agent.
One of the other agents, a Black man, yelled at the tall man, “What the fuck?”
Max couldn’t hear it through his ringing ears, but he could see the agent’s words leave his lips.
Max fell, realizing as he hit the floor that he wouldn’t make it out of this hallway. Blood spurted from a gaping chasm in his torso. Pain surged through him in waves. But he still gripped the phone in his fist. They didn’t know he was armed, didn’t know his backpack was a bomb.
Go out like a boss. While he still had the chance, he pressed the call button with his thumb, bypassing the timer.
The backpack exploded, incinerating Max and blowing through the apartment door in a ball of roaring fire.
CHAPTER
73
LAUREN FELT HANDS on her, helping her up. She heard muffled voices talking to her. She made her way silently downstairs, ears ringing, dizzy, confused, dimly aware of arms around her, guiding her. Her head and chest ached from the force of the explosion. She breathed in the smell of her own singed hair. The skin of her hands pulsed. Burned.
As the fog in her head dispersed ever so slightly, the noise in her head became louder: Emily. Oh god. Emily!
Carl’s partner, Rick, was with her. They were walking through the lobby. He was talking to the other agents. “She’s Carl Cintron’s wife.”
The agents knew Lauren’s daughter and mother were the targets. An agent walked by holding a plastic bag with Lauren’s gun.
Lauren’s mind came into focus, the words bursting out of her. “Emily.” She grabbed Rick, sobbing. “Where is she?”
Sirens wailed in the distance, coming closer. Police cars. Ambulances. Fire trucks.
Rick tried to calm her. “Carl’s on his way, Lauren. He’ll be here in a minute.”
“Oh no, oh no,” she keened. Rick’s response sounded like confirmation that Emily and Kathleen were dead. Her legs buckled. Rick and his new partner held her up and led her outside.
A blaring fire truck appeared, stopping in front of the building as Lauren and the two agents entered the fresh air. Firefighters jumped out. Unmarked police cars and SWAT trucks screeched to a halt, filling the block at angles. Their lights strobed the street packed with emergency personnel. Onlookers had begun to gather and mill around among the first responders, as no perimeter had yet been set up by the cops.
Smoke hovered over the top of the building. Lauren’s vision was narrow and dark with dread and shock, and she panted with panic. Rick and his new partner each had an arm around her waist to keep her walking toward an ambulance, her hands held out in front of her, r
ed and blistering.
On the sidewalk, cops ran by. They formed a line facing the milling crowd, shouting for onlookers to step back from the sidewalk, to let the firefighters work. The crowd backed up.
“You’ll have to wait,” a cop said to an Orthodox man who was trying to get around the barricade, calling out toward the building in frantic Yiddish.
Lauren pulled herself away from Rick and his partner. Her eyes blurred with tears, she turned 360 degrees, scanning the crowd for Emily and Kathleen. Tenants were streaming out the front door of the building, mostly mothers and children. One group ran to the Orthodox man, who embraced them and picked up a toddler. Emily and Kathleen weren’t there.
“No, no, no.” Lauren replayed the blast in her mind, the apartment door blown away, the fireball, the man’s body consumed. Had that happened to Emily? Her cry came from deep in her belly: “No.”
“Come on, Lauren.” Rick took her arm again, trying to steer her toward an ambulance attendant who was approaching them with a wheelchair.
Lauren was about to go with them when she saw, out of the corner of her eye, a shadow moving on the sidewalk. She froze. A dog. Her eyes focused on him, ten yards away. No leash. Covered with soot.
“Rusty! Rusty!” she called, her eyes searching around frantically. Moving toward him, Lauren shouted again, “Rusty!”
Rusty stopped. He turned back and took a few steps toward the side of the building, where an alley separated it from the brick wall of the next building. A group of EMS workers were waiting on the sidewalk there for clearance to go inside the building to retrieve any injured. Lauren ran to follow the dog.
A woman came around from behind the crowd of EMS workers. Lauren took in the sling on the woman’s arm. Her head was bandaged. Kathleen. Rusty ran toward Kathleen but kept going, passing her. Emily emerged from the alley behind Kathleen. Rusty fell in beside Emily, and she put her hand on his head.
Kathleen, Emily, and Rusty, all three covered in soot, walked toward Lauren.
CHAPTER
74
A WEEK AFTER THE explosion, Emily and Kathleen walked furtively, following Hector through the labyrinthine basement of Lauren’s building. They passed a laundry room and reached a metal door under a red exit sign.
Hector opened the door and peered out. “All clear.”
It was nighttime. They took dimly lit garden paths behind the apartment complex, scurrying from the cover of Lauren’s building to the cover of the next. Emily glimpsed news vans still parked out front on Cabrini Boulevard. The reporters were waiting for a chance to see Emily. She’d been holed up, unable to go anywhere after the news had hit the internet about Max’s motives for blowing up the Airbnb and trying to kill her and her grandmother. The media loved the story. It had trended on Twitter for days, under #LoveBomber.
Emily could barely believe it when she watched the FBI’s New York director announce that Max, a young billionaire and member of a powerful family, had become dangerously obsessed with her. The director had told reporters, “Max Dawson also became fixated on the influence Emily Silverman’s grandmother had on her. Dawson hired a foreign mercenary to set Kathleen and Emily’s building on fire and made multiple attempts to assassinate them.”
Kathleen’s criminal case had been dismissed, although the police hadn’t yet caught the actual arsonist or the shooter. The police said Max had been in contact with a Russian hacker, who they believed had drained Kathleen’s bank accounts. Unfortunately, it was doubtful Kathleen would ever get her money back. She and Emily might never get their old life back either.
The case had been wrapped up with a neat bow. Within twenty-four hours of Max’s death, his family had released a statement about him being off his bipolar meds. The family spoke to the police about his troubled past—harming pets and obsessing over girls who weren’t interested in him. The family thought he’d improved after reaching adulthood, but he’d only become adept at covering up his conduct. They’d issued an apology to all those harmed and announced that they would compensate the injured, as well as Kathleen, the tenants of her building, and the Airbnb owner and two of his neighbors whose apartments had been destroyed. Thankfully, no one had suffered permanent injuries in the explosion.
Every time the media mentioned Max’s family, they were described as “a well-known philanthropic family.” The media treated them as Max’s victims too—undoubtedly their PR team at work.
There had been no public report about a connection between Max and Sharon’s or Wayne’s death, or Max’s connection to Jackson Mattingly, although Kathleen and Emily had both told the FBI what they’d learned. The hospital bracelets had been destroyed in the explosion.
Carl’s car was double-parked on Cabrini Boulevard in an amber puddle of streetlight, a block south of Lauren’s building. Carl was in the driver’s seat and Lauren rode shotgun, her hands covered with bandages. She had second-degree burns that would heal. Her hair had burned on one side of her head too, so she’d gotten it cut short into what Emily playfully called a Jewfro.
Kathleen, Emily, and Hector piled into the back seat. Emily and Kathleen ducked down when they passed the gaggle of reporters gathered outside Lauren’s apartment building on the one-way street. Lauren had signed a one-year lease for a new temporary apartment, having to use her name to avoid the landlord leaking that it was Kathleen and Emily who would be living there. They were headed there now, trying to keep the location a secret.
Hector had brought Skye to his mother earlier, keeping her away in case they failed in their attempt to get Emily and Kathleen out unnoticed. He would bring her and Rusty to the new apartment afterward. Hopefully, by the time Kathleen and Emily returned to Kathleen’s building after the renovation, the media would have mostly forgotten about them.
“When will the FBI talk about Max’s relationship to Jackson Mattingly?” Emily asked Carl, frustrated that the FBI had focused on Max’s crush on her and ignored that he was probably a serial killer. Carl had been working overtime since the explosion, and she’d barely had a chance to see him. “They were first cousins.”
“I don’t know what the Bureau is looking at,” Carl said. “There’s a cone of silence around me, standard operating procedure when an agent has a personal connection to people involved in a case. I’ve got to believe they’re still looking at it.”
“There are threads on Reddit questioning why an FBI agent shot Max,” Hector said. “They’re saying Max had a secret that someone didn’t want revealed.”
“I’m sure there’s a thread on Reddit for every police-involved shooting,” Carl insisted. “Max was shot by accident by a hyperactive agent who got ahead of himself. Besides, with the hospital bracelets incinerated, there’s no proof that Sharon was Jackson’s mother. And even if there was, it wouldn’t prove that Roger Merritt was his father.”
“The FBI would need probable cause and a judge to sign a warrant to get a DNA test on Roger,” Lauren added.
“A DNA test that showed Jackson and Max were first cousins would prove Max’s real motive to hire someone to kill Sharon, Wayne, and us,” Emily insisted. “The cops may not believe Wayne was murdered, but Sharon’s murder is still unsolved.”
“Maybe they checked, and Roger wasn’t the father after all,” Carl said. “Then the two wouldn’t be cousins. I mean, no offense, but Sharon was a prostitute.”
“I don’t believe she was having sex with anyone but Roger during that time,” Kathleen said. “Of course, nobody would pay attention to a madam’s character reference for a prostitute.”
Over the last several days, Kathleen and Carl had warmed up a lot toward each other. To Emily’s relief, Kathleen’s relationship with Lauren was beginning to thaw too. They’d barely argued during the time Kathleen and Emily had been holed up in Lauren and Carl’s apartment.
Lauren looked back at Emily. “You told the FBI our theory about a motive. It’s over. Just remember, you can’t publicly accuse Roger of fathering Jackson Mattingly. He wasn’t the one who t
ried to kill any of you, so there’s no reason to push it. The legal fees from Roger’s defamation suits would wipe us out.”
“I agree with your mother on this one,” Kathleen said. “Roger may have arranged a very coldhearted adoption, but it’s not as if he sold the boy to a sex slavery ring. Jackson Mattingly was adopted by a perfectly normal family that wanted him. Roger doesn’t deserve to be marked for life because of what Jackson or Max did, and Max is dead, so how important is it to tie Max to Sharon’s death?”
Carl steered the car onto the Henry Hudson Parkway, which would bring them to their new apartment near Inwood Hill Park.
“Okay, I get it.” Emily leaned into Hector, who put his arm around her shoulders. She covered his hand with hers. “I’m just glad it’s over.”
CHAPTER
75
A MID A STATELY group of black-clad mourners, Roger walked from the burial site toward a line of SUVs, limos, and luxury vans. It had been a quiet service attended by close family who would mourn Max no matter what he’d done … or what they’d done to him.
Their family had a history of men like Max. And Jackson. And him. Even those in the family who lacked the propensity or the gene, as they alternately called it, always knew the family’s power lay with those wily, ruthless ones: the income producers. So the brothers, sisters, and cousins nailed up the storm shutters and protected the gifted ones when they acted out.
Unless they couldn’t.
Times had changed. Video cameras everywhere. DNA evidence. It wasn’t so easy to cover things up when those with the gene lost control. It was the job of each generation’s gifted to groom the next, but it was hugely challenging to rein in the impulses of the young ones until they matured enough to strategically control themselves. Especially in the modern age. In the final analysis, no one person was more important than survival of the family.
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