“You could’ve read that in the paper.”
Ian closed his eyes, pulling together the dream impressions. “You found me beside the pool the day of the funeral—your sister’s funeral. You asked me who’d brought me. I followed you into a bedroom, where Jimmy and Rory and Sean Callahan and my mother were. Jimmy Doyle told you there wouldn’t be a distribution, but the money would go into a trust.”
“Who told you all that?” Ed’s voice was suddenly stronger.
“Some I remember. Some Rory and Sean told me,” Ian lied.
The old man shook his head as much as the tubes would allow. “I’ve still got nothin’ to say.”
Ian felt his patience give way. “Listen, Ed, I’ve been told my dad wasn’t involved with the Doyle family until years after the art theft happened. All I want is a confirmation if that’s true. Just tell me—was my dad there the night of the art theft?”
Ed squinted at Ian, as though to read his face. “That’s it?” he asked quietly.
“Yes.”
Another pause. “Okay. If there was any kind of art job, and I’m not saying there was, your dad wasn’t there that night.”
Even hearing it a second time, Ian still couldn’t believe it. “That’s the truth? He wasn’t there?”
Ed nodded. “That’s right.”
“Then why was my dad entitled to a share of the money if he wasn’t there?”
The old man’s chin came up. “You want to know why he was entitled to his share of the money?” McMartin let out a loud laugh, followed by a groan of pain and a low hacking cough. “If you really don’t know, I suggest you ask your mother,” he gasped out.
“Ed,” Ian said, his voice softening, “in case you haven’t heard, my mom—Martha—has Alzheimer’s. She can’t tell me. And what’s it matter at this point anyway? No matter what you tell me, the trust is supposed to get distributed in two days. I only get my fee if I meet that deadline. What’s the harm in letting me know a few facts about my own parents? Who’d be hurt by that?”
The old man shook his head. “Me, if Callahan ever found out. The Keeper of Family Secrets.” Ed closed his eyes. “All that money you’re gonna hand out—it’s no use to me. When Doreen was alive, well . . .” His voice drifted off.
Ian was wondering if he’d gone to sleep when Ed opened his eyes again. “Okay,” he said in resignation. “Fine. Forget about Callahan. What can he do to me now? And it looks like I won’t be rid of you until I say something. So I’ll tell you a little family history. The rest you can figure out from there.”
Ed looked at Ian again, his eyes hinting at guilty pleasure, like he was about to say something he’d been wanting to say for a long time.
“The man you’re really working for here? The guy who decided what shares got handed out and who got ’em? Well, the joke’s on you, kid. ’Cause that man, Jimmy Doyle, was Martha’s father. Which makes him your grandfather. Grandpa Jimmy, the low-life scum who had the guts to let his illegitimate daughter and her punk kid come to his own wife’s funeral.”
40
MONDAY, JUNE 11
11:20 P.M.
PORT ST. LUCIE, FLORIDA
Ed McMartin’s house, like the neighborhood around it, was drenched in a damp darkness. Covered with perspiration, Ian stared through his open car window, hearing McMartin’s words resonate in his ears.
Ian Wells. Martha Wells. Connor Wells. None of them were the same people they’d been that morning. In the space of a few sentences, Ed McMartin had shredded Ian’s identity and his memories of his parents forever, leaving him to try to reinterpret his life in a matter of hours.
At first, he’d tried to tell himself it was all a lie. Harry Christensen once said that if you were listening honestly, the truth was always on key; even good lies were a little off pitch. Ed McMartin might have spent a lifetime lying—even lying up to the minute he told Ian the news—but he’d delivered the note about Jimmy Doyle and his mother perfectly.
If it wasn’t a lie, then it was the truth—which sounded obvious, but carried so much more weight. He truly was Jimmy Doyle’s grandson. The grandson of a murderer and a thief.
Ian stared numbly into the dark. So why had he come back here? Even if it was true, what was he looking for?
He pulled out his new cellphone and played the voicemail again. “Ian,” Brook said in her recent message to him, “I got a call from Chloe. Apparently she’s taking our new friendship seriously. She said Eldon’s got her preparing the new warrants today. They’ll go to the judge in the morning. They could be executing them by tomorrow afternoon. Call me when you get a chance so we can talk this over.”
Ian didn’t need to talk anything over; he knew what it meant. By the end of the day tomorrow, the prosecutor’s office would see bank records showing nine million dollars coming in and out of his client account in less than a week. Which meant they’d be coming to arrest him by nightfall. And his mother, the loose end, would be all alone and unprotected when Sean Callahan came to silence her. And then there was Katie who was involved now too.
It ought to have been devastating to contemplate. It would be when he got past this place. But he needed to do something here before he could even begin to grapple with it.
He couldn’t take his eyes off the house.
Ian got out of the car and walked to the front door. It was locked, just as he’d expected. A few houses along the street had their lights on, revealing front lawns. Not McMartin’s house. The housecleaner obviously didn’t live there. The place was dark, as silent as a tomb.
He walked around the house. A pool extended into a backyard topped by a mesh roof and enclosed by adobe-like walls with windows chest-high. He saw no wires that would indicate a security system, and no security warning stickers on the windows or lawn.
Ian picked up a fist-sized stone bordering some bushes. Shedding his shirt, he wrapped the stone and then tapped hard on the nearest window glass. There was a cracking sound. He pulled the broken glass apart carefully, dropping the pieces to the grass at his feet. Shaking out his shirt, he put it back on and cleared the last shards from the window edges before climbing through.
The pool glimmered turquoise in the starlight coming through the mesh roof. A sliding glass door separated the pool from the interior of the house, where he could see a black grand piano. Ian circled the water, the faint chlorine smell tickling his nostrils, and went in the door.
A switch was on one side of the door. He reached for it—then stopped. That would be foolish. Instead he crossed the living room in the dark.
On the far end was a short hallway. He took it to a single door. There he paused for a moment before reaching for the knob.
The bedroom inside was lit by a night-light plugged into the far wall. He wanted it to seem familiar, to tap into his dream memories. Except the room was too generic for that. A bed extended into its middle. A chair bordered the wall to his left. There was a window in the far corner. All resonated vaguely. But it could have been one of a thousand bedrooms in a thousand homes.
Ian backed into the hall, then returned to the living room. If his dreams were correct, there should be another hall and room. He walked across the living room and found a second hallway that led to another solitary door.
He opened it and entered. No night-light here. Windows on one side of the room were covered in a closed sash. He chanced turning on a lamp on a desk.
Ian started as the room came alive in light.
The walls were covered in children’s wallpaper, festooned with whales and dolphins from floor to ceiling. Bamboo furniture rested on thick shag carpet: a desk, two dressers, a chair. His sense of familiarity gained strength.
On the far side of the room was a wide closet. Ian went to the closet and pulled its double doors apart. The pungent odor of mothballs hit him squarely in the face. Inside, suits and dresses hung neatly from a single rod. Beneath were stacks of shoe boxes.
Ian separated the suits, revealing a white wall above the shoe box
es. Reaching out a hand, he ran his fingers along the dark wood of the closet wall about the height of his waist.
His fingertip grazed a small gap.
And he knew. He knew why he was here. He’d come back after Ed’s announcement to see his grandfather again. Through this spy hole. Like he’d seen him the last and only other time in his life, apart from the funeral. Standing here, in the dark.
Ian crossed to the desk and turned out the lamp, making it like it had been that night. Returning to the closet, he felt for the crack again, then knelt and pressed his eye against it.
He could see the dimly lit bedroom beyond once more. For a moment it was the same nondescript place but seen from a different angle. Spare and empty.
Except images began to trickle back to him. Fuller images than his dreams. Rory Doyle sitting on the single bed, his head bowed. His mother talking with Jimmy Doyle about Connor creating the trust. Discussion of a single painting that remained to be sold—and the old man demanding that, as a price for their refusal of a full share, Martha and Connor keep it for him until it was sold, insisting that no one else would know. The scene, moments later, when his mother was gone and it was Callahan standing beside the old man and promising not to hurt Rory. Then Callahan smiling as Jimmy Doyle elicited no similar promises about Martha and Connor Wells.
Ian focused on the impressions of the old man with the outdated hat. A man who’d led a crew into an art gallery thirty-five years before in a job that killed a security guard. Led his own son, young Rory, on that job. What kind of monster did something like that to his own child?
The kind of monster who then coolly and patiently sold the paintings over decades to maximize their value. Stringing everybody along to suit his timetable and keep law enforcement in the dark. Holding on to the money into his grave and then, with the trust that Connor created, even beyond.
He refused to believe he was related to that man; he just happened to share his genes.
Ian allowed his gaze to drift down the bedspread in the night-light’s glow just as he had in his dream. It reached the line where the bedspread touched the floor.
And the dark room was gone.
He wasn’t looking into the room of his memories anymore. He was there. He could feel the beating of his young heart like an accelerating metronome in his chest, could feel the thin wall cold against his eye socket. His breath was racing from his nose so loud they should have been able to hear it in the adjacent room. The girl who’d brought him here was still standing somewhere just behind him in the study, watching.
He saw again what he’d seen then, but could not recall in his dream. It was sticking out from under the bedspread, splayed on the carpet invisible to Callahan and Jimmy Doyle, who stood a few feet away on the far side of the bed.
Four small fingers. The fingers of a child’s hand.
Ian was pulling back from the spy hole again as he had that day, looking for the girl who could explain who was under the bed and had been all the time. Then he was tripping once more over the boxes at his feet and falling noisily to the closet floor. Trying desperately to rise amid the cardboard and disgorged shoes as the room lights came on.
Staring at shiny black wingtips, silk socks, and under-cuffed pant legs.
A powerful hand was wrenching him into the air and dropping him hard onto his own trembling legs.
“What a curious, tenacious little rat ya are,” Callahan was saying in a harsh Irish brogue, bent over and speaking only inches from Ian’s face. Spittle pooled at the corners of the man’s twisted mouth, his face red with anger. “Listening to things we shouldn’t be hearing again, are we?”
Ian couldn’t speak, any more than if the Irishman’s hand was crushing his throat instead of his shoulder.
“I don’t know how long ya were standing there, boy,” Callahan said, “or if ya understood a word of it, but let me be very clear. If ya ever breathe a word of what ya heard today, I will slit your mother’s throat from ear to ear in front of ya. And there’s not a single thing in the universe ya could do to stop me. Do we understand, little Master? Do ya believe me?”
Ian was nodding his quivering head.
“You will forget it all. Every syllable. Every gesture. Every word.”
Ian kept nodding.
Sean Callahan’s expression transformed to disgust. “Your family’s been a curse on Jimmy Doyle and always will be. The mistake that won’t go away. Ed was right. Ya shouldn’t be here at all, stainin’ Christina’s memory with your presence. And don’t think that pathetic man your mother married can protect ya—’cause he can’t. Nobody can save ya or that unholy mistake of your mother if this gets out.”
Callahan released him and stomped from the room. Alone once more, Ian looked down at the dark staining the carpet beneath his feet. No tears would gather in his eyes. No sound would come from his throat. Only a shudder that took the whole of his body—and the certainty that, as commanded, he would forget.
The images fled. Ian was kneeling in the darkened closet again, looking through a small hole into an empty bedroom lit only by a night-light. The shame, terror, and confusion of the memories left him weak and drained, as if he were waking from an overpowering nightmare. All he wanted was to return to his car and begin the journey home. Get back to Brook. Back to a mother he would, now more than ever, protect from Sean Callahan and the whole world if necessary.
Ian began to lean back when a figure stepped into the doorway of the bedroom opposite the spy hole. It appeared so suddenly—then disappeared so quickly—that he barely had time to register what he’d seen. Dark clothes. A hoodie. A face too indistinct to make out. And the glint of the night-light’s faint beam off something metallic in the figure’s left hand.
He stood. Sounds of movement traced a path in the living room, approaching.
He scanned the study. The only door was the one he’d entered through. The only windows were above the desk, covered by the sash.
The footsteps neared the study door. Ian stepped backward within the closet, away from its open doors. He slid several suits and dresses around his shoulder and into the gap he’d made in front of the spy hole.
The footsteps were in the room. They walked to the middle and stopped.
Ian held his breath and counted the seconds. Nine. Ten.
The steps retreated toward the study door, stopped and turned again.
This time they came fully up to the closet. The mass of clothing Ian had pushed around him was shoved hard, back into his chest. He could hear heavy breathing as the figure crouched.
Whoever it was, the person was looking through the spy hole.
Ian focused on remaining still. Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. His lungs began to ache. He imagined himself crashing through the clothing, down on the person . . .
Twenty-nine. Thirty.
The figure stood. Slowly retreated from the closet. Left the room.
Ian took a careful gulp of air. Then it struck him: the person knew he was here somewhere, had seen his car, and wouldn’t be leaving until Ian was found.
He slid aside the clothing and left the closet. The study door was still open. Ian walked softly to it, leaned down, and examined it. The door had a pressure lock.
He gently closed the door, pressing the lock into place. Stepping to the windows, he pulled on the nearest sash cord as though it held a bell he didn’t want to ring. He watched the sash rise slowly toward the ceiling.
It reached the top. Ian pulled the cord to the side to secure it. He let it go.
The sash came tumbling down.
A grunt of recognition came from the direction of the pool. The sound of footsteps began approaching rapidly, into the living room toward him again.
Ian tore the sash aside, feeling for the lock atop the window. He caught it and flipped it open. With both hands he threw the window up and then leaped through the light screen separating him from the outside air.
The screen popped free and he was falling. His shoulder hit the grassy gr
ound. He rolled—at the same moment he heard a thud on the study door he’d just locked.
Scrambling to his feet, Ian sprinted toward his car, fumbling for the keys in his pocket. Two more heavy thuds followed, and then he heard the study door smashing open.
He was nearly at the car door when he could make out sounds of someone fighting the sash. He was dropping into the driver’s seat when the first silenced shot registered with a different kind of thud against the bumper. A second slammed into the front quarter panel.
Ian started the engine and threw the car into reverse. He pushed the accelerator to the floor. The car roared backward in an uncontrolled weave, up the street and away from the house. Another bullet careened off the pavement where the car had been parked seconds before. A fourth hit the bumper again.
He twirled the wheel around and felt the rear tires leap the curb onto a darkened lawn. He quickly shifted into drive and stomped on the gas.
The car raced back over the curb onto the street again. He didn’t ease his foot from the accelerator until he was half a mile away.
41
TUESDAY, JUNE 12
2:47 P.M.
FEDERAL COURTHOUSE
DOWNTOWN MINNEAPOLIS
“And so, Your Honor,” Brook listened to herself saying, “we believe the evidence is clearly admissible, given that—”
“Inadmissible,” the judge interrupted.
“Your Honor?”
“Inadmissible. You said the evidence is ‘clearly admissible,’ but you meant the opposite. You are arguing on behalf of the United States, aren’t you? As opposed to the accused?”
She looked down at her papers a thousand yards away. “Of course, Your Honor. Inadmissible.”
The remainder of the argument passed in the same blur. The absence of questions from the usually voluble Judge Fitzsimmons was the clearest sign he viewed her as impaired this afternoon and was inclined to cut her some slack.
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