The Second Son

by Martin Jay Weiss

  Agents Matz and Shu ran back to their car, not speaking a word until they were on the highway. Rufus Wall may have slipped away, but he didn’t leave with their real target: Stella Godeaux. She had to still be in the US. And their only hope was that she wouldn’t leave without their bait: Ethan Stone.

  Matz asked her digitally savvy protégé to check their own tracking device that was monitoring the GPS on Ethan’s phone. “Where is he now?”

  “He’s still at Sean McQueen’s home. Just sitting on his ass.”

  “Call him.”

  “What should I say?”

  “Ask him why he’s not looking for her.”

  Shu dialed Ethan’s phone. It rang four times until he got an answer. “H’llo?”

  “Why are you sitting on your ass?” Shu whined. “You’re wasting valuable time—”

  “You must be looking for Ethan,” Jack said. “This is his brother.”

  “Put him on. This is the FBI.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I…I don’t know.”

  Shu mumbled to Matz, “He’s not there.”

  “What do you mean he’s not there?” Matz asked.

  “What do you mean he’s not there?” Shu repeated.

  “He’s looking for his girlfriend.”

  “Without his phone?”

  “He left it here,” Jack said.

  Shu covered his mouthpiece and told Matz, “He left his phone there.”

  “Goddamnit! He must have known you put a tracking device in it… How the hell are we going to find him if he doesn’t have his phone?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am. Is that rhetorical?”

  “No, it’s a hemorrhage. Ask the brother where the hell he is now.”

  Shu asked Jack, “Where is he now?”

  Jack said, “No idea.”

  “Goddamnit!” Shu said. “Have him call us as soon as you hear from him. Or you call us. Call us from this phone…from his phone—”

  “He gets the point,” Matz said.

  “I’ll call you if I hear from him,” Jack agreed, “from this phone.”

  It’s true what they say about law enforcement: 10 percent shear fear, 90 percent boredom.

  Ergo, the agents spent the next hour in silence.

  —

  An hour later, Ethan’s phone rang again. Jack ran over and checked the caller ID.

  “It’s Emily Tak. She’s a programmer at Stalker.”

  “Go ahead, answer it,” Sean said.

  “Hey, Emily, it’s Jack.”

  There was a pause while Emily checked the number she had dialed. “Hey, killer.” Her voice was more ornery than usual.

  “It was self-defense,” Jack explained.

  “I know,” she said, without asking for him to elaborate. “I’m looking for Ethan.”

  “He’s not here, what’s up?”

  “Why are you answering his phone?”

  “He left it here.”

  “Where’s here?”

  “I’m in San Francisco.”

  “Working for the enemy,” Emily whispered, as if it were worse than killing a man. “I heard. Just have him call me as soon as he comes back.”

  “Okay.”

  “Wait!” Emily blurted.

  “I’m still here.”

  “Do you know where I can reach him now?”

  “You can’t,” Jack told her. “He doesn’t want anyone to know where he is.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s looking for Brooke. He thinks she’s in some kind of trouble, and he’s being tracked by his phone, this phone…so he left it here with me.”

  “That could be a trap,” she warned.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’ve got to find him. He’s in danger…oh God—!”

  The thought had crossed Jack’s mind, too. What if Brooke was setting Ethan up? Ethan, Sean, and Jack wanted Brooke to be innocent so badly that they all encouraged Ethan’s search for her, regardless of the risks. Without a phone, no one could get to him.

  “I understand your concern,” Jack said, “but I don’t know what to do about it now.”

  She burst out crying. “Bailey’s dead!”

  Jack went silent.

  “He was shot at the beach,” Emily explained. “I’m in the office now. Police are still questioning us. The FBI was here—”

  Sean saw Jack’s expression and approached.

  Jack whispered, “Bailey was killed.”

  “Ask her what the police think. Do they have a suspect?”

  “Who’s that?” Emily asked. “Who are you talking to?”

  “Just a friend of mine.”

  Sean rolled his eyes.

  “Actually, it’s my boyfriend,” Jack told Emily. “I guess this is as good of a time as any…I moved up here to be with him. I’m gay.”

  “Mazel tov,” she sniffled, “it’s about freakin’ time.”

  “You knew?”

  “I suspected.”

  She knew. Everyone probably knew.

  But now it was out there. Jack was out. It was his first time saying it out loud without fear, and it felt great. His life would never be the same, but Bailey’s life was over.

  Perspective!

  “What the hell was Bailey doing at the beach?” Jack asked. “He hates the sun.”

  “I don’t know,” Emily said. “He came to the office really early, before anyone was here, like he usually did. His mocha was on his desk. But he must have taken a walk to the beach for some reason because they found him shot dead under the Santa Monica Pier.”

  “Do the police have a suspect?”

  “If they do, they’re not telling us,” Emily said. “They’re confiscating all our computers. I think they’re shutting us down.”

  Jack said, “Ethan told me about the guy you found that had an account and was looking for Brooke.”

  “C. G.”

  “Did you tell the cops?”

  “Yes, but we still don’t know who C. G. is.”

  “Yes, we do,” Jack told her. “Ethan and Bailey talked about it early this morning. Probably right before he was killed…”

  “Is it her husband?” Emily asked. “Was Brooke married like I thought?”

  “No. It’s her brother. CG is Clinton Godeaux. Tell them. Tell the cops.”

  “I will.”

  “Okay, Emily, stay strong.”

  Jack was about to hang up when Emily said, “You know what I said to Bailey last night? I told him to bugger off. He was bugging me so I told him to bugger the fuck off! Nice, huh?” Emily cried harder. “That’s the last thing I said to him.”

  “I know you and Bailey had your differences, but you spent a lot of time together, and he really liked you. He just had a funny way of expressing himself sometimes.”

  “I know,” Emily confessed, “I’ve been shagging the bastard for the past two years!”

  “No kidding,” Jack said gibingly.

  “You knew?”

  “I suspected.”

  “Tell me the truth, did anyone else think so?”

  Jack smiled. “Everyone.”

  And they shared a laugh.

  CHAPTER 34

  Ethan downshifted, accelerated, and then winced when the gears shrieked. He hadn’t driven a stick-shift car since high school, and taking a refresher course on a $100,000 borrowed sports car while thinking that the love of his life was about to get killed was not a good combination. He drove like a cautious maniac, trying to navigate his conflicting emotions. When he had left Los Angeles and headed up to Big Sur, he thought his brother and girlfriend had run off together. Now he was driving down to Big Sur from San Francisco with new information ab
out Brooke and a new reality for his brother. Even his opinion about Sean McQueen had changed from prejudices about his rumored business practices to the acceptance of him as his brother’s lover.

  Fucking perspective.

  Ethan thought about his brother’s lifelong secret, the courage it took to come out, and the truth about their best friend, Barry. That was a lot to process in and of itself. But compounded with the possibilities of what Brooke was still up against was causing his mind to race out of control. Brooke had often teased him about his American ambitions, how he was never satisfied and always wanting more than he had. She’d used every phase of Stalker as a perfect example: He had had a commercial idea, but he needed to convince his brother. Once he had talked Jack into being the lead programmer, he needed financing. Once Bailey had showed up with an angel investor looking to fund a tracking app that used biometrics, he needed to get online before anyone else came up with a similar idea. Once competitors had shown up, he had needed to be better and grow faster.

  Brooke often said things like, “It’s all about the journey, not the destination,” but Ethan couldn’t quite grasp that concept. He always wanted to get to the next phase, never spending enough time appreciating what he already had. Now he wondered if he took the things he loved for granted, like his loyal partner, Bailey, his talented brother, Jack, and his loving girlfriend, Brooke. Were they all trying to tell him that he had lost perspective?

  From now on he was going to appreciate what he had, he decided. He was going to broaden his view of his ambitions and the effects they had on other people. He was going to be more thoughtful about the consequences Stalker technology could result in—and make changes accordingly. He was going to transform. And he was going to start with doing whatever he could to get his love back. Losing Brooke trumped everything, and he needed to find her so he could tell her so. He felt a pang of optimism, a recharged purpose. He was also starting to feel pretty good about his command of McQueen’s Maserati GranTurismo, now hugging the winding curves with precise control, going a bit fast, and then he quickly sobered and slowed. He approached Dancing Rabbit—ground zero for the transformers.

  And Brooke.

  He glimpsed a dark sedan parked in the driveway and the two white-haired detectives who were kicked out of his interrogation room by the FBI, Johnson and Ramsey. He imagined them on stakeout, chomping on donuts, waiting for missing Rabbits to reappear—which they never would—while he sped by with a deafening roar, unseen. He glanced his rearview, and they didn’t pull out after him. So he parked McQueen’s joyride behind a cluster of large trees just down the road.

  The chimes rang when he entered the Henry Miller library, just like before. But he didn’t hear Anna’s voice when he walked inside this time. Instead, he was greeted by a woman with drooping eyelids, unkempt straw-colored hair, and an aging rock ’n’ roller’s swagger, as if she were channeling Joni Mitchell.

  “Welcome to The Henry Miller Library,” said with a singsong flair, revealing miles of wear on her jagged boned face. “Name’s Sasha. How may I be of service?”

  “I’m looking for somebody, actually—”

  Sasha giggled. “Aren’t we all?”

  “Are you the ‘real’ shopkeeper?” Ethan asked, trying to determine whether or not she really worked there, or like Anna Gopnik, was just hiding out.

  “I’m not only the shopkeeper,” Sasha told him. “I’m a librarian, historian, writer, and expert on every famous author who ever called Big Sur their home.”

  “Can you name all three?” Ethan joked.

  “Jack Kerouac’s 1962 novel, aptly titled Big Sur, best explained why this area is so inspiring and transformative to creative people,” she said, revving up for a seemingly well-rehearsed dissertation on everything literary within a fifty-mile stretch and the last fifty years. “But it didn’t begin with the beat generation,” she droned on, “American poet Robinson Jeffers meditated about Big Sur’s ‘wine-hearted solitude, our mother the wilderness’ in poems like Bixby’s Landing—”

  Ethan cut her off, “I’m here to see Anna.”

  Her smile faded. “Who?”

  “Anna Gopnik, unless she goes by a different name by now.”

  “No one else is here besides me now.”

  Ethan wondered if he needed a password or something. “It’s okay,” he said with a conspiratorial wink. “I’m a friend. I know she’s hiding, and transitioning. I was here yesterday—”

  “We close in ten minutes,” Sasha warned as she walked behind the counter and busied herself with her cash register. “You’re welcome to peruse until then.”

  Peruse? Ethan wondered if that was code for snoop through the bookshelves or back room. “Last time I was here, Anna showed me a passage from Tropic of Cancer—”

  “That one?” Sasha pointed to a quote on the wall. Sasha’s eyes glazed over as if she were reciting a prayer. “We are all alone here and we are dead. It’s about the necessity to change course radically, to start completely over from scratch.”

  “Like a Dancing Rabbit?” Ethan asked. “Are you a Rabbit or do you just help them hide?”

  Sasha stared back concernedly. “Are you feeling well, son?”

  This lady’s no Rabbit, Ethan decided, and just then, he noticed a large watercolor paining over Sasha’s shoulder of a French château. It was one of Brooke’s. It wasn’t her usual landscape of Napa, looking out from the church, but rather a close-up of the château with the church in the distance. Ethan stepped closer. “That painting wasn’t here yesterday.”

  “That’s correct,” Sasha said. “It came just this morning.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “It was donated.”

  “By who?”

  “By whom,” Sasha corrected. “It was donated anonymously, a deliveryman just dropped it off.”

  “There had to be a name or organization—”

  “There wasn’t.”

  “Then how do you know it was a donation?”

  “It came with a note.”

  “What did the note say?”

  “That the painting was a donation to the Henry Miller Memorial Library,” she said, irritated with his line of questioning. “Are you a detective?”

  “No, I’m not a detective,” he assured her. “Have there been any detectives here lately?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Can I see the note?” he pressed.

  “I just told you what the note said.”

  “Please,” he tried to sound desperate, because he was, and because he thought she had empathetic eyes. “It’s really important to me.”

  She reached in the garbage can, pulled out a FedEx slip, and handed it to him.

  Ethan read, “‘For the wall next to the clock.’”

  “See,” Sasha pointed at the slip. “No signature, and no name. Most of our things are donated this way. Rarely do donors want a receipt, although we do that for tax purposes if any of them should ask—”

  “This was obviously sent from someone who has been here recently. She knew you had a clock up there.”

  Sasha showed no reaction.

  “That painting was done by Brooke Shaw.”

  Still no reaction.

  “Stella Godeaux,” Ethan tried.

  “I don’t know all of our visitors. Most are just passing through.”

  Ethan noticed there was a return address on the FedEx form. He reached for her laptop on the counter. “Do you mind if I just look this up?”

  She grabbed Ethan’s hand. “I do, actually.”

  “Please,” he pleaded, “I’m pretty sure that the person who sent this knew I would be coming here to look for her.”

  Sasha looked at him skeptically.

  “She’s the love of my life,” he said, “and I won’t stop looking until I find her.”

  “W
hat makes you so sure this is from her?”

  “The estate in that painting looks like a house in Napa Valley that she often painted—”

  “It’s a French château,” Sasha countered, ever the expert. “We must assume it’s a scene in France.”

  There was a crumpled up newspaper inside the FedEx box and Ethan noticed a photograph that looked just like the painting. “What’s that, inside the box?”

  Sasha lifted the box. “Just old newspapers used to protect the painting.”

  Ethan pulled the newspaper out and smoothed out the creases. Sure enough, it was a photograph of the château with a title: Highpoint Estate. Ethan remembered their angel investor’s mysterious shell company: Highpoint Corp.

  Just below the photo, there was an article:

  NAPA VALLEY REGISTER

  House Of Mystery

  Napa Valley’s largest private house was built 1993 on a forty-eight-acre plot on Highpoint, a wealthy hilltop neighborhood on the north side, with the loveliest views from nearly every vantage. First owned by British tycoon Arthur Godeaux, the mansion boasts eighteen bedrooms, a ballroom, and a glass rotunda. Arthur Godeaux passed away last year and was survived by his children, the will and testament has been contested, leaving the property in a state of flux. The city of Napa has been unable to determine who is now the rightful owner. Recent activity on the property has forged speculation and controversy to the region. The British government has disallowed the Godeaux children to take possession of the estate and there is speculation that the property has been subsequently sold.

  A recent report by the Financial Times has found that offshore companies own more than $100 billion worth of real estate in California. The state’s property market has become a form of legalized international money laundering, according to a former editor of the San Francisco Chronicle.

  For Napa residents, worries about the lack of transparency in the purchase of the Godeaux property have become a real concern, with insinuations ranging from a possible mafia hideaway to Russian oligarchs using the property to get money out of their country…

  After Ethan read it, he turned it to show Sasha the photo of the French château-style manse. “It wasn’t about me, or us. It’s about this!”

  Sasha looked uncertain how to react. “I’m happy for you,” she said reluctantly. “Does that mean she wants you to go find her or stay away?”