“This is important, Kendall,” he said quietly. “I’m trusting you.”
“I know,” I said quickly. “It will be fine, I promise.”
“Look at me.”
I brought my eyes up to his, where they locked into place. The shameless—and I mean, literally, without shame—appeal in his face completely disarmed me, just for a moment.
“I know,” I said again, quieter.
He was close enough that I should have been able to hear him breathe, but I couldn’t. He was that sure. “I don’t trust a lot of people. You don’t either.”
“Mason. I know.” I finally looked away, and he stepped back.
“Well, have a nice week, or whatever,” he said, turning and casually skipping down the stairs.
“Yeah,” I said faintly. “You have a good trip.”
“Thanks,” he called. “I won’t—but thanks.” He went around the corner and was gone.
I stepped back into the house and shut the door behind me, pushing the lock firmly into place. My mother was standing there waiting for me.
She was leaning slightly forward, and her hands were balled up into fists at her sides.
“Hi,” I said, as gently as I could. “Mom, it’s OK. I promise, it’s OK.”
My mom let out a ragged breath. “There’s something going on here I don’t understand, isn’t there?”
I drew in a shaky breath, feeling like I might cry. “Yes.”
She closed her eyes. “I knew it,” she muttered. “I knew there was something wrong, but I couldn’t see what it was . . .” She opened her eyes and looked at me, her eyes a force of nature. “There’s something not right with that boy. Not right with how he came here, not right with how he asked where you were. He was lying, Kendall. Why would he lie?”
It was nice to hear it put so simply. How could she already know that? I nodded.
She stepped closer and looked at me sharply. It was the patented Judith Evans truth-serum glare, and I never stood a chance. I braced myself to spill, to tell her everything—the hacked Facebook page, the stolen pills, my search for the thief, Gilly, Simone.
“Tell me,” she said, her voice even again, almost hypnotic. “I should have pushed before, and that’s my fault. I didn’t know how to—” Her voice cracked here, and she took a moment to collect herself. “Tell me the truth. What are you doing?”
I felt my knees buckle underneath me. I looked at her pale face and wide eyes and whispered, “I’m not sure anymore.”
Her face seemed about to shatter like a broken wineglass. “OK,” she said softly. “It’s late anyway. I think you need to sleep. But this, whatever you’re doing with this boy; this can’t go on. Will you promise to tell me when I can help you?”
I made a decision. I nodded.
She grabbed me then, in a hug unlike any hug she’d given me in years. I found my arms reaching around her, too, holding on for dear life.
Mom let go. “Now go to bed,” she ordered. She turned around, but I caught sight of her wiping her eyes. “I mean it, Kendall.”
Back in my room, I tore the seal off of the first envelope and hungrily pulled out its contents.
It was a single piece of paper, with a long string of numbers and symbols. They meant nothing to me. I opened the next one. It, too, was a single sheet of paper with the same string of numbers and symbols. The third one, same deal.
“Fuck,” I muttered, tossing them onto my bed. I threw my hands into my hair in frustration. This whole thing was nothing but dead end after dead end.
I caught sight of myself in the mirror. I looked tired and pale. Diminished. I’d even lost weight. But then my eyes fell on the magazines sticking out from under my bed: my Discover and Scientific American issues.
Biting my lip, I went back to my bed and took a closer look at the papers. Then I started to smile. This wasn’t some kind of code. It was a formula. It was math.
I could do math.
I grabbed my chemistry textbook, my algebra textbook, and my computer and got to work.
The formula was written in a convoluted way. There were a lot of archaic symbols, mathematical blind alleys, and some really indecipherable handwriting. It was starting to get light outside when I finally translated it into a simple, chemical formula. Even after that, it took a few minutes for what I was looking at to soak in. I was tired and it seemed too simple. But there it was: a classic GHB formula, crossed with ecstasy and modified with sedatives. I opened my nightstand drawer and took out the note Mason had left after he’d drugged and dumped me on the steps of Howell. The handwriting matched.
I started laughing—a dry, choking sound after a night of no sleep. Mason didn’t just sell this drug; he was the drug. And here was proof.
Nancy Drew would have slapped the shit out of me. And Simone was going to kill me.
Because, I suddenly knew that I had been wrong. Simone was strong enough to withstand a video. She had nothing to be ashamed of. I had said that I refused to participate in slut-shaming and then acted like she would or should be ashamed.
Simone would forgive me for letting the video get out. Mason had to go down.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
By the time my mom came down the stairs the next morning, I was waiting for her with a cup of coffee and her briefcase.
She stopped in the doorway of the kitchen. “What’s this?” she asked. We weren’t the type of people who made coffee for each other—well, maybe my dad was, but my mom and I certainly were not.
I pushed the coffee toward her. “I need your help.”
I started at the beginning.
Within a few hours, I was sitting once again in an interrogation room at 1PP, only this time, my mom was sitting next to me. Rockford was in street clothes—a gray hoodie and skinny jeans—scrutinizing the addresses on the envelopes. The formula sheets in Mason’s handwriting were strewn across the desk. I clutched a notebook containing my careful translation.
When he had first walked in, he deliberately put his hand out toward me, his eyes serious. I had shaken it. Now, he looked up at me, his face neutral, professional, and his voice respectful. “How many of these addresses do you know?”
I looked at my mother. “You will follow my every direction,” she had commanded as we left the house. “This is nonnegotiable. The moment you resist, I pass you off to another attorney. Is that understood?”
My mother nodded, so I turned back to Rockford. “This one is the Fish Hook,” I said, pulling the first envelope toward me. “And this one is a Columbia University library.”
“Those I know,” he said, with a little grin. “Remember?”
He slammed me against a brick wall once. I remembered. But I needed him to be my ally, so I simply nodded. He nodded back. “What about these other two? These, I don’t know.”
I picked up the third one. It was in Chelsea. “I don’t know this one,” I said. “I’ve never delivered there, and it’s not one of Mason’s spots that I’m aware of. But this one . . .” I picked up the fourth envelope. “This one is interesting.”
He took it from me and read out loud. “P.O. Box 346, Cold Spring, NY 10516. I can track the P.O. box, but can you tell me who it belongs to?”
I shook my head. “But I do know that Mason held a meeting with someone named Leon Cohn at 1286 Brook Trail, in Cold Spring.”
Rockford went still. “Leon Cohn?”
“Yeah. It was an important meeting, too. Mason was being really careful. He wouldn’t text the address or even give it to Cohn in person himself. He sent me to deliver it to him, at the Four Seasons. Why, do you know who he is?”
Rockford leaned forward. “Does the name Rodney Cohn mean anything to you?”
“No. Should it?”
He hesitated. “Has Mason has ever mentioned his father?” he asked, a wary catch in his voice.
I sucked in my breath. “Is that his father? Rodney Cohn?”
“So he has mentioned him.”
“Not much,” I answered,
adding up what I knew about Mason’s father in my head. “I know that he owns a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, among other properties. I’ve always sort of assumed he’s at least on the condo board of Simone’s building. I mean the one on the Upper West Side, where he has an office. I know that Mason doesn’t get along with him. And that he’s visiting him in Texas. Right now.”
Rockford stood up. He gathered the envelopes and the formula sheets together. “Is it all right with your lawyer if you hang out here for a while?”
His voice sounded like a jump rope pulled tight. My mother eyed him carefully and finally said, “We will do everything we can to cooperate. For now.”
Rockford nodded at her and left.
My mother and I were left alone. I looked at her, but she was scrolling through her phone. Her mouth was hard and set. I looked away.
“Who’s Simone?”
“What?” I turned back to my mom. That was not a question I’d expected. “What do you mean?”
She was still looking at her phone, but I noticed that there was nothing on the screen. “You called the building where that awful kid runs his business ‘Simone’s building.’ So who’s Simone?” I realized I hadn’t ever mentioned Simone by name. I had referred to the girl in the video just as my friend—maybe she’d even assumed it was Audrey. She didn’t know anything about my life these days, not even the name of my only friend.
I kept looking at her, wondering when she was going to make eye contact. “She’s the girl in the video Mason is using to blackmail me. She’s my friend. Or she was.”
“So her name is Simone. Your father mentioned the girl who came over cheerful and left considerably paler and slouching.”
“He noticed that?”
My mother finally looked up. She turned to me. “He did,” she said, uncharacteristically gently. “He does. We both do. We just . . . don’t always know what to do about it.”
I didn’t have a response to that, so I told her, “She doesn’t know about the video. She probably thinks I just chickened out of going to the cops and that I’m a scumbag roofie dealer now.”
My mother nodded but didn’t say anything. She started to put her hand on my shoulder, but Rockford opened the door, and she pulled it back, snapping into Judith Evans, Esquire. In a strange moment of synchronicity, I snapped into the girl in the photograph.
Rockford sat down. “So, I sent your calculations with the formula to the medical examiner. If she agrees with you, as I suspect she will, we can proceed.”
My mother cleared her throat. “Proceed with what, precisely?”
Rockford waited until he caught my eye. And then he grinned. “We can take Mason Frye all the way down.”
“And how do we do that?” I asked.
Rockford pulled out a file and opened it to a picture of a dark-haired middle-aged man with sparkling eyes. “This is Rodney Cohn. He and his wife, Louisa Cohn, had one son, Leon. Louisa died of ovarian cancer eight years ago. Twenty-one years ago, Rodney had an affair with a twenty-two-year-old ballerina named Therese Frye. And nine months after it ended, she had Mason.”
I looked closer at the picture of Rodney Cohn. The coloring was completely different. Mason must have gotten the blue irises and the blond hair from Therese. But the squirrelly smile and the cheekbones—the blunt stare—that was all from his dad.
“Yeah, I know,” said Rockford, reading my look. “It’s a little creepy once you see it.”
“So, Leon Cohn is Mason’s brother?” I pulled the file toward me. “I would never have guessed that.”
“I suspect Leon didn’t either. As far as we know, Rodney never introduced his sons. They know of each other, but they were kept carefully apart. Therese signed a nondisclosure agreement and received a very generous child support package, which, from what we can tell, she used primarily to turn herself into a new-money society babe. Don’t get me wrong, Mason wasn’t materially neglected either. He was sent to the best schools, lived in the best neighborhoods, really had the best of everything. But I doubt that there are a lot of people in Therese’s social circle who even know Mason’s her son. Rodney kept in touch with him but at a very clear distance. Mason never laid eyes on Louisa or on his brother.”
“So what does Mason want from Leon now?”
Rockford closed the folder and shrugged. “Can’t say for sure. But Leon has a gambling problem, and he’s the CFO of one of his father’s companies. My guess is that Mason wanted to involve his father’s money in his business. And where his money is, Rodney Cohn is never far behind. My guess is, he lured in Leon to implicate Rodney in his affairs.”
My mother broke in. “This is fascinating, but what is it you want Kendall to do?”
“Exactly what Mason told her to do.”
“What?”
“Deliver the envelopes.”
“But . . .”
“No one’s going to make any more of those ‘doses,’ Kendall,” said Rockford, making conspicuous, contemptuous quotation marks with his fingers. “Mason didn’t even give you a readable formula. At least he didn’t think he did. He keeps that close. I think those notes are a signal. That Columbia address—we found the remains of an old lab in a private study carrel six months ago. The Fish Hook we’ve known for some time has housed a mobile lab for Mason. Components need to be acquired, new equipment bought. Now that we know to whom these signals are going and when, we can sit on them, collect the evidence. We can actually forge a trail through Mason’s whole operation.”
I looked at Mom. “And all Kendall has to do is deliver the letters?” she asked.
Rockford hesitated. “Hopefully.” My mother raised an eyebrow. “If Mason comes back to town, we need Kendall to stay . . . in character. He can’t suspect that we’re tracking him. Or he’ll clear off. He’s done it before.”
“He was in Houston,” I whispered. They looked at me. “I’m just remembering something Mason said. About hanging around Rice all summer.”
Rockford grimaced. “I almost had him last year. But . . .” He looked away. “But, I missed him. I let him get away. I stayed undercover to catch Rainier.”
The pieces started to fall together. “And you almost got Jerry to roll on him last year, too.”
He nodded. “He’s been a criminal informant, a CI, for a while. But we couldn’t use him as a witness without blowing the case, and he was never involved in the actual drugs anyway—never even saw them, in fact. Mason was careful. Jerry gathered materials, set up meetings, rented locations, moved money. But he never touched the drugs. So I was directed to drop the Frye investigation.”
“Why didn’t you, then?”
“Well, I had,” he said. He looked at me and smiled, a genuine smile this time. “Until Jerry came to me and Vin with a story about a high school girl who had gotten involved in Mason’s operation. A girl who, it seemed, might be on my side.”
My mother broke the silence. “I’m going to need to get something on paper with the DA before I agree to let Kendall do anything.”
“She’s on her way,” he said, standing up. “But, for what it’s worth, you have my assurance that if Kendall helps us get these guys, she’s going to walk away clean.” I snorted. He looked at me. “What?”
If I had learned anything this year, it was that clean was a relative term. “Nothing,” I said.
An hour and a half later, my mom and I walked out of the precinct with a deal. We got into the car and drove off in silence.
“Thank you,” I said, once the precinct was out of sight.
She exhaled and looked over her shoulder at me. “You’re going to have to be very careful. I want you taking zero risks, do you understand?”
I shrugged. “I know how to handle Mason by now. He likes me. He’s not going to hurt me unless he can gain something from it.”
Mom winced and shook her head. “That’s not what I mean.” She turned back to the road. “You’re not completely out of the woods, legally. If all goes according to plan, the DA isn’t goin
g to charge you with any of what you’ve already done. But, Ken Doll, if you go off-book here? If you do something that can be construed as abetting Mason and they don’t catch him? There’s a real chance that they will charge you. And you turn eighteen in six weeks. I won’t be able to get you tried as a juvenile.”
It hit me like a volleyball in the nose. But all I could say was, “You called me Ken Doll.” She hadn’t called me that in weeks.
Mom turned onto the West Side Highway. I looked around. “Why aren’t we just getting on the bridge?”
“Because I’m dropping you off at Simone’s apartment.”
“What? Why?”
She looked at me. “You need a friend, Ken Doll,” she said softly. “And it seems like this girl was taking care of you. Better care of you than I was anyway.”
“Mom . . .”
She took her sunglasses down from the mirror pocket and slipped them on. “Don’t worry,” she said. “The guilt’s not debilitating. And if I can’t take care of you in some ways, I can at least help you with this. I’m a good lawyer, Kendall. And I don’t want you to go, but I’m getting you to YATS if it kills me.” She turned to me. “You do know that I don’t want you to leave, right?”
I hadn’t known. I should have, but it hadn’t even occurred to me.
I took the elevator up to Simone’s apartment and, for the first time, rang the doorbell without the noxious presence of Mason rumbling upward from the floorboards.
A nebbishy man, slightly balding, with thick glasses, opened the door. He looked puzzled to see a teenage girl there but smiled nonetheless.
“Yes?” he asked. “May I help you?”
“Hi, Mr. Moody. My name’s Kendall Evans. I’m Simone’s friend. Is she home?”
His face softened. “Oh. Kendall. It’s nice to meet you. Simone’s here, but, is she expecting you?”
“She’s not.” I frowned. “Is she OK?”
He rumpled his curly hair. “She’s OK. She just . . . had a little bit of a long night, I think. Let me just go see if she’s up.”
“It’s OK, Dad,” said Simone, strolling into the foyer. She hooked her arm into his briefly and, very slightly, laid her head down on his shoulder, swinging her long, silky hair over his arm. He gently pushed her hair back, and she straightened, smiling up at him. Something in me started hurting a little.
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