“Your mother died of ovarian cancer?”
Callie nodded.
“There’s a long history of ovarian cancer associated with fertility drugs. I suspect that the problem for your parents wasn’t on your father’s side. If your mother couldn’t conceive, even after the drugs, even with IVF, and adoption was out of the question, Lewis may have offered a . . . slightly less legal alternative.”
“You think my parents . . .” Callie’s voice trailed away, and Mac’s heart broke for her. He’d heard in her voice that night on the beach how much she’d idolized her father.
“I think they bought you. Possibly, they believed they were going through a surrogate, that the egg and sperm were their own, but I doubt it. Not only because the idea of legal surrogacy didn’t become popular until after your birth, but because had the transaction been legal, there would have been no need to dummy up a birth certificate that claimed your mother gave birth to you.”
“And by then, Lewis had moved to the island,” Mac agreed. Stick to the topic, keep away from the personal aspects. “He was operating outside the US legal system. He had the birth mother with him there. Your father must have taken the picture of you with your mother when they picked you up. You said your father was familiar with boats; chances are they came over from, say, Miami, collected you, and sailed home. Restrictions were a lot looser in those days. If they drove from New York to Florida, they’d never have to pass through an airport, through any kind of official channels. Using the private dock at the hotel and another private dock in Florida would have made them virtually invisible. Sure, their boat might have been searched for drugs, but that’s about it.”
“But why not bring my birth certificate with them? Put an earlier date on it, not a later one?”
“Maybe you were premature,” Mac suggested. “They had everything planned out, organized the birth certificate and had it done up in advance so your parents could bring it with them to St. Martin in case anyone checked on their way back into the US, but you came early.”
“That would do it,” said Nash. “Lewis wouldn’t want the birth mother to keep you—she might get attached to you.”
“Even if I accepted all this, and I am not saying I do, parts of what’s happening still don’t fit for me.” Callie pulled free of Mac’s grip and walked over to the window overlooking Times Square. “You think John Lewis killed all these people to protect his inheritance. But would a man like him even know how to hire a killer? How could he find someone to stab Ed Steele in prison? And why try to blow up my house before I got to St. Martin, but then attempt a kidnapping once I was there, rather than just killing me outright?”
“I don’t know,” Nash admitted. “We’re a long way from having a perfect theory, and a longer way from proving it, certainly from proving it to the satisfaction of the court system either in the US or in France.”
“So even if you knew for sure John was behind this, you couldn’t make him stop.” Callie still hadn’t turned around, and Mac wished he could see her face, rather than those tight shoulders, that stiff back. She was taking the whole situation remarkably calmly, at least on the surface, but without a glimpse of her eyes, he couldn’t tell how much was an act.
“Not yet. We’ve put his name out through channels to see what we can dig up, though. HSE has resources, Calliope. We will get John Lewis. You just have to give us a little time.”
Callie nodded but remained where she was. Nash shared a glance with Mac, then rose.
“I’m heading back downtown. I’ll call you as soon as we hear anything. Try to get some sleep.”
After bolting the door behind Nash, Mac walked over to the window. Callie had not budged. After a minute, he slipped his arms around her, pulling her back against him. She stiffened even further, every muscle strung tight, then relaxed. In silence, he rested his chin on the crown of her head. Outside, lights flashed, giant videos played on electronic billboards, and tourists in T-shirts made merry in the warm summer night. Times Square was still alive, bustling with movement despite the late hour.
“When we were on the island,” Callie said at last, “and you suggested trying for a DNA match between me and the woman they thought might be Nicole, did John object?”
“Not much. He probably knew it wasn’t Nikki, so he didn’t worry about the results. I never mentioned wanting to send the results to Vince, or he might have put up more of a fuss.”
“Do police check international databases of DNA? Do such things even exist?”
“I’m sure every country has their own that other law-enforcement agencies could theoretically get access to if they were willing to go through the necessary hoops, but the fact is that not every local PD even has the necessary equipment to connect to CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System for the US. I never heard of anyone in our department, or even in the GBI—the Georgia Bureau of Investigation—trying to find a match through an international database. Why?”
“Because Mark Lewis bought the Paradis from Andre Charbonnet after helping him and his wife conceive. How many other European clients might he have had? I can’t help wondering whether any of their children have turned up dead or missing recently.”
Mac reached for his cell phone with one hand, using the other to keep Callie anchored firmly to him, and dialed Nash. “Can you talk?” he asked when the other man answered.
“Yeah. I’m driving, though. What’s up?”
“I have a project for your geek squad. We need an untraceable website with an e-mail drop box, dedicated to finding former clients of the Lewis clinic. And it has to be publicized as quickly and widely as possible, in papers worldwide. The kind of people who used Lewis’s services don’t surf the dark corners of the web, so we need to advertise in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the London Times, the Wall Street Journal, places like that. If we can get enough evidence of Pop Lewis’s misdeeds, maybe John will see the futility of trying to erase them.”
“Just one problem. We can’t be sure any of the people involved is related to Lewis. His DNA we don’t have.”
“Fuck. How could I have missed that?”
“We all did. Lexie was just pointing it out to me on the phone when you called. When I get downtown, I’ll see what I can find out about Lewis’s family, whether there are any brothers and sisters willing to submit samples for analysis. Exhumation’s a possibility, if Lewis is buried in the States, though if the kid has half a brain—and he seems to—he’ll have had dear old dad cremated.”
A couple of unconnected bits of data coalesced into an ugly whole, and Mac cursed again. “Don’t bother. If there were relatives, John’s eliminated them. He couldn’t afford to have them hanging around, because they would have proved he wasn’t Lewis’s kid.”
“What?” Nash and Callie spoke as one.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense. You never met Nikki, Nash, but I guarantee she and Callie are related. If they have the same father, and that father is Mark Lewis, then Callie and John should share DNA, too. But I’ll bet anything you like they don’t. It’s the only reason he wouldn’t have objected more strenuously to testing Callie. He knew no matter what happened, she couldn’t be connected to him.”
“Well, hell.”
“Exactly.” Callie tried to squirm out of his grasp, but he hung on to her. “Get your guys working on the Lewis clinic stuff. Call when you get something set up.” He flipped the phone shut, shoved it back into his pocket, and, taking Callie by the shoulders, turned her to face him. Her dark eyes brimmed with tears.
“This is good news,” he said, the ferocity of his own words surprising him. “You don’t want to be related to a mass murderer.”
“I don’t want to be related to a con man who sold black-market babies or a serial rapist, either,” she replied, shrugging him off and stalking across the room, “but no one asked me.” She plopped down on the sofa and look
ed up at him. “What am I supposed to do now?”
“I wish I had an easy answer. It’s late. Maybe Nash’s night owls will have something for us in the morning.”
“I don’t think sleep is on the agenda.” She glanced away, then back at him, then patted the cushion next to her. He accepted the invitation. “You told me you grew up in Atlanta,” she said once he was seated. “What was your family like?”
“Small. Most of my life, it was just me and my mom. My dad couldn’t hack the responsibility of a wife and kid, and hit the road when I was four. He sent money off and on for a couple of years, then disappeared altogether.”
“That must have been tough.”
“For my mother, it probably was. But most of my neighborhood was single-parent families, with mothers who cleaned houses like mine or worked as cocktail waitresses or worse. Many of the guys I ran with had never met their fathers, so I had it pretty good.” Jesus, he sounded like a sap. What was it about this woman that made him open up like a fucking book?
“Your mother, is she still alive?”
“No. She died while I was in the Army. Massive stroke.” It still hurt to think about her dying alone with him half a world away, but the doctors had assured him she hadn’t suffered.
“I’m sorry.” Callie touched the back of his hand, and he flipped it, twining his fingers with hers.
“Why the sudden interest in my parents?” He figured he knew the answer, but it would be better for her to admit it herself.
***
Callie stared down at their hands, her pale, small fingers meshed with his large, brown ones. How could she explain to him what she didn’t even understand herself? Since her father’s death, she’d felt unmoored, adrift. The discovery of the picture had compounded the sensation, and the events of the past several days . . .
“I’m not sure I know who I am.”
“Of course you do. You’re Calliope Elizabeth Pearson. You’ve lived all over the world and speak, what, four languages? You share a house with a chef named Erin and write articles for travel magazines. Nothing about you has changed. Your biological family is just a little different from what you believed.”
“That biological family doesn’t frighten you at all? I guess Mark Lewis isn’t technically a rapist, but he certainly inseminated a lot of unwilling women, and he obviously passed along his bad genes to Ed Steele.”
“Did he? I’m no scientist. I can’t say definitively there’s no genetic component to evil. In fact, I’m pretty sure there is one; one bad seed in a family of great people—what other cause is there? I saw it all the time in Narcotics. But biology isn’t destiny. Humans are capable of tremendously unselfish acts, and there’s no biological reason for them. Robin Cory, Deborah and Diane Masters—they were Lewis’s kids, too, and they contributed to charity projects that benefited hundreds, even thousands of people.
“You were the one who said Ephraim Steele traded in his faith for profit. Doesn’t it make sense he’d raise a kid without a conscience, even if that kid wasn’t biologically predisposed not to give a damn about anyone else?”
“I suppose.” Callie took a deep breath, tried to let Mac’s assurance release some of her tension.
“And John Lewis, whose parentage we know nothing about—though I’m certain Nash is digging into it even as we speak—could have turned out completely normal if he hadn’t been raised by Mark Lewis.”
“His mother committed suicide.” Remembering his telling her so, she realized she might have spent an evening looking through family scrapbooks with a killer. Shouldn’t she have been able to tell?
“Yeah. Nikki told me about it. The first Mrs. Mark Lewis locked herself in their garage with the car running. Makes you wonder if she suddenly realized what she had married.”
Chapter Ten
John Lewis hated to sweat, avoided it whenever possible, but he was sweating now. Luckily, the man on the other end of the phone couldn’t see the moisture beading around his hairline or smell the fear and frustration oozing from his pores.
“I told you, she doesn’t know anything. That picture was all she had. There was no need for your stunt in Grand Case. You brought the fucking gendarmes down on me for no reason whatsoever. They’re crawling all over the hotel. I don’t dare move the crates. Not now.”
“You imagine I care about some provincial French law enforcement? Do you have any idea who helped your brother-in-law evade us? Who took him to the US and hid him there?” The smooth, cultured voice was sharp with fury.
A drop of sweat rolled down John’s face. “Why don’t you tell me?”
“Are you familiar with Harp Security Enterprises?”
“No.”
“Then you are a fool. Dwight Harper would like nothing more than to get a man inside my organization. He and his private army, recruited from your country’s three-letter agencies, have caused me no end of trouble. I’ve spent countless dollars, missed out on lucrative opportunities, lost good men, all because of him. And you, you bring him right to my door. Dwight Harper served with Brody in the Army. You should have known that.”
“Don’t lay this on me. Your man in New York was supposed to take Callie Pearson out of the equation before she even met Brody.” John twitched, imagining Callie’s body going up in flames. How could he have ordered such a thing? What a horrible waste it would have been, especially since he’d had to dispose of Nicole’s body before he could get much out of it. The drugs, the booze, the freezing, something had damaged her beyond utility. And Callie, Callie was the youngest of the girls. She would have been his father’s greatest creation. With every day, he was more certain she held the cure.
“And he has seen the error of his ways.”
John shivered at the implied threat, again thankful Henry Falcone couldn’t see him. John had beaten the odds for almost twenty years, using a playboy socialite persona to keep his reputation as clean as his hands were dirty, but Falcone, though close to him in age, had been in the game twice as long and more than twice as deep.
At fifteen, John had overheard a conversation between Mark and Ava Lewis that gave him his first clue as to the source of his father’s wealth. He’d only had vacations to search, so it had taken three years to find Mark Lewis’s secret records, but the payoff had been more than worth the effort. His respect for Lewis—lost upon discovering that his mother had conned Lewis into marriage by claiming another, far less respectable man’s baby was his, which she’d told her son in a fit of drunken regret when he was seven—returned. That admiration had grown with the realization that Mark Lewis had manipulated his first wife into committing suicide when her drinking and wild moods had threatened to become an embarrassment.
Upon graduating high school, John had insisted on inclusion in all aspects of his father’s business. He’d gone to college for hotel management but had spent his summers at the Lewis fertility clinic in Miami. Between the two, he acquired a firm grasp on both international finance and the psychology of victimization. He could smell desperation whenever it entered his orbit, and never hesitated to take advantage of it. By twenty-five, he’d amassed a small fortune, carefully secreted in offshore banks, by selling drugs through the clinic behind Mark Lewis’s back.
But after a while, running the clinic’s illegal sideline became too easy. No one suspected such an upstanding citizen, and John became restless. He’d been searching for something to bring the heady taste of risk back into his life when a fire swept through the property in 2001. Like most people, Mark Lewis was underinsured. He sent John out to find new financing, but traditional investors had no interest in the kind of terms Mark Lewis—who insisted on retaining control of the hotel—was willing to offer.
John had tasted failure for the first time, and in the quiet wretchedness of it he could hear his mother’s voice and her laughter. She expected him to come to a bad end. She sneered at his pathetic attempts to sav
e his father and the legacy they had built together.
You’re no better than your father. And I don’t mean that shit with his fancy car and his fancy degree. I mean your real father. You know what he was? He was a high school football coach. I screwed his brains out the night after I lost my virginity to your precious daddy. He was a total loser, your biological father. He fucking cried afterwards. Said he had nothing to offer me. Like what? Marriage? He was already married. That’s why I fucked him; his wife was my English teacher and she was a bitch. He was nothing. Nothing. Just like you’re going to be. You’re going to lose that goddamned hotel, and I am going to laugh and laugh and laugh.
Which was how John had come to an agreement with Henry Falcone.
For more than ten years now, Falcone had been paying to use the Paradis’s private docks, its storage facilities, and the occasional bungalow to conduct his business under the aegis of the Lewises’ sterling reputation. The relationship provided numerous benefits to both men, but the hotel was John’s, and he’d always considered himself in charge of the operation.
Until today.
“Look,” he said, forcing a conciliatory note into his voice. “Mistakes were made, obviously. But Calliope Pearson’s no threat to you.”
He’d asked Falcone for help to eliminate a few threats to the Lewis estate, claiming that undiscovered heirs endangered their business dealings. Falcone had lent him a hit man for the Masters sisters and another to blow up Callie’s house. Thank goodness that one had failed.
“You assured me your sister’s husband wasn’t a threat.”
“He wasn’t. Isn’t.” At the angry silence on the other end of the phone, he rushed on, the next words tasting foul. “I could have been wrong about that. But you never told me to look for connections to Harp Security. I never even heard of them.” Falcone growled, and John pushed on. “Nothing ties you to me. Nothing. We’ve made certain of it. So relax. Even if Callie Pearson manages to figure out what my father was up to, she couldn’t connect it to you. Hell, she couldn’t even prove her own paternity. You have nothing to worry about, regardless of what friends Mac Brody may have.”
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