The Greater Good

by Casey Moreton

  Her brother, Wyatt, was dying of leukemia. He was living back at home so that their parents could take care of him. Most likely, this would be their last Christmas together. The thought of losing him filled her with…well, it was simply too much to contemplate.

  First, though, there was work to be done. Brooke shook off her musings in an attempt to focus. Just a few more hours and she’d be free. The minutes simply couldn’t tick by soon enough.

  An hour later, Brooke made the mistake of passing Darla’s open door. Brooke barely got three steps beyond when she was summoned inside. She cringed, debated hurrying on, then reluctantly entered her boss’s domain.

  “Have you called Richmond?” Darla said without looking up from her desk.

  “Not yet.”

  “We needed that nailed down amonth ago!”

  Cringe.Clearly, Darla was in one of her pissy moods today. They came and went like the tides. Maybe it had to do with the holidays.

  “If you need a baby-sitter to hold your hand, Brooke, to help you get this done, I guess—”

  “I’ll make the call, Darla.” Brooke blew a tuft of blond hair out of her face. Her lean figure, shoulder-length blond hair, average height, stylish skirt and top, and tortoiseshell horn-rimmed glasses made her the absolute picture of a corporate go-getter. Brooke was accustomed to her boss’s fury. The woman’s angelic face and movie-star smile could turn vicious in a millisecond. “You have my word.”

  “Fine, fine!” Darla wheeled around in her executive-style swivel chair, turning her attention elsewhere. In an instant she was on the phone and quickly had a new victim. “Jonesy, where is that documentation? No, no—you said Wednesday. Jonesy, you’re late,again!”

  Brooke took advantage of the window of opportunity, and backpedaled out of Donovan’s den of terror. Deadlines generally put Darla on the warpath. She could be your best friend, your pal, your amigo, but when the screws began to tighten, as a story came due for broadcast, well…frankly, she transformed into a shrew. Although, in comparison to the remaining 99 percent of the women in the industry, she was a saint.

  Brooke nearly escaped. She had her arms stacked to overflowing with file folders, videocassettes, and script binders as she navigated the foot traffic toward the relative solace of her own tiny work space. Darla sprang out the door, still holding the phone to her ear.

  “Brooke! Brooke, hold on!”

  Brooke Weaver froze, midstep.

  “Brooke!”

  Brooke pivoted on her heels.

  Darla motioned her back to her office.Cringe. That could mean anything. Being called to Darla’s office was a nerve-shredding grab bag of the unknown. Whether good or bad, the result was invariablymore work. She shuffled toward her boss’s door.

  Brooke poked her head in, and Darla set the phone down. “Sorry,” Darla said, as apologetically as her nature allowed. “Favor to ask. I’m swamped. Haven’t been home since, like, July. So I haven’t made it down to check the V.I.P. box for at least three or four days.” Darla sighed, sweeping an open palm above her desk, acknowledging the immense clutter.

  Brooke caught the hint. “Say no more, Chief. I’ll hit it on my way home.”

  “You’re a champ.”

  “So they say.”

  “Youare coming to the party tomorrow night, right?” Darla flashed herthe look.

  “I’ll be there with bells on.”

  “Great! If you would, swing by the post office on your way home today, and bring any mail from the box to my place tomorrow evening. Six o’clock sharp. You’re a doll—oh, here’s the key.” Darla dropped the key on the videocassette case atop Brooke’s load.

  “I’ll be here all night. Think about me when you’re lounging about, eating chocolate and watching cable.”

  Brooke smirked. “You know very well that you areall I think about.” Then she turned back into the corridor, NBC employees rushing past her. Over her shoulder she called, “See ya, Chief!”

  The V.I.P. box was Donovan’s special secret. She’d developed enough faith in Brooke, over an exhaustive period of time, to trust her to periodically messenger its contents to her whenever the need arose. It was nothing more than a garden-variety post office box. Darla had maintained it for years. It was her way of keeping “sensitive material” away from prying eyes in the mailroom at NBC. She had dozens of trusted informants scattered throughout the various realms of industry, politics, and power, and the vast majority of these “anonymous sources” were understandably paranoid. So, there was the “V.I.P.” box. It had served her well. Darla was violently possessive over the box’s content and had laid down two nonnegotiable rules regarding Brooke’s occasional assistance: first, she was to tell no one of the box’s existence; and second, under no circumstances was she to openanything —period!

  The walk from Rockefeller Plaza to the post office seemed twice as long because of the bitter cold and the biting wind. A tall gentleman with close-cropped hair and a long wool coat held the door for her, and nothing had ever felt so good and right and lovely as stepping into the great heated expanse of the United States Postal Service.

  Brooke snatched off her gloves with her teeth and waded through a sea of fellow New Yorkers to the opposite end of the building. 1124, 1123…1122. She turned the key in box 1122 and removed two business-size envelopes and a parcel wrapped in brown paper. She felt her hand around deep inside the box, just to be sure.

  She found some breathing room and set her Eddie Bauer backpack on a table by a window. The table was littered with change-of-address forms. She brushed them aside. Her pack was filled with a change of clothes, a water bottle, the script she’d worked on for the last nine months of her life, and an entire compilation of other odds and ends from her daily existence.

  Neither the letters nor the parcel possessed a return address. Nothing from the box ever did. If anything, there’d be a symbol or a code word written in the upper left-hand corner. The first envelope had nothing more than the box number and the proper postage. The second envelope had a small, hand-drawn sunflower, in red ink. She could only guess what shadowy figure had doodled that bit of hokey artwork.

  Brooke unzipped the outer compartment of her pack and managed to wedge both envelopes alongside a Pottery Barn catalog she spent most of her free-time lusting over. The parcel, she estimated offhand, was the size of a hardcover book or a small gift box. The wordBEACON was written in block lettering in the upper corner. The outer compartment of her pack was stuffed, so she pulled back the flap, yanked out a fleece pullover, and stuffed the parcel deep inside.

  She glanced up and saw fresh flakes sticking to the outside of the window. She dreaded going back out in the cold. Just then, a cab pulled alongside the curb and let out a passenger. Without hesitation, Brooke swiped up her pack by its straps and made a mad dash for the door.

  16

  Early afternoon

  PRECISELY TEN MILES (AS THE CROW FLIES) FROM THE POSToffice where Brooke had just hailed a cab in Manhattan, Joel paid his driver and stood on the street corner in a working-class neighborhood in Queens.

  He had exchanged his usual attire of mindless-gray business suits for newly purchased khaki pants, a turtleneck sweater, and a casual-looking midthigh-length hooded coat. From a pocket of his coat he unfolded five sheets of blue paper from a legal pad. The contents of these pages represented close to forty-eight hours of nonstop legwork and desperation. The subject of interest was an address jotted near the bottom of the fifth page. The name that accompanied the address was that of Louis Vena. The road to Louis Vena had been a long and winding one.

  He had begun at the only point he could, with what little he had. New York was an enormous place to find something or someone, even if you had a name or a destination to work with. But with Megan, he’d had neither. She would be twenty-two now, and given her and her mother’s flight a decade earlier, they likely had taken on a new last name, at the very least. Perhaps entirely new identities. But all of that was pure speculation. The sum
of what he had was a face and a description of a young woman and a taxi number.

  He had begun with those small clues on Monday evening. Now, just forty-eight hours after his mind-blowing sighting at JFK, Joel was inching closer, taking hold of one small piece of the puzzle at a time.

  Monday night he had hardly slept at all. His adrenaline had been pumping. More than once he had questioned his own sanity. Was there even the remotest chance he had actually seen his daughter? The question seared through his brain. Megan had been twelve years old when they disappeared, yet he’d seen a full-grown woman at the airport. So, how could he even begin to convince himself that it was truly her? Was this merely self-deception on a grand scale? Perhaps.

  Genuine doubt, though, had never really entered his mind. His conviction lay in the fact that when he’d first seen the woman’s face, he’d have sworn she was Ariel. Standing there, luggage in hand, his mind on other matters, he had believed wholeheartedly that he was staring at his ex-wife. There had been no doubt. It was the face he’d married. The face he’d loved.

  Yet in a fraction of a second he had realized that the woman was much too young. Ariel would be in her forties. And in that instant, the synapses of his mind aligned, producing the answer to the riddle: Megan had grown up in the mirror image of her mother. It happened every day, in millions of homes across the globe. Mothers and daughter. Fathers and sons. Simple biology. Something deep in his gut told him there was no doubt about it.

  Monday night, in the earliest stages of the hunt, her face and description were of no use to him. Neither was her name. His only lead was the taxi number, 1881.

  He rented a room in Manhattan and opened the phone book to the Yellow Pages. There were dozens and dozens of listings for taxi and livery companies in the greater New York area. Across the street from the hotel was an all-night grocery, where he purchased a legal pad, a pack of four ballpoint pens, and a New York street map.

  With the map spread across the small reading table in his room, he pinpointed JFK and, using the mileage scale in the corner of the map, drew a measured circle around JFK. The circle indicated a twenty-mile radius. He repeated the process with a second circle, this one half the distance, establishing a ten-mile radius.

  Then came the lengthy process of pinpointing, on the map, the street address of each cab company in the Yellow Pages. If an address fell beyond the twenty-mile radius, it was crossed out. Anything between ten and twenty miles was underlined, and any company inside the ten-mile radius was circled. This assumed that any taxi company outside the twenty-mile radius was less likely to service JFK on a regular basis.

  Abiding by this strategy, he was able to instantaneously shrink the search parameter to fewer than twenty miles. On his legal pad, he compiled a list of companies falling within the ten-mile radius. This was his A-list. Next, he compiled a B-list, those companies falling between the ten- and twenty-mile marks.

  Calls made to the companies on both lists produced fourteen cars with 1881 as their identifying numerals. By this time, it was early Tuesday, and only a third of these companies operated around-the-clock. Joel was connected to the dispatch offices of the available five and, under the guise of being a detective with the NYPD, requested information regarding any fares picked up at JFK between five and seven, Monday evening. Of these five, there’d been no fares from JFK.

  That left nine.

  He’d have to wait until morning.

  As painful and frustrating as it was, Joel had resigned himself to the cold reality that he might very well have run aground. This might be the end of the road. He had nine more shots. Nine more arrows in his quiver. Nine smooth, flat stones to fling into the abyss. But it would have to wait until daylight.

  He fell asleep on the floor, his head on the map. By the time he awoke, sunlight poured through the drapes. He had struggled to his feet, bleary-eyed and half-alert. His head had felt strange, dense. It was Tuesday, 11:20A .M. He had overslept.

  Joel had run across the street for coffee and then jumped on the telephone. A stupid mistake had cost him a lot of daylight. Nobody was very forthcoming with information. His first call was on the money, or at least began that way; car number 1881 had picked up a fare at 6:30P .M. at JFK and delivered the fare to an upscale apartment building in Manhattan. The dispatcher informed him that no log was kept regarding passenger description. “We don’t care what they look like, Detective, so long as they pay their fare.” He was hesitant to divulge the driver’s name and home phone number.

  The next six companies produced only negative results. In each case, 1881 hadn’t gone anywhere near JFK. But the last companies on the list were pay dirt. Each had had fares from JFK around the time frame in question. Joel spoke with one of the drivers right on the spot. Sure he’d picked up a fare a few minutes before five—an older fellow with his wife.

  Dead end.

  The remaining driver was already on duty. At the request ofDetective Benjamin, the dispatcher radioed the driver and patched him through to Joel. Yes, he’d picked up a fare at JFK, but it had actually been well after 7P .M., and he’d not followed the route into Manhattan that Joel described. Joel thanked him.

  By now it was late Tuesday evening.

  The sole remaining lead was through Cross-City Taxi & Livery. The cabdriver’s name was Louis Vena of Queens, New York. Repeated attempts to reach Mr. Vena by phone on Wednesday had failed. No one answered, and either the Vena family did not have a machine or had failed to turn it on upon leaving for the day. The dispatcher had stated that Wednesday was Vena’s day off.

  All of this had led Joel to the street corner in Queens on a cold, overcast winter’s day. The written address led him to a small brick house with one window overlooking the street. Joel ascended the front steps and pressed the doorbell button. A minute’s wait, and no answer. A mailbox hung from the brick facade to one side of the door. Joel cast a glance over each shoulder, and lifted the flap to peek inside. He pulled out a gas bill. It was addressed to Mr. and Mrs. L. Vena.

  Joel waited in the cold with no assurance that his man would show. He waited across the street. He didn’t have to wait long. He watched as a short, stocky man wandered down the sidewalk, stopped at the door, unlocked it, and disappeared inside. Joel took a breath and headed back across the street.

  Thirty minutes later, Joel added a crisp fifty-dollar bill to the two he’d already handed Louis Vena. Vena folded the bills into a shirt pocket and showed the stranger to the door. Joel thanked him again, and again found himself alone on the street in working-class Queens.

  He buttoned his coat, chilled by the sudden cold, yet pumped by sudden exhilaration. Every sound, every visual stimuli, every evidence of life in the city was lost to him. He was blind to all things save for the realization that he’d taken an enormous leap forward, a monumental step closer to Megan.

  During the hours in question, Vena had picked up several fares. He vaguely remembered a young brunette wearing a maroon beret but failed to offer specifics. Where he’d dropped the brunette, he couldn’t state with any amount of confidence. What hecould offer, though, were the three stops he had made in Manhattan somewhere within the desired hours. Who he had dropped where was simply beyond recall. Three separate fares at three separate stops. And he was pretty confident that one of the fares had been the brunette.

  The sum of his new knowledge did not point him directly to Megan. It only narrowed his area of focus. Thirty minutes of conversation and $150 had wrenched every available drop of recollection from the memory of a cabdriver from Queens.

  Joel departed with three street addresses. How his investment in Louis Vena would pan out, only time would tell. Was Vena trustworthy? Perhaps. There was presently no room for debating the issue. If there was any substance to the information at all, one of the most populated cities in the world had just shrunk dramatically.

  17

  SET AGAINST CRUSHED VELVET, UNDER ARTFULLY ARRANGEDlighting, the five-carat diamond glowed and shimmered, seeming to p
roduce a life and light of its own.

  Each point of light danced in the eyes of Megan Durant. The spell had been cast. No other hypnotic in the universe can match that of a diamond over a woman. Her lips parted ever so slightly. She leaned against the glass display case. For the longest time she didn’t blink. She didn’t breathe. If her heart continued to beat, she didn’t notice. Every molecule of her existence froze in the perfection of the moment.

  Olin was poised at her side, arms crossed over his chest. It gave him great pleasure to gaze on her profile. He made no attempt to hide it. A smile lit his face. The deep blue of his Armani suit amplified the blue of his eyes, which never left Megan.

  The gold band glided down the length of her slender third finger. Megan held out her hand, raising it slightly, turning the diamond at different angles to the overhead light.

  “Well?” Olin said, knowing she was completely enamored.

  “It’s fabulous.” Her voice came out as a dreamy sigh.

  “Yes, absolutely,” the saleswoman agreed, seeing that she had them hooked. Now it was time to play the fish, to work the line, to reel her in. “Stunning, really.”

  “You make it look beautiful,” Olin said, not caring about the ring except that it brought such joy to Megan’s eyes.

  Megan took a step back from the counter. She ran the tip of a finger against the stone, feeling the perfection of the cut. It seemed to be nearly the size of a dime and gave off the light of an entire galaxy.

  “I really don’t know what to say,” she said, clearly out of breath.

  “Say you love it.”

  “Oh, I do. I do. It’s just so overwhelming.”