The Greater Good

by Casey Moreton

  Brooke’s father brought his newspaper with him to the table. He settled into his chair at the head of the table, and shuffled through to the sports section. “The Nicks ate it again last night,” he said to no one in particular.

  Brooke parked her brother at the table and then flopped in a chair next to him. There were cartons of milk and orange juice on the table. She poured herself a small glass of juice.

  Grace worked in front of the oven range, occasionally wiping her hands on her apron. She carried two serving dishes to the dining area, setting them on braided hot pads on the table.

  “Everything smellsgreat,” Brooke said.

  “Well, eat up, because there’s plenty,” Grace said, turning back to the kitchen.

  Wyatt insisted on pouring his own milk. His thin arm strained to hold the carton of milk steady as the white stream gurgled in the bottom of his glass. There were splotches on the tablecloth where he’d missed his target. Brooke watched her brother, wanting to help him, but knowing that it was important that he feel that he was still capable of performing certain basic tasks for himself.

  Curls of steam rose from the griddle. Dean worked his fork like a surgeon’s tool. Without tearing his eyes from the sports page, he reached blindly toward the center of the table and grabbed the squeeze-bottle of ketchup. He squirted a whole blob on the side of his plate.

  Wyatt went through the laborious process of transferring a fried egg to his plate. The result was a broken yoke. It oozed in streams, forming a yellow perimeter around his French toast. He glared at the mess for a moment, then cut a glance at his sister.

  “I like to mix my food,” he said with a shrug and a grin.

  “It all winds up in the same place, anyway,” Brooke said, then sipped her juice.

  “Hey,” Wyatt said, “how about some of that world-famous coffee of yours?”

  “Coming right up, mister,” Grace said, backing her chair away from the table.

  “Keep your seat, Mom. I’ve got it.” Brooke jumped to her feet and grabbed a coffee mug from the cabinet. “I can’t tell you how nice it is to be away from the city for a while. It took me quite some time to decompress during the train ride up here. But the ride forced me to mellow out and catch up on a little sleep. And it’s so peaceful up here. You don’t know how badly I’ve missedtrees, of all things.”

  Grace said, “I’m relieved you got here safely. I kept expecting to see your train overturned on one of those news reports.”

  “Yeah, we saw a lot of folks who’d slid off the road.”

  “Serves ’em right for getting out in this weather,” Dean said, never looking up from the page before him. His mouth was full. “People can’t stay home for ten minutes. Run, run, run…that’s all it is.”

  Brooke’s mother rolled her eyes.

  “Yeah,” Wyatt piped in. “Shoot, it’s looking like I’ll have to invest in snow chains for my wheelchair. Otherwise I’ll have to quit my job as a welder down at the docks.”

  “Welder? Uh,yeah.” Brooke fiddled with her utensils.

  “I for one will sleep better at night when you move somewhere less hostile,” Grace said, peppering her eggs.

  “New York is fine, Mom,” Brooke said.

  “Brooky here is bulletproof, Mom,” Wyatt said.

  “It’s a mother’s job to worry, you two,” Grace responded. “Otherwise, I’d have nothing to do. Every time I see something on the news about someone being shot or getting into an accident, I’m always glad to know that the two of you are safe. Like those poor people in that apartment building last night. One minute everything was fine, and they were going on about their lives. The next minute—Whooooosh!!!—the whole place explodes in a ball of flames.”

  “We don’t live in Libya, Mom,” Wyatt said.

  “It wasn’t Libya. It was right there in New York City.”

  “What?” Brooke raised her head. “An apartment building in New York?”

  “Mmmhmm.”

  “That’s terrible. Where?”

  “I’m not exactly sure. It’s been on CNN all morning. They don’t know if it was an accident or what. Pretty scary stuff,” Grace said, shaking her head woefully.

  “Probably a terrorist,” Dean added from behind his paper.

  Brooke’s news instincts took over. She just couldn’t miss out on a good story. She headed for the front room. She turned on the TV and flipped through channels until she landed onHeadline News. They were making the half-hour financial report. That meant she’d missed the top stories and would have to wait for it to come around in the rotation. She returned to the kitchen and took her plate from the table, taking it with her to the front room.

  “Don’t get anything on the carpet,” Grace said behind her.

  Brooke sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV, her plate on her lap. She picked at her French toast as she flipped slowly through the cable channels. The fire felt good on the side of her face.

  It took ten minutes to hit on anything about the explosion.

  “Oh, my gosh,” she said, watching the footage of flames shooting from the rubble. She set her plate down on the carpet beside her. She studied the network footage, drawn to something eerily familiar, which she couldn’t immediately put her finger on.

  Wyatt steered his wheelchair into the front room. “What gives?” he said.

  “Shhh.”

  They watched the television screen together in silence.

  Finally, Brooke said, “I’m waiting for them to give an address. Something…” She shook her head. “There’s something familiar about that building.”

  “You know that building?”

  “Maybe, yeah, I think…”

  The footage showed firefighters dousing the blaze with long hoses. Smoke rose high above the destruction. On the screen, reporters interviewed witnesses in the street, asking them what had happened. There were shots of the dead and injured being spirited away on stretchers and then loaded into ambulances. Text appeared at the bottom of the screen, identifying the location of the explosion.

  Brooke’s jaw dropped. “Please, God, no!”

  “What? What?” Wyatt sat up straight in his wheelchair.

  Brooke had jumped to her feet. She backed away from the television set. “No, no, no!!!” Her voice had risen in her distress, bringing her parents into the room.

  “What is it, dear? What’s wrong?” her mother asked, wiping her mouth with a corner of her apron.

  “What’s the problem?” Dean Weaver insisted, his newspaper trailing from his fist at his side.

  Brooke Weaver stood ashen-faced. Her eyes looked as big around as soup cans, unblinking. “Darla!” she said. “That’s Darla’s apartment building!”

  “No way,” Wyatt said.

  Brooke turned and dashed for the kitchen. She jerked the cordless phone from the wall and in her panic misdialed Darla’s home number several times. She finally got all the digits punched in their proper order and listened to the line ring. She could barely contain herself.

  “Comeoncomeoncomeon!” she muttered, staring at the countertop. “Darla, come on, pick it up. Answer the phone!” She could hear Wyatt and her parents talking in the front room, all of them clearly baffled by the situation.

  There was no answer.

  She dialed again.

  Still no answer.

  She hung up, then dialed Darla’s office number. The voice mail picked up. She left a frantic message, “Darla, this is Brooke. Are you all right? I just saw the fire on the news. Please call me the minute you get in. I’m worried sick.”

  She hung up.

  She dialed Darla’s cell phone. No answer.

  She tried again, praying that she’d misdialed the first time.

  Again, no answer.

  Then it occurred to her to try someone else in their production team to find out what was going on. She dialed Joyce’s desk. There was no answer. She took a deep breath and dialed Lesley. No answer. Lipton Stephenson. His voice mail picked up.


  She had failed to get ahold of a single member of their team. She hung up, brushing her fingers through her hair. Perhaps they’d gone to lunch together. But she glanced at the clock on the wall. It was still early morning. They should be at work by now, but the day had just begun. Everyone should be busy. A meeting, perhaps?

  Then a terrible, terrible thought bubbled up in her mind. A thought so horrendous it frightened her to even consider it. She pulled over a kitchen chair and sat down.Oh no, please no, she thought, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath.

  The Christmas party.

  They would have all been at the party.

  Brooke suddenly felt a sick lump in her stomach.

  Okay,she told herself,remain calm, just remain calm. Take a deep breath and relax. There is a perfectly good explanation for what is going on. But she knew there was not a perfectly good explanation. They had all been at the party—Darla, Barry, Joyce, Lipton, Connor, Jill, Lesley—and they had all been in the explosion.

  Time seemed to stop. For a long moment, she forgot where she was.

  Her hands began to tremble. She felt quite sure she would vomit.

  She dialed the phone. A female voice picked up. “NBC News, this is Mandy.”

  “Mandy, this is Brooke Weaver.”

  There was a pause.

  “Brooke?Oh, thankgoodness! We all thought for sure…I mean, you didn’t show up this morning and nobody answered the phone at your apartment, so we thought you’d been with the—”

  “Mandy, where’s Darla, and the others on the team?” Brooke said, her head growing dizzy with each passing second.

  “You mean…you don’t…you haven’t heard?”

  Brooke hung up the phone.

  Her stomach began to lurch. The spasm grew stronger. It was all coming up. She rose from the chair and stumbled toward the bathroom, passing through the edge of the front room, heading down the hall.

  “Brooke? Sweetheart?” her mother called after her.

  “What’s going on?” she thought she heard her father say.

  She made it through the bathroom door, but she hit the linoleum hard on her knees, barely managing to brace herself with her outstretched hands. She was breathless, her heart hammering in her chest. Her knees were like rubber, too shaky for her to stand. She was vaguely aware of the sounds of her family coming down the hall after her.

  As she balanced there on the bathroom floor on her hands and knees, a mental picture flashed into her mind’s eye: it was her seven friends, talking and laughing in the final seconds before the apartment building went up in smoke and flames.

  Another call had been answered at the NBC studios at Rockefeller Plaza at a different desk, a few minutes earlier.

  A female voice asked, “I’d like to speak to Darla Donovan.”

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Donovan is not in this morning,” a woman at the reception desk said. “Would you like to leave a message?”

  “No. No. How about Brooke? Could I speak to her?”

  “BrookeWeaver?”

  “Excuse me?”

  The receptionist clarified herself, exactly as the caller had assumed she would. “Brooke Weaver is one of Ms. Donovan’s assistants.”

  “Ah, of course. Yes, could I speak with Brooke Weaver?”

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Weaver is not in the office this morning, either. I would be happy to—”

  The line was disconnected.

  The call had come from a pay phone a block away. Carmichael, still wearing the brown wig, hung up the phone and turned to Lewis, who was standing beside her.

  “Bingo,” she said.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  They hurried to the van and climbed in.

  Carmichael dialed a cell phone from the passenger’s seat.

  “What?” Desmond said, answering the phone in Julius Albertwood’s penthouse at Trump Tower.

  “Her name is Brooke Weaver,” Carmichael said.

  Porter sat at a table near Desmond, with a laptop computer before him. Desmond nodded at him, and said, “Brooke Weaver.”

  Porter rattled the computer keys. In four minutes they had a phone number and an address.

  Twenty minutes later, Lewis and Carmichael exited the apartment. Terri Bryant had told them everything they needed to know to find Brooke Weaver. They had found her in bed, sleeping off a bit of a hangover. They slit her throat and left her in the bathtub with the shower curtain drawn. Afterward, they stole the cash and credit cards from her purse and tossed the apartment. The police would think it was a robbery gone bad. Carmichael grabbed a framed photo of an all-white family; Brooke Weaver and her family, she assumed.

  Now they knew where Brooke Weaver had been headed when she left the message on Darla Donovan’s answering machine. She’d gone home to Mommy and Daddy. And they had a picture of her. Everything now seemed pretty clear-cut. Belfast should have no problem finding her in Syracuse.

  28

  THE PHOTO OFARIEL HAD GOTTEN HIM NOWHERE.JOELhad spent a long, cold night outside the apartment building on East Fifty-seventh. He’d gone almost entirely without food, and entirely without sleep. And now he was violently ill.

  A hacking cough was ripping his chest out through his throat. He had a fever, he was sure of it. His head was pounding. What a stupid, stupid decision, he thought.

  The night before, desperate for a lead, he had stood outside the front doors to the apartment building, approaching residents of the apartment as they came and went, showing them the black-and-white photocopy, asking if they recognized the face. Most folks ignored him, hurrying on through the door or out to catch a cab. Canvassing the apartment had turned into an abysmal dead end. Every ten minutes he fought the urge to call Crouder for an update.

  He found a grimy little dive down the street and huddled over a steaming cup of coffee at a table against the wall. He sat coughing until his face was purple and his voice went hoarse. He could now barely talk.Stupid, stupid, stupid!!!! Maybe this was how it should end, he thought. Maybe this was a sign, a sign that he was meant to fail.

  Megan was out there somewhere, but in his condition he could not go on searching for her. He felt like he was going to die. He needed a doctor. He was freezing, yet his flesh was hot to the touch. How his growing momentum from twenty-four hours ago had slammed to such a complete and absolute halt, he couldn’t understand. He was growing increasingly depressed.

  Leaving the coffee shop, he found a small, corner grocery and purchased a bottle of cold and flu formula. It was increasingly hard to focus, let alone navigate the busy city streets.

  After all he’d been through in the last four days, after the peaks of emotion and flood tide of adrenaline, after entertaining the prospects of reuniting with his daughter, his only present desire was to simply make it back to his hotel room and pass out in bed until sometime tomorrow.

  The Ducati motorcycle was parked at the curb between a Chevy Cavalier and a Fiat. The face shield on the rider’s helmet was flipped up. He saw Belfast and the girl come out of the Waldorf-Astoria and hail a cab. It was 10A .M.

  As the taxi merged with traffic, R’mel flipped down his face shield, and the Ducati pulled away from the curb, fishtailing slightly as the rear tire fought for traction on a patch of ice. R’mel gunned the throttle, accelerating through traffic, making sure to keep the cab in view. At Fifth Avenue, the girl got out of the cab. She blew a kiss at the rear window, then spun on her heels and pranced off for a morning of shopping. Behind the face shield, R’mel smiled.

  St. John was anxious. It was Friday morning, and he was just flat-out ready to put this whole circus behind him. Once the money was in place, he could shake off this anxiety.

  He was glad that Megan was going to spend the rest of the morning shopping. He’d outfitted her with a string of credit cards—cards with no limits. He’d told her to go crazy, but he knew she was not like that. For her, life wasn’t about the money. She loved him and would always love him. The money, if anything, was about security. I
t would allow them to focus on each other rather than worrying about how to pay the mortgage or where their next meal would come from. Sure, she’d grow accustomed to the finer things, but he was convinced that she’d not even flinch if he announced that he wanted to give the money away.

  From the very beginning, he had called himself Belfast. A killer for hire could not feasibly use his given name when doing business. The only way to function, to carry on a normal existence outside of his chosen occupation, was to maintain an alias. When he was little, his family had had an Irish setter named Belfast. St. John had loved the dog.

  He had managed to rigorously protect his birth name. It would have been devastating for his true identity to ever be made known to those with whom he came into contact in his profession. But now, after more than a decade of bearing the enigmatic label of Belfast, the time had come to rid himself of the name forever.

  The payment of $5.9 million U.S. was to be wired to an offshore account in the name of one Charles Masnad. St. John would then have the money transferred to a web of accounts throughout the Caribbean and Europe. Eventually, the money would wind up in six banks in Europe—five with one million dollars each, and one with nine hundred thousand dollars. There the money would remain until needed. By that time, “Belfast” would be no more. There was a knot in the pit of his stomach.Just let this morning be the end of it, he thought. There should be a small yellow envelope in the bank box. The envelope would contain the account number in the Caribbean where his fortune awaited him. St. John called the driver’s attention to the bank ahead of them. “That’s it,” he said.

  The driver honked at a Volkswagen sedan, then swerved into the right lane. He put the transmission in park and said something over the seat at St. John. St. John peeled off several bills, and folded them into the man’s hands.

  R’mel spoke into the mike in his helmet. He was instructed to hold his position outside the bank and wait for further instructions. He steered the bike up alongside the curb, within sight of the bank, and used the heel of his boot to knock down the kickstand.