Find You First

by Linwood Barclay

  But his current will left nothing of significance to any one individual.

  There was no spouse. There’d been a couple of girlfriends at UConn, a couple of romances right after college, and he’d had a few meaningless flings in the past decade. But if Miles was honest with himself, he’d only ever had one real love: computers. There’d been some women who might have been happy to share a life with him despite all that, but he’d seen, firsthand, what a marriage could descend into. The only thing that had kept his parents together, at least until they’d driven into that bridge abutment, was their mutual hatred for each other. It was a kind of sick, twisted energy that kept them both alive. Miles had always wondered if his father had driven deliberately into the abutment, or if his mother had reached over and grabbed the wheel to make it happen.

  How could you endure an upbringing like that and want it for yourself? Not Miles. His brother, Gilbert, had believed he could beat the odds, but the woman he’d found and committed himself to—the one Miles thought of as Cruella but whose actual name was Caroline—had as many issues as their mother, if not more. She was a controlling, narcissistic woman. She could put on a smile when she needed to, charm you from here to Cleveland, but the moment your back was turned, watch out.

  And from everything Miles could tell, Gilbert’s daughter, Samantha, had come under the mother’s spell, or at least been cowed by her mood swings. Go along to get along, as they say. Maybe Gilbert put up with the daily tension and anxiety because he didn’t know it could be any other way. When you grew up in a dysfunctional family, you assumed all families were that way. You could walk out on the one you had and trade it for one that was even more fucked up. Miles guessed that was how Gilbert saw the world. As bad as it was, it could be worse.

  Miles had been reluctant to leave his brother a large part of his estate because he feared Caroline would get her hands on it. And he’d felt no small measure of guilt because of that. Gilbert was forty-five, the older brother by three years. He’d looked out for Miles when they were younger. Ran interference for him, protected him from their parents’ tirades. Like the time Miles, too young to have a driver’s license, took out the father’s Oldsmobile for a joyride and backed into a fire hydrant, knocking the bumper right off and sending a geyser of water into the sky. Gilbert knew their father would kill him, so he confessed to the crime. Gilbert was nearly six feet tall at age fifteen, and had enough weight on him that their father would never dare take a belt to him the way he might have when Gilbert was younger. But Gilbert bore the brunt of his anger, which was considerable.

  It was interesting how Gilbert was better at standing up to their father back then than he was at standing up to Caroline now.

  Miles had set up a trust for Gilbert, without his knowledge, that would pay him twenty thousand dollars a month once he’d passed. Given what Miles had, it was a token amount, and there was nothing he could do, in death, to stop Gilbert from handing it over to his wife, but at least it would keep Caroline from getting her hands on a massive inheritance.

  But now, there were other people to consider.

  “I have to sort some things out,” he told Dorian, “while I’m still able.”

  “Go on.”

  “This disease isn’t going to kill me overnight. It may be long and drawn out and pretty fucking horrible. If I’m going to leave money to my children, whoever they are, I need to do it now. Give it to them while they have time to enjoy it.”

  “That’s what you want to do,” Dorian said, seeking clarification. “Distribute your wealth … now … to these biological children, whoever and wherever they may be.”

  He nodded.

  “I see,” Dorian said. “No others you’d want to consider?”

  “I’ll still allocate some to charities,” he said.

  The look on Dorian’s face suggested she had been hoping for a different answer.

  Miles said, “I need to find out who they are. My children. How many there are. Names, addresses.”

  “Jesus, Miles, think about this a minute,” Dorian said. “What if they don’t even know they owe their existence to a fertility clinic? That their father isn’t their real father? You gonna send them an email with ‘Guess what?’ in the subject line? Call them up and say, ‘Hey, I’m your dad. I donated sperm at a clinic more than two decades ago, your mom got it, and here you are! And you’re about to become a multimillionaire! Wanna grab a beer? Oh, and by the way? I’ve got a fatal genetic disease, and there’s a chance—nothing to get alarmed about—you might develop it, too. So whaddaya say about that beer?’ Miles, there’s a lot to consider here.”

  Miles closed his eyes briefly. “Shit,” he said.

  “Exactly.”

  He opened his eyes. “They’re entitled to know.”

  Six

  New York, NY

  The police had closed off Seventieth Street at Park. A massive crane truck sat dead center in the street about halfway between Park and Lexington, and not a car, not a cab, not even a cyclist, was going to get through here for the next few hours.

  Parked on the street, just behind the crane truck, was a Winnebago, a mid-1970s recreation vehicle from the company’s Brave series. Eighteen feet long, as aerodynamic as a box car, with that distinctive W painted down the side. The RV was wrapped in an assortment of straps and braces, and the man in the small, glass-enclosed cockpit was moving the crane’s hook into position above the vehicle.

  The sidewalk in front of three brownstones had been blocked off, and up on the third floor of the one on the right was a gaping hole about twenty feet wide and twelve feet high. Two large panes of glass that would have filled that space were hung on either side of the opening from straps that came down from the roof.

  A large crowd had formed in the street to watch. It wasn’t every day one got to see an RV placed on the third floor of a New York brownstone. But as everyone knew, this was where Jeremy Pritkin lived, and if Jeremy Pritkin wanted a Winnebago in the top floor of his residence, that was exactly what Jeremy Pritkin was going to get.

  Several news crews were there to cover the event, and a reporter from NY1 had managed to pull Pritkin away from supervising the project to ask him a few questions. Pritkin, six feet tall, trim, looked at least a decade younger than his sixty-five years. He stepped well away from the crane for the interview and took off his yellow hard hat, revealing short, salt-and-pepper hair. He had not chosen the rest of his outfit with an engineering project in mind. He was in his trademark midnight blue suit, crisp white shirt, and dark blue tie decorated with hundreds of minuscule golden dollar signs.

  “Angie Warren here on East Seventieth,” the reporter said, “talking to New York notable Jeremy Pritkin about a somewhat outlandish decorating project. Are you really putting a Winnebago inside your house?”

  Pritkin smiled, showing off a set of Hollywood-perfect teeth. “It’s going into my office, up on the third floor.”

  “That’s kind of where you allow your eccentricities to run free,” Angie said.

  “Well, I don’t know about that. We all have our idiosyncrasies, don’t we?”

  “Why a Winnebago?”

  “First of all, it’s an iconic American design, a symbol of exploration. Thousands of Americans got into these vehicles and set forth on adventures of exploration, a little like early settlers who moved westward across the nation. They’re beautiful machines, in an ugly kind of way.” He chuckled.

  “But there’s something personal about them for you, isn’t there?”

  Pritkin nodded. “When I was in my teens, my parents bought one of these—a slightly longer model—and when my dad got his summer holidays, we’d hit the road. Saw everything from Niagara Falls to the Grand Canyon. I think it was those trips that really sparked my interest in national infrastructure, highways and bridges and the like.”

  “And prompted you, eventually, to create a multi-billiondollar highway engineering firm.”

  “Which I sold fifteen years ago, which allo
ws me certain indulgences such as this,” Pritkin said, grinning. “The Winnebago will be a mini-office within my much larger study. A little retreat, if you will.” He pointed to the open space that had been created in the side of the building. “And with any luck, in a few hours, it will be in place, the windows back on, all in time for tonight’s party.”

  “Will you be giving tours of the new addition?”

  Pritkin shook his head. “The third floor is my private place.”

  “While we’ve got you, Mr. Pritkin, you wrote an op-ed in the Times yesterday very critical of the mayor’s budget cutbacks, suggesting he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing.”

  Pritkin shrugged. “I’m not sure that he does. But I don’t imagine my opinion will stop him from coming to my party.”

  Angie smirked. “You have so many strings to your bow. Industrialist, author, opinion columnist, philanthropist, financier—can we now add interior decorator?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure this will start a trend. Everyone’s going to want an RV in their living room. I can imagine one now being added to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.” He chuckled again.

  Pritkin saw that the crane had hooked onto the Winnebago, and the vehicle’s tires were losing their grip on the pavement as it began its ascent.

  “Must end things there,” he said, put the hard hat back on, and headed back to the operation, standing almost under the RV as it was lifted off the street. Pritkin was joined by another man in an orange hard hat and matching orange safety vest. He had a tag on his vest that read: BERT: SUPERVISOR.

  “I hear some sloshing,” Bert said. “Is there still fuel in the tank?”

  “We’ll siphon it out later,” Pritkin said. “Not to worry.”

  “Moved a few grand pianos in my day, but nothing like this,” Bert said. “I can’t believe the city let you do this.”

  Pritkin looked at him and winked. “It helps to know people.”

  He watched with awe and wonder as the vehicle rose higher. Within a few minutes it was level with the third-floor opening. Half a dozen workers stood at the edge, ready to guide it into the building and put it into position.

  “Love to keep watching, but I’ve a party to get ready for,” Pritkin said, giving Bert a pat on the shoulder and heading into the brownstone.

  As it turned out, the mayor did not come. Jeremy Pritkin figured his feelings were hurt, the big baby. But the guests who did arrive that evening still made an impressive list. Anybody who was anybody was here, wandering the first two floors of the joined brownstones, drinking, laughing, dancing, mingling, nibbling. And the nibbling was not restricted to the hors d’oeuvres. Ears and necks were evidently just as tasty. If you saw a bathroom door closed for a long time, it wasn’t because someone was suffering from indigestion.

  Jeremy liked his guests to have a good time.

  If ever there was a party house, this was it. And shouldn’t it be, for a place that was listed for $60 million when he bought it four years ago? There were movie stars here, Grammy winners, failed presidential candidates, a former governor, a famous lawyer who offered his expertise on CNN or Fox or MSNBC nearly every night, a composer who’d won a Tony fifteen years before and had been dining out on it ever since, even a sheik from one of the Emirates, dressed not in his traditional Kandura white robe but a pair of thousand-dollar jeans and a silk shirt with the top three buttons undone.

  Jeremy had acquired a who’s who of interesting friends and acquaintances over the years. When you were something of a Renaissance man, who’d dabbled in more fields than Hershey’s had kisses, and had a problem, chances were you already knew someone who could help you solve it.

  No matter how serious.

  Also sprinkled throughout the crowd were a few less-than-famous faces, although what they lacked in notoriety they made up for in beauty. Young, gorgeous women, some younger than others. Aspiring starlets, models, stewardesses, dancers, many looking to make some cash while they waited for their Broadway careers to blossom. Jeremy liked to have at least half a dozen here to serve drinks, gather up coats, tend to the guests’ needs.

  Some were more needy than others.

  Jeremy worked the crowd. Lots of hugs, plenty of thank-yous.

  A silver-haired woman in her seventies, dressed in a glittering floor-length gown, sidled up to him, slipping her arm into his.

  She whispered, “On behalf of the Met’s board of directors, I would like to thank you for your generous support.”

  “It was nothing,” he said modestly. “Glad to do it.”

  “Two million is not nothing,” she said. “I just wanted to show my gratitude.”

  He grinned slyly. “But Gretchen, your husband is right over there.”

  She laughed, slapped his upper arm. “You’re too much!” And then, whispering again, “If I thought I could get away with it, and if only you had a thing for older women …”

  Now it was his turn to laugh. He gave her hand a squeeze and moved deeper into the crowd.

  “Thanks for that tip!” someone outside his field of vision said to him. “The stock has doubled!”

  Jeremy gave a general thumbs-up and kept moving. He had his eyes on a round-shouldered man who had to be pushing eighty, looking down the dress of one of the young women hired to work the room.

  “Judge Corliss,” he said, getting the man’s attention. “How are we doing tonight?”

  The man’s head snapped up as he eyed the host. He nodded and extended a hand. “Great party,” he said. “Special occasion?”

  Jeremy shook his head. “Do you need an excuse to get together with friends?”

  “Course not.”

  “I understand you’re going to be presiding over our case,” Jeremy said. “Just found out, in fact.”

  “Before or after you sent my invitation?” The judge laughed at his own joke.

  “After. Look, I know you have to call it the way you see it. I know you’ll be fair.”

  “Without question,” the judge said, but there was something exchanged between them at that moment. A look. An understanding.

  Jeremy shook the man’s hand again and was about to strike up a conversation with the anchor for one of the Big Three networks’ early morning shows and a director who’d been up for an Oscar three years ago—how he’d been nominated in the first place was a mystery to Jeremy; the film was utter shit—when someone tapped him on the back.

  He turned and came face-to-face with his personal assistant, Roberta Bennington. Fiftyish, shapely, and tall with jet-black hair that she always swept over to rest on her right shoulder. She might not have been able to look him directly in the eye were it not for the four-inch stilettos she wore whenever here at work. Jeremy had a thing that none of the female staff in his employ could wear flats. Not a fetish, he insisted, although not one of the women who worked for him believed that for a minute.

  “She’s waiting for you in your office,” Roberta told him.

  Jeremy nodded, turned, and departed.

  He walked up the two broad flights of stairs to the third floor. Given that his home was three brownstones stitched together, some areas of the third floor were open to wanderers, but to enter the long, wide hallway that led to his office, one had to enter a four-digit code to open the double doors.

  He keyed in the numbers, opened the door, and proceeded down the hallway, lined on one side with massive windows made of one-way glass that looked down onto East Seventieth, and on the other, large, framed black-and-white photographs.

  These pictures were unlike the Picassos or Pollocks or Pissarros one might find elsewhere in his expansive home. These photos were neither abstract nor landscapes. These were works by Helmut Newton and Robert Mapplethorpe and others. Erotic photographs. Men with women, men with men, women with women. Men alone, women alone. Imaginative couplings and solitary pleasures, many with close-ups of genitalia.

  When he reached the end of this gallery, he reached a second set of doors, but there was no keypad this time.
He opened the doors and went inside.

  It was, if not quite the size of a tennis court, close. One wall, the glass one that had been dismantled earlier in the day and then put back in place, afforded a broad view of East Seventieth Street, but anyone gazing up from the sidewalk, or hoping to get a peek into Jeremy Pritkin’s world from the brownstone across the street, would have been disappointed. This glass, like that in the hallway, was one-way. From the street, this window gave the appearance of a massive mirror.

  The angular, boxy Winnebago was parked up against the far wall, the front end pointed toward the street, close to the window. Shelves stocked with art books lined another wall, and more graphically sexual art was displayed on the one behind the expansive desk that dominated the room.

  Well, that dominated the room before the RV was put in place.

  As Jeremy closed the second set of doors, he heard the crying, even before he saw the girl.

  The large leather chair in which she sat enveloped her. With its oversized arms and towering seatback, the chair dwarfed her, like some novelty piece of furniture at a state fair that visitors needed a ladder to crawl into to have their picture taken.

  The girl was not waiting to have her picture taken.

  Dressed in fashionably ragged jeans and a sweatshirt emblazoned with the letters NYPD, she sat with her knees drawn up to her chest, her skinny arms wrapped around them to hold them in place. Her hair, blond with streaks of pink, hung over her eyes, partly obscuring the tears that ran down her cheeks. When Jeremy entered she drew in on herself, tightened the grip on her knees.

  She did not look more than fifteen.

  “Oh, Nicky, Nicky, Nicky,” Jeremy said softly. “Nicky Bondurant. Look at you.”

  He sat in a matching leather chair next to hers and turned so that he could address her more directly. He drew out the folded silk handkerchief that was tucked into the front pocket of his suit jacket and handed it to her.