by Harlan Coben
“Hard to estimate,” she said, “but probably close to forty million dollars.”
That opened his eyes. “Whoa.”
“But this isn’t just about the money.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“Stop being cynical for a second. Just imagine what would happen to Truth Haven if fourteen more sons come forward with claims. It will, in effect, destroy the Truth.”
“Come on, Dee.”
“What?”
“Will you stop with the Truth? You know that’s all a lot of nonsense. You just admitted that to me.”
Dee Dee shook her head. “You’re so blind, Ash. I love the Truth.”
“And you’re using it to get what you want.”
“Yes, of course. Those two things aren’t contradictory. No one believes every passage of a holy book—they pick and choose. And every pastor who makes money from his religion—if he believes in what he preaches or not—is getting something out of it. That’s life, my love.”
That was wild rationalization, but on some level, it was also absolute truth.
It was getting hot in the car. Ash turned up the AC. “So we only have two more sons to eliminate.”
“Yes. One in the Bronx, one in Tallahassee.” Then Dee Dee added: “Oh, and now we also have to get rid of Simon Greene.”
Chapter
Thirty-Five
Simon and Cornelius stood outside the same bank branch where a few hours earlier Simon had withdrawn the money for the DNA test. Rocco had sent Cornelius to make sure Simon understood that he wasn’t getting this information for free. So here Simon was, back at the bank, looking to take out more cash.
Because he’d already withdrawn a somewhat large amount of money and didn’t want to draw more attention to himself, he’d called Yvonne for help. He spotted her now, walking toward him.
“Any issues?” he asked.
“No.” Yvonne glanced over at Cornelius, this black man with the threadbare T-shirt and the thick white beard, then back at Simon. “Who is this?”
“Cornelius,” Simon said.
Yvonne turned to him. “And who are you, Cornelius?”
“Just a friend,” Cornelius said.
She looked him up and down and then asked, “And what do you need this money for?”
“It’s not for him,” Simon said. “He’s helping me.”
“Helping you what?”
Simon quickly explained about Rocco and Luther. He naturally left off the fact that Cornelius had been the one who saved his and Ingrid’s lives. When he finished, he braced for Yvonne’s counterarguments. None came.
“Stay out of sight,” Yvonne said. “I’ll get the cash from my account.”
Simon wanted to tell Yvonne that he’d pay her back, but Yvonne was Ingrid’s sister and would get pissed off if he made the offer, so he just nodded. When Yvonne entered, Simon and Cornelius walked down the block so they weren’t loitering directly in front of the bank.
“Good time to fill me in,” Cornelius said.
So he did.
“That’s messed up,” Cornelius said when he finished.
“Yup.” Then: “Why did you help us, Cornelius?”
“Why not?”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. Not a lot of chances to be a hero in real life. You got to step up when the opportunity presents itself.”
Cornelius shrugged as if to emphasize it was a no-brainer and that simple, and Simon believed that maybe it was.
“Thank you.”
“Also Ingrid, she was nice to me.”
“When she wakes up, I’m going to tell her what you did, if that’s okay.”
“Yeah, that’s okay,” Cornelius said. “You still got the gun I gave you?”
“Yes. You think we’ll need it?”
“Never know. But no, I don’t think you’ll need it. Still, we will make provisions.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning we don’t just walk in with thousands of dollars unarmed.”
“Got it.”
“And one other thing,” Cornelius said.
“What’s that?”
“Don’t let me be the black friend who gets killed. I hate that in movies.”
Simon laughed for the first time in what felt like months.
Cornelius’s phone buzzed so he stepped aside. Yvonne came out of the bank and handed him the cash. “I asked for nine thousand six hundred and five dollars.”
“Why that amount?”
“So it’s not the exact same as yours and trips up a computer somewhere. Six hundred and five, six five. June fifth. You know the date?”
He did. Simon’s godson Drew, Yvonne’s oldest kid, was born on that day.
“I thought maybe it would bring you luck,” she said.
Cornelius came back. “That was Rocco.”
“What’s up?” Simon asked.
“He’ll be at my place in a couple of hours. He needs to locate Luther.”
Cornelius waited outside the hospital while Simon and Yvonne headed back up to Ingrid’s room. They greeted Sam. The three of them sat near the bed for over an hour and waited for Rocco to give Cornelius the okay. When the nurses changed shifts, the new nurse, a stickler for the rules, came in the room and said, “Only two people are supposed to be in the room at any one time. Do you mind rotating? One of you can stay in the waiting area down the corridor?”
Sam stood. “I need to do some studying anyway.”
“You should head back to school,” Simon said. “Your mother would want that.”
“Maybe so,” Sam said, “but I don’t want that. I want to be here.”
He turned and left.
Yvonne said, “He’s special.”
“Yes.” Then: “I spoke to one of Paige’s professors today.”
“Oh?”
“He thinks Paige might have been raped on campus.”
Yvonne said nothing. She just stared at her sister in the bed.
“Did you hear me?”
“Yeah, I heard you, Simon.”
He watched her face for a tell. “Wait, you knew?”
“I’m her godmother. She…she used to confide in me.”
He could feel the red rush to his face. “And you didn’t think to tell me?”
“She made me promise not to.”
“So if Drew came to me with a huge problem and told me not to tell you—”
“I would expect you to keep your promise,” Yvonne said. “I’d trust that I picked you to be his godfather so Drew would have someone to talk to when he didn’t want to go to Robert or me.”
It was pointless to argue about it right now. “So what happened?” Simon asked.
“I helped Paige get private counseling.”
“No, I mean, what exactly happened with this rapist?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Seriously, Yvonne?”
“Paige was having trouble remembering the details. He may have slipped her something, I don’t know. She didn’t report it for days, so the rape kit didn’t help very much. The therapy was helping her, I think. She was trying to remember, work through it slowly.”
“How about charging the bastard?”
“I encouraged that. But she wasn’t ready. She had no memory of it. She couldn’t even say for certain if she consented or not.” Yvonne held up her hand to stop his next question. “It was messy, Simon.”
He shook his head. “You should have told me.”
“I begged Paige to. I did. Even after she shut me out. But yeah, at some point she stopped talking to me too. She said she was fine now, that it was taken care of. I don’t know what happened. Paige stopped taking my calls, she started up with that Aaron guy…”
“And you just kept this from us? She’s spiraling like this, and you still never said a word.”
“I never said a word. To you.”
He couldn’t believe what she was saying. “Ingrid?”
There was a knock on the door behind them
. Simon spun toward it. Cornelius opened the door and leaned his head inside.
“Come on,” he said. “Rocco’s waiting.”
Chapter
Thirty-Six
Ash took the Major Deegan Expressway south off the Cross Bronx.
“You have to assume,” Ash said to Dee, “that more of the fourteen sons are going to send their DNA to those genealogy sites.”
Dee Dee nodded, flipping the phone back on to check for messages.
“So what then?”
“The Truth won’t survive the week. I don’t understand all the legal stuff, but once his estate goes into probate, it’s harder to make a claim.”
“Still,” Ash said. “Someone is bound to put this together.”
“How so?”
“Another one of the Truth’s sons puts his DNA into the system.”
“Okay.”
“He sees he has three or four other brothers—and they’re all dead.”
“Right. One was shot in a robbery. One committed suicide. One is just missing, probably a runaway. One should be, I don’t know, stabbed, maybe by a drug-addled homeless nut. Horrible set of coincidences. And that’s if he’s able to track them down. Which isn’t easy. Their accounts stay active after their deaths. So first any new son would email his dead half brothers. They wouldn’t write back. He’d probably just drop it there, but even if he somehow tracks them all down and figures out the connection and somehow gets law enforcement from various states to cooperate on these old crimes, what will they find?”
Dee Dee had thought this through.
“Ash?”
“They’d find nothing,” he said.
“Right, so— Oh, hold up.”
“What?”
“A text came from Simon Greene.” She read it aloud:
Heading to Cornelius’s apartment where we first met. May find a lead. How’s it by you?
“Any thoughts on who Cornelius is?” Ash asked.
“None.”
“This isn’t good.”
“It’ll be fine.”
“And what’s the deal with Mother Adiona?” he asked.
“That I don’t know.”
“She told me not to trust you.”
“But you do, Ash.”
“I do, Dee Dee.”
She smiled at him. “We can worry about her later, okay?”
They found a spot in front of some concrete barriers in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx. They both had guns on them. They also both had knives. This one was to look like a stabbing—something, Ash thought, that probably occurred a lot amongst the various drug factions on these streets.
He was about to open his door when he heard her say, “Ash?”
Her tone stopped him. He looked toward her. She gestured with her chin up ahead. She took out her phone and held up the image she’d screenshot from the PPG Wealth Management website.
“That’s him, right?” she asked.
Ash took a look. No question. Simon Greene was walking into the building.
“Who is that with him?”
“My guess? Cornelius.”
Dee Dee nodded. “I’m thinking this isn’t going to be a stabbing, Ash.”
“Yep.”
She glanced toward the weapons bag in the backseat. “I’m thinking it’s going to be more like a gun massacre.”
* * *
Rocco was the kind of gigantic it was hard to fathom, so that each time you saw him, you were struck anew by the sheer size of him. When he strolled around Cornelius’s apartment, Simon half expected to hear fee-fie-fo-fum à la “Jack and the Beanstalk.”
Rocco squinted at the books on the shelves. “You read all these, Cornelius?”
“I have. You should try it. Reading gives you empathy.”
“Is that a fact?” Rocco grabbed a book off the shelf, paged through it. “Do you have the fifty grand, Mr. Greene?”
“Do you have my daughter?” Simon countered.
“No.”
“Then I don’t have fifty grand.”
“Where’s Luther?” Cornelius asked.
“Stay cool, Cornelius. He’s close by.” Rocco lifted his mobile phone. “Luther?”
A voice came through the phone’s tinny speaker. “I’m here, Rocco.”
“Just stay put,” Rocco said. “Our friend here doesn’t have the money.”
“I have money,” Simon said. “It’s not fifty grand, but if whatever you tell me helps me find my daughter, you get the full amount. You have my word.”
“Your word?” Rocco was a big man and had a laugh to match. “And what, I’m just supposed to trust you because you white guys are so trustworthy?”
“No, none of that,” Simon said.
“Then why?”
“Because I’m a father.”
“Oooo.” Rocco wiggled his fingers. “You think that impresses me?”
Simon said nothing.
“Only thing that impresses me right now is cash money.”
Simon dropped the cash on the coffee table. “Almost ten thousand.”
“That’s not enough.”
“It’s all I could get on this short of notice.”
“Then buh-bye.”
Cornelius said, “Come on, Rocco.”
“I want more.”
“You’ll get more,” Simon said.
Rocco hemmed and hawed a bit, but the cash on the coffee table was calling to him. “So here’s how it is: I got something to tell you first. It’s pretty big. But then my boy Luther…Luther, you still there?”
From the phone: “Yeah.”
“Okay, you stay there. Just in case they try something. A little insurance.” Rocco flashed his teeth. “So when I’m done, I’m going to tell Luther to come in here, because he’s got something way bigger to say.”
Cornelius said, “We’re listening.”
Rocco picked up the cash. “I got a confirmed sighting of Paige.”
Simon felt his pulse quicken. “When?”
Rocco started counting out the bills. “Two days after her old man got murdered. Seems your daughter stayed around here for a while. Hid maybe, I don’t know. Then she got on the six.”
The six train, Simon thought. Closest subway stop.
“Someone was pretty sure of that,” Rocco said, still counting. “Not definite. But pretty sure. My other boy though, he’s convinced he saw her. No doubt at all.”
“Where?” Simon asked.
Rocco finished counting, frowned. “This is less than ten grand.”
“I’ll get you another ten tomorrow. Where did he see Paige?”
Rocco looked at Cornelius. Cornelius nodded.
“Port Authority.”
“The bus terminal?”
“Yeah.”
“Any idea where she was going?”
Rocco coughed into his fist. “Tell you what, Mr. Greene. I’m going to answer that question. Then Luther—Luther, get ready, okay?—is going to tell you the rest. For fifty K. I’m not going to negotiate either. You know why?”
Cornelius said, “Rocco, come on.”
Rocco spread those huge hands wide. “Because when you hear what Luther has to say, you’ll give us the money to keep our mouths shut.”
Simon’s eyes locked on Rocco’s. Neither man blinked. But Simon could see. Rocco meant it. Whatever Luther had to say would be huge.
“But first, let me answer your question. Buffalo. Your daughter—and this is confirmed by a reliable source—got on a bus for Buffalo.”
Simon scoured his brain for anyone he or his daughter knew in the Buffalo area. Nothing came to him. Of course, she could have gotten off earlier, really any place in upstate New York, but he still couldn’t come up with anybody.
“Luther?”
“Yeah, Rocco.”
“Come up, okay?”
Rocco disconnected the phone. Then he smiled at Cornelius. “It was you, wasn’t it, Cornelius?”
Cornelius said nothing.
“You the o
ne who shot Luther.”
Cornelius just stared him down. Rocco laughed and held up his hands.
“Whoa, whoa, don’t worry, I ain’t going to tell him. But here’s the thing you’re about to find out. He had his reasons.”
“What reasons?” Simon asked.
Rocco moved toward the door. “Self-defense.”
“What are you talking about? I wasn’t going to—”
“Not you, man.”
Simon just looked at him.
“Think about it. Luther didn’t shoot you. He shot your wife.”
Rocco smiled and reached for the doorknob.
Several things happened at once.
From the corridor, Luther screamed, “Rocco, look out!”
Rocco, working on instinct, flung open the door.
And then the bullets started to fly.
Chapter
Thirty-Seven
Five minutes earlier, Ash pushed open the door loaded with graffiti.
He entered the poorly lit foyer first. Dee Dee followed. They didn’t have their weapons out. Not yet. But their hands were poised near them just in case.
“Why would Simon Greene be here?” Ash whispered.
“Visiting his daughter, I imagine.”
“So why not say that in his text to Elena Ramirez? Why talk about this Cornelius guy?”
Dee put her foot on the rickety step. “I don’t know.”
“We should step back,” Ash said. “Do more research.”
“You step back then.”
“Dee.”
“No, Ash, listen to me. Elena Ramirez and Simon Greene are cancers. We need to get them now or they’ll spread. You want to be more cautious? Fine. Go back to the car. I have enough firepower to handle this.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Ash said. “And you know that.”
A small smile toyed with her lips. “Are you being sexist again?”
“You wouldn’t leave me either.”
“That’s true.”
“This place,” he said. “You know what it reminds me of?”
Dee Dee nodded. “Mr. Marshall’s brewery. The smell of stale beer.”
He was amazed that she’d remember. JoJo Marshall had been one of Ash’s foster fathers, not hers. He made Ash work the fermenters. Dee Dee had visited him there a few times and clearly, like him, had never gotten over that stink.
