by Robert Ellis
Matt didn’t know what to say. He understood where Cabrera was coming from. Although he didn’t agree, he understood and could accept his partner’s reasoning for everything he had just said. But halfway through, Matt had been looking past his house and noticed a red LED light blinking from the street. As he strained to see through the fog, he noticed the outline of a car, the red light coming from something like a GPS device mounted on the dashboard.
It was the car in his rearview mirror. The silver Nissan.
“I’ve gotta go,” he said.
Cabrera was incensed. “Were you listening to me? Did you hear anything I just said?”
“I heard everything, Denny. I understand—believe me, I do. But right now I’ve gotta go.”
He switched off his phone, then looked back at the Nissan and felt his body rock with anger. The car was parked underneath the trees on the other side of the street and could have been there for the past hour. Even worse, the guy behind the wheel had a picture-perfect view of the front entrance to his house and the door off the carport.
It felt like an insult. A personal violation. It was after one thirty in the fucking morning.
Matt rushed into the living room. As he began to draw the Smith & Wesson .45 holstered on his belt, he stopped when he noticed the baseball bat leaning against the closet door. He grabbed it, then headed back onto the deck and rushed down the steps. He was following a coyote trail below the ridge and around the house next door. As the path began to rise up the slope, he slowed down, and then stopped when he reached the street.
He could see the silver Nissan idling in the fog. He was close, just twenty-five yards away. Although he was standing behind the car, it looked like the man inside was talking to someone on his cell phone. It looked like the man was distracted, oblivious to his surroundings.
Matt studied the shadows cast by the streetlight blowing through the tree branches and thought he spotted a seam of darkness in the fog that matched the car’s natural blind spots. As he stepped into the seam and started moving forward, he knew that he was invisible. He knew that if the man checked any mirror in the car, all he would see was fog.
Matt noted the license plate number, committing it to memory, then eased his way to within two feet of the driver’s-side door. He could hear the man talking to someone on the phone. Although he couldn’t make out what he was saying through the glass or over the sound of the engine, he could tell by the tone that it was a business conversation and guessed that the subject matter had something to do with him.
Matt felt another wave of anger wash through his body and tried to bury it. Inching closer, he became still, invisible, and looked the man over with great care. He was in his early forties, on the chunky side, with a receding hairline. A white male with a face so soft and plain that it would be difficult to pick him out of a crowd, much less a lineup. Matt noted the suit jacket hanging from the passenger seat, the striped tie that had been pulled away from the open collar, the glow of a cigarette between the man’s fat fingers, the spent cup of coffee and the .38 revolver resting on the console between the bucket seats.
Nothing about the guy or the car he was sitting in felt like law enforcement. Nothing about anything Matt was staring at had the feel of being legitimate or righteous.
Not at this hour.
Not in front of his house.
He raised the bat over his head and stepped up to the window. When the man turned, his eyes lit up and he shrieked and hit the gas. Matt swung the bat but only managed to get a piece of the rear fender. The man in the silver Nissan had been fast. Too fast. Matt watched him take the bend hard and vanish around the corner, the fog wafting in his wake like smoke from a grass fire. Like trouble.
CHAPTER 20
It didn’t feel much like sleep, but Matt had grown used to it. Every night overseas had gone exactly the same way, not just for him but for everyone he had been with. They didn’t really sleep or dream, because no one could get to a place safe enough to let go. Instead, they spent four or five hours suspended in what they called the blur.
After his return home, it had taken Matt three years to get a decent night’s rest. But now that feeling was back.
He could see Jane Doe’s face in the darkness. The slashes. The blood. The deformity that somehow reminded him of a clown’s face, swollen and all ripped up.
He could see Grace standing over her corpse, his entire being riddled with fear and anguish.
He could see a man he imagined was Cabrera’s father huddled with other men outside a Home Depot, hoping every car that pulled out of the lot might mean a few hours’ work.
But in the end the blur always returned to the same image. The same memory. His oldest memory.
He could see his father walking out the front door, tossing a suitcase in the car and driving off. He could hear his mother weeping, the tears flowing down her cheeks. He could feel her hugging him and telling him that everything would be okay.
It had taken him many years to figure out who his father really was. When his mother had been alive, Matt was too young to wonder. When his aunt took him in, the subject never came up, until one day, at twelve years old, Matt opened the business section of the New York Times. Money had always been tight and he knew that his father had been a deadbeat dad who bailed on child support, didn’t remember a single birthday, and never helped out. His image of his father was of an indigent, a bum who slept in public places, wore tattered clothing, and rarely bathed. A loser with empty pockets who walked out on his obligations and left his wife and son out on a limb to fend for themselves. A man who, when his wife died of cancer, couldn’t be reached and refused to take back and raise his son. So when Matt opened the newspaper and learned that he shared his father’s name, when he saw his picture below the headline and read the caption M. Trevor Jones, chairman, president, and CEO of PSF Bank of New York, one of the five largest banks in the United States, when the old image died and the new one slapped him across the face, Matt turned to his aunt and asked her why she hadn’t said anything.
Because I promised your mother that I would never bad-mouth your father in front of you, and unfortunately I’m not capable of keeping that promise, Matty. I don’t care for your father very much. I don’t think he’s a good man.
In many ways it had been a relief.
For years Matt had blamed himself for his father walking out on them. Now, at the grand old age of twelve, he realized that it was the other way around. There was something fundamentally wrong with his father. Something bent and broken. But even more important to Matt, all of the anger that he had been harboring for all these years, all of the rage and hatred he had felt for the man, all of it in a single moment burned up and vanished before his eyes. What remained was curiosity, the same kind of curiosity he’d felt when his aunt had taken him to the Bronx Zoo and he got his first look at a rattlesnake.
Over the years Matt’s interest in his father only grew. Although he agreed with his aunt, he kept his thoughts to himself because he didn’t want to upset her. He began reading the business section of the paper every day. He knew the year that his father began serving on the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. When Time magazine added his father to the list of the world’s one hundred most influential people, he bought a copy, read it late at night with a flashlight, and hid it under his bed. He scoured the Internet and knew the terms of his father’s forty-million-dollar pay package for the year. Even more, he knew that his father was the highest paid CEO of any bank in the country.
His curiosity had nothing to do with his father’s wealth. It was all about the hypocrisy and what appeared to be a radioactive form of greed. It was all about a man who walked down Wall Street thinking that he was a king but emanated darkness and all things evil. It was all about the memory that came to Matt when he couldn’t sleep and floated in the blur—his father walking out the front door with his suitcase and driving away. Forever away.
It was all about a single question
.
Why?
Matt thought that he deserved an answer. And after his return from Afghanistan to New Jersey, he called his father at his office in New York City. When the woman who answered the phone claimed that Mr. Jones didn’t have a son by the name of Matthew Trevor Jones and hung up on him, Matt laughed at her bitchy attitude, went on the Internet, and found a home address. As it turned out, his destitute asshole father—dear old Dad— lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, off Indian Field Road. From the satellite photos Matt pulled off the search engine on his computer, the man was slumming it in a palatial mansion on Long Island Sound. A large yacht, more than seventy feet long, was anchored just offshore.
Matt chewed it over for several days, then decided to make what amounted to an hour’s drive north into Connecticut. Dizzy with curiosity, he had no real plan and no guarantee that his father would even be home. The road was desolate, the walls and gates sparse. As he neared the water and his father’s mansion came into view, he pulled over and got out of the car. He was beginning to feel nervous and wondered if confronting the man might be a bad idea. Maybe he should have written his father a letter or made a second attempt to reach him on the phone.
He looked past the ten-foot wall and through the gate. Although there was an entrance for show on the side of the house, he could tell that the place faced the sound. He could also tell at a glance that this was no mini-mansion. Instead, the building was big and loud and had the appearance of being way overdone. But what struck Matt most about the place was how cold it felt—more like a hotel than a home, more public than private, almost institutional but almost Vegas as well.
How could anyone build something so cheap and tasteless on such a magnificent piece of land?
A woman in a chef’s uniform walked outside and lit a cigarette. Matt saw her and stepped back but wasn’t sure that he’d been quick enough. Easing forward, he peeked through the gate. Her back was turned. She’d missed him. She didn’t know that he was here.
He glanced back at his car, debating whether or not he should leave. He could remember seeing a dirt road on the satellite photos that wandered through the woods encircling the house and provided public access to the water. It took a few moments to find it. Tall reeds and dune grass covered the entrance. By all appearances, the way had been deliberately obscured by the people living on Indian Field Road, who didn’t want strangers around.
Matt parted the reeds, climbed over the gate, and started down the road. It was a summer evening, about an hour before sunset. He could see the rear of the mansion over the wall and, through the thick foliage, six cars parked in a lot that could easily fit ten more. As he passed what he thought was the kitchen door, he looked for the woman smoking the cigarette, but she must have gone back inside.
He kept moving, thinking. As he started around the bend, he began to hear voices coming from the other side of the wall. After another twenty-five yards, they became more clear and he stopped. They were close. Too close to be seen over a ten-foot wall. Matt took a step forward, his eyes dancing from tree to tree until he found the right one. All he needed was another five, maybe six, feet.
He grabbed hold of the first branch and started climbing. Once he had the height, he found a space within the leaves and inched his head upward until his eyes finally rose above the wall. There were three people sitting on the other side of the pool on the main terrace. It was a safe bet that the woman was his father’s second wife. The two men looked to be about five years younger than Matt and no doubt were their sons. They were drinking wine and eating hors d’oeuvres, served by a young Hispanic man dressed in a tux. The woman had bleached blond hair and was wearing too much jewelry. Matt guessed that her looks had faded ten years ago, and no amount of plastic surgery could bring them back or even soften the severity he saw in her face. The two sons were dressed like boys, with matching blue blazers and tapered tan slacks to go along with their soft faces, their long hair and bangs.
Matt turned away, thinking about his mother. He had been so young when she died. He had felt so blue and so lonely—scared to death that he might end up in a state-run home or on the street. His eyes found their way across the water to his father’s yacht. From here it looked more like a ship, and Matt thought it probably required a crew to operate. But what really caught his eye was the name of the yacht printed across its stern.
Greedy Bastard, Greenwich, Connecticut.
Matt shook it off and turned back to the house. They were laughing about something. And then, after a few moments and as if on cue, it finally happened.
All three of them turned as a man exited the house and strode across the terrace with a glass of wine in his hand. Matt wouldn’t have needed an introduction, because he saw that same face every day in the mirror when he shaved. That same face, less twenty-five years.
It was his father, his deadbeat dad, slumming it on the sound.
M. Trevor Jones.
Matt couldn’t take his eyes off him. Every line on his face, every gray hair on his head, but even more, the sound of his father’s voice—Matt drank it in, like swilling a gallon or two of gasoline that had been sweetened with honey.
The sound of his father’s voice.
It was almost as if he’d fallen into the river of what used to be. He could remember hugging his father when he came home from work at night. He could remember the smell of his skin. The memory seemed so clear and vivid.
But after fifteen or twenty minutes passed, after studying the man and trying to measure him, something happened that Matt didn’t understand at first. He was gazing at these four people sipping wine on their terrace and snacking on whatever their butler was serving on his silver tray. He was gazing at what amounted to his own family, but the spell had faded and all the honey was gone.
He couldn’t help thinking how ridiculous they seemed.
Maybe it was the way his father looked at his wife, the phony smiles and the forced laughs that they shared. Maybe it was all the gold jewelry the woman was wearing, or the way the two boy-men were dressed up to look like twins. Freaks.
It felt perverted and corrupt. It felt dirty.
No matter what it was, Matt realized that he no longer needed to meet his father. That he no longer needed his father to tell him why he had abandoned him. Matt had just answered the question for himself. He could see it before his eyes. He could see it in who they were.
No matter what the hardship, his father walking out on him and his mom had been a gift. A blessing in disguise. A lucky break in the sense that he was out of their lives forever and had no influence over them.
Matt heard a phone begin ringing and panicked. It was his cell.
He scrambled to dig it out of his pocket and shut off the sound but slipped from the tree and began falling. Butterflies swarmed his stomach as he dropped through the air. When he finally landed, he found himself sprawled out on the couch with his .45 in his right hand and the phone in his left. He dropped the gun and tried to pull himself together as he checked the time. 6:00 a.m. He brought the phone to his ear without looking at the caller ID. It turned out to be Laura Hughes, and she sounded upset.
“Matt,” she said in a shaky voice. “Oh, God, Matt. Someone broke into the house last night.”
Matt reached for his .45 and got to his feet. His mind cleared.
“I’m on my way,” he said.
CHAPTER 21
The intruder had entered the house through a window on the second floor that opened into Hughes’s study and, like the master bedroom, overlooked the pool and backyard. He had used a glass cutter, making a round hole just big enough to reach inside and open the latch. A long piece of clear tape had been attached so that the glass could be removed without making any sound.
Matt looked at it still taped to the roof over the first-floor porch, then turned to Laura. She was watching from the hallway and seemed more than nervous.
“There aren’t any alarms on the second floor?” he asked.
She shook her hea
d. “Just downstairs.”
She was still dressed for bed. She was wearing another T-shirt and that pair of pajama bottoms with pictures of flowers and rainbows and pots of gold. She had added a robe, which she kept tugging on and pulling across her chest.
“Everything was okay with Kevin, right, Laura? He didn’t seem quiet or preoccupied? He wasn’t worried about something or someone? He didn’t mention anything going on at work?”
Those blue eyes of hers got bigger and were right on him. She seemed surprised by his questions. She seemed confused and nervous about them. When she spoke, her voice was low pitched and scratchy.
“I thought you said it was a holdup.”
Matt nodded. “I did,” he said. “But it might be more than that.”
“More than that?”
“Did you see anyone hanging around yesterday? Maybe sitting in their car looking at your house.”
“I didn’t see anyone, but I wasn’t looking. You’re scaring me, Matt. You think this has something to do with Kevin’s death?”
“I didn’t say that. Everything’s gonna be fine. Trust me. It’s okay.”
He hadn’t said it, but deep inside he knew that there was no other explanation for the break-in and that it wouldn’t take long for Laura to figure it out on her own. He looked away from her just as a ray of sunlight struck the carpet. He could see shoe prints in the pile. The impressions were fresh and distinct and led out of the study and down the hall.
“When was the last time you vacuumed?”
Her eyes dropped to the carpet. “A few days ago. Why?”
Matt shrugged. “Just curious,” he said. “I need to go through Kevin’s desk. It’s gonna take a while. You might as well shower and get dressed.”
She gave him a look. “When was the last time you had something to eat, Matt?”
