The Dreaming Tree

by Matthew Mather

  Roy opened another search box, typed in the keywords to see if the story back home included his name yet. He clicked on the top story and had to read the headline twice: “Eden Corporation Set to Receive Two-Billion-Dollar Bequest from Estate of Lowell-Vandeweghe.”

  The story ran on for a page.

  It wasn’t the New York Times, but a smaller news outlet. It talked about how Royce hadn’t been seen in more than a week. Rumors were that he was dead. The story had gone viral and was linked to reports of Shelby Sheffield’s family claiming they were going to sue Eden Corporation.

  The reporter had tried to get in touch with Atticus Cargill, the director of the trust, and then Gary Thomas and Samuel Phipps—the people listed as secondary contacts. No one offered a comment. No one could get in touch with any of them.

  Toward the end, the stories veered into conspiracy, and for the first time, he saw his name linked to Jake Hawkins. Another reporter said she had a source who said that Roy had been surgically attached to the body of Jake Hawkins, now known to be the Fire Island Killer. The story appeared only in a fringe gossip column, but still, it was out there.

  “So they finally found out,” Jake Hawkins said. He read the story over Roy’s shoulder. “Took them long enough.”

  “Let me think.” Roy slumped forward and pressed his hands into his face over the keyboard.

  Two billion dollars. Could it be true?

  He willed himself to focus and did another web search. The story about the value of his trust was even in the Wall Street Journal. It was enough money to make people do crazy things. Atticus had to have known. He had lied to Roy’s face and told him the trust was worth eight million when it was really closer to two billion. Now the old bastard was missing. He had to have conspired with Dr. Danesti to change the terms of the trust and make Eden the beneficiary. Had Roy’s mother known? Was she part of this? How did Dr. Danesti think he could …?

  Dr. Danesti.

  Roy’s thoughts became clear for the first time in many days.

  Dr. Danesti was adopted from outside America. He had an Eastern European accent. The man who delivered the twins—Mrs. Achari said that she thought he was Russian. That was close enough to Romania, wasn’t it? The languages sounded nothing alike, but both were behind the Iron Curtain back then. The Russian could have delivered twins and spirited one of them away, eventually to be raised in Romania. He remembered the party at the Chegwiddens’ house, how everyone said he looked just like Dr. Danesti. They were the same age. Everything fell into place. This was no accident, no random chance.

  This was revenge, pure and simple.

  Dr. Danesti was the twin.

  Jake Hawkins smirked. “I told you it was a twist.”

  Danesti must have lived a life on the outside, gone to medical school. Had Roy’s father discarded the twin? Left him here to rot? That would make a person crazy for revenge, wouldn’t it? He remembered how Dr. Danesti had a fascination with his mother.

  And his wife?

  She’d said “Nicky.” That Nicky said Roy was going to go crazy. Nicolae. Nicky. His wife had to be having her affair with Danesti. The man was trying to steal his life.

  Not just steal it, but create a monster, make Roy suffer a fate worse even than death. Seek revenge and attach his twin’s head to the body of a serial killer, and in the process inherit all of Roy’s family’s money—take his wife and his life. Danesti was behind all this.

  And he must have murdered Jake or had him killed.

  So Hope was right. Her husband was executed in some conspiracy, just not the one she imagined. If Hope was determined to uncover the truth—and expose a billion-dollar theft and murder and cover-up of a serial killer—there was no telling what Danesti and his people might do to her and Elsa to protect his secret.

  54

  “Give me half an hour,” Del said into her phone, knowing that it would be more like three times that.

  Getting a cab at this time on New Year’s Eve in Greenwich Village? She’d be better off walking.

  “Want me to come get you?” Coleman asked.

  The only date she could get for New Year’s was her partner, who was coming with his wife. She needed to get online and start dating, or something. This was embarrassing.

  Del said, “I’ll be there soon. Don’t worry.”

  “Keep us posted. You have the address?”

  “I got it. Don’t worry.” She hung up and went back to scrubbing paint from her fingernails.

  Del had on a simple black dress and her Manolo heels, ones she took out only for special occasions. Her law books were spread across the paint-spattered table in the middle of the loft. Her fourth year of night school, but she wasn’t sure what she would use the degree for. She enjoyed learning about the law and structure of government, but more to the point lately, she’d been focused on libel.

  Could she be sued for what she had done?

  Certainly, she could lose her job, but that would depend on whether anyone found out it was her. She had opened up a new online email account and used an anonymizer to try to hide her IP address. She had used the same process when she was a teenager, to access illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing sites and download free music and movies.

  Except that they weren’t free, as her father had explained when he found out. Grounded her for a whole month. Still, she had learned how to create an anonymous path onto the internet, but who knew how much scrutiny that could withstand from a determined investigator?

  She still couldn’t see the full picture, but she could sense its outlines.

  Her blank canvases hung up and down the walls of her loft, but they weren’t blank to her. To everyone else, they were bland strokes of different shades of white, but to her, the paintings sparkled in vibrant colors. Images and shapes that nobody else could see. She had always imagined she could apply the same talent to being a detective, seeing lines and shapes invisible to others.

  Was she right?

  Her leaked story had gone viral almost instantly. Two billion dollars in limbo for a man who’d had his head cut off and was missing? Possible links to a serial killer and one of the world’s most valuable tech companies? The internet went crazy.

  Within a day, the investigative minds of the fourth estate were digging into the crack she had pried open. Bright lights peering into the dark corners of the finances and practices of Eden Corporation. Into the details of RLV Trust Corporation.

  Where was Atticus Cargill? Had he escaped from the country, with a few hundred million in hand? Sordid details of LCT Capital and Gary Tarlington, Atticus’s partner, had emerged.

  She had even let slip a rumor that Roy was attached to the body of Jake Hawkins, the Fire Island Killer, but that story seemed so far-fetched, it had gotten traction only on the conspiracy websites’ outermost fringes. The story had gained momentum, but it was also drawing a lot of criticism and anger from the very people who had warned her off.

  Very powerful people.

  She used a nail file to scrape off another fleck of white paint from her fingernail, and her phone rang again. She tapped the answer button without looking. “Coleman, I told you, I’ll be there soon.”

  “Detective Devlin?” asked a female voice.

  Del stopped cleaning her nail. “Who is this?”

  “Are you alone?”

  “Is this a joke?” A prickling sensation crept up the nape of Del’s neck.

  “Answer the question.”

  “I’m going to hang up.”

  “Jake Hawkins’s passport was just used to clear passport control at JFK.”

  “Who is this?” Del asked again, much more calmly now.

  “You called us, remember? We’ve alerted the FBI and local law enforcement. We sent the images from the cameras at JFK to them. It’s Royce Lowell-Vandeweghe.”

  “Did you stop him?”
r />   “Jake Hawkins was not on any watch lists. He is deceased, at least officially. Roy will be arrested, at minimum for passport fraud—when he’s found. If he’s found. Our office has issued an arrest warrant, but tonight half the NYPD is out on crowd control.”

  “When? When did he go through customs?”

  “An hour ago.”

  “Why are you calling me?” An hour? That meant Roy was already in the city. Twenty minutes in a cab from JFK, maybe less.

  “Because, Ms. Devlin, you’re the one who set this train in motion. We know about your leaks to the press. I believe your intent was to get Mr. Lowell-Vandeweghe’s attention?”

  Del felt the blood drain from her face, felt as if it pooled in the bottom of her stomach.

  “Seems that you’ve succeeded, Ms. Devlin. The FBI will take a few hours to respond. I suggest you use that time wisely.”

  The phone cut off. Del pressed her hands together and wobbled on her heels.

  What had she done?

  55

  “Can I look at the big one?” Roy pointed at a large knife in the display case. “What’s that called?”

  He’d been asking the pawnbroker, but dead-man Jake answered first: “I believe that is called a bowie.”

  “A bowie,” the clerk said. He took the knife out and handed it to Roy.

  “See? I told you I knew my knives.” Jake Hawkins pressed his hands against the glass display top, then clapped them together. “That’s American pioneer Jim Bowie’s own design. A beautiful tool for gutting an animal. Always better to do a job right, with a sharp blade, than wimp out and use a gun. That’s what I say.”

  Buying firearms wasn’t an option. Too risky in New York. Too much attention. On the glass in front of Roy was a machete, its blade a foot and a half long. He had asked the clerk to sharpen it for him. Three more weapons, all switchblades, were on the counter.

  “I told you, don’t call them switchblades,” Jake said. “Those are assisted-opening knives. Only gangbangers call them switchblades.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I get it,” Roy replied.

  “You sure you’re okay, sir?” the clerk asked. He leaned over the counter with the bowie knife. The man’s left eye drooped downward and his front teeth stuck out.

  “I’m fine.” Roy took the knife. This guy wasn’t going to win any beauty contests, either. “It’s an allergic reaction. Sunflower seeds I ate on the plane. I already took an antihistamine.”

  The same thing he had told the passport officer at the airport.

  Open sores had broken out on his neck and cheeks—his skin beginning to rot and slough away. The left side of his face was swollen and hurting. His eyes felt as if they might burst from their sockets, and his vision was blurry. The vibrations from the walls and floor grew more and more intense. He had gotten a dozen blister packs of OxyContin before leaving India. It helped, but it wasn’t masking the pain anymore, only keeping enough of a lid on it that Roy wouldn’t scream.

  The deformity had probably helped him get into the country, by making it impossible to tell that he wasn’t the man in the passport picture. And on the inside, too, there was no difference between them anymore. Two had become one.

  The dead man leered at two young women who banged through the front door of the pawn shop. They were drunk, dressed in short skirts despite the cold. One had on black tights and a fur-lined bomber jacket. They held on to each other for balance, took one look at Roy, then made mock horror faces at each other and giggled. They walked down an aisle, giving Roy a wide berth. Customers were coming in and out of the shop to buy New Year’s paraphernalia. It had taken Jake three tries to find a pawn shop open this late, this close to Times Square. Right next to Ray & Frank’s liquor store, conveniently enough. The girls reappeared with a box of sparklers and paid the clerk.

  Roy tested the edge of the bowie knife. Carefully. He held the blade up to the face of the girl in the bomber jacket. “What do you think? Like it?”

  She staggered back a few steps. Her friend grabbed her to make sure she didn’t fall over and gave Roy the finger. “What the hell is wrong with you?” she said.

  “I bet you could give yourself a clean shave with that,” Jake said. He watched the girls leave the shop. “Don’t worry about them.”

  “I’m not worried.” Roy tested the edge of the blade with his thumbnail.

  “Did you say something, sir?” The clerk leaned over the counter again, fixing Roy with his good eye while the other wandered off to look at the floor. The guy smelled of sweat and sausage and yesterday’s booze.

  “I’ll take them all.”

  The clerk paused a few beats to calculate in his head. “How about a hundred and forty?”

  “How about three hundred?” Roy pressed his last three bills onto the counter.

  For what he was about to do, he didn’t need money.

  “But one more thing.”

  “I got no more knives.”

  “Do you have a menswear section?”

  56

  “Do you need me for anything else, sir?” Nicolae Danesti’s administrative manager hung halfway in the door to his office, her business suit already exchanged for a modest yet modern evening gown. “Everyone’s arrived.”

  “I’ll be down in half an hour,” Nicolae replied. He checked his watch. Ten forty-five.

  “Do you need any help with your bow tie?”

  “I’m fine.” He adjusted it himself, admiring his tuxedo in the reflection from the floor-to-ceiling windows. “Dim the lights,” he said.

  His manager left him alone. Tonight was a big night. Half the fifty-eighth floor—the entire rehabilitation wing—had been redecorated to host Eden’s New Year’s Eve celebration. Many of the world’s elite were here, having traveled from all over the planet.

  How could they not?

  The richest people in the world were the oldest, and they needed him. You couldn’t take money with you into the afterlife, but Dr. Danesti sold the dream of hanging on to this one. To those who hungered for more time, this promise was worth any price. They all wanted to be here for the special announcement he would make at the stroke of midnight.

  As the lights dimmed, Nicolae’s reflection in the window faded, replaced with a view of the blazing lights of Manhattan’s skyscrapers. From a thousand feet up, he gazed out at the world laid out below him. The media attention on Royce Lowell-Vandeweghe in the past few days had been troubling, but sometimes, to change the world one had to endure criticism.

  His financing had been secured, and his backers didn’t seem to care about the negative publicity. In any case, wasn’t the maxim “no publicity is bad publicity”? Everyone understood that this was a process. Shelby Sheffield had lived two years longer than he would have naturally, and Royce … well, that was still to be determined. Nicolae had learned from the experiences, had become stronger from them.

  “Sir?”

  His bodyguard now leaned in from the doorway to his office.

  “There’s a call from downstairs. A Detective Devlin just entered the building.”

  “What does she want?”

  “She was invited by one of the guests. Just thought you might want to know.”

  “Keep an eye on her, but that’s all.”

  It didn’t matter. His sources suspected the detective in the leaks to the media, but better to keep the devil close, where you could keep an eye on him—or her. Keep the Devlin close. He laughed at his little joke. She was just doing her job, or trying to, and he understood that. It wasn’t personal, and it wouldn’t make any difference, or even be her job for much longer. He couldn’t imagine anything that would derail his plans now.

  The dream of his lifetime was coming true.

  “They can all wait a little,” Nicolae said to his bodyguard without taking his eyes from the skyscrapers before him. Clouds, illuminated fro
m below by the city lights, skimmed the tops of the buildings, threatening something between snow and rain. Dots of water flecked the outside of the window.

  “Antoine,” he said to the bodyguard, “we’re going upstairs, and I don’t want to be disturbed for the next half hour.”

  He needed to gather himself for his big speech.

  Nicolae didn’t enjoy these parties. All the dinners with the glitterati, the rubbing elbows—it was all a means to an end, something to be endured. His real passion was always the work, his revenge on a world that had treated him so shabbily.

  * * *

  The lab was dark, the ceiling and the stainless steel refrigeration units along the walls lit only by the cold blue glow from the vats lining the center aisle. Nicolae Danesti walked the length of the room, hands clasped behind his back, admiring his babies in the glowing tanks of liquid.

  And he did think of them as his babies.

  Bonobo chimpanzees at varying stages of embryonic development in the first row of containers. Artificial wombs in which he had implanted fertilized bonobo eggs—but eggs genetically modified and bathed in fetal growth factors. Bonobos were the closest living relatives to humans, sharing over 99 percent of their DNA, yet were just two feet tall and sixty pounds at maturity. The perfect tool for the next step in his research. Normally, they gestated in eight months, just a month less than humans, but in these artificial wombs, he’d sped up the process to just three—albeit with some deformities, but he was getting closer.

  The next row of vats held bonobos in more advanced stages of growth—complete fetuses, and then complete animals in incubators. Bonobos reached sexual maturity in twelve years in the wild, but he had accelerated the development of a fully formed fifty-pound male to just under a year. They looked perfect, their small arms and legs wrapped around them, their eyes closed—but then, their eyes would never open, not by themselves.

  He had genetically engineered these primates as anencephalic—grown without a brain.

  Next month, he would perform the first brain transplant into a manufactured body, from a thirty-year-old bonobo into the year-old body of its brainless clone. For humans, this was equivalent to putting the brain of a seventy-year-old into its own eighteen-year-old body. Not the body of someone else, but its own body, just a much younger version.