Харлан Кобен - Win

“I don’t know.”

“Didn’t you tell me you talked to one? Lake something.”

“Lake Davies.”

“Wouldn’t she know?”

“She might, but I’m not sure she would tell me, especially if she’s been receiving payments. She also claims the women of Jane Street were low-level, so she may not know.”

“But my father is dead,” she says.

“Yes.”

“So why would anyone still be paying to keep his reputation intact?”

Now I do make a face. “You just entered the gates of Lockwood Manor. Do you really need to ask that?”

She considers that. “Let’s say you’re right. Let’s say my father was somehow part of the Jane Street Six.”

I hadn’t said or even concluded that yet, but I let it go for now.

“What does that have to do with stealing the Vermeer and Picasso all those years later? What does it have to do with my father’s murder or...” Patricia stops. “Or what happened to me?”

“I don’t know,” I admit.

“Win?”

“Yes?”

“Maybe we know enough now.”

“Come again?”

“I’ve built this charity on our family story. A large part of that is my father spending time helping the poor in South America and my desire to carry on his legacy. Suppose it comes out that the story is built on lies.”

I think about that. She makes an excellent point. Suppose what I find ends up being damaging to the Lockwood name and, more specifically, Patricia’s worthwhile cause.

“Win?”

“It’s better if we are the ones to unearth the truth,” I tell her.

“Why?”

“Because if it’s bad,” I say, “we can always bury it again.”

Kabir hops off the helicopter, keeping one hand atop his turban so the slowing rotors don’t blow it off his head. He wears a black silk shirt, a green puffy down vest, worn blue jeans, and bright-white throwback Keds. I look behind me and up, and I see my father at his window, predictably frowning down at what he sees as a foreign interloper.

I wave Kabir toward me and lead him down through the wine cellar to Grandmama’s back room. When we arrive, Kabir takes it all in, nods, and says, “Bitchin’.”

“Indeed.”

When the press finally learned that Ry Strauss had been the murder victim found with the stolen Vermeer, the story, as you might imagine, generated enormous headlines. In the past, those headlines would have lasted for days, weeks, even months. Not today. Today our attention span is that of a child receiving a new toy. We play with it intensely for a day, maybe two, and then we grow bored and see another new toy and throw this one under the bed and forget all about it.

I spent most of the Ry Strauss media frenzy in the hospital. In the end, every news story, and yes, I’m moving if not mixing my metaphors, is a burning fire — if you don’t feed it a new log, it dies out. So far, there was nothing new. A stolen painting, the Jane Street Six, a murder — all delicious in their own right and together forming an intoxicating brew — but that was eleven days ago.

The media had not yet learned about the suitcase with my initials found at the scene or the case’s links to Cousin Patricia and the Hut of Horrors. That is good, in my view. That makes my investigation somewhat easier to navigate now.

Kabir carefully lays the file folders out on Grandmama’s old table. The key to hiring a top assistant and working cooperatively is having a shared vision. Kabir understands that I am visual and that I like facts and evidence displayed in organized patterns. The folders are all the same size (legal, nine inches by fourteen) and the same color (bright yellow). His neat handwriting is on the tab of each.

“The Jane Street Six,” Kabir says.

The six folders are in a neat row. I read the names in the tab from left to right: Lake Davies, Edie Parker, Billy Rowan, Ry Strauss, Arlo Sugarman, Lionel Underwood. Alphabetical order. To answer your question, I am not OCD, but much like the Kinsey Scale, I believe that we are all more on a spectrum than we care to admit.

“Okay if I start?” Kabir asks.

“Please.”

“We know the fate of Ry Strauss and Lake Davies,” he says, sweeping the two files away, leaving only four. “So let me update you on the others.”

I wait.

“Beginning with Edie Parker. Her mother is still alive. She lives in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. She claims to have not seen or heard from her daughter since that night. She has also refused to talk to the media, but she will talk to you.”

“Why me?”

“Because I told her it was your painting found with Ry Strauss. I may have also hinted that you know more about the Jane Street Six’s whereabouts than reported.”

“Tsk, tsk, Kabir.”

“Yeah, you’re a bad influence on me, Boss. Let’s move now to Billy Rowan, okay?”

I nod.

“It seems that Billy and Edie were getting pretty serious, more so than people realized. Billy Rowan’s father is still alive, the mother died twelve years ago. But here’s the kicker: Ten years ago, Rowan’s father retired and moved from Holyoke, Massachusetts, to an assisted living facility in Bernardsville, New Jersey.”

I consider that. “Bernardsville is right next to Basking Ridge.”

“Yes.”

“So Mrs. Parker and Mr. Rowan now live within miles of one another.”

“One point two miles, to be exact.”

“That can’t be a coincidence,” I say.

“I don’t think it is either,” Kabir says. “Think they’re doing the nasty?”

“The nasty?”

“The nasty, the ugly, knocking boots, boning, playing hide—”

“Yes,” I say, “thank you for the thesaurus-like clarification.”

“Of course, they both gotta be near nineties.” Kabir makes a face as though he’s gotten a whiff of Eurotrash cologne. He quickly shakes it off. “Anyway, I couldn’t get William Rowan — that’s his name — on the phone, but Mrs. Parker said that both she and Rowan’s father would meet you at his assisted living facility tomorrow at one p.m., if you’re up for it.”

“I’m up for it. Anything else?”

“On Parker and Rowan? No.”

He lifts the Parker and Rowan folders and places them in the same stack as the Strauss and Davies ones. That leaves only two.

“And if I can go out of order, I have nothing new on Lionel Underwood either.”

He adds Underwood’s folder to the pile. That leaves only one folder.

Arlo Sugarman.

I glance at Kabir. He is smiling.

“Paydirt,” Kabir says.

“Go on.”

“As you know, for years there has been zero sign of Arlo Sugarman — nothing since that FBI raid that killed an agent. But of course, you got new information from Lake Davies.”

“That he was in Tulsa,” I say.

“Exactly. More to the point, Lake told you that Arlo Sugarman was posing as a student at Oral Roberts University. You didn’t tell PT about that, did you?”

I shake my head.

“Right, based on when Lake was still on the run, I figured that she and Ry would have had to have crossed paths with Arlo sometime between 1973 and 1975. To be on the safe side, I spread that timeline out until 1977 on the off chance that Arlo disguised himself as a freshman and stayed there for four years.”

“And?”

“And then I started digging. Oral Roberts University has a pretty impressive alumni page. I started there.” He tilts his head. “Did you know that Kathie Lee Gifford graduated from Oral Roberts?”

I say nothing.

“Anyway, I used a photoshop app to change photographs of Arlo Sugarman. In all the famous ones, he has long hair and a huge beard — kinda like me when you think about it, right?”

“As rain.”

“Come to think of it, that would have been a good disguise.”