Харлан Кобен - Run Away

No Paige. No PG.

“Paige Greene is not a relative,” Lou said.

“Then how does she fit into this?”

A commuter app told Simon that taking the 1 train south to get to Columbia University would take eleven minutes total, which was considerably faster than a taxi or car. Simon stood waiting for the elevator that plummets you into the bowels of Washington Heights when his mobile rang.

The number was blocked.

“Hello?”

“I’ll have the paternity results in two hours.”

It was Randy Spratt from the genetics lab.

“Great,” Simon said.

“I’ll meet you in the courtyard behind the pediatric wing.”

“Okay.”

“Mr. Greene, are you familiar with the expression ‘payment on delivery’?”

Man, it was amazing how easily people fell into small forms of corruption. “I’ll have the cash.”

Spratt hung up. Simon stepped back and called Yvonne’s mobile.

Yvonne answered with a tentative “Hey.”

“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’m not calling to ask about Ingrid’s big secret. I need a favor.”

“What’s up?”

“I need to make a cash withdrawal of nine thousand nine hundred dollars from our branch near the hospital.”

The amount had to be under ten thousand dollars. For any amount over that, you had to fill out a CTR — currency transaction report — with FinCEN. In short, it would be reported to the IRS or law enforcement, and Simon didn’t want to deal with that right now.

“Will you arrange it, please?”

“On it.” Then: “What’s the cash for?”

“Maybe you and Ingrid aren’t the only ones with secrets.”

It was an immature thing to say, but there you go.

As soon as he hung up, the elevator doors opened revealing a dingy and poorly lit car. Commuters piled in until an alarm of some kind started to beep. Subway elevators plunging down into the earth’s core are probably the closest urbanites get to what a coal miner goes through, which, of course, wasn’t close at all.

The 1 train was pretty much at capacity, though not sardine-can packed. Simon chose to stand. He held on to a pole. He used to check his phone or read a newspaper, anything to escape the claustrophobic feeling of being locked in with strangers, but lately, Simon liked to look around at the faces of his fellow passengers. A subway car is a microcosm of our planet. You saw all nationalities, creeds, genders, persuasions. You saw public displays of affection and arguments. You heard music and voices, laughter and tears. There were rich people in business suits (often Simon himself) and there were panhandlers. You were all equals on the train. You all paid the same fare. You all had the same right to the same seats.

For some reason, over the last year or two, the subway hadn’t been something to avoid. It had become, when there weren’t issues with construction and delays, something of a refuge.

Simon entered the Columbia University campus at the center gates on Broadway and 116th Street. This was the same entranceway he had first crossed as a high school junior visiting for a prospective tour with his father. His father, the greatest man Simon would ever know, was an electrician with the IBEW union, Local 102. The idea that a child of his could one day go to an Ivy League school stunned and intimidated him.

Dad had always made Simon feel safe.

That was the thing. Two weeks before Simon graduated, Dad died of a massive coronary while he was driving to a job in Millburn, New Jersey. It had been a devastating blow to Simon’s family — the beginning of the end, in many ways. When Simon started to have children of his own, he would try to remember how his own father had done it, like an apprentice trying to study the master, but he always felt as though he was falling short.

Did Simon’s children love their father as much as Simon had loved his?

Did they respect him like that?

Did Simon make them feel that kind of safe?

And mostly: Would his father have taken his eye off the ball and let his daughter become a junkie? Would he have stood by idly while his wife got shot?

Those were the thoughts that haunted Simon as he stepped on the campus where he’d spent four years.

Students hurried by him, mostly with their heads down. He could make the standard whining observation about how the youngsters were all staring at their little screen or had headphones jammed into their ears, how they all wanted to shut out the world so that they could be surrounded by people and yet completely alone, but his generation was just as bad, so what was the point?

Simon spotted the bronze statue of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, sitting on her throne. If you looked closely, Simon knew, you could find a tiny owl hidden in her cloak by her left leg. Legend had it that the first member of an incoming class to find the owl became the valedictorian. Athena’s left arm is outstretched, purportedly to welcome visitors, but Simon sometimes saw it as more like his grandmother’s shrug gesture when she’d say, “Eh, what can you do about it?”

His mobile rang again. The caller ID told him it was Elena Ramirez.

“Anything new?” he asked.

“Yeah, a lot.”

Elena hit only briefly on the actual reasons she’d gone to Maine, just to say that something was clearly fishy with the adoptions. She concentrated instead on what her tech guy had helped her discover about the DNA genealogy. Simon moved up the steps of Low Library. He half sat, half collapsed on the cool marble and listened as Elena ran through what she had learned — the adoptions, the half brothers on the DNA website, the sudden deaths.

“Someone is killing them off,” Simon said at one point.

“It seems so, yes.”

He wasn’t sure what he felt when she told him that Paige, who had signed up for the same DNA genealogy test, was not a blood relative. It should have been a comfort — didn’t it mean that he was indeed the father? — but then a thought occurred to him.

“We don’t know for sure,” he said.

“Don’t know what for sure, Simon?”

“That Paige isn’t a half sibling too.”

“How so?”

“Maybe Paige didn’t list her real name. I read about a few cases where people put in other people’s DNA or fake names or whatever. So maybe she’s that other sibling, the one with initials.”

“NB?”

“Right.”

“No, Simon, that can’t be.”

“Why not?”

“He’s listed as a male. If Paige put her own DNA in here, even if she used a fake name, they’d know if the DNA sample came from a male or a female. This was from a male. So NB can’t be Paige.”

“So maybe she used another pseudonym.”

“Maybe. But we now control Henry Thorpe’s page. It lists all his relatives. There are no female relatives who are closer than a third cousin.”

“So I still don’t get it. How is Paige involved?”

“Through Aaron somehow, but I don’t know. Maybe we’ve been looking at it the wrong way.”

“How so?”

“Maybe your daughter put someone else’s DNA in instead of her own.”

“I thought about that, but why?”

“I don’t know. We need to track down her movements. Maybe Paige discovered something. A crime or something that made no sense. Something that led her to Aaron.”

Simon thought about it. “Let’s take a step back and see what we know for sure.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“First off, all of these men came from the same biological father.”

“Right.”

“They were all probably adopted out of the same small agency in Maine.”

“Right.”

“And there was some kind of cover-up. The father’s name isn’t listed on the adoption reports.”