Линвуд Баркли - Find You First

Caroline was going to ask, then decided against it. She believed there were some things she was better off not knowing.

Broderick had glanced down at her hand more than once. “I see you’re married. What does your husband do?”

“He’s an accountant,” she said, unable to hide the disappointment in her voice. “For a tech firm his brother owns.”

“Oh,” he said. “That sounds interesting.”

“Not particularly. So, this work you do, are there others who do this, too?”

“I know others,” he said. “We have our own network. Sometimes we team up if the job is challenging.”

Caroline thought again about that missing witness.

“And what are you working on right now?”

“As it turns out,” he said, smiling, “I’m between jobs and have some free time.”

Two days later, the service manager at the dealership where Caroline had bought her car phoned to say they were going to replace the entire engine, no charge, and they were tossing in one free car detailing per month for the next two years. It was also the first time Caroline could ever remember a car dealership sending flowers.

New York, NY

Jeremy Pritkin never did join Nicky Bondurant in the Winnebago that night. She’d done as he’d asked and gone inside, figuring he would be along shortly and they would do what they always did, or at least some variation of it. But then he’d gotten that phone call and forgot all about her.

The windows of the RV were cranked open, so she was able to hear the conversation, although she didn’t really have any idea what it was about. But it was clear Jeremy was upset about something, and she had the sense he was talking to a sister or a brother. She thought she’d heard the name Marissa.

When he was done with the call, Pritkin left the office and, presumably, returned to his party.

Nicky thought the smart thing to do was wait, at least for a little while, in case he came back. The last thing she wanted to do was make him even more disappointed with her.

It was never a good idea to disappoint Mr. Pritkin.

She waited for the better part of thirty minutes before deciding it was safe to leave, more than enough time to check out this new addition to Jeremy’s headquarters. What a crazy thing, putting an RV in your third-floor office. The man came across, in public, like a pretty normal guy. Well, if you defined normal as unbelievably rich and connected, outspoken and opinionated, someone who had the ear of decision makers around the globe.

But the outside world also had glimpses of his eccentric side. The Winnebago event was only the most recent.

Jeremy let Architectural Digest do a spread on his place in Spain, where he had a swimming pool shaped like the grill of a Rolls-Royce. And he’d once spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy some custom-made car from a TV show in the sixties — the Black Beauty or a Monkeemobile or a junky truck some hillbillies drove around in. She couldn’t remember which because she had no idea what the shows were. But when Jeremy bought it at an auction, it made the news. So now that he had it, he’d tucked it away in a garage somewhere. It wasn’t like he could actually drive the thing down Park Avenue. He spent God knew how much on a sports jacket Steve McQueen wore while driving a Mustang in some famous movie chase in San Francisco. Couldn’t wear it. Wasn’t even his size.

So those were some of the things the public knew.

But Jeremy Pritkin also had secrets, his love for erotic photography one of the less notable ones. Much bigger was his passion for having young girls like her available to him in his palatial New York residence.

Nicky was not the only one. Over the years, plenty of young women had moved through here. Entertained the man of the house and his friends, then moved on to other things when they got a little older.

She’d found it surprising, at first, that this had not become well known beyond the walls of this place, but having now spent time here, she understood. Pritkin liked to offer some of his more influential friends the fringe benefits that came with knowing him, with being part of his club of influencers. Young, shapely fringe benefits.

Membership has its privileges.

And once those friends had partaken of the pleasures here, the last thing they wanted to do was blab about it. They didn’t want to put themselves at risk of exposure. But they did more than that for good ol’ Jeremy. They ran interference for him, protected him.

Like that old fart of a judge.

Eeewwww.

And the girls who’d been through here kept quiet, too. From what Nicky’d been told, several had leveraged the connections made here to go on to better things. Hotel management, personal assistants to CEOs, internships for political types in Washington. At least, those were the ones Roberta liked to talk about. Nicky’d also heard gossip about at least one who’d become a junkie and ended up on the streets of Newark, and another who just, well, one day she was there and one day she was gone. No one ever heard another thing about her.

Nicky felt badly that she had disappointed Jeremy by raising, with a couple of the other girls here, the issue about whether what went on here was, you know, right . True, Jeremy had been good to her in many ways. He’d pulled strings to get her enrolled in a local high school even though she had no roots in the community, no family in the Big Apple.

In the beginning, Nicky thought he’d done this out of the goodness of his heart, but it wasn’t long before he was asking her to invite friends to the brownstone. Young girls who might need a hand up, a little financial assistance, were willing to learn about the “service industry.” The services, Nicky soon realized, more often than not included keeping Mr. Pritkin and his wealthy, male friends entertained behind closed doors.

Jeremy made it clear she needed to find just the right girls. At first, she’d thought that meant pretty . And of course, Jeremy did want her recruits to be attractive. But what he really was implying was girls who were vulnerable. Girls from low-income households, one-parent families. Girls not connected to people with any kind of pull or influence. Girls with no one to turn to for support. Girls who would be amenable to the needs of Jeremy and his acolytes in return for a life that was better than the one they currently had.

Runaways, for example, like Nicky.

She’d left her Norfolk home seven months earlier. Her mom had found a new boyfriend — the fourth in twelve months — and this one had moved in with them. If there was any good news, it was that this guy wasn’t an ass-grabber or anything. He left Nicky alone where that was concerned. But he ordered her around like he was her goddamn father. Pick up your room, clean the house, make dinner. Do your homework. Turn down the TV. Stop being on your phone all the time. Take those buds out of your ears.

Nicky complained to her mother, but that got her nowhere. “He’s taking an interest,” her mom said.

The previous summer, hanging out at Virginia Beach, Nicky became fast friends with a girl from Brooklyn who was on vacation with her family. Nicky even got to know the parents in the week that they were there. Super laid-back. The dad was an artist, the mother a music producer. Artsy types. Nicky hit it off with them.

“If you ever come to New York...”

So Nicky went to New York. Got in touch with her friend from Brooklyn. Bunked in with them for a week.

Then two.

The parents finally went, “Uh, you moving in?”

Her friend pleaded her case. There was trouble at home. Could Nicky stay a little longer? The parents said okay. And then, when it looked as though their patience was wearing thin, one of their daughter’s friends told Nicky she knew of a rich guy in Manhattan who was looking for some help and maybe she should go check him out?