Линвуд Баркли - Find You First

“Something like that.”

When they reached the clinic, Miles wondered if it had gone out of business. The waiting room was empty.

But the receptionist Miles had seen here on his previous visit, the one who’d provided the list of names, was at her desk behind an open sliding-glass panel. Julie Harkin did a double take when she looked up and saw Miles standing there, Chloe just behind him.

“I’m here to see Dr. Gold,” he said.

“He’s not in today,” she said quietly. “He’s canceled all his appointments for the rest of the week.” Her eyes narrowed. “You were here before. You’re Mr. Cookson.”

“Yes.”

She glanced about, as though checking to make sure there really were no other people in the room, and when she looked back at Miles she spoke in a voice that was barely above a whisper. “You sent that woman.”

Miles nodded. “I did. Thank you for helping.”

Julie did not look like she was going to say, You’re welcome . She asked, “What did you get me into?”

“Nothing,” Miles said. “I haven’t said anything about where we got the information.”

“But things have started happening,” she whispered accusingly. “Bad things. And the doctor’s freaking out about something. And it’s all happened since you were here. What have you done?”

Then Julie looked past him, as if noticing Chloe for the first time. “Who are you?”

“Chloe Swanson,” she said, offering up a small wave. Then she looked about the room and glanced down the hallway at the doors to various visitation rooms. “So it all began for me here, huh?” She nudged Miles with her elbow, trying to lighten the mood. “Which room did you do it in?”

“Stop,” he said.

Chloe stopped.

Miles said to Julie, “Where is he?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe at home, maybe out drinking somewhere. I have no idea.”

“I really need to talk to Dr. Gold. Please.”

Julie bowed her head briefly, as though reluctant to look him in the eye. “You know, I looked you up. I know who you are. I wondered who’d have that kind of money, to pay for confidential information. Your name was on all those files. You’re trying to find your biological children.”

Miles nodded. “I had different... motivations in the beginning. But now they’ve changed. You said bad things are happening, and you’re right. Those children I fathered, they’re in danger. I don’t know exactly why. That’s why I want to speak to Dr. Gold again.”

Julie studied him for a moment before she made a decision to pick up the phone and enter a number. After about ten seconds, she said, “Dr. Gold? It’s Julie. I know, I know you didn’t — something has come up and I need to know — I can’t really say what it is, but if you—”

Julie looked at Miles and Chloe. “He hung up.”

“Shit,” Miles said.

“But there was an echo,” she said. “Like the walls were metal. I’m betting he’s at his storage unit.”

Julie wrote down the address on a piece of paper, then two other numbers. One was three digits, the other four. “That first one is the unit number,” she said, “and the second is for the keypad at the gate.” She looked defeated. “I was going to ask you not to tell him where you got the names, but it doesn’t matter anymore. I’m finished here.”

The storage facility was not far, and Charise had them there in less than ten minutes. She drove the limo right up to the gate, powered down the window, entered the four-digit code into the keypad, and waited while the gate retracted.

Once in the compound, she drove up to a drab, windowless, two-story structure. There were access doors at each end, both equipped with keypads.

“If you need me, sir, I’m available,” Charise said as she held the back door open for Miles. She stood there, taking a stance. “One thing in my work history I didn’t mention was bouncer.”

Miles couldn’t help but grin. “Good to know, but I think we’ll be okay.”

Once they were inside the building, Chloe asked Miles to read off the unit number from the slip of paper Julie had given him.

“It’s two-oh-four.”

“Upstairs,” she said, checking the signs.

They found a stairwell around the corner from a freight elevator, reached the second floor, and started looking for numbers.

“This way,” Chloe said, grabbing Miles’s sleeve and taking him down a corridor in the opposite direction he’d been headed.

About thirty feet ahead, a storage unit door was raised to the open position. Someone could be heard moving things around. There was a buzzing sound that lasted several seconds, then a pause, then the sound of more buzzing.

They closed the distance and saw Martin Gold, in a blue suit and tie, feeding papers into a shredder that had been set up on the edge of a box, the spaghetti-like strips of paper being fed into a green plastic garbage can.

“Dr. Gold,” Miles said loud enough to be heard over the buzzing of the shredder.

Gold looked up, startled. He stopped feeding paper into the machine and the buzzing stopped.

“How did you get in here?” he said.

“We—”

But before Miles could say another word, the cell phone tucked away inside his jacket started to ring. He dug it out and saw DORIAN.

“Hang on.” He tapped the screen and put the phone to his ear. “Look, Dorian, let me call you back in—”

“We got the results already,” she said.

“What? Are you serious?”

“Yeah.”

Miles turned away from Chloe and the doctor and took a few steps away from them. “Is she okay? Does Chloe show any signs?”

“Chloe doesn’t have Huntington’s.”

Miles sighed and smiled. He felt the weight of a dozen cinder blocks lifting from his shoulder. “That’s wonderful.”

“There’s something else, though.”

Miles felt the blocks drop back into place. He recalled Chloe’s fear that she might test negative for his disease but be found positive for a totally different condition. “She has something else? Christ, what is it?”

“She’s perfectly healthy,” Dorian said. “But they compared your profiles. Yours and Chloe’s.”

“Okay,” he said slowly.

“There’s no DNA match between the two of you.”

Miles couldn’t find any words.

Dorian added, “You’re no more related to her than I am to the Queen of England.”

Somewhere over Pennsylvania

Rhys Mills normally liked an aisle seat, and as close to the exit as possible. It was a control thing. Whenever possible, he liked to be first off the plane. And he hated the window seat, being hemmed in by someone, having to maneuver around them if you wanted to use the bathroom.

But today, booking at the last minute, Rhys had few options. He had asked the middle-aged woman on the aisle if she would like the window, trying to make it sound as though he was doing her a favor, but she wasn’t interested. Had a very active bladder and might need to get to the bathroom lickety-split, she told him, like he was dying to hear every possible detail about her urinary situation. So here he was, leaning into the fuselage, looking down through the clouds at the state of Pennsylvania.

Heading home.

It was usually a good feeling. But Rhys was filled with dread, as well as heavy-duty painkillers for his knee. The assignment he and Kendra had been sent on was unfinished. Worse, Kendra was dead. If he was to finish this job, he’d need a new partner. This had not been the kind of gig, to use Kendra’s word, one could do alone.

Every time he closed his eyes, he saw her lying there, her face a mess of raw hamburger. Saw his hand pointing the gun downward, squeezing the trigger.