The Love Killings (10 page)

CHAPTER 19

Matt stepped off the elevator and hustled down the hall to the Crisis Room, wrestling with his emotions. He resented being led on by someone like Day whom he didn’t trust or even respect. He couldn’t afford to waste time chasing phantoms right now. Especially after making what he considered a significant step forward in his understanding of the Stratton and Holloway murders.

He burst through the door and cut across the room to the desk he’d been assigned. It was 7:30 a.m. Fifteen to twenty people were already here, but he didn’t know or recognize anyone.

Matt opened his laptop and switched on the power. As he waited for the machine to boot, he tossed over the idea of coming forward with his revelation about the doctor. He wondered how Doyle and Rogers would take it given the fact that he had no tangible evidence. Just thoughts and guesses and personal observations made before the crime lab had a chance to process their findings and file their reports.

The truth was that Matt wished he could talk to Dr. Baylor about his revelation. He wished that he had some way of making contact with the surgeon.

That, too, worried him.

Deciding that his best bet was to keep his thoughts to himself, to remain cautious until he found something so real even Rogers would be convinced, Matt pulled his laptop closer and typed a name into the search engine.

Julie Stewart.

He didn’t expect to get a hit. He wasn’t sure he even wanted one. But then he clicked the Search key with his cursor, and something strange happened.

Hundreds of links to articles were assembling on the screen. Julie Stewart was mentioned in books and newspapers. As Matt scrolled down, he spotted his aunt’s name as well. Photographs were included. The two sisters appeared very young—eight or nine years old—and were posted with two siblings Matt didn’t know existed, Joseph and Eleanor. But it was the names and photographs of his mother’s parents, Howard and Michelle Stewart, that dominated the listings. Matt had never met either one of his grandparents, nor did he know anything about them. He was only a boy when his mother died of cancer, and he was sent to New Jersey to live with his aunt. He clicked through the photo gallery, comparing their features with the vague memory of his mother’s face. When he couldn’t find a single image of anyone in the family that wasn’t at least four decades old, he guessed that something catastrophic had happened and recalled how his aunt never seemed to want to talk about her past.

Matt sensed movement close by and looked up. Doyle had just entered the conference room, closed the door, and picked up the phone. Kate Brown was looking his way as she sat down at her desk with a cup of takeout coffee and a bagel.

“Everything okay?” she said.

Matt nodded. “Just catching up.”

Her phone rang. When she took the call, Matt’s eyes rocked back to his laptop. Something catastrophic had happened to this family. His mother’s family. Something no one wanted to talk about.

Matt sorted the listings by the most recent and found an article that had been published in the business section of the
New York Times
just a few years ago. It was a historical piece for the column Throwback Thursday on Wall Street. Another photograph of his grandfather was featured, along with his business partner, Robert Kay. Once Matt got a feel for where the story was headed, he checked on Kate Brown again, then turned back to his laptop and started eating up the words in huge bites.

Four decades ago Matt’s grandfather, Howard Stewart, had run a Ponzi scheme on Wall Street that burned down and caused a recession. Investigators estimated the size of the fraud to be in the neighborhood of thirty-two billion dollars. World markets before China’s rise, particularly in New York, London, Berlin, and Tokyo, crashed. Nearly five thousand investors in Howard Stewart Investment Securities LLC lost everything they had, including their homes and cars, their futures, their retirement accounts, their pensions, their savings. All of it gone in a single day, their lives ruined.

Yet Stewart and his business partner and many of the top executives at their investment firm had lost nothing.

The target of the investigation had always been centered on Matt’s grandfather. But after a few weeks, his business partner’s frequent claims that he was innocent and had no knowledge of the financial scheme began to fall on deaf ears. The two men had begun to argue as the net tightened. And one night, as Matt’s grandparents slept in their home in Maplewood, New Jersey, they were shot dead.

Matt’s heart skipped a beat. All he could think about was his aunt and his mother and what they’d gone through. According to the article, the four children had heard someone break into the house and sought refuge in the attic. When they heard gunshots, they waited until dawn, then the boy snuck downstairs and called for help.

In spite of the darkness, one of the children caught a glimpse of the killer and thought that he looked a lot like their father’s business partner, Robert Kay. Kay had been over that night, and there had been another argument—this one so loud that the neighbors noticed. When questioned by local detectives, Kay admitted that he and Stewart fought, but claimed once again that he was innocent. Unfortunately for Kay, he had no alibi and couldn’t prove where he was at the time of the murders.

Kay was found guilty on two counts of murder in the first degree and sentenced to 150 years with no possibility of parole. After one week in prison, he tried to hang himself in his cell. Ten days after that his body was found in the showers with a bar of soap stuffed down his throat.

Matt stopped reading so quickly. He could guess what happened next. The four children would have been carted off to parts unknown and raised by a family member. Once the four siblings came of age, the umbilical cords to their pasts would need to be severed once and for all. That would have been when their names were changed from Stewart to Clemens.

Julie and Abby Clemens, Matt’s mother and aunt.

Somehow Ryan Day had found this. Somehow the gossip reporter had unearthed a huge chunk of Matt’s family history. No wonder the special agent at the FBI’s office in Westwood hit a black hole when he ran his mother and aunt through the system.

Matt needed a cigarette and looked up when he heard someone slap their hand on his desk. It was Special Agent in Charge Wes Rogers, glancing at Matt and then Brown, who’d just hung up the phone.

“Listen up, you two,” he said quickly. “The Holloway autopsies have been moved up to 10:00 a.m. this morning.”

“Where?” Brown asked.

Rogers handed her a three-by-five card with an address jotted down on its face. “Chester County Hospital,” he said. “It will probably take you guys an hour to get there. You better head out.”

Rogers started to walk off, then seemed to remember something and turned back. “Oh, and Jones,” he said. “I spoke with your supervisor in Hollywood last night, Lieutenant Howard McKensie.”

Matt met Rogers’s gaze but didn’t say anything. For some unknown reason, the special agent had shed his anger and smiled at him.

“It’s your lucky day, Jones. McKensie wanted you to know that the fire’s been contained. Your house survived. It’s still standing.”

CHAPTER 20

Andrew Penchant sat at a table in the arcade, sipping from a bottle of mango-extremo-flavored Gatorade that he’d stolen while on the job at the Walmart Supercenter. He was skimming through the newspaper, shaking his head, and trying to ward off that weird feeling again. That odd sensation that seemed to have inhabited his body and mind over the past several years, and controlled his entire being now.

He didn’t know if his condition had a name, but after the past few weeks, he’d started to call it dream walking.

It was like he’d stepped out of his skin and couldn’t find his way back in. It was like he was standing on the other side of that idiotic pinball machine, watching himself read this lousy newspaper.

He could see his lean body, his long blond hair braided into cornrows, his light-brown eyes the color of wheat, his angular face, and clear complexion. But with his summer tan erased by an early winter, he thought he looked pale, and despite his strength, even a bit unhealthy.

His mind surfaced. Some asshole kid playing the pinball machine was staring at him.

He tried to shake it off, glanced at the last page in the city section, then flipped the paper over in disgust. The people he’d been reading about today were so fucking boring that he had to fight off a yawn. Half of them were so stupid that they ate three meals a day with their hands. The other half were so full of themselves that they had to be hand-fed on silver spoons or they’d die of starvation.

What the fuck happened to normal? Where did all
those
people go?

Andrew felt a blast of cold air and looked up just as a blonde entered the arcade. He figured she was somewhere in her late teens and could tell that she had a hot body going on underneath her parka. With girls like her, the untouchable ones, he could always tell without really seeing. He dug her gray eyes, her soft and gentle face. She looked naive and shy, and he liked that, too. He picked up his Canon digital SLR, zoomed in on her face, then focused the lens and snapped the shot.

The camera flashed, and those bright-gray eyes turned his way like a pair of headlights. He read her lips as she made a goofy smile and mouthed the words
What are you doing?

She walked over. Girls like her never walked over. She was gazing at him, staring at him, taking in everything on the table. He didn’t like the feeling of being measured. She really was naive.

“You just took my picture,” she said.

“So what?”

“It’s my picture. I want it back.”

He liked her. He could tell that she liked him, too, but he didn’t know why. He flashed a lazy smile at her and shook his head.

“You can’t have it back,” he said. “It’s mine.”

“Ha—”

She laughed and unzipped her parka. He’d guessed right. She had a killer body. Lots of curves and a better-than-decent, even perky, set of tits. He liked perky, even though he knew they never lasted long. Gravity and time always won when it came down to tits. Not that the result was necessarily bad. It was just an observation he’d made over time.

His eyes rose up to the girl’s face. She was gazing at the newspaper on the table, then giving him a suspicious look, her eyes shimmering.

“No offense,” she said, “but you don’t look like someone who spends a lot of time reading newspapers.”

He laughed. “I like headlines,” he said. “I’m on my way to becoming a headline. A living legend. Right now I’m only a man of mystery.”

“A man of mystery—oh my God. At least you’ve got nice hair. Who ties your braids for you?”

Andrew thought it over. He didn’t want to tell her that his mother braided his hair.

“A friend,” he said in a quieter voice. “How come I haven’t seen you here before? What’s your name?”

“Avery Cooper.’

“How old are you?”

“Nineteen. What’s your name?”

“Andrew Penchant, and I just turned twenty-one.”

She thrust her hand out. He gazed at her for a moment. She reminded him of someone, but he wasn’t sure who. Then he stood up, took her hand, and gave it a soft squeeze.

“Glad to meet you,” he said. “Want to have some fun?”

“What kind of fun?”

He flashed another smile and glanced at the storage closet door. The padlock was hanging open from the clasp, the arcade manager outside emptying the trash.

“Let’s go in there for a little while,” Andrew said.

She still had that suspicious smile going on. Maybe it was even a naughty smile because those big gray eyes of hers were starting to burn a little. All Penchant knew was that she started marching toward the storage closet without being pushed or even dragged. Once she stepped inside, he slammed the door on her and jammed the open lock shackle through the clasp.

She was locked inside the closet. Locked in complete darkness. Locked in a small and incredibly disgusting place, and he couldn’t stop laughing. He could hear her fists banging on the door. She was making the climb to panic mode, and doing it quickly, and he loved everything about it.

“Is this a joke?” she was saying through the door. “What are you doing? Let me out, you asshole. Let me out right now.”

He pulled the lock out of the clasp and swung the door open. As the light struck her face, he saw the fear showing in her eyes, but still couldn’t stop laughing.

“Very funny,” she said. “You’re already a legend, Andrew.”

“I had you, though. Didn’t I?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Ah, come on. It was just a joke. Why can’t you take a joke?”

“Let’s go back to the table,” she said finally.

“You want something to drink?”

She grabbed his bottle of Gatorade as she sat down. “I like mangos. I’m drinking yours. If you want something, go buy it yourself.”

She was still stewing. Still pissed off. He tried to pull himself together and sat down.

“Tell me about your family,” he said.

She sipped from the bottle. “What do you want to know?”

“You look like you come from money. You’ve got that refined look goin’ on.”

“Nobody who lives in Northeast Philadelphia is refined, Andrew.”

He shrugged as he thought it over. She might be right.

“Guess not,” he said. “Is your mother pretty?”

“What?”

“Is she pretty?”

“I don’t know. I guess so.”

“How many brothers and sisters have you got?”

“Two brothers.”

“Do they make you have sex with them?”

She gave him a look, but remained quiet. The fear and anger had faded away, but he’d struck a nerve.

“No,” she said finally.

“What about your father?”

She was eyeing him carefully, and then a wicked smile flashed across her face. “Andrew Penchant, you are the single most disgusting person I have ever met in my life.”

He nodded and smiled back at her.

“What about your family?” she said.

He shrugged. “I don’t really have one.”

She seemed delighted and laughed. “Oh, that’s right. You’re a man of mystery. An international man of mystery.”

“Not yet, but I like the way you say the word
international
. It’s got a ring to it.”

She leaned across the table and lowered her throaty voice. “You look like trouble, Andrew Penchant. You look like a real project. My dad would never let me go out with you. He’d look you up and down and call you a loser boy.”

He sat back in his seat and took it all in. He could feel his stomach stirring. He could feel joy coming to a boil inside his body. He’d just met a hot-looking bitch named Avery Cooper, and she wasn’t running away. This girl was falling for him. He didn’t know what to make of it. It had never happened before.