Run Away

Chapter Twenty-Eight

When Simon got back to the ICU, he was surprised to see Detective Isaac Fagbenle waiting for him. For a second, maybe two, hope filled his chest — had he found Paige? — but the expression on Fagbenle’s face indicated that this wasn’t going to be good news. The hope fled even faster than it came, replaced by whatever the opposite is.

Despair? Worry?

“It’s not about Paige,” Fagbenle said.

“What then?”

Simon glanced over the detective’s shoulder to where Sam sat bedside of Ingrid. Nothing new there, so he turned his attention back to Fagbenle.

“It’s about Luther Ritz.”

The man who shot his wife. “What about him?”

“He’s out.”

“What?”

“On bail. Rocco posted a bond for him.”

“Luther wasn’t remanded to trial?”

“Presumption of innocence, Eighth Amendment. You know, like we still do in America?”

“He’s free?” Simon let loose a breath. “You think that puts Ingrid in any danger?”

“Not really. The hospital has pretty good security.”

A nurse pushed past them, giving them an annoyed glance because they were somewhat blocking the entrance. The two men moved to the side.

“The thing is,” Fagbenle said, “the case against Luther isn’t a slam dunk.”

“How’s that?”

“He claims you shot him first.”

“Me?”

“You, your wife, one of you two.”

“Didn’t you do a residue test on him?”

“Yes. He claims two things. One, he was shooting practice shots, nothing to do with you. And two, if you don’t buy that, he fired back because you shot him first.”

Simon scoffed. “Who’s going to believe that?”

“You’d be surprised. Look, I don’t know all the details, but Luther Ritz is claiming self-defense. That’s going to lead to some tough questions.”

“Like what?”

“Like why you and Ingrid were down there in the first place.”

“To find our daughter.”

“Right. So you were agitated and worried, right? You went to a drug den that your daughter frequented. No one would tell you where she was. So maybe you got more than agitated and worried. Maybe you were desperate, so desperate you or your wife pulled a gun—”

“You can’t be serious.”

“—and he ended up shot. Luther, I mean. So he fired back.”

Simon made a face.

“Luther is back home how, convalescing from a serious wound—”

“And my wife is” — Simon felt his face redden — “lying in a coma ten yards from us.”

“I know that. But you see, someone shot Luther.”

Fagbenle moved in closer. Now Simon got it. Now he understood what was happening here.

“And as long as we don’t know who shot him, Luther’s claim of self-defense will lead to reasonable doubt. The witnesses, if there are any who come forward, won’t be backing your recounting of the events. They’ll back Luther’s.” Fagbenle smiled. “You didn’t have any friends in that drug den, did you, Simon?”

“No,” Simon said, the lie coming quick and easy. Cornelius had shot Luther and saved them, but there was no way Simon would ever admit that. “Of course not.”

“Exactly. So there are no other suspects. Ergo, his attorney will claim, you took it upon yourself to shoot Luther Ritz. You had time after that with everyone scattering. You hid the gun. If you wore gloves, you got rid of them. Whatever.”

“Detective?”

“What?”

“Are you arresting me?”

“No.”

“So this can all wait, right?”

“I guess it can. I don’t buy Luther’s story. Just so we’re clear. But I do find one thing odd.”

“What’s that?”

“Do you remember when we went into his hospital room so you could make a positive ID?”

“Yes.”

“And Luther, well, let’s just say his driveway doesn’t quite reach the road, if you know what I mean. He was dumb enough to admit being shot at the scene, remember?”

“Yes.”

“So he isn’t fast on his feet.”

“Right.”

“And yet when I asked Luther why he did it, do you remember the first thing he said?”

Simon said nothing.

“He gestured toward you, Simon, and he said, ‘Why don’t you ask him why?’”

Simon remembered. He remembered the feeling of anger that came over him then, looking at Luther, that waste of humanity who’d made the decision to try to end Ingrid’s life. The gall of it all, that someone as low as that could hold such power, had enraged him.

“He was grasping at straws, Detective.”

“Was he?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think he’s that smart, Simon. I think Luther knows something he hasn’t yet told us.”

Simon considered that for a moment. “Like what?”

“You tell me,” Fagbenle said. Then: “Who shot Luther, Simon? Who saved you guys?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s a lie.”

Simon said nothing.

“And there’s the rub, my friend,” Fagbenle continued. “Once one lie is let in the room, even for the best of reasons, a whole bunch more will ride in on its back. Then those lies will gang up and slaughter the truth. So I’ll ask you one more time: Who shot Luther?”

They were eye to eye now, inches apart.

“I told you,” Simon said through gritted teeth. “I don’t know. Is there anything else?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Then I’d like to go sit with my wife.”

Fagbenle slapped Simon’s shoulder in a gesture that was trying to be both friendly and intimidating. “I’ll be in touch.”

As Fagbenle headed down the corridor, Simon’s mobile rang. He didn’t recognize the number and debated letting it go to voicemail — too many solicitations nowadays, even on mobile phones — but the area code was the same as Lanford College’s. He moved to the side and answered.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Greene?”

“Speaking.”

“I got your email and phone message, so I’m calling you back. This is Louis van de Beek. I’m a professor at Lanford College.”

He had almost forgotten about leaving those messages. “Thanks for getting back to me.”

“No problem.”

“I’m calling about my daughter Paige.”

There was silence on the other end.

“You remember her? Paige Greene.”

“Yes.” His voice sounded very far away. “Of course.”

“Do you know what happened to her?”

“I know she dropped out.”

“She’s missing, Professor.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that.”

“I think something happened to her at school. I think something at Lanford started all this.”

“Mr. Greene?”

“Yes?”

“If I recall correctly, your family lives in Manhattan.”

“That’s right.”

“Are you there now?”

“In the city? Yes.”

“I’m teaching this semester at Columbia University.”

Simon’s alma mater.

“Perhaps,” van de Beek continued, “we should have this discussion in person.”

“I can be there in twenty minutes.”

“I’ll need a little more time. Do you know the campus?”

“Yes.”

“There’s a big statue on the steps in front of the main building.”

The main building was called Low Memorial Library. The bronze statue, oddly enough called Alma Mater, depicted the Greek goddess Athena.

“I know it.”

“Let’s meet there in an hour.”

The cops showed up at the Green-N-Leen Vegan Café because someone called 911 when Raoul and his man bun went down from Elena’s knee kick. At first, Raoul, who was still cupping his wounded nuts, wanted to press charges.

“She assaulted my family jewels!” Raoul kept shouting.

The cops rolled their eyes, but they also knew they had to take a statement. Elena pulled Raoul and the man bun into the corner and said simply, “If you press charges, I press charges.”

“But you—”

“—got the better of you, yes I know.”

Raoul was still cradling his crotch as if he’d found a wounded bird.

“But you assaulted me first,” Elena said.

“What? How do you figure?”

“Raoul, you’re new at this. I’m not. The surveillance tape will show that you reached out and touched me first.”

“You were running after my friend!”

“And you assaulted me to stop that, so I defended myself. That’s how this will play. And worse. I mean, look at me, Raoul.” Elena spread her arms. “I’m short, I’m chubby, and even though I’m sure you’re very in touch with your feminine side and all kumbaya on feminism, that tape of a small albeit round middle-aged woman kneeing you in the balls will go viral.”

Raoul’s eyes widened. He hadn’t considered that, though maybe his man bun had.

“Do you want to roll those dice, Raoul?”

He crossed his arms over his chest.

“Raoul?”

“Fine,” he said in the most petulant tone imaginable. “I won’t press charges.”

“Yeah, but now that I start thinking about it, I might.”

“What?”

Elena made the trade. Alison Mayflower’s “real” name — Allie Mason — and current address in exchange for letting bygones be bygones. Alison lived on a farm outside of Buxton. Elena made the drive up. No one was home. She debated sitting outside the house for a bit, but it didn’t look as though anyone had been home in a long time.

Back at the Howard Johnson’s, Elena sat in a room that couldn’t be more motel generic and tried to plot her next move. Lou from her home office had discovered that Allie Mason lived in that farmhouse with another woman named Stephanie Mars.

Was Stephanie Mars a friend? A relative? A partner? Did it matter?

Should Elena drive the half hour to Buxton and try again?

There was no reason to think Alison Mayflower would be more cooperative this time, but then again, trying doggedly was why Elena made the big bucks. Literally. And it wasn’t as though the first meeting hadn’t borne fruit. It had. There was clearly something shady going on with those adoptions. Elena had strongly suspected that before, but after her encounter with Alison Mayflower, she knew for sure. She also knew that at least in Alison Mayflower’s mind, the children had needed saving. And the big new piece of this cockamamy puzzle, though Elena had zero idea how it fit:

All the adopted babies were boys.

Why? Why not girls?

Elena took out a pad and pen and charted out the ages. Damien Gorse was the oldest, Henry Thorpe the youngest. Still, they were almost ten years apart in age. Ten years. That was a long time for Alison Mayflower to be involved in all this.

That meant her involvement was deep. Super deep.

Her phone rang. It was Lou from the home office on some special app he’d installed on her phone. The app made all calls untraceable or something like that. “The leakers in the White House use it,” Lou had told her. “That’s why they never get caught.”

Lou didn’t use it very often.

“You alone?” he asked when she picked up.

“You didn’t call for phone sex, did you?”

“Uh, yeah no. Open up your laptop, wiseass.”

She could hear the excitement in his voice. “Okay.”

“I emailed you a link. Click on it.”

Elena opened her browser and started to sign into her email.

“You click it yet?”

“Give me a second, will you? I’m typing in my password.”

“Seriously? You don’t have it saved?”

“How do you save it?”

“Ugh, never mind. Tell me when you have the link up.”

Elena found Lou’s email and clicked the link. A website called Ance-Story came up.

“Bingo,” she said.

“What, why?”

“Let me just double-check something.”

Elena grabbed her phone and checked her texts. There was one from Simon Greene, who’d informed her that his daughter Paige had no charges on her credit card for DNAYourStory, but that he had found one for $79 to:

Ance-Story.

She filled Lou in on Simon’s text. “Okay,” Lou said, “so this is going to be even bigger news than I thought.”

Elena’s eyes traveled down the home page. No doubt about it — this was definitely one of those DNA genealogy sites. There were all kinds of photographs of people embracing and cute catchphrases like “Discover Who You Really Are” or “Only You Are You — Uncover Your Unique Ethnic Origins.” There were other links that could help the potential customer — like the thrilled people in the embracing photographs — “find new relatives.”

Below that, the packages the potential customer could purchase were displayed. The first option, priced at $79, offered you a breakdown of your ancestry and the chance to connect with DNA relatives. The second option was called “For Your Health Too.” It offered the same as package one, but for an extra eighty dollars, you’d receive a “full medical report that could make you healthier.”

The word RECOMMENDED was stamped in flashing letters above the more expensive package. What a surprise. The company itself was suggesting you spend more money on their products. Gasp.

“You on the home page?” Lou asked.

“Yes.”

“Click Sign in.”

“Okay.”

“You’ll see two fields. User name and Password.”

“Right.”

“Okay, this is the part where I get legal on you. I called on the secure app because I figured out how to get into Henry Thorpe’s DNA account.”

“How did you do that?”

“You really want to know?”

“No.”

“I know we could get permission from his father—”

“But he has no standing. I already heard this today.”

“So what we would be doing by signing in... well, I’m not sure it’s completely legal. This could be viewed technically as hacking. I want to caution you.”

“Lou?”

“Yeah?”

“Give me the user name and password.”

He did so. She typed them in. A page came up that read: “Welcome back, Henry. Here’s your ethnic composition.”

Henry was 98 percent European. Under that, he was listed as 58 percent from Great Britain, 20 percent from Ireland, 14 percent Ashkenazi Jew, 5 percent Scandinavian, and then everything else was negligible.

“Scan down to the bottom of the page,” Lou said.

She traveled past something called Your Chromosomes.

“You see the link that says ‘Your DNA Relatives’?”

She said that she did.

“Click it.”

A new page came up. On the top, it read “Sorted Strength of Relationship.” Next to that, it noted that “You have 898 relatives.”

“Eight hundred and ninety-eight relatives?” Elena said.

“Henry Thorpe better get a bigger Thanksgiving table, right? That’s normal, maybe even on the low side. The vast majority are distant cousins who share less than one percent of your DNA. But click Page One.”

She could hear the excitement in his voice.

Elena clicked. The page took its time loading now.

“You see it?”

“Calm down, I’m using a Howard Johnson’s Wi-Fi.”

And then she did indeed see it. The whole case started to come together. That was how it felt. Like a whole bunch of those big puzzle pieces suddenly started to fit.

Four people were listed as: Half-Sibling(s) of Henry.

“Holy crap,” she said.

“Yep.”

Damien Gorse of Maplewood, New Jersey, was listed first. His full name. Just like that. The murdered owner of the tattoo parlor was a half brother of Elena’s client.

Under that, also listed as a “half-sibling male,” were just initials.

“AC from the Northeast,” Elena said. It didn’t take much to guess. “Aaron Corval.”

“Probably.”

“Any way to confirm?”

“I’m working on it. See, the site doesn’t let people just list themselves anonymously. It gives you two options. Full name. Or initials. But they have to be real. I’d say half the people do full name, half do initials.”

Next, also listed as a half-sibling male, were the initials NB of Tallahassee, Florida.

“Any way to trace down NB?”

“None that are legal.”

“How about illegal?”

“Not really. I could send him a message as Henry Thorpe, see if he’ll tell me his name.”

“Do it,” she said.

“That violates—”

“Can it be traced back to us?”

“Don’t insult me.”

“Then do it,” Elena said.

“It turns me on when you bend the rules.”

“Super, great. We also need to contact the authorities. Maybe they can get a warrant off what we have, I don’t know.”

“We can’t give them what we have, remember?”

“Right, okay. But NB, if we find his identity, needs to be warned. He could be next.”

“There might be more.”

“What do you mean, ‘more’? More what?”

“Siblings.”

“How do you figure that?” she asked.

“Henry Thorpe put his DNA into at least three of these sites.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Lot of people do. The more databases you’re in, the better your odds of finding blood relatives. My point is, he found four half siblings in Ance-Story alone. He may have found more elsewhere, I don’t know.”

“These are all half siblings, right?”

“Right. On the father’s side.”

She glanced down the page. “What about this last guy, the fourth half sibling?”

“What about him?”

“He’s listed as a Kevin Gano from Boston. Did you check him out?”

“Yeah. And — drumroll — this is big. You ready?”

“Lou.”

“Gano is dead.”

She’d expected that reply, and yet it still landed with a wallop. “Murdered?”

“Suicide. I talked to the local cops. Nothing suspicious about the case. He lost his job, seemed depressed. He went into his garage and shot himself in the head.”

“But they weren’t looking for anything suspicious,” she said. “He was probably...”

She stopped. Her heart fell.

“Elena?”

She didn’t say it out loud, but suddenly the answer seemed obvious. A suicide. Two murders.

And a disappearance.

Henry Thorpe was probably dead. If the killer wanted to make sure he didn’t link to the others — if he didn’t want a cop to start looking at any links between murder victims on, say, a DNA site — you’d just make one of the victims look like a runaway.

Damn.

Was Elena searching for a dead man?

“Elena?”

“Yeah, I’m here. Something else we need to look at.”

“What’s that?”

“We know Paige Greene signed up with Ance-Story too.”

“Yeah, well, she’s not a half sibling. That’s the total list there. All male.”

“Maybe some other way.”

“There’s a search engine. Use it.”

She typed in “Paige Greene.” Nothing. She typed in “Greene” and her initials and a few other ways that Lou suggested. Nothing. She looked through the relatives list. There was one first cousin, also male, listed and then several third cousins.

No Paige. No PG.

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

“Then how does she fit into this?”