The Match

Chapter Twenty-One

“Okay,” Hester said to Wilde, “let’s see where we are.”

They sat in Tony’s Pizza and Sub, which looked pretty much exactly how you’d picture a place with that name to look. Two guys with hairy arms flipped pizzas. The tablecloth was vinyl and checkered red. Each table held a paper napkin dispenser and shakers for parmesan, oregano, and red pepper.

“Where should we start?” Wilde asked.

“You don’t want me to say ‘at the beginning,’ do you?”

“Please don’t.”

“I’ll get us rolling,” Hester said. “First off, Peter Bennett is adopted, what, twenty-eight years ago. Did the sister — what’s her name again?”

“Vicky Chiba.”

“Did Vicky tell you how old he was?”

“No, just that he was a baby.”

“Okay, I don’t think it matters if he was two months or ten months. He’s adopted. He grows up near Penn State. Do we think it was in this rural area because they wanted to keep to themselves?”

“Could be. They were in Memphis before that.”

“Okay, so Peter grows up never knowing he’s adopted. The whole family lies about it. That’s a little sketchy, don’t you think?”

“I do.”

“But let’s skip that for now. Peter grows up, yada yada yada. He applies for a reality TV show and learns he was adopted. He’s upset, naturally. He puts his name in a bunch of DNA sites hoping for a match. One match he gets is you.” Hester stopped. “Well, that leads to the obvious question.”

“What’s that?”

“You only put your DNA in that one data bank, right?”

“Right.”

“Peter Bennett put his in several, the sister said. So maybe he got other hits. You need to investigate that, Wilde. Maybe he reached out to other blood relatives. Maybe they got in touch with him.”

“Good point.”

“Back to our timeline. Peter goes on the show. He wins. He gets married to the comely Jenn. He becomes famous. He becomes rich. He’s riding high. We don’t know what he’s doing about the fact that he’s adopted. Maybe he’s forgotten it. Maybe he’s hearing from more relatives. Whatever. Peter is flying high, living the good life, and then, boom, the podcast ends it all for him. He crashes to the ground. He’s ostracized and canceled and loses everything. We know he was distraught, not just by what others say, but by the communication he sent you via that DNA site. So you add it all up — the high, then the low, the confusion, the displacement, the losing everything, including his marriage. He sinks lower and lower. He’s drowning. He tries to swim up, but then McAndrews or that DogWhatyoucallit hits him over the head again. That’s it. He’s finished. So — and now we are just theorizing — Peter finds McAndrews, kills him in revenge, realizes what he’s done, flies to that suicide cliff, jumps.”

Wilde nodded. “Not an unlikely scenario,” he said.

“But you don’t buy it.”

“I don’t buy it.”

“Because you see a flaw in the logic or because you don’t want to buy it.”

Wilde shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.”

“You’re going to see this through to the end.”

“Yes.”

“Because that’s what you do.”

“Because I don’t really know any other way. I don’t see any point in stopping now, do you?”

“I don’t. One other thing.”

“What?”

“There is something strange about that Reality Ralph podcast.”

“Like?”

“Like maybe Jenn’s sister Marnie is lying.”

“Didn’t Peter confess?”

“If we can believe Jenn,” Hester said.

“You don’t?”

Hester made a maybe-yes, maybe-no face. “Either way, we need to talk to the sister. I may have burned my bridges on that by talking to Jenn.”

Wilde nodded. “I can take a run at Marnie.”

They both reached for another slice.

“It’s odd though,” Hester said, taking a dainty bite. “As a small child, you’re found in the woods. You have no memory of how you got there. You were just, I don’t know, abandoned or whatever. You honestly believe you were in those woods for years—”

“Let’s not go through this again.”

“Let me say this, okay? I know I’ve questioned your memory in the past. So did a lot of experts. The majority concluded that you couldn’t have survived that long on your own, that you were abandoned only days or weeks, but the trauma made you think it was longer. I used to believe that too. It makes sense, when you think about it.”

“And now?”

“Now, some thirty-plus years after you were found, we learn a blood relative of yours was secretly adopted in an adjoining state — another child who seemed to have no past. So we have two babies with no background just appearing out of nowhere. That’s bizarre, Wilde. So yeah, this started out as a curiosity quest. I’ve always been dying to know your origin story even if you’ve been reticent. But now, well, now it might be something bigger. Something more monstrous.”

Wilde sat back and took that in.

Hester took a far bigger bite of the pizza this time. Still chewing, she said, “Seriously, how good is this pizza?”

“Very.”

“The secret is honey.”

“There’s honey?”

Hester nodded. “Honey, hot Calabrian soppressata, mozzarella.”

“It works.”

“Tony’s has been in town forever. You know that.”

Wilde nodded.

“And you’ve been before, right?”

“Of course.”

“Even as a kid?”

Wilde had no idea where she was going with this. “Yes.”

“But never with David.”

Boom. Just like that. Wilde didn’t reply.

“My son was your best friend. You hung out a lot. But you never came here with David, did you?”

“David didn’t like pizza,” Wilde said.

“Is that what he told you?” Hester made a face. “Come on, Wilde. Who doesn’t love pizza?”

Wilde said nothing.

“When Ira and I first moved to town — I mean, the very first day — we brought the boys here for dinner. The place was crowded, and the waiter gave us a hard time because one of the boys — Jeffrey, I think — wanted just a slice of pizza and the waiter insisted he had to order a full dinner. One thing led to another. Ira started getting impatient. It had been a long day and we were all hungry and cranky, and then the manager told us we couldn’t sit at the table because of the slice of pizza. Ira got furious. The details aren’t important, but we left without eating. Ira went home and typed out a letter of complaint. It was like two pages long, single-space. He sent it, but he never heard back, and so Ira made it a family rule that we’d never order from them or go into Tony’s again.”

Wilde smiled. “Wow.”

“I know.”

“I remember when our team won the county championship in baseball,” Wilde said. “David and I were in eighth grade. We came here to celebrate, but David made some excuse for not being able to attend.”

“My David was a loyal boy.”

Wilde nodded. “He was at that.”

Hester grabbed a napkin from the dispenser and dabbed her eyes. Wilde waited.

“Still eating?” she asked.

“I’m done.”

“Me too. You ready to go?”

He nodded. The tab had been paid already. Hester rose to leave. Wilde did the same. When they were outside, Tim started up Hester’s car. Hester put her hand on Wilde’s arm.

“I never blamed you for what happened,” Hester said. “Never.”

Wilde said nothing.

“Even though I know now you lied to me.”

Wilde closed his eyes.

“When are you going to tell me what really happened to my son, Wilde?”

“I’ve told you.”

“No. Oren took me up to the crash site. Did I tell you that? It was right before you ran off to Costa Rica. He showed me where David’s car went off the road. He walked me through it. Oren, he’s always known you didn’t tell the truth.”

Wilde said nothing.

“David was your best friend,” she said softly, “but he was my son.”

“I know.” Wilde met her eye. “I would never compare.”

Tim got out of the car and came around to open the door for Hester.

“We are not going to do this today,” Hester whispered to Wilde. “But soon. Do you understand?”

Wilde said nothing. Hester kissed his cheek and slid into the backseat. When the car was out of sight, he turned and headed down the road. He texted Laila.

The dancing dots told him she was typing a reply.

Wilde couldn’t help but smile as he typed another text.

He pocketed his phone and picked up the pace. Laila had been his best friend’s wife. There was no way around that. She and David had been soulmates. Wilde and Laila had both spent years, probably too many of them, trying to push away the obvious ghost in the room instead of simply letting him be.

His phone did the text-buzz thing again. Wilde looked down at the message.

He was reading the message a second time, his head down, his face lit up by the phone’s screen, when the two cars came screeching to a halt.

“Police! Get the fuck down on the ground now!”

Wilde tensed and debated his next move. He could make a run for it. He would likely get away too, but they’d charge him with running from the police and resisting arrest, even if he was innocent. He’d have to go into hiding right when the search for Peter Bennett was revving up.

Wilde didn’t want that.

“NOW, ASSHOLE!”

Four men — two in uniform, two plainclothes — pointed their guns straight at him.

They all wore ski masks.

This was not good.

“NOW!”

Three ran toward him, one kept a gun trained on him. With his hand still on his phone, Wilde slowly lowered himself to the ground, not so much to surrender peacefully as to give himself time to turn off the phone’s volume with his thumb and then hit call. There was no opportunity to scroll through and get the right number. Laila’s number had been the last one on his screen. The call would go to her.

The three men continued their bull rush.

“I’m not resisting,” Wilde said, trying like hell to hit the right buttons on his phone. “I’m surrendering—”

The three men didn’t care. They crashed into Wilde hard, knocking him onto the asphalt. They flipped him over onto his stomach. One jumped up and smashed a knee into his kidney, shocking the liver and internal organs. The other two grabbed Wilde’s arms and pulled them too hard behind his back. Wilde felt the rip in his shoulder cuffs, but it didn’t register much through the waves of pain still emanating from the kidney blow. The men twisted his wrist and knocked the phone from his hand. They cuffed him, pressing down on the bracelets so that they cut off circulation.

One of the uniformed cops — it was hard to make out a badge number or anything else in the dim light — stomped on the phone, then stomped again. The phone shattered.

On his stomach, his face being pushed into hard asphalt, Wilde was able to make out that the first car, the one closest to him, had all the earmarks of an unmarked police car — a Ford Crown Vic with municipal plates, a cluster of antennas, tinted windows, out-of-place lights on the mirrors, and grill that hid their flashers. The second vehicle was a regulation police squad car. Painted on the side, Wilde could now make out two words:

Hartford Police.

Henry McAndrews’s old force. Oh, Wilde thought, this was definitely not good.

The cop who had kneed him lowered his lips to Wilde’s ear. “You know why we’re here?”

“To serve and protect?”

The punch to the back of Wilde’s skull stunned him, made him see stars.

“Guess again, cop killer.”

They jammed a black bag over Wilde’s head, bathing him in dark, and pushed him into the backseat, being sure to bang his head on the way in. One of the men said, “Drive,” and they were gone.

“I’d like to know what I’m being charged with,” Wilde said.

Silence.

“I’d also like to call my attorney,” Wilde said.

“Later.”

“I don’t want to be questioned until I speak to my attorney.”

More silence.

Wilde tried again. “I said, I don’t—”

Someone silenced him with a hard punch deep in the stomach. Wilde doubled over, retching, the air gone from his lungs. If you’ve ever had the wind knocked out of you, you know what an awful feeling it is, as though you’re suffocating and dying and there is nothing to be done about it. Wilde had enough experience to know that this feeling would pass, that it was caused by nothing more than a diaphragm spasm, that his best bet was to sit up and breathe slowly.

It took thirty seconds, maybe a minute, but he rode it out.

Wilde wanted to ask where they were headed, but the blow to his solar plexus still stung. Did it matter? If they were taking him to Hartford, it would be an uncomfortable two-plus hours. His handcuffs were still on. There was one cop in the back with him, another in the driver’s seat obviously. Could be a third. No way to tell with the bag over his head. He weighed his options and saw none. Any move he would make would be foolhardy. Even if he could incapacitate the guy in the back — through the blindfold and cuffs — the back door wouldn’t open from the inside.

There was just no way.

Ten minutes later, the car pulled to a stop. Not Hartford, Wilde knew. Not Connecticut. The car door opened. Strong hands reached in, grabbed him, and dragged him out. Wilde considered going weightless, flopping to the ground, but he figured that would only earn him a kick in the ribs. He stayed upright and kept pace, letting the men lead him.

Even with the bag over his head, his deep inhalation detected pine and lavender. Wilde listened. No traffic sounds. No street bustle or voices or mechanical whirs. Under his feet was dirt and the occasional root. There was no way to know a hundred percent, but Wilde felt pretty certain he was somewhere quiet and rural, probably in or near woods.

Not good.

They hauled him up three stairs — he dragged his feet, testing the surface, realizing it was made of wood — and then he heard the creak of a screen door. There was the smallest tinge of mildew in the air. This wasn’t a police station. A cabin, maybe, somewhere remote. A hand on either shoulder pushed him onto a hard chair. No one spoke. He could hear the men moving around, whispering. Wilde waited, trying to keep his breathing even. The black bag was still on his head, making it impossible to see or identify his assailants.

The whispering stopped. Wilde braced himself.

“They call you Wilde,” a gruff voice said. “Is that correct?”

He saw no reason not to reply. “Yes.”

“Okay, good,” the gruff voice said. “I’m going to skip good cop, Wilde, and move right to bad cop. There are four of us. You know that. We just want justice for our friend. That’s all. If we get that, it’s all good. But if we don’t, you, Wilde, end up dying a very long and painful death and we bury you where no one will ever find you. Am I making myself clear?”

Wilde said nothing.

That was when he felt something cold and metallic rest against his neck. There was a moment’s hesitation and then a zapping sound. An electric current surged into him. His eyes bulged. His body lurched. His legs straightened. The pain was all-consuming, a living breathing thing that shut down everything except your desire to make the pain stop.

“Am I making myself clear?” the gruff voice said again.

“Yes,” Wilde managed to say.

And then he felt the cold metal rest against his neck again.

“Good, glad we see eye to eye. This is a cattle prod, by the way. Right now, I have it set on low. That’s going to change. You understand?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know who Henry McAndrews is?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know him?”

“I read about his murder in the paper.”

Silence. Wilde closed his eyes and bit down, waiting for the high-voltage jolt. But of course, they knew that he would be. They wouldn’t want that. They wanted to mess around with his head.

“We know you were at his house, Wilde. You came in through the sliding glass door. You messed around with his computer. He had a sophisticated CCTV system. We know it all.”

“If you know it all,” Wilde said, “then you know I didn’t kill him.”

“Just the opposite,” the gruff voice said. “We know you did it. We want to know why.”

“I didn’t kill him.”

Without warning, the cattle prod zapped him again. Wilde felt every muscle involuntarily stiffen. He slid off the seat to the ground, flopping like a fish on a dock.

Two strong hands picked him up and dumped him back in the chair.

The gruff voice said, “Here’s the thing, Wilde. We want to play this straight. We are going to give you a chance, not like what you did with Henry. We just want to know what happened. We will then locate the evidence to back up that truth. You’ll get arrested. You’ll get a fair trial. Sure, you’ll tell people about this little meeting, but there will be zero evidence it occurred. It won’t affect the trial. Still, this is your best bet. You tell us what happened to Henry. We free you and find the evidence. It’s all straight and fair. Do you understand?”

Wilde knew better than to contradict Gruff Voice: “Yes.”

“We aren’t interested in pinning it on you, if you didn’t do it.”

“Good, because I didn’t. And before you hit me with that zapper again, I know you don’t have me on CCTV. If McAndrews had those kind of surveillance videos, then you’d have also seen the killer weeks earlier.”

“You broke in.”

The metal was against Wilde’s neck again. He shuddered.

“Are you denying that?”

“No.”

“Why did you break in?”

“He was anonymously harassing someone.”

“Who?”

“A reality star. He used bots and fake accounts.”

Another voice: “You really think you can talk shit about Henry?”

This blast from the cattle prod must have been set at the higher level because it felt to Wilde as though his skull had exploded into a thousand pieces. His body wouldn’t stop convulsing. He dropped again to the floor, but this time whoever had the cattle prod kept it on him. The voltage kept coursing through him. His legs jerked. His arms spasmed. Wilde’s eyes started rolling back. It felt as though his lungs and internal organs were being overloaded, as though his heart would burst like an overfilled balloon.

“You’re going to kill him!”

Through the din, Wilde heard the buzz of a phone. The cattle prod went silent. Wilde kept convulsing. He flipped over and vomited.

From seemingly a great distance, Wilde heard a voice say, “What? But how?”

Everything stopped, except Wilde, who was still madly twitching, trying to ride out the agony, the hot electricity still scalding his veins. His ears rang. His eyes started to close. He let them. He wanted to pass out, anything for relief. Then he felt the strong hands picking him up again. Wilde tried to help, but his legs wouldn’t obey any command.

Soon he was back in the car.

Fifteen minutes later, the car stopped suddenly. Someone uncuffed him. The car door opened again. The strong hands shoved him out. Wilde hit the asphalt and rolled away.

“If you tell anybody about this,” the gruff voice said, “we’ll come back and kill you.”