“I’ll buy you a dozen.”
At the Escalade, the man held the door for him. It had been a long time since someone held a door for Merrick, and he enjoyed the familiarity of it. The man’s suit jacket fit too snugly across the chest to button because of the Kevlar vest, and through the gap Merrick saw a shoulder holster. He found it reassuring.
Inside the stretch limo’s spacious interior, Damon Ogden was taking in the crowded scene in the parking lot. He began to say something, but the sight of Chelsea caused him to reconsider. Good. Merrick wasn’t in the mood for another lecture. He took his seat beside the brittle, severe woman facing Ogden. He patted her knee.
“Cutting it a little close, weren’t you?”
“Would you rather I left you entirely?” the woman snapped back, removing a pair of oversized sunglasses to study her offended knee as if calculating where to begin the amputation.
“Look who I found,” he said casually, as though they’d all just bumped into each other at Bergdorf’s. As he reached over to help his daughter into her seat, the two women froze—Chelsea balanced, half in, half out of the vehicle, Veronica Merrick staring, mouth agape. A truly priceless moment, and Merrick did not feel one bit bad for savoring it.
“Mother?” Chelsea sounded dumbfounded.
Veronica Merrick slipped her sunglasses back on and adjusted them on her nose with a surgeon’s precision.
“Hello, dear. What have you done to your hair?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The giggling tapered off, but it left Gibson with a bad case of the cold creeps. He would hear that laughter in his nightmares—low, joyless, and lunatic. The creature in the chair stuck out a hand, which opened and shut reflexively like that of an infant demanding something that it didn’t yet have a word for. He wanted the pictures. Gibson handed them over, and the man in the chair clutched them to his chest.
“Stay there,” Gibson said, as much to give himself the illusion of control as for any expectation that the man might obey.
A search of the living room turned up a wallet with seventeen dollars, a credit card, a Manhattan gym membership, and an expired driver’s license that belonged to one Martin Yardas, twenty-six years old, of Montclair, New Jersey. No slip of paper with a username and password, but the picture on the license confirmed the identity of the man in the chair . . . if Gibson squinted and used his imagination. The Martin Yardas who had stood for this picture was a plump, rosy-faced kid. There were two kinds of people in the world: people who smiled in IDs and people who didn’t. Martin Yardas fell into the former category. At least he had six years ago. Contrasted with the gaunt ruin of a man in the chair—face pitted and charred, teeth yellowed like pit stains on an old white T-shirt—the driver’s-license photo and intern photograph formed a cautionary time lapse of the brutal toll that drugs took on the body.
What other story did the pictures tell? Why was Charles Merrick bouncing a two-year-old Marty Yardas on his knee? Did Merrick have a son whom he’d kept off the grid all these years? His ex-wife’s legal team had thoroughly excavated Merrick’s life during the divorce, and she wouldn’t have hesitated to use something this damning had it been discovered. After all, Martin Yardas was roughly the same age as Lea, which meant Merrick had been stepping out while Veronica Merrick was pregnant with his daughter. That took a special sort of person, and Charles Merrick was certainly special.
But it also appeared that Merrick had remained involved in his son’s life . . . to a point. He’d bounced Martin on his knee, at least once, and arranged an internship at Merrick Capital. Would that be enough to manipulate an eighteen-year-old into being his accomplice? Convince a kid to be his lackey while he served an eight-year prison sentence? Gibson knew the answer to that. It was if the son worshipped him. If the son craved his acceptance and respect. A son like that would risk just about anything. And from Charles Merrick’s point of view, it certainly made practical, if cruel, sense—who else would Merrick have entrusted with his money? Who else but a young, estranged son desperate for Daddy’s approval? Gibson glanced at the pitiful remains of Martin Yardas.
Look what loyalty earns you, he thought.
“CharlesMerrick119070&,” whispered Yardas.
Gibson nearly jumped out of his skin. Unwittingly, he’d imagined himself as alone in the room.
“What did you say?”
Yardas repeated the string of characters.
Gibson entered it into the username field and looked expectantly at Yardas. “What’s the password?”
Martin Yardas stared sullenly past him at the monitor; his lips moved silently. Gently, Gibson prodded him for the password, but Yardas said nothing more.
Then why give me the first half? Just to mess with me?
Gibson didn’t think so. Yardas wanted to tell him, but he needed permission.
“I won’t tell him that you told me. I promise. It’ll be our secret.”
“Our secret?” Yardas repeated.
“It’s not his money. You know that.”
Giggles burbled up again from the cracks in Martin Yardas as if Gibson had unwittingly told a profound joke. Gibson saw tears coursing down his cheeks.
“Why don’t you tell me?” Gibson asked. “What’s the password?”
The giggling faded to silence, and Gibson watched Yardas struggle to his feet. The man wasn’t well, but he wasn’t as weak as he looked. He shuffled over to the computer, leaned over Gibson’s shoulder, blocking Gibson’s view, and quickly typed a long string of characters. Yardas hit enter and drew back to show Gibson.
He was laughing and crying again.
It must have been a strange sight: this ragtag motorcade snaking its lazy way through West Virginia. Her father’s rented security at the fore, pursued by God only knew who. If you could call it pursuit. Everyone driving responsibly below the speed limit, obeying all posted traffic signs—not willing to risk police interference. It lent the proceedings an illusion of peacefulness that Lea wanted desperately to believe, but she sat facing backward and in the gathering twilight could see the long line of cars come for revenge. There would be no peace today.