“I know about your brother,” I said. Bitterly I heard the slight tremble in my own voice, but I kept going. “I know what he did to Fritz. He molested his own nephew. Your son. And you buried it when you found out. Your own goddamn son.”
I expected Davenport to react with a wide-eyed look of shock, or indignation, in any event something contemptuous and loud and threatening. Instead, he placed the Montblanc on the desktop in front of him and looked at me out of those dark, unsettling eyes. “Whom did you speak to, my brother or Fritz?” he asked calmly.
A bit unnerved by his poise, I pushed on. “Both of them, actually,” I said. “But it was Fritz who told me what Wat had done. What you did.”
“What I did,” Davenport echoed. He continued to stare at me. I was struck by how much older he looked than when I had last seen him, in my dorm room ten years ago. His face was thinner, the skin worn and blotched like pages in a dog-eared paperback, notes inked in the margins, passages of text underlined. “You have no idea what I have done.”
Anger rose in my head like blood. “I know you drove your son away, that you—”
He cut across my words. “Why are you here, Matthias?”
The blunt query stopped me in my tracks. I contemplated the question and then said, “Because I wanted you to know that I know. I wanted you to know that I spoke to Fritz. I saw him. And he told me why he left, why he ran away from Blackburne, from me, everything. Because you put your fucking company ahead of your own child. You got the FBI to back off, you bribed policemen, all because of this.” I waved my arm to encompass his office and NorthPoint in general. “It’s pathetic.”
Annoyingly, Davenport looked unmoved by my self-righteous rant. “You want me to be evil, the cruel, uncaring father,” he said. “A monster. That would be easier to understand.” He stood up, walked around the desk until he was facing me. I almost took a step back but held my ground. “I’ve done things you could call monstrous,” he said. “I’ve designed and made things that were used to kill other people in the name of peace and security. I’ve helped to stop wars and to start them. I’ve aided the United States government in protecting our country from terrorist attacks. What I didn’t do was protect my own family.”
I stared at him. If he was going to play the pity card, I might hit him in the face. “I just told you I spoke to your son who’s been missing for ten years,” I said. “Don’t you even want to know if he’s all right?”
Davenport picked up a tablet from the conference table next to us. “I know he’s all right,” he said. He woke up the tablet, tapped it. On the wall behind the conference table, the flatscreen flickered briefly and then displayed a digital outline of the United States. Red dots lay scattered across the map, principally in the western half in a ragged line from Texas to Montana, a few dots farther west in Utah and Nevada, some to the east in Nebraska and Minnesota. An arrow pointer appeared on the screen, glided over top of a red dot in Wichita, Kansas. A window popped up to the side of the red dot: September 2009. The arrow moved south to Houston: December 2009, November 2010. Fort Morgan, Colorado: February 2011. More cities, more dates, a month or so in between cities and towns. Several had multiple dates going back to 2006. Then I noticed that one dot on the map was bright green: Jackson Hole. I stared at Davenport. He moved the arrow onto Jackson Hole, clicked it. May 2009, May 2010, May 2011. He clicked the most recent date, and a photograph blossomed like a digital flower: a blond-haired Fritz leaning against a fence post, hands in the pockets of his jeans, along with two other men, one wearing a dark cowboy hat. The man in the hat was George, the rodeo clown who’d had the melting makeup face. In the photograph, George was laughing, and Fritz was looking at him with that slight, lopsided smile that was so familiar it hurt, a sharp pang of loss and remorse.
“I know where my son is,” Davenport said. “I’ve known for a long time.” He put the tablet down on the conference table and looked directly at me. “My father fought in World War Two. He came back from the Pacific a bona fide war hero. He saved thirteen crewmen from burning to death on his destroyer after a kamikaze hit it. That was his moment in the sun. When he came back home, the sun went behind a cloud. For the rest of his life, he felt he was owed something for his service, more than the already significant amount that was due to him. People grew tired of buying him drinks, tired of hearing his war stories. He never had a steady career after the navy. He failed to provide a steady home for me and my brother. I swore that I would never do that to my own family, and so I built NorthPoint.” Davenport turned away from me and looked at the photograph of Fritz on the flatscreen. “And because I was afraid of losing my company, because I lost sight of the reason for which I worked all my life, which is so ironic it’s obscene, I drove my own son away, possibly for good, and I have lived with that ever since. I will live with it for the rest of my life. So I am reduced to spying on him. It’s what I have instead of a relationship with him.”
Somehow I was able to find my voice. “But you could . . . You could go to him, you could talk—”
“It’s been ten years, Matthias,” he said quietly, still looking at the picture on the flatscreen, a digitized Fritz hovering over the conference table with his sideways smile. “He knows where I am. If he can bring himself to forgive, he’ll come to me.” He glanced at me, saw my look of incredulity. “If I went to him,” he said, “tracked him down to whatever backwater motel or rodeo lot he was living in this month and showed up on his doorstep, what do you think he would do? He’s been running from me and my brother for a decade. In time he’ll come back. On his own terms.”
“Does Abby know?” I managed. “Or his mother?”
“No,” he said. “They believe he is dead. Which, for all intents and purposes, he is.”
“Legally declared dead,” I said.
He inclined his head. “It allowed my wife and daughter to mourn him so they could achieve some kind of closure.”
“That’s not the only reason,” I said. Davenport looked at me with his dark eyes. “There was a trust, wasn’t there? From Fritz’s other grandfather, your wife’s father. All in Fritz’s name. Your son told me. How much did you get? Six, seven million?”
Davenport continued to look at me like a snake sizing up a boy with a stick. “Enough to cover some . . . indiscretions that my brother made,” he finally said.
“NorthPoint cleared a billion dollars last year,” I said. “Your pocket change could pay off any ‘indiscretions’ of Wat’s. You had to rob your own son?”
“My family lives comfortably,” Davenport continued in that same calm, even tone. “But most of my personal wealth is tied up with this company. Using monies from the trust fund was more discreet than cutting a corporate check.”
“And Wat? What does he know about . . . this?” I indicated the map.