At the time, Grace had thought, No, not John. It’s you. You’re the one who wants nothing more to do with me. You’ve poisoned him. But now, finally, she realized. Caroline was just the messenger.
It was John. It was John all along!
John was the one who’d betrayed Lenny. He’d betrayed them both. The more Grace thought about it, the more obvious it was. John was the only person close enough to Lenny to have been able to steal that money. When the SEC started looking into Quorum, he must have panicked. Somehow he persuaded Lenny to change the fund’s partnership structure so that he, John, wouldn’t be liable when the money was discovered missing. Of course, Lenny’s sudden death must have raised the stakes dramatically. Exposure was always likely, but after Lenny disappeared it became a certainty. Quorum investors started asking for their money back and the fraud was exposed. But by then it was easy for John to shift the blame to Grace. She was Lenny’s partner now, not him. Better still, Grace trusted him. He’d made sure of that. When everyone else had deserted her, John Merrivale stayed close. Not because he cared for me. Because he wanted to stage-manage the whole thing! The FBI investigation. My trial. It was John who had dealt with the police, “protecting” Grace from their questions. It was John who had insisted she fire Kevin McGuire and hire Frank Hammond, the attorney who had let her down in court. Now that she was safely behind bars, John had washed his hands of her. He wasn’t even man enough to come himself. He sent Caroline to do his dirty work for him.
Looking back, Grace was astonished at her own naïveté. The way she’d begged John to believe her about the partnership, to believe that she knew nothing about Lenny cutting him out and transferring his shares to her. How could I have been so stupid? It was in his interest not to be a partner! If John had been a partner, he’d have been legally liable for what happened at Quorum. He’d be in jail now, not me.
Grace had no idea how John had done it. How he’d managed to dupe Lenny into changing the company structure, never mind how he’d stolen all that money and kept it hidden. But she knew that he had done it somehow. If it took her the rest of her life, Grace Brookstein was going to find out how.
I’ll discover the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And when I do, I’ll tell the world. I’ll clear Lenny’s name and my own. I’ll get out of the hellhole.
Grace slept.
GAVIN WILLIAMS FELT DIRTY.
Just being here, inside a prison, surrounded by deviants, was enough to make his flesh creep. Of course, the fact that the wrongdoers were women made it all the more disgusting. It was unnatural. Women should be chaste and clean and subservient. They should be good and loving, like his mother. Gavin Williams’s mother had adored him. “You’re so handsome, Gavin,” she used to say. “You’re so smart. You can be anything you want to be.”
Gavin bolted into the men’s room and washed his hands for a third time, scalding them under the faucet until his skin was red raw.
Women should be like his mother. But they weren’t. In the real world, women were greedy, dirty bitches, whores who only wanted to have sex with you if you were rich or powerful. Hedge fund guys, billionaires like Lenny Brookstein, they spent their lives drowning in pussy. How Gavin Williams loathed those men, with their flashy cars and their model girlfriends and their beach houses and their private jets. He, Gavin Williams, was better than the Lenny Brooksteins of this world. He was an incorruptible patriot, a modern-day Robespierre. He was a revolutionary, bringing justice to America.
I am the righteous sword of the law.
The Lord Almighty says, “I will punish them. The young men will die, their sons and daughters starve. Not one of these plotters will survive, for I will bring disaster upon them…”
“Mr. Williams?”
Gavin stood in the hallway of Bedford Hills infirmary. A pretty young nurse looked at him strangely.
“Yes? What is it?”
“Mrs. Brookstein is awake. You can talk to her now.”
GAVIN WILLIAMS WAS CERTAIN THAT GRACE Brookstein held the key to finding the stolen Quorum money. The rest of the FBI task force had given up on her as a potential witness. Harry Bain told him, “Forget about Grace, Gavin. She’s a dead end. If she were going to tell us anything, she’d have done it by now.”
But Gavin could not forget about Grace. Her dirty whore’s face haunted his dreams at night. Her voice mocked him during his long days spent poring over the complex paper trail that Lenny had left behind: I know, she taunted him. I know where that money is, and you don’t.
The press continually compared the Quorum fraud with the Madoff case, but the two could not have been more different. Madoff’s returns were so ludicrously consistent. It was plain to anyone with the brains to look that he was a fraud. Either he was doing insider trading, or running a Ponzi scheme. Those were the only two logical possibilities. Given the fact that nobody traded with Madoff, none of the major banks, no brokerages, nobody, it had to be a Ponzi.
Quorum was different. Everybody had traded with Lenny Brookstein. There wasn’t a firm on Wall Street that had seen through the guy, not a whisper of the scandal that was to engulf him and his fund so spectacularly. The missing Quorum billions were not just the figment of some creative accountant’s imagination. They were real. But Brookstein had been so secretive about his trades, even flying paper records to Cayman and Bermuda to be burned, it was virtually impossible to follow any transaction to its end point. Not unless you were an insider. Not unless you knew.
When Gavin Williams got word of Grace Brookstein’s suicide attempt, he knew it was an opportunity not to be missed. Like the last time he interviewed her at the morgue, she would be in a weakened state. But this time there would be no lawyers to protect her, no phone calls, no escape. This time, Gavin Williams would squeeze her till she couldn’t breathe. He would get the truth from Grace Brookstein if he had to make her vomit it out.
For today’s interview Gavin had dressed as he always dressed: dark suit and tie, his short, gray hair neatly parted, black shoes so shiny he could see his own reflection in the leather. Discipline, that was the key. Discipline and authority. Gavin Williams would make Grace Brookstein respect him. He would bend the deviant to his will, and expose Harry Bain, his so-called boss, for the shortsighted fool that he was.
When Grace saw Gavin Williams, her pupils dilated with fear.
Gavin Williams smiled. Her terror aroused him. “Hello again, my dear.”
She looked weak. Dwarfed by her white prison nightgown, still pale from blood loss, she seemed as insubstantial as a ghost or a wisp of smoke.
“What do you want?”
“I’m here to make a deal with you.”
“A deal?”
Yes, a deal, you greedy bitch. Don’t pretend you don’t understand the concept. You’re as corrupt as hell and one day you will rot in hell for your sins.
“It’s a deal you can’t refuse. The procedure is simple. You will provide me with three account numbers. All refer to funds held in Switzerland. You are familiar with all of them.”
Grace shook her head. She didn’t know any account numbers. Hadn’t they been through this the last time?
“In return, I will see to it that you are moved to a mental health facility.”
“Mental health? But I’m not crazy.”
“I assure you, the conditions at penal sanatoriums are considerably superior to those at correctional facilities such as this one. The account numbers, please.” He handed Grace a piece of paper with a Credit Suisse letterhead. Grace glanced at it and sighed, closing her eyes. The drugs made her sleepy. As frightened as she was of this man, it was a struggle to stay awake.
“John Merrivale,” she croaked. “It’s John Merrivale. He took the money. He knows where it is. Ask him.”
Gavin Williams’s eyes narrowed. How typical of a woman! To try to shift the blame, just as Eve blamed the serpent when she polluted the world with her sin. How stupid did Grace think he was? Did she think the FBI hadn’t looked into Merrivale, into all the staff at Quorum?
“Don’t play games with me, Mrs. Brookstein. I want those account numbers.”
Grace was about to reason with him, but then she thought, What’s the point? He won’t listen. He’s insane. If anyone needs the sanatorium, it’s this guy, not me.
“I know what you’re doing. You’re holding out for more.” Gavin Williams positively glowed with rage. “Well, you won’t get it, do you understand me? You won’t get it!”