“I’m sorry, honey, but it’s the truth. Your father didn’t want to live.”
“Maybe not. But he sure as hell didn’t want some deranged junkie to stick a steak knife in his heart. He didn’t ask for that! He didn’t deserve that.” Mitch’s mother raised an eyebrow as if to say, That’s a moot point, but she let him finish. “And what about the police? What the hell have they been doing? They just let whoever killed Dad walk free. Like his life didn’t mean anything at all.”
“I’m sure they’ve done all they can, Mitch.”
“Bullshit.”
It was bullshit. The Pittsburgh police had done the bare minimum, grudgingly completing the paperwork on Pete Connors’s murder without lifting a finger to attempt to track down his killer. Mitch made a bunch of complaints, all of them politely ignored. That’s when it dawned on him.
People like my dad don’t matter. In the end, he was no different from those poor housewives he used to scam with promises of a better life and white-collar jobs. There’s no justice for people like that. The underclass. No one cares what happens to them.
Two weeks after his father’s funeral, Mitch telephoned Helen.
“I’ve made some decisions.”
“Uh-huh?” Her voice sounded weary.
“I’m going to become a cop. A detective.”
It wasn’t what she’d been expecting. “Oh.”
“Not here, though. I need to get away from Pittsburgh. Start afresh. I thought maybe New York.”
“That’s great Mitch. Good luck.” Helen hung up.
Ten seconds later, Mitch called her back.
“I was hoping you’d consider coming with me. We’d get married first, obviously. I thought we could—”
“When? When would we get married?”
“As soon as you like. Tomorrow?”
Six weeks later they moved to New York as man and wife.
Seven weeks after that, Helen was pregnant.
THEY CALLED THEIR LITTLE GIRL CELESTE, because she was a gift from the heavens. Helen delighted in motherhood, wandering around their minuscule Queens apartment cuddling her daughter for hours on end. Mitch loved the baby, too, with her shock of black hair and inquisitive, intelligent gray eyes. But he was working long hours, first training, then out on the streets. Often, by the time he got home, Celeste was asleep in her crib and Helen was passed out on the couch, exhausted. Imperceptibly, as the months and years passed, Mitch found it harder and harder to pierce the cocoon of love enveloping his wife and daughter.
He got promoted and moved them to a bigger place, expecting that this would make Helen happy. It didn’t.
“We never see you, Mitch.”
“Sure you do. Come on, honey, don’t exaggerate.”
“I’m not exaggerating. The other day I heard Sally-Ann ask Celeste if she had a daddy.”
Mitch said angrily, “That’s ridiculous. Who’s Sally-Ann anyway?”
Helen gave him a withering look. “She’s your daughter’s best friend. Sally-Ann Meyer? She and Celeste have been joined at the hip for the last two years, Mitch.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Mitch felt bad. He wanted to spend more time at home. The problem, as he told Helen, was that the bad guys never took a vacation. Muggers, junkies, gang leaders, rapists, every day they walked the streets of the city, preying on the vulnerable, the helpless, the poor. Preying on people like my father. Being a detective was more than Mitch’s job. It was his vocation, the same way that being a mother was Helen’s. And he was great at it.
The divorce came like a bolt from the blue. Mitch got home one night expecting to find his supper on the table. Instead he found a sheaf of legal papers. Helen and Celeste were gone. In hindsight, he realized the writing had been on the wall for a long time. Ever since the economy imploded, crime in the city had been steadily rising. Then Quorum collapsed, unemployment in New York spiked and overnight a bad situation got twenty times worse. Mitch Connors was on the front line of a war. He couldn’t just lay down his gun and be home in time for dinner.
Well, maybe he could. But he didn’t. By the time he realized the toll his dedication had taken on his marriage, it was too late.
THE NYPD HAD BECOME MITCH CONNORS’S LIFE. But that didn’t mean he loved it. Guys joined the force for different reasons, not all of them laudable. Some reveled in the authority that the badge and the gun gave them. Power trippers. They were the worst. Others were looking for a sense of camaraderie. To those guys, the NYPD was like a softball team or a fraternity. It filled a void in their life that marriage, family and civilian friendships couldn’t fill. Mitch Connors understood those guys, but didn’t count himself among their number. He hadn’t become a cop to make friends, or to lord it over his fellow citizens. He’d joined up as a form of atonement for his father’s death. And because he still believed he could make a difference.
Whoever killed Mitch’s father had gotten away with it. That was wrong. Guilty people deserved to be punished. As for guilty rich people, educated people like Grace and Lenny Brookstein, they were the worst of all.
MITCH STOOD UP, KICKING HELEN’S TORTURE chair out of his way. There was a problem with him taking this case. A downside. Now, what the hell was it?
At last it came to him. Of course. The FBI would be involved…
It had been two years since the Brooksteins’ audacious fraud first came to light, but as the whole of America knew, the stolen Quorum billions were still missing in action. Harry Bain, the FBI’s debonair assistant director in New York, ran the task force set up to find the Quorum cash, and he’d come up with a big fat zero. Bain’s agents had interviewed Grace Brookstein numerous times in prison, but she’d stuck like glue to her story. According to her, she knew nothing about the money and neither did her dear departed husband.
Like most NYPD men, Mitch deeply distrusted the FBI. With Grace Brookstein on the run, it was inevitable that Harry Bain would start poking his Harvard-educated nose into Mitch’s case, asking questions, tampering with witnesses, pulling rank. As Mitch’s boss would so eloquently put it, “Bain’ll be all over your ass like a bad case of herpes. You better be prepared to fight him off.”
Mitch was prepared.
The money is Harry Bain’s problem. Grace Brookstein is mine.
Maybe, if he caught Grace and became a national hero, Helen would take him back. Was that what he really wanted? He didn’t know anymore. Maybe he wasn’t cut out for marriage.
It was time to get to work.
SIXTEEN
AS SHE CLIMBED INTO THE VAN, the warm air hit Grace like a punch.
Her fingers and toes throbbed painfully as her circulation began to return. It was good to be off the road, but she knew she could trust no one. How long till the news of her escape became public knowledge? Hours? A day at most. Perhaps it was on the radio already? They would issue a new Photofit…
“Where you headed?”
It was a good question. Where was she headed?
Grace looked at the compass on the dashboard. “North.”
Her “plan,” if you could call it that, was to meet up with Davey Buccola in three weeks’ time. They had a rendezvous arranged in Manhattan—Times Square. It was Davey who had convinced Grace not to go after John Merrivale as soon as she got out. “Don’t risk blowing your cover till we know all there is to know.” Davey was convinced he was close to proving who had killed Lenny. “Just a few more weeks. Trust me.” He’d proposed both the time and the place of their meeting. His theory was that Times Square was so public, so obvious, no one would think to look for Grace there. “Even if someone were to recognize you, they’ll assume they made a mistake. And hopefully by then, they won’t recognize you. You’ll have had time to work on how you look.”
Grace would have liked to meet sooner, but Davey was adamant. “Not till I have more to tell you. Till I’m certain. Every meeting’s a risk. We need to make it count.”
In the meantime, Grace would find a safe place to lie low, get her head together and, of course, start working on a decent disguise. She already looked completely different from the woman America remembered from her trial. No one who knew Grace in her glory days as the queen of Wall Street would have recognized her now. The broken nose, the dull complexion, the short, lank hair and pain-deadened eyes; they would all help protect her in the first few hours and days. But ultimately, Grace knew, they wouldn’t be enough. She would have to keep changing, daily, weekly, like a chameleon.
It wasn’t just her looks that had to evolve. I’ll have to change on the inside, too. Successful con artists, like successful actors, learned how to become someone else. They projected a confidence, a believability, that worked better than any mask or wig or hair dye. Grace had repeated the mantra endlessly in the days leading up to her escape: