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We met at boarding school when we were ten. Both of us dumped at a private institution where rich mothers and fathers sent their sons when only the most exclusive prep school would do. I remember standing in line for the phone we all had to share, so I could call my parents and beg them to let me come home.
When it was my turn, I made the call and got my mother on the line. I wanted to talk to my dad but she told me he couldn’t come to the phone right then. I let her know how much I hated living at school, and how badly I missed my brothers and my baby sisters. I begged and pleaded to be allowed to go to a day school and live at home, but she just told me to stop crying and that I was embarrassing her. I often wondered if I’d been able to catch my dad on the phone that day, if things might have turned out differently. Dad was reasonable. Mom was not. She let me know in no uncertain terms that I was staying put, and wouldn’t be coming back home until Isaac showed up at the end of November to bring me there for Thanksgiving. Then she told me it was for my own good and hung up on me.
Some of the other boys witnessed me crying and taunted me. They called me a baby and pushed me around before I ran off and hid behind one of the school buildings and cried some more. When I lifted my head up later, I discovered I wasn’t alone. The boy who was right below me alphabetically in the class was sitting a few feet away. James Blakney. I asked him why he was there. He told me he’d called his parents the day before for the very same reason as me. James had gotten his father on the line. The same cold, hard message was delivered to him, only it came from his dad instead of his mom. We bonded that day and found out that boarding school didn’t suck so badly when you had a friend to share it with.
That was twenty-one years ago, and boarding school had been exchanged for Harvard eight years later. Then it was grad school—Harvard Law for James and Harvard Business for me. Now our companies took the place that school had filled when we were kids. Not much was different between us today than it’d been back then, I thought as I walked through the doors of his law firm.
“He’s free now if you want to go on in, Caleb.” His legal secretary had known me since I was a kid, from back when she’d worked for Judge Blakney, James’s father.
“Thank you, Mrs. Kennedy.” I gave her a wink.
“Aren’t you ever going to call me Marguerite?” she teased back.
“No, ma’am. It wouldn’t be courteous for me to address you as anything other than ‘Mrs. Kennedy’ on account of my oath. A scout is always courteous.”
“Still with the Boy Scout thing, Caleb, after all
these years?” This was our little game.
“That’s right, Mrs. Kennedy. I try to always remember to conduct myself like the Eagle Scout I am.”
James looked at me weirdly when I entered his office and sat in the buttery-soft leather chair reserved for clients. Right now I was a client.
“What has this girl done to you, my friend?” he said, after a minute of staring.
“How much time do you have?” I answered.
“That good, huh?” He didn’t look convinced.
I removed a piece of lint from my pant leg before replying. “The word good is insufficient and lacking in details to help you understand what she has done to me.”
He gave me another thoroughly weird look before opening the file on his desk. It contained the information he’d found since I’d called him from the car, after I’d dropped Brooke at Harris & Goode this morning.
“Three hours isn’t enough time to get a whole lot, but I’ve got some baseline stuff for you and it’s a start. Brooke Ellen Casterley, twenty-three years old. Birthday, seventeenth May, when she will turn twenty-four. Born at King George Hospital, Essex, England to Susanna Casterley and Michael Harvey. Here’s her birth certificate.”
James slid it to me across the desk. “And the husband?”
“He was a bit more of a challenge, but I found his name on the public marriage record filed when he married Brooke. Marcus Kyle Patten, age twenty-nine at the time of the marriage, thirty years old at the time of his death. Born in Salem, Mass., died in Chatsworth, an affluent LA suburb, just seven months into the marriage. Here’s his birth certificate.”
He slid that one over as well. “How did she meet this guy do you think?”
“I think I can make a good guess there. They met at Suffolk University where she was an undergrad, and he was probably just finishing up law school. Patten passed the Massachusetts state bar exam two years ago in February. He married Brooke a little over a month later in April.”
“But they lived in California and Marcus died there. Why take the Massachusetts bar exam and not California’s?”
“I’m still working on that, but Brooke probably knows what she’s talking about if she said the family operated in criminal activity. I’m thinking they needed an inside man versed in the law. Like the mob always sends their brightest bulb in the box to law school. Best way to keep all that money out of the hands of the IRS.”
“The family is organized crime?” I asked.
“Looking that way. They own storage unit rentals. Hundreds of them all over the state. Could be a nice cover for smuggling: drugs, guns, anything that’s controlled, plus a legit business helps to hide the money laundering activities they need to do. Oh, and this Marcus Patten had some anger management issues while in law school, and sounds like maybe a drinking problem, too. An aggravated assault charge was filed for a bar fight that turned vicious, before it was then quietly dropped. The family probably paid off the victim—that and maybe he was fearful of losing the other eye. Marcus ripped into the guy’s face with a broken beer bottle and left him blind on the left side. He reads like one crazy motherfucker.”
“Jesus, this guy and his family sound like Sleeping with the Enemy meets Sons of Anarchy.”
“I know. It’s a miracle your girl made it out in one piece.”
She nearly didn’t. “While we’re on the topic of crazy people, how is Janice?”
“I wouldn’t know, and I’d like to keep it that way, thank you very much. Besides I told you a few days later at lunch that I didn’t fuck her, I just let her into my apartment. Which was the worst, most terrible idea ever. Why didn’t you come down there and save me from her, bro?”
