“I caught him bugging her a while back. I didn’t know he was involved with DTG.” Ivan tilted his head back and stared at me. “Cierra’s my girlfriend.”
“Really. Does the old man know about it?”
I shook my head. “Not yet, but I want Cierra to meet my grandparents. Anyway, this is disturbing that he’s still tailing her, and he’s using a different car. I thought after we beat the shit out of each other it had ended. I guess I was wrong.”
“That probably explains why I never saw you over at her place when he was there watching her. He probably made sure you weren’t around. But I found out a lot more about the asshole.”
I glanced at the pictures, Cory’s dark eyes stared back as if they were mocking me. “Like what?”
“First of all, the only Cory Bracker I found in St. Louis has been dead for the past fifteen years. He died in a motorcycle accident.”
“So this ass has assumed this guy’s identity?”
“For a long time.”
“Who the hell is he?”
“Ryan Prescott.”
Sudden coldness hit me and I drew my head back stiffly. Fuzzy thoughts raced through my mind and I couldn’t think. I just sat there speechless, looking down at the man in the photos.
Ivan cleared his throat. “When I was doing all this digging, I found an article from about fifteen years ago asking where Ryan Prescott was. It seems the person they were talking about in the article was your half-brother and he just seemed to have disappeared. That was around the time Cory Bracker appeared on the real estate scene.”
“What’re you saying? My brother was kidnapped twenty-one years ago. I’m sure there’s more than one Ryan Prescott in the United States.” I darted my eyes back to the photo and stared at it. There was something familiar in his face. The wide nose reminded me of my dad’s, and the gray eyes looked very much like mine.
It can’t be. I’m just imagining things. It isn’t him.
“Cory Bracker is your brother, Ryan Prescott. I had the fingerprints examined. Before Ryan became Cory, he worked at a government job that required fingerprints. Ryan got into a fight when he was eighteen years old and living in North Dakota. He was arrested and fingerprinted. I found the connection because he took on a couple of other government contract jobs when he’d already assumed the real Cory Bracker’s identity. That was a mistake, because the prints came back as Ryan Prescott. There was an investigation lodged, and he just disappeared. I came across the investigation during my background checks, and that led me to unraveling the truth behind the man.”
I scrubbed my face with my fist over and over. “I can’t believe this. If it’s true, why wouldn’t he have contacted me or my mom? And why the hell would he be trying to destroy me? This isn’t making any sense. And what about the fucker who snatched Ryan?”
Ivan stared at me for a few seconds then splayed his hands out on the table. “There was no kidnapper. Ryan Prescott staged the whole thing to get money from your family so he could start a new life.”
It was like he’d rammed a steel pipe into my stomach and knocked all the air out of me. What he was saying couldn’t be true. All the nights of worrying, the money, his scared voice over the phone, and the years of missing him, feeling awful that I was alive and he wasn’t, and it was all a hoax? It couldn’t be true.
“I wished it hadn’t turned out like this.”
I shook my head. “If this is all true, why is he doing this to me?” Images of Ryan reading to me, playing with me, taking me to the movies raced across my mind. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“That I can’t answer.”
For several minutes, neither of us spoke. It was too overwhelming and crazy. The reality I’d lived for the past twenty-one years had suddenly been turned upside down and inside out.
Breaking the silence, Ivan shifted in his chair and closed his notebook. “I’m meeting another client. Are you going to be okay?”
I nodded, my gaze still on the pictures.
“I’ll call you later. The cops will be there tomorrow night, right?”
Another nod.
“If you need something, call me.” He stood up and walked out.
After what seemed like hours, I picked up the phone and called my mother, telling her to meet me at my grandparents’ house. Even though she kept pushing me to tell her the reason, I didn’t. I wanted her to hear it in person. She wouldn’t believe it. Hell, I didn’t believe it, but all the reports, the fingerprints, the photographs, and the copies of driver licenses with Ryan’s picture when he was eighteen years old sprawled before me. The facts didn’t lie.
Cory Bracker was Ryan, and he’d come to San Francisco for no other reason than to destroy me.
And now I had to do the same to him.
