Fucking loser, Broderick thought. No wonder Caroline was looking elsewhere for what she needed. In more areas than one.
Broderick pretended to be distracted by something else, and deliberately bumped into Gilbert.
“Oh, sorry,” he said. “Wasn’t watching where I was going.”
“No problem,” Gilbert said.
Broderick kept on walking until he was out on the sidewalk. He stopped, took out his latest burner phone, and entered a number.
Three rings later, Gilbert said, “Hello?”
“There’s a key card in your pocket,” Broderick said. “Eleventh floor. Third room on the right after you get off the elevator.”
He ended the call, tossed the phone in a garbage can at the corner of Temple and Chapel Streets.
Chuckled.
Forty-Eight
New Haven, CT
“So, Dorian has explained some of this to me, but why don’t you start from the beginning.”
Her name was Lana Murkowski, and she was not only a friend of Dorian’s, but an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and she had met Miles a few years before, when the Bureau was conducting a wider investigation into cyberhacking by the Russians. She also happened to live in nearby Darien, was on her day off, and was here in an unofficial capacity as a favor to Dorian. She had put a call in to Lana while Miles was in the limo on his way back from New Rochelle, without, as it turned out, Chloe.
Miles didn’t want to talk about it.
A few hours later, Lana showed up at the Cookson Tech offices, and they’d taken one of the conference rooms for a private chat.
Dorian had brought in coffee and snacks and had asked to sit in, provided Miles had no objection.
“No,” he said. “You need to be up to speed on this, too.”
When Lana asked Miles to outline the situation for her, he took a breath and did his best. He started with his first visit to Dr. Gold and his acquiring the list of women who had been impregnated with what he had thought at the time was his sperm.
“How’d you get that list?” the agent asked.
Miles glanced at Dorian and back to Lana. “Is that important?”
“Yes.”
“We bribed someone at the clinic to get it for us.”
“Who did that?”
“Heather,” he said. “The company investigator.”
“Wouldn’t it be helpful to have her here today?”
“It would,” Dorian interjected. “But her mother went into the hospital last night. Possibly a heart attack. Heather’s off the map for the next few days.”
Lana said, “Go on with your story.”
Miles said that once he had the list, Dorian and Heather ascertained the names of the children those women had given birth to, tracked down their whereabouts, and compiled as much information on them as possible.
And soon after that, they began to disappear.
“Let’s go through them one by one,” Lana said.
Miles did. Most of the information he and Dorian had on Katie Gleave, Jason Hamlin, and Dixon Hawley came from media reports. Miles had learned firsthand that Todd Cox was missing. So far, the remaining individuals had not met with misadventure.
“But I’m worried,” he said.
“Okay,” Lana said. “Let’s see what we have here, starting with this Todd Cox. For all you know, that hand under the bed belonged to him.”
“No,” Miles said quickly. “Because of the finger.” He explained.
Lana nodded. “Okay. But the woman in the van? There’s no proof she had anything to do with this.”
“What about the two cups of coffee?” Miles asked. “That deer?”
Lana flashed him a patronizing smile. “Deer run pretty fast and it would have been easy for your driver to miss it. And she could have had an old cup of coffee that had gone cold and bought a new one that was hot.”
Miles was undeterred. “What about how clean Todd’s place was?”
Lana shrugged. “Some people are tidy. And if they’re moving on, they want to leave the place in good shape. Look, I’m not saying this doesn’t all seem a bit strange, but if you want to get the authorities involved, you need something a little harder. You don’t have any bodies. No concrete evidence of foul play. It could all be coincidence.”
“No,” Miles said. “What about the doctor?”
“He’s worth talking to, sure,” Lana said. “Sounds like he’s covering up something.”
“Miles has a theory,” Dorian said, “that the doctor is impregnating all these women himself.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time something like that has happened,” Lana said. “Say that’s the case. How does it explain the disappearances? How do those things connect?”
“I don’t know,” Miles said. “But Dr. Gold as much as threatened me if I didn’t drop this.”
“You bribed his employee for private information,” Lana said. “If I were him I might have threatened you, too.”
“I don’t think he knows how I got the names.”
“He knows you got it from somewhere.”
Dorian looked at Lana. “Isn’t there anything you can do? At least the Bureau could find the remaining kids — okay, they’re not really kids anymore — and warn them?”
“What would you have the FBI tell them?”
“That they’re in danger,” Miles said.
“From whom?”
“Granted, that’s not clear yet.”
“And why are they in danger?”
“Chloe had a theory. If you reduce the number of people I was intending to give the money to, whoever’s left gets a larger share.”
“That suggests that one or more of these people who you had believed were your biological children could be behind this. Doesn’t that seem a little out there? How would they even know? You’d not yet communicated your intentions to them, and there’s nothing to suggest any of them, except for Todd Cox and Chloe, availed themselves of the services of WhatsMyStory.”
Miles sighed.
Lana wasn’t done. “Let’s suppose the FBI were to impart this sketchy information to these people. How are they supposed to act on it? What would you have them do?”
“Be on guard,” Miles said.
“Be on guard,” Lana said. “Suppose someone came to you, out of the blue, and said you might be about to disappear but they didn’t know why and they didn’t know who might make it happen. How would you handle that?”
Miles was searching for the words but could not come up with any.
“I haven’t got enough to go back to the Bureau and open a file on this. Certainly not officially.”
Miles said, “Couldn’t you at least go to the various local law enforcement agencies involved, including the police in Paris, and ask them to provide whatever information they had? Then you could look for commonalities? I’ll bet none of the departments working these cases are even aware of the possible connections with other departments.”
“If there are any,” Lana said.
“I give up,” Miles said.
Lana gave him a sympathetic look. “Mr. Cookson, I want to ask you something and I mean no disrespect at all. But I need to pose the question.”
“Go ahead.”
“Is paranoia one of the symptoms of your disease?”
Miles eyed her icily. “No.”
“Okay,” she said. She gave Miles and Dorian a concluding nod and rose from her chair. “If something develops, get in touch. Dorian, Mr. Cookson.”
And with that, Agent Murkowski departed.
Miles looked dejected and defeated.
“Miles,” Dorian said, “maybe she’s right. Maybe it’s time to step back, let this go. You’ve done what you could. But everything has changed.”