Next of Kin Read online

Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Ben liked the warmth. He stood close to the bonfire at the water’s edge. In his left hand he held a metal skewer that flashed in the light of the flames. He was holding the skewer close to the heat, toasting the two marshmallows on the end. Careful not to burn them, he glanced to his left and right. His cousins John and Hayley and Ariel were toasting marshmallows. He looked through the flames and saw his mother and father on the other side of the thick branches they’d used to build the fire. His father held the end of Ellen-Marie’s skewer with one hand while she held the middle of it with two hands. She kept trying to put the marshmallow too close to the fire, and their father restrained her.

  Ben smiled. He knew she wanted to see the marshmallow catch fire and then to fling it at a tree or out into the lake behind her.

  His mother sat on one of the enormous logs around the bonfire, eating a s’more, talking with Aunt Natalie. She noticed him watching her. With her mouth still full, she giggled at him and waved.

  But no, she was pointing at the bonfire, at the flames.

  He looked more closely and saw something dark in the center of the fire. It must be smoke, he thought. Dense, swirling smoke that resembled a small version of tornados he’d seen on the television news.

  And then the darkness at the center of the fire grew larger, spun faster, reached higher, up into the air. He watched it rise, lifted his head to follow its path, saw it spread out above all of them until it hid the stars and covered the sky in blackness.

  He tried to step back from the fire, but he couldn’t. He looked left and right. His cousins were laughing and eating s’mores. They hadn’t noticed the smoke. Across the fire his mother was still talking with his aunt. His father helped his sister rotate her skewer to brown the underside of the marshmallow.

  Ben waved at them, but they didn’t see him.

  He called out to them. “Mom! Dad! Ellen-Marie!”

  Yet they ignored him.

  Can’t they see the smoke? he asked himself. Aren’t they afraid of it?

  And of the fire.

  All this time the fire was growing, spreading outward until the flames licked his knees. He smelled something burning and realized his bangs were on fire.

  He swatted at his face. He cried out. He tried to lean backward.

  But he couldn’t move, and the others wouldn’t move.

  First the smoke enveloped his cousins. And then he watched, helplessly, as the growing fire touched them gently, as if giving their faces the faintest kiss, and then it burned them.

  They caught fire, and their skin bubbled and broke open and turned crimson before blackening. Their hair exploded in a white puff and then turned to ash.

  “No!” he called out. “No!”

  It was then he looked over at his mother and father, at his sister. All three of them were smiling at him, waving.

  And then the fire seized them. They didn’t fight it. Didn’t try to run from the heat.

  He shouted at them: “Go into the water! It’s just behind you! Jump into the water! It will save you!”

  But they didn’t move, couldn’t move.

  He felt the warmth. Looked down. His clothes were on fire.

  He struggled to get out of them.

  He saw his skin bubble and begin to peel off him.

  With all his strength he tried to get away from the heat. He took in the deepest breath he’d ever taken and gave a final shout.

  Chapter Thirty

  Mei heard herself scream.

  The sound was muffled, as if it came from a great distance. Alarm and distress mixed with the most basic of emotions: fear.

  Breathing deeply, she opened her eyes and remembered she was at Ward’s house in Greenwich, Connecticut. Sitting up on one elbow, she shifted her legs on the soft white linens. Listened to the barely audible sound of the furnace pushing warm air into the room through the registers. Opened her eyes in the darkness to see the clock beside the bed, its digital numerals gray green and reading 4:07 a.m.

  Then she heard another muffled cry. Was she still asleep? No. No, she couldn’t be. She was quite sure she was awake. And her mouth was closed. No, the cry couldn’t have come from her.

  Ben.

  He was in distress. Of course. The scream and cries were coming from the bedroom next to hers.

  She threw back the duvet, put on a T-shirt, and opened the door to the hallway. Nobody there. She went to Ben’s door and didn’t knock but opened it quickly, closed and locked it behind her, and went over to the bed. Perching on the edge of the mattress, she could see the faint outline of Ben’s form. He’d kicked off the duvet. Moving closer, she saw his long black hair against the white sheets.

  She put a hand, very gently, on his side.

  “Ben?” she said. “Ben, it’s all right. Everything is all right.”

  He writhed for a moment and then was still.

  “Ben,” she repeated. “You’re okay.”

  She saw him turn. Heard a gasp, a great intake of breath.

  “Ben?” she said again.

  “Mei?” His voice small, uncertain.

  “Yes.”

  In a quavering voice, he said, “I was having a nightmare.”

  “I know. But I’m here and you’re all right.”

  “I was dying.”

  She put her arms around him. He snuggled in and pushed his face into the crook of her neck. She felt the wetness of his tears. She said, “It was only a bad dream. You’re here with me in Ward’s big house.”

  For a moment he was quiet. Then he said, “There was a fire. It burned everyone and I screamed but I couldn’t move couldn’t get away couldn’t raise my hands couldn’t . . .”

  He sobbed and held her tightly.

  She returned his embrace just as tightly and said, “It’s all right, Ben. It’s all right. You had a dream. A really bad one. In dreams we can’t do what we need to do. But in life, sometimes, we can. Remember how you escaped from the killer and survived. And now you’re here with me at Ward’s house. There are guards and Rottweilers outside. There’s a security system. And Ward has weapons, and you have your panic bracelet.”

  Quiet for a moment, he rolled onto his back. “But what happens next week or next month?”

  She put a hand on his chest. “Buddy will catch the person who did these terrible things and put him in prison forever.”

  Ben sighed.

  She waited.

  After a while he asked, “Do you have to go?”

  “Go where?”

  “Back to your room?”

  She bent over and kissed his forehead. “I’ll stay right here tonight.”

  “All night?”

  “Yes. All night.”

  She got into bed beside him and lay quietly. Soon his breathing grew even, and she knew he’d fallen asleep. What a wonderful new sensation it was to be near this boy, to smell his hair and sense his light breath against her skin.

  As she lay in the darkness, she thought of Buddy. It was with Buddy she’d decided to have a child—if they married. Although she’d been adopted, she’d never considered it. She hadn’t strongly desired children until she’d met him. But here was a child who needed her. Not just anyone, but her. Should she, could she, turn her back on that responsibility?

  As she in turn fell asleep, she knew she couldn’t answer that question.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The next morning Buddy left the apartment for an interview with part of the surviving Brook family. He suspected they knew something, but he didn’t know if they’d tell him what it was.

  After walking over to Fifth Avenue, he turned south and studied the high-end co-op buildings to his left and the park to his right. A few blocks farther, and he looked through the park’s black wrought-iron fence at the zoo. He sniffed but couldn’t smell the animals. He kept going, taking a right on Central Park South that led him past the Plaza Hotel and the Ritz-Carlton.

  He looked down Seventh Avenue and could see Carnegie Hall’s ochre-
colored façade, which brought back memories of his senior recital there during his last month as an undergraduate at Juilliard, when he’d failed in front of thousands.

  He’d begun a difficult piece—Schumann’s Kreisleriana Agitatissimo—with suitable aggression. In an instant going from silence to maximum volume. The first minute was the most difficult, and he played its rumbling chords with clarity and technical perfection.

  But as he’d begun the development section, he’d glanced out at the audience to his right. He’d seen his father watching him, coldly it seemed, sitting next to his wealthy blonde stepmother. And a row behind them, his mother perched on the edge of her seat, alone.

  He’d returned his eyes to the keyboard. Tried and failed to keep focus.

  Blurring an easy passage, he’d grown conscious of his hands. They’d always been large and muscular but now they seemed chunky and oafish, too clumsy for demanding sixteenth notes, and lacking in finesse.

  Having lost his place, he’d lifted his hands from the keyboard.

  The hall was silent, and he’d hunched over the instrument in the silence.

  Then the notes had come to him, but they made no sense.

  He’d detected his father’s disapproval and derision, his mother’s alarm.

  Pushing back the piano bench an inch, he heard the sound echo out into the hall.

  He’d put his hands together.

  In that moment he hadn’t felt his father’s disapproval or his mother’s alarm. He’d only sensed his rejection of those emotions. A pushing away of them.

  A cough had sounded in the audience.

  More coughs.

  The rustling of programs.

  He’d realized that for at least a year he’d been playing for his father, and that he no longer wanted to continue. Didn’t want to play the piano. Maybe ever. He’d thought he was a highly trained monkey, performing for his father, the famous Juilliard professor.

  Pushing the bench away from the keyboard, he’d stood.

  The coughing had stopped. An eerie quiet had come over the hall.

  Slowly, Buddy had turned away from the crowd. Then he’d walked off the stage, the roar of the audience’s surprise, compassion, and ridicule following him as he went.

  The next day he realized that he should have regained his focus and finished the piece, no matter how badly he’d played. He’d come to believe that if he’d finished his performance like a man, his mother would have been proud of him. She’d told him his failure didn’t matter, but he knew it did. She’d sacrificed so much for his private lessons and touring, she must have been greatly saddened. During her subsequent illness he’d given up the piano, and her death made all music frivolous. He’d decided never to perform again. Instead he’d become a homicide detective with the NYPD, something as far from Juilliard as possible, but to him, just as magnetic. He’d become a different man, or maybe he’d always been a man who wanted to hunt others, who was attracted to darkness and saw weakness and fallibility everywhere, not only when he looked in the mirror. There was nothing frivolous about homicide.

  At the southwest corner of the park, he reached Columbus Circle, a busy roundabout with Time Warner Center, an enormous mixed-used development, curling around its corners. Two towers clad in smoky but partially reflective glass, the right housing the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, the left some of the world’s most expensive condominiums. Russian oligarchs and other foreigners had bought many of the condo units, their way of laundering money they’d made in various criminal enterprises. Buddy knew that if he hadn’t moved in with Mei, he’d have been priced off the island along with others like him. Now Manhattan served tourists and the rich. Everyone else just visited.

  He walked around to the entrance to the condos. After he badged the doormen, one called up to Carl Brook’s duplex on the top floor to get the okay, and he was shown to an elevator and began his rise to the top of the city.

  His first thought, when the lawyer Robert Kahler opened the door to the condo, was what every police detective thinks when investigating a case: If you aren’t guilty, why do you need a lawyer? But of course he knew that a billionaire wouldn’t meet with the NYPD absent legal representation. This didn’t bother him all that much. He’d get his man no matter how many lawyers were hired.

  “Good morning, Detective Cyrus Edward Lock.” Kahler was dressed in a conservative navy-blue suit. He wore his graying hair short, and his pale complexion seemed almost white behind the silver-colored frames of his eyeglasses. Buddy had met him before. He’d never liked Kahler, who earned millions of dollars a year defending wealthy criminals.

  Buddy didn’t smile. He didn’t like his given name or Robert Kahler’s use of it. “Mr. Kahler.”

  “Please come in.” The lawyer pulled the door farther open and stepped to the side so that Buddy could pass. “The family is ready for your interview.”

  Buddy walked into a modern foyer with expensive-looking paintings on the white walls, light maple floors, and modern furniture. He looked up at a wide skylight that showed clouds passing not far above. Refocusing on the room, he saw no members of the Brook family. He stopped and turned back toward Kahler.

  After closing and locking the large door, Kahler looked at Buddy and said, “Perhaps we should discuss ground rules.”

  Buddy shook his head, turned, and walked into the living room.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  His first thought was that he’d never seen better-looking people. All slender with great facial structure and not an ounce of fat. They wore beautiful clothes. All had dark hair—Carl’s graying at the temples—and perfect skin. He felt like he was in an advertisement for Armani. Or some kind of Hollywood casting call for the perfect family. The perfect rich family.

  Perfection put him on guard.

  “Good morning,” he said to the Brooks. He didn’t bother to smile. “Detective Lock, NYPD.”

  “Good morning,” they answered in unison.

  They were sitting on furniture arranged around a low glass coffee table. The furniture was black leather and dark wood. Husband and wife on the sofa. Son and daughter on chairs facing the sofa.

  Carl Brook stood up and crossed the floor toward Buddy. He was fifty years old but looked younger, despite his eyeglasses’ thick black frames. His tailored white shirt underscored his skin’s healthy glow and the expensive-looking dark-wash jeans. He was well built, with broad shoulders and muscular arms. He offered his hand. “I’m Carl.”

  They shook hands. Carl’s grip was firm, strong.

  Carl said, “This is my wife, Rebecca, our son, John, and our daughter, Ariel. We’re anxious to be of help, because we want justice for whoever killed my brothers and their families.”

  “Thank you,” Buddy said. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Losses,” Carl corrected him.

  “Yes.” Buddy looked him in the eye. “Losses.”

  Kahler appeared to Buddy’s right. “Shall we begin?”

  Buddy ignored him. “I’d like to interview Carl, Rebecca, and Ariel together. But I’ll start with John, alone.” He turned to the young man. “You ready?”

  John was shorter than his father, about five feet eight inches and thicker in build. All-American in appearance with dark eyes and a square jaw. Could have been—maybe was—a model. Despite the family tragedy, he had a pleasant demeanor edged with a confidence that bordered on entitlement.

  Buddy thought he recalled John from the photographs that hung in Ben’s parents’ house at Camp Kateri. He said, “Where can we speak privately?”

  Kahler said, “Detective Lock, I object to your interviewing John without me or his father present.”

  Buddy kept his eyes on John. “You have something to hide?”

  John stood up quickly. “Nope. That’s fine, Mr. Kahler. I’m not worried about it.”

  “You’re sure?” his father asked.

  A moment later Buddy and John were sitting at each end of an oversized tan leather sofa. It was a large den wi
th a flat-panel television mounted to the opposite wall that must have been at least seventy inches. Below the screen were two ottomans that matched the sofa. Buddy opened his notebook, but he also set a digital recorder on the sofa’s middle cushion and switched it on.

  “You’re John Brook?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you in school?”

  “Yes. I’m a senior at Horace Mann.”

  “College plans?”

  “I’ve been accepted at Princeton, but I might go right to a hedge fund. Usually the funds take people out of college or business school, but I’m good with numbers and have connections and, well, money.”

  Buddy made a note. Then he said, “Were you at Camp Kateri over New Year’s Eve?”

  John’s face darkened. “Yes.”

  “Did you hear anything when your aunt Brenda, your uncle Alton, and your cousin Ellen-Marie were killed?”

  “No.” John shook his head. “Not until the sirens, after Ben called the police.”

  “Where were you?”

  “I was with everyone else until midnight. Afterward I visited my cousins, Lucy and William, at their parents’ house. Then I went to our house.”

  “Do you know who’d want to kill Alton, Brenda, or Ellen-Marie Brook?”

  “No.”

  “For the past week, you were with your parents and sister here in Manhattan?”

  “Yes.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “The usual. School, homework, friends.”

  “Anything strange or odd happen to you?”

  “No.”

  “What about last night?”

  John’s eyelids flickered. “What about it?”

  “Where were you?”

  “I was, uh, with a friend.”

  “Who?”

  “A friend from school.”

  Buddy waited a moment, and then said, “Name?”

  “Ayla Cross.”

  Buddy wrote down the name and asked, “Where were you?”

  “Her place—her parents’ place—at 1095 Park Avenue.”

  Buddy made another note. “You were there all evening?”