ACCORDING TO Dr. Grant’s files at both the DMV and city hall, he was two weeks shy of his sixty-first birthday. He looked like a mummified fifty, a benefit of being one of the city’s most prestigious plastic surgeons. Mrs. Grant was twenty-five years his junior and had the classic look of a certain kind of second wife, replete with breast implants and a flat expression that differed from Tyler Rochester’s mother in that it came from Botox, not booze and pills. The resemblance to a ventriloquist dummy was hard to miss.
Unlike the ministry of help at the Rochesters’ townhouse, there was only one other person in the apartment—Mrs. Grant’s mother, who looked in some strange way more suited to Dr. Grant than his wife. Everyone was holding up well considering their world had just been destroyed by a man with a razor blade.
Hemingway sat down in one of the wing chairs facing the sofa and explained that they had a few questions that they had to deal with now—things they needed in order to move forward with the investigation. She ran through the questions she had put to the Rochester boy’s parents, focusing on new people in their son’s life.
Mrs. Grant’s mouth barely moved as she talked about her missing child. She began by saying that he was a good boy. Hemingway had interviewed many parents and they always began with that same heartbreaking expression. After that, Mrs. Grant went on in an orderly fashion, almost a summation of Bobby’s life. He excelled at school, particularly science, taking MIT’s Young Achiever’s award this year for a robot he had designed and built that cleaned countertops using black light to target bacteria. She nodded at the piano in the corner of the living room, a shiny art deco Bösendorfer; she thought he played too much but when she approached the subject, he had reacted like most kids when told they had to cut back on video games. With pride she related how he had written two piano concertos over the winter and had a recital coming up at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in late July.
Bobby’s driver, Desmond, had worked for them for six years now, driving the boy to and from school, to his extracurricular activities and piano lessons from the first time he had stepped out of the apartment on his own. Dr. Grant had purchased the pistol they found in the glove box. It was clear to Hemingway that both Dr. and Mrs. Grant were upset about Desmond’s death. They seemed like compassionate, decent people.
The deeper they got into the questioning, the tighter Dr. Grant’s face got, until he stood up, nodded at the door, and told them that they would better serve his son if they were out trying to find him.
After cards were exchanged, Dr. Grant walked them to the elevator, telling them to do anything necessary. If they faced any budgetary restraints, they were to come to him. The bell pinged and the doors slid open. Phelps stepped into the car and as Hemingway turned to shake Dr. Grant’s hand, he held it and looked into her eyes.
“After everything we went through to have Bobby, it will kill his mother if something happens to him. Find my son.”
Hemingway did her best to look confident as she nodded. Then she turned and stepped into the elevator. As the doors slid closed, Dr. Grant stared at her, his face still locked in disbelief. On the descent to street level, something told her that he was still standing there, staring at the elevator doors, trying to figure out who he had to speak to in order to trade his soul for a time machine.
They moved through the lobby and out to the no-standing zone where she had parked the Suburban. When they reached the SUV, her phone chirped.
“Hemingway.”
“Yeah, Hemi, it’s Lincoln. I got you that appointment you wanted at the Manhattan office of the Department of Waterways and Estuaries. Your contact is Dr. Inge Torssen . . . Torssen . . . Torssensomethingorother. It’s up near the Bronx—One Hundred and Forty-fourth on the West Side. Can you be there in fifteen minutes? This Torssen woman has a flight out of Newark in two hours and she won’t be there for much longer.”
“Fifteen it is,” she said, hung up, and pulled a U-turn in a smoking arc of rubber.