The second floor of a five-story brick building in Tribeca houses the Rampart Protection & Investigative Services office. I spot a boutique hotel, a café, a hair salon and a branding agency farther along the street. I suspect the latter is responsible for the proliferation of too-similar business logos rendered in an earthy color palette with flourishes of leaves and flowers for scant distinction. The neighborhood appears to be collectively targeting consumers who place a premium on eco-friendliness and natural ingredients. I don’t grasp how private investigation fits in, but then I don’t really care.
The pedestrians are dressed and groomed according to the latest trends. A blend of musical styles wafts in the air, and the overall feel is of youth, vitality and creativity. The staidness of established New York is figuratively far from this community of startups.
I enter through the heavy double iron doors painted orange-red and find myself in a tiny vestibule, with an unmarked door on the left and a staircase and elevator on the right. I unwrap the scarf draped around my hair and shove it into my clutch. A fierce-looking black man with wide shoulders and a cool glance half sits on a stool backed into the corner of the elevator car with a baseball bat near at hand. He takes stock of me with zero expression and waits.
It doesn’t seem like the neighborhood would require such an intimidating elevator operator, but so many things in this world change their face when it’s dark.
“Second floor, please.”
He tugs easily on a pull chain that simultaneously lowers a gate from the top and raises its twin from the bottom, like a mouth snapping closed. He pushes the button, and we start our ascent.
I exit into another vestibule more aptly described as a landing and enter through the metal door distinguished by a placard denoting that Rampart is on the other side.
A pretty redhead wearing statement eyeglass frames in a bright blue greets me. “Hi! Can I help you?”
Her station is a vintage-looking metal piece reminiscent of a teacher’s desk. It’s squeezed in by the door, but beyond her is wide open space, with windows on every brick wall except the one at my back and columns holding the upper stories aloft. There are four rows of desks, two lining the outer walls and two down the middle comprised of desks placed side by side and face to face.
Unlike Baharan, Rampart affords no one the relative privacy of a cubicle. Instead, it’s a shared space, the desks boasting wood-veneer tops that can morph into standing workstations by levered brackets. At the opposite end, a glass wall and door provide delineation for a conference room. The windows are all open, allowing the scents and sounds of the city free rein.
“I have an appointment with Giles Prescott,” I reply.
She checks her monitor. “Ms. Armand?”
“Yes. Tris, isn’t it?”
She beams at me, inordinately pleased that I remember the name she gave me over the phone. “Yes.”
Hopping to her feet with excess energy, she rounds the desk and leads the way. “I’ll show you to the conference room and let Giles know you’re here. How are you doing today?”
“As well as can be expected.” I can’t imagine anyone coming to Rampart would have a pleasant reason for doing so.
“I love your dress, by the way.”
“Thank you.” Vaguely Grecian in style, the one-shoulder ruched dress in fire engine red is one of the few pieces of clothing in my closet that isn’t neutral. It hugs my waist and emphasizes my curves. With gold hoop earrings and nude kitten-heel slingbacks, it strikes just the right note of casually, effortlessly sexy.
I’ll change before heading to work, but the dress is perfect for my initial meeting with Mr. Prescott. I want sex to flavor his first impression of me; it’ll make him more manageable. Young men the same age or younger than my sons fill the room, but their eyes spark when I enter, and their heads turn to follow me.
“Can I get you something to drink?” she asks. “Coffee, water, soda? I can also bring you a menu for the smoothie place across the street.”
“Do you have sparkling water?”
“Yes. Perrier okay?”
“Perfect.” Going against my nature, I sit in one of the chairs on the side, closest to the head of the table. He’ll have to either sit directly beside or across from me. It’s essential to assume the position of power in any interaction, so I typically would take one end of the table but adopting a more vulnerable persona is the goal in this case.
Giles Prescott is a retired police officer. He’s hardwired for heroism. A damsel in distress should trigger that innate protective instinct. If I can also trigger his mating instinct, even better. The red dress has a one hundred percent success rate so far.
I scroll through my emails while waiting, but it’s not long.
“Ms. Armand.” The deep voice snags my attention. “Here’s your water. I’m Giles Prescott. I’m sorry to keep you. I had an offsite meeting earlier, and it took me longer to return to the office than anticipated.”
A strong hand sets a bottle of Perrier in front of me, along with a glass and napkin. The wrist is thick and adorned with a gold Rolex. Rolled-up shirtsleeves display powerful forearms, the muscles flexing under café au lait-hued skin. I note the broadness of the shoulders before finally allowing myself to study his face and meet his eyes. I expected I’d have to feign feminine interest, but my admiration is genuine. Giles Prescott is an attractive man.
“Thank you. And the wait was no bother. I appreciate your time.”
His smile is boyish, which softens the bluntness of his masculinity. He’s a mix of races, the result compelling if not classically handsome. A gifted barber crops his curls and precisely shapes his beard. His shoes are respectable, his dress slacks off-the-rack but tailored. He eschews jacket and tie and leaves the collar of his dress shirt unbuttoned. He wears a wedding band, but that doesn’t mean he’s unavailable …
I wait until he assumes his position beside me, at the head of the table. “Mr. Prescott, I’m Kane Black’s mother.”
He nods. “I know. I looked you up this morning. It helps me prepare. Did he refer you?”
“In a way. I want a better understanding of the investigation into his wife – if they’re even legally married, considering she’s operating under an assumed name. I’ve read your final report, but it doesn’t seem complete. She used the earliest alias you recovered in her late teens. What about before then?”
“Before then, she was the responsibility of a parent or guardian. She –”
“A mother.”
“If she was telling the truth about that,” he qualifies, and with that, he alters, the easy charm hardening into the flat gaze of a cop. “She’s been honest too rarely to believe her about anything. For all we know, she could have two parents who are alive and well. We have to assume that any information provided by her is a fabrication.”
“She’s been diagnosed with dissociative amnesia and has been living under yet another alias. Is it possible her identities are symptoms of that mental illness? Bluntly, can we determine if she’s a victim or a criminal?”
“A shrink would be better able to sort through why she is who she is. I can only tell you how.”
“That’s fair.” My fingers drum on the tabletop. “Kane ended your investigation. Did you reach a dead-end, or did he act prematurely? Could you have possibly unearthed more?”
He studies me. “Didn’t he tell you?”
“Honestly, Mr. Prescott, I can’t believe anything he tells me when it comes to her. He’s been obsessed with her for years, to an unhealthy degree.”
He nods as if that’s no surprise. “I think we could have dug up more. She’s unforgettable and hard to mistake for anyone else. Once we narrow in on a location, people have remarkably detailed memories of her.”
“Yes, I’ve seen her in action. She’s incredibly charming, which helps make her a terrible blind spot for Kane. A possibly dangerous one, from what I gather. Your report suggested underworld ties …?”
“She doesn’t live modestly. Thorough background checks are required to lease the sort of multimillion-dollar properties she prefers. As you saw, copies were always made of her identification, but that alone wouldn’t be enough. A deep dive into her history would be routine, and she would have to hold up to scrutiny. Someone – and it could be her – is skilled enough to insert false information into government databases, then delete those entries later when that identity is no longer needed.”
His reports were detailed, so I knew all this. Ivy, Lily, Daisy … she liked her botanical names, didn’t she? And didn’t their very similarity suggest premeditation? Or perhaps the opposite is true. Either way, it was doubly concerning to have it laid out verbally.
“I don’t understand how Kane could know all this and let it go.”
“He didn’t let it go,” he corrects, leaning back in his chair. “He let me go. We believe he’s retained the services of a different firm.”
“He hired someone else? Why would he do that? Did you fuck up?”
Prescott’s smile is wry. “No. I run a tight ship here at Rampart. My staff is comprised of retired law enforcement officers from police departments, branches of service and federal agencies. I have a slew of lawyers on staff and paid student interns from a cross-section of disciplines. We don’t make mistakes, Ms. Armand.”
“Aliyah, please.” The siren of an emergency vehicle abruptly pierces the air. The alarming sound, mechanical chirps and beeps designed to be impossible to ignore, pours in through the open windows, chafing my nerves and setting me further on edge. The frenetic sound grows louder by the second as the vehicle draws closer.
His eyes crinkle in the corners as his smile widens and he raises his voice. “We work directly here. We knock on doors, ask questions and dig. I document things minutely, and we act within the scope of the law. While some of the professionals on my team are familiar with undercover work, we aren’t covert intelligence specialists.”
I reach for my water and attempt to unscrew the metal cap, but my hands aren’t quite steady. Prescott reaches over and gently takes the bottle from me, opening it and pouring the contents into the glass.
“Why would Kane need to act covertly?”
“There are two ways to come into money: honestly and dishonestly. For a woman as young as your daughter-in-law to come into her fortune honestly would mean she either inherited it – and there would be a paper trail for that – or she earned it. That amount of money isn’t earned without a lot of people knowing about it, including the IRS. We haven’t found anything that would legitimize her or her fortune.”
The room spins, and I take a deep, slow breath. Gideon Cross would never do business with a criminal, especially someone who’d stolen or embezzled money. He overlooks Paul’s misdeeds because he sympathizes with Kane, having also suffered the sins of a father. But Lily? A woman who owns a majority share of the company alongside Kane …? We would lose all of the investment into ECRA+ if Cross pulled out. It would be a near-fatal blow to Baharan.
“Your son used her assets to build his company,” he goes on. “If a crime ties to those assets, they’ll be reclaimed. Whenever an inquiry is made into her background, someone becomes aware that she’s being sought. You make a lot of inquiries; a lot of people know. She’s been changing her identity for years. You don’t do that unless you’re hiding, so taking a more covert approach – perhaps stepping outside the lines of the law, which we don’t do here at Rampart – would help minimize the risk of turning over the wrong rock and having something really dangerous crawl out.”
Oh no … Bile rises into my throat, burning acid that devastates soft tissue. I swallow hard, pressing a hand to my stomach in a vain effort to stop its roiling.
It’s not just Cross’s partnership we stand to lose. It’s Baharan itself. It’s everything.
“This is a nightmare.”
“There are a lot of pieces in play, but your son is still searching for answers. He’s just taken the search underground. He’s following the money, tracing it back to its source. If he knows where it came from, he has something or someone – maybe multiple someones – to keep an eye out for.”
“What if I paid you to keep looking?”
“Why would you take that risk?”
My brow arches. “He’s my son. I know him. And I know he’s incapable of being objective when it comes to this woman.”
Anger bubbles up at the understanding that everything I own is in jeopardy, every member of my family. Fury boils over.
I push back from the table, my chair legs scraping like nails on a chalkboard. The siren passes just below the window and deafens.
Is Kane working to save the company? Is his focus still on Baharan? Have I misjudged him? I certainly haven’t misjudged how he looks at her unless it’s all an act. Gaining her trust would be the smartest and most expeditious way to resolve this. Is that why he took her away? Is he building a rapport to gain the information he needs?
His choice is between Baharan and whatever-her-name-is. Which will he choose? Or is he working to keep them both?
I move to the window and look down at the narrow street below. The traffic prevents the ambulance from moving any faster than a crawl. Someone is waiting for help somewhere in the city, and it will be some time before it arrives. Perhaps it will come too late.
Baharan cannot wait until it’s too late.
I start thinking about how I can raise the money to pay Lily back and send her away with her troubles. I haven’t a clue how to pull off a buyout of this magnitude, but if I can manage it, Kane won’t have the majority any longer. I just have to make sure that no other single board member steps in and takes it over. I’ll confide in Ryan. Kane is his friend; he’ll never do anything to hurt him, and he’ll make sure we handle this in a way that’s best for my family.
My growing hatred for Kane settles my nerves and gives me strength. He should be the one coming up with the money. He could simply sign over the penthouse to his pseudo-wife, and that would probably be enough. He could even institutionalize her – for her own good, of course. Having researched Dr. Goldstein, including watching his video lectures on YouTube, I’m sure he would zealously argue the benefits of committing her. Lily and Amy could be locked up together and keep each other company.
Instead, we’ll have to rely on the loyalty of friends to hold on to Baharan. I need to get everything in place, then sit down with Lily and get rid of her.
Prescott reaches around me and pulls down the window sash, marginally lessening the din.
I glance at him. I’m vibrating with vicious energy that needs an outlet. “There’s a hotel up the street.”
His brows raise. I see the moment he understands the invitation. “I’m married.”
“Congratulations. The offer stands.”
“It’s a flattering offer, but I love my husband, and I don’t cheat.”
“Ah.” I move around him to retrieve my clutch. “A pity.”
“Should I assume you’ve decided against continuing the investigation?”
I pause, considering.
He crosses his arms. “Ms. Armand, you’re clearly a formidable woman used to getting what she wants, but I urge you to let your son manage this. The woman you know as Lily has been ably protecting herself for years in ways that imply a high threat level. Whatever you think you can leverage is unlikely to exceed what she’s deftly avoided so far. You’re quite frankly not in her league.”
“I appreciate your candor, Mr. Prescott. Can you tell me the full value of the LLC’s assets when my son inherited them?”
“She leased the properties she resided in and her cars. As for bank accounts, I can’t access prior statements, only the assets in their accounts now.”
“I guess I’ll just have to ask her.” I turn toward the glass door, and he nimbly outsteps me and opens it. “It really is a pity,” I tell him again.
I hurry through the row of desks to the exit, anxious to get a failsafe in place.