He pulled the binder out, opened it, and there it was, as simple as that, sitting among a host of Double Eye binders. A black file with a pile of documents fastened between the two covers.
In re O’Malley.
He grunted in pain from his cracked ribs as he sat down on the cement floor and opened the file, rifling through the pages as fast as he could to get some idea of what the whole thing was about. The file was arranged in reverse chronological order, with each document fastened on top of the documents that preceded it.
The most recent documents were a series of letters dated in the fall of 1979 from Liam Byrne, Esq., to a Robert Spangler, Esq., referencing the O’Malley matter and discussing, in quite formal tones, an apparently delicate negotiation. From the careful language of the letters, Kyle sensed that the terms being exchanged involved silence and money. Kyle paged quickly through the rest of the file until he stopped at a name. Colleen O’Malley.
So she was the O’Malley of the O’Malley file. He had guessed that the creepy old man was a fraud, and now this confirmed it. If the file was to be turned over to anyone, he would find this Colleen and turn it over to her. If there was money to be made, he’d let her make it.
He kept paging back until he found, at the bottom of the document stack, an affidavit from one Colleen O’Malley. It was browned with age, and it had the caption of a lawsuit, O’Malley v. Truscott, with a heading claiming the case was brought in Philadelphia’s Court of Common Pleas, but there was no case number on the document, or anywhere else in the file, as if the lawsuit were contemplated but never brought. The affidavit trembled a bit in Kyle’s hands, and it felt to him like the key to some ancient puzzle. Kyle started reading with a hunger that surprised him.
Colleen was young, sixteen at the time, a student at a local Catholic high school. The affidavit painted a picture of innocence, a girl who entered adolescence shy and sheltered by her loving family. And then another name emerged. Francis Truscott IV, aged eighteen.
Son of a bitch.
Suddenly Kyle understood the power and danger inherent in the file, why everyone was searching for it, how much damage could be done with it and how much profit could be made. Just a boy at the time of the affidavit’s telling, Francis Truscott IV was now the junior senator from Pennsylvania and one of the main Republican presidential hopefuls, with a great deal of money behind him.
Kyle slowed down and started reading more carefully. The affidavit told a classic story, as old as love itself and told with a certain panache, certainly not in the words of the sixteen-year-old who had affixed her signature to the back of the document. Kyle grew certain he was reading the words of his father, and it felt as if his father were somehow close to him now, as if he could feel Liam Byrne’s breath on the back of his neck as the old man stood over his shoulder, telling him the story of these star-crossed lovers.
The shy young girl from the city, the confident older suburban boy. A chance meeting while volunteering at a homeless shelter, a flirtation, a budding romance. Love wild and on the bloom until the families catch the sweet floral scent. The O’Malleys unhappy because Francis isn’t a Catholic. The Truscotts unhappy because Colleen is from a poor family with no social standing. Efforts by both families to come between them. Romeo and Juliet played out on a landscape of asphalt Catholic-school yards and lush suburban backyards, until the plot changes in one brutal turn and . . .
Above him Kyle heard the screen door bang shut and the creak of a floorboard. He froze, even as his heart started racing. Quietly he closed the file and clutched it to his chest as he rose from the cement floor.
Someone was in the house. How? Why? Damn it.
The why he knew already, from what he had gleaned in just a few moments with the O’Malley file. It didn’t take much imagination to rustle up the scores who would kill to get their hands on the thing— Truscott himself, of course, along with Truscott’s Republican rivals, Democratic operatives, tabloids looking to spike circulation. Not to mention the fake O’Malley, who was after the file for his own damn reasons, or that bastard Sorrentino, who just wanted the cash he could squeeze out in blackmail.
And the how was just as obvious. Kyle had driven here with more concern with what was on the radio than with who might be following him. He had parked right in the driveway. He had put the damn lights on in the kitchen and the basement. It was as if he had placed an announcement on the Internet. And after he had opened the door, he’d left the thing not only unlocked but also open, so that the bastards, whoever they were, could stroll right in.
How could he be so stupid? The answer to that was easy: When had he ever done anything smart?
He looked around in panic for a moment and then heard another f loorboard creak , t h is t ime closer to t he basement door. He lu nged for the circuit box, slammed it open, started smacking closed the circuits one after the other until he plunged the basement into darkness.
With the sputtering fluorescents silenced, he could hear footsteps above him. Slow and ominous. Coming ever closer to the basement door. And then reaching the steps. And then climbing down. Deliberately and unhurriedly. One step. Then the next. One at a time. Almost leisurely, as if unconcerned about the darkness or what might be waiting for him in the basement. The way an ogre would climb down to his lair, where a captive lay in chains, waiting for evisceration.
Kyle wouldn’t wait. As silently as possible, he moved toward the stairs, slinking his left side up against a wall, crouching down, flashlight at the ready. Whatever pain he was feeling from his injuries was blunted by adrenaline coursing through his body. When the bastard descended all the way into the darkness, Kyle would blind him with the flashlight and then charge, putting a shoulder into his chest and slamming him like a rag doll against the wall. It wouldn’t be so easy to get up from that, unless the bastard really was an ogre, in which case it wouldn’t matter.
Crouched down, the knuckles of his left hand still clutching the file, on the floor, like an offensive lineman waiting for the snap count, Kyle saw the merest shadow of a man, first his feet, then his legs, then his torso, thick and bent, then the round, bulbous head. Kyle lifted the flashlight and tensed his legs, preparing for the violent leap. Wait. Wait. Wait.
Click.
A glare of white and then that head coming clear. A mop of white hair. A gray, lined face. A tense, ironical smile with big yellow teeth.
Instead of leaping, Kyle stood up slowly and stared, slack-jawed and overcome.