“It would be hard not to guess without some form of fresh brain trauma,” Win said. “You want to help him.”
“Want doesn’t matter,” Myron said. “If Greg’s alive, we are obligated to help him.”
“Is this the part where I say, ‘Even if he’s a murderer?’”
“And then I nod sagely and reply, ‘Even if.’ Or maybe ‘Let’s cross that bridge when we get to it.’”
“‘Even if’ is the less hackneyed line,” Win said with a sigh. “Do I need to remind you that this will open a lot of old emotional wounds for you?”
“Not really.”
“Or that you’re not good with handling old emotional wounds.”
“I’m aware.”
“Your destructive ex. Your career-ending injury. Your biological son.”
“I get it, Win.”
“No, my dear friend, you don’t. You never do.” Win sighed, shrugged, slapped his hands on the table. “Okay, fine, let’s do it. The Lone Ranger and Tonto ride again.”
“More like Batman and Robin.”
“Sherlock and Watson.”
“Green Hornet and Kato.”
“Starsky and Hutch.”
“Cagney and Lacey.”
“McMillan and Wife.”
“Scarecrow and Mrs. King.”
“Simon and Simon.”
“Turner and Hooch.”
Win gasped. “Don’t we wish?” Then he snapped his fingers. “Tango and Cash.”
“Ooo, good one.” Then: “Michael Knight and KITT.”
“KITT, the talking car?”
“Yes,” Myron said. “Plus, it has to be the Hoff playing Michael. None of these crappy reboots.”
“Michael and KITT,” Win repeated. “Which one of us is which?”
“Does it matter?”
“It does not,” Win said. “So first steps?”
“Follow the money trail from the offshore accounts.”
“Negative,” Win said.
“Why not?”
“We won’t be able to trace the money,” Win said. “I’m that good.”
“Then look at the Callister murders maybe.”
“On it already. And you? Where do you go?”
Myron thought about it. “To my destructive ex.”
Chapter Three
Emily Downing, the destructive ex, answered the door of her apartment on Fifth Avenue with a wide smile. “Well, well, well. If it isn’t the good one I let get away.”
“You use that line every time you see me.”
“It’s what always comes to mind. How long has it been, Myron?”
“Three years. Greg’s funeral.”
Emily knew that, of course. For a moment they just stood there and let the history wash over them. They didn’t try to stop it or pretend that it wasn’t happening. They’d met in the Perkins Library at Duke University the first month of their freshman year. Emily met Myron’s eye and gave him a crooked smile from across the study table. Boom, Myron was a goner. They were both eighteen, both away from home for the first time, both inexperienced in the ways that teenagers pretend they aren’t.
They fell in love.
Or at least, he did.
Standing in front of him now, all these years later, Emily said, “You don’t really think Greg’s alive, do you?”
“Do you?”
She gnawed on her lower lip, and boom again, Myron fell back to those cooling autumn nights in her dorm room, the lights low, the moon in the window over the quad. After almost four years of college dating, Myron broached the subject of marriage toward the end of their senior year.
Emily’s response?
She took Myron’s hands in hers, looked him straight in the eye, and said, “I’m not sure I love you.”
Yet another boom. A very different kind of boom.
“Greg alive,” Emily said in amazement. A strand of hair fell across her eye. Myron almost reached out and pushed it away. “It’s too weird.”
“You think?”
She gave him the crooked smile again. No boom this time. Barely a nostalgic pang. “Still a sarcastic wiseass.”
“I gotta be me.”
“Don’t I know it. But all of it was weird. Starting with you taking on Greg as a client.”
“Greg was a solid source of income.”
“More sarcasm?”
“No.”
“I never understood it,” Emily said. “Why did you work with him? And don’t tell me it was just about money.”
Myron decided to go with the truth. “Greg had hurt me. I had hurt him.”
“So you two were even?”
“Let’s just say we both wanted to move past it.”
“Greg liked you, Myron.”
He said nothing.
“It’s why I asked you to give the eulogy. I think it’s what Greg would have wanted.”
Myron and Greg’s basketball rivalry started in sixth grade, moved to AAU when they were thirteen, then high school, then the ACC where Myron’s Duke battled Greg’s UNC. There were rumors of bad blood between the two superstars, but that was just hyperbole. On the court, they both battled with the type of zeal only the hypercompetitive could comprehend. Off the court, they barely knew each other.
Until Emily.
“Did you tell” — Myron took a deep breath — “Jeremy?”
Just saying the name hushed the room.
“I mean about Greg being alive—”
“Don’t,” she said.
“Don’t what?”
“Jeremy’s still stationed overseas.”
“I know that.”
“There’s no reason to tell him.”
“You don’t think he has the right to know that...” — Myron didn’t know what term to use so he used the one that Jeremy would have — “...that his father may still be alive?”
“Jeremy’s work is dangerous. He needs to focus. It can wait until we know for certain.”
Fair point. And really, it wasn’t Myron’s business. Jeremy had made that clear. This was a distraction and not a good one. Myron kept making the mistake of veering off track. Win had warned him. There was too much history here.
“By the way,” Emily continued, knocking him back to the present, “I didn’t tell the cops this, but Greg knew Cecelia Callister.”
That made Myron pull up. “Wait, what?”
“Not well. He probably met Cecelia two, maybe three times. Back in the day, we used to hang out. Cecelia and I, I mean. We were friends when we summered out in the Hamptons right after we both got married. I know we went out once as couples — me and Greg, Cecelia and her first husband, a nice guy named Ben Staples. Or maybe Ben was her second. I can’t remember. Anyway, it was a million years ago.”
Myron tried to take this in and see what it meant. “Could they have been more?”
“You mean like lovers?”
“Like anything.”
“Greg and Cecelia,” Emily mused. “Who knows?”
Myron tried another avenue. “When was the last time you heard from Greg?”
“When he ran off for Cambodia or wherever.”
“Laos. That was five years ago.”
“Something like that.”
“And not a word after that?”
“No,” she said softly. “Not a word.”
He couldn’t tell whether that bothered her or not.
“Look, Myron, Greg and I... it was a strange relationship. We got divorced years ago after, well” — she gestured with her hand in Myron’s direction — “you know.”
He did.
“But Jeremy was still a sick kid, even after the transplant, and whatever issues Greg had... has?... damn, which is it? Whichever, he loved that boy, even after...”
And there it was.
After Myron’s clumsy senior-year proposal, Emily dumped Myron for, you guessed it, Greg Downing. To raise the heartache to the tenth power, she and Greg fell so hard for one another that they got engaged four months later.
That was where it got messy.