TPG (6 page)

Kyle wiped the
perspiration from above his lip. “And why are you telling all of this to me and
not the police?”

“I’ve already told
the police.”

Kyle narrowed his
eyes. “And?”

“And they aren’t
listening to me. So I need someone else to help me out.”

“But why me?”

“You’re a
professor,” he said. “And you know about this stuff.”

“But I don’t know
that much about it. And what I do know says that what you’re saying can’t be
true. So how am I going to be of any help?”

“Because I know
you’ll come around once you think about it. So just do that for now. Think
about it,” Liam said. “Then once I find out which messages were deleted, if I’m
right, I think then you’ll change your mind. And so will the police.”

Kyle didn’t know
what to say. Once Liam found the messages it wasn’t Kyle who was going to
change his mind, it’d be Liam.

And Kyle could
kiss his job and career goodbye, while flushing the remaining respect and
integrity he had straight down the toilet with the rest of his life.

It was only a
matter of time.

CHAPTER TEN

“Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“What was I
supposed to say?” Kyle said into the phone, having just relayed the entire
conversation to Eddie.

“How
about—‘Yeah, I wanted to fuck your niece, but I didn’t kill her, you
psycho,’” Eddie yelled into the phone. “I mean, there’s only two things going
on here. One, the guy knows what you were up to. Or two, he’s a fucking nut.
And either way, I have no idea why you would tell him to give you a call after
he finds out about the deleted texts. I mean, Jesus, Ky, you gotta grow a pair
at some point and say enough is a fucking nuff. You tried to screw a hot chick.
That’s it. You didn’t try to kill her, man. So she was a couple of decades
younger than you and was your student. Big fucking deal. You know how many guys
would’ve jumped at that opportunity?”

“What if he’s on
to something though,” Kyle said.

“Are you kidding
me? There’s no way someone’s going around Manhattan blowing up people’s brains
with just their thoughts.”

“But if Liam’s
right about the statistics,” Kyle said, “it
is
extraordinarily strange.”

“You can’t be
serious.”

“I’m not saying I
think it’s happening the way he thinks it is, but maybe something else is going
on.”

“C’mon, Ky.
Really?”

Kyle sighed and
rubbed the back of his head, feeling the dull pain beginning to grow into a
full-on headache. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I’ll find out if the
statistics Liam’s citing are even real first.”

“Good idea. Do
that. And then promise me one thing?”

“What’s that?”

“You think back to
what happened the last time you played Good Samaritan.”

“I have the
mediation in a few days, so trust me, I can’t not think about it.”

“Good.”

After they hung
up, Kyle scrolled down his BlackBerry contact list to Tom’s phone number,
knowing the man could quickly access the information he needed since NYU’s
forensics department also housed the city’s Chief Medical Examiner’s
Office—the OCME. Tom could just access the OCME’s intranet to find out
how many ruptured aneurysm victims there’d been in the past few months. He’d
also be able to see if Liam was right about them being so young and
symptom-free.

Tom picked up
after the second ring. “I haven’t checked on her since we last spoke,” he said,
not waiting for Kyle to say hello.

“I actually need a
different favor.”

The line went
quiet.

“I know,” Kyle
said. “I know I said I wouldn’t bother you again with anything else, but
something strange is going on with what happened to Allie.”

“How so?”

“Her uncle told
me—”

“Her uncle? You
talked to her uncle?”

“He called me.”

“Does he know the
real reason why you were there?”

“He doesn’t even
know I was there.”

“So why did he
call you?”

Kyle didn’t want
to delve into the whole situation, so he simply said, “I’m not quite sure, but
when we were talking he told me there have been four ruptured aneurysms in the
past two months to people in their twenties. Their early twenties.”

“That’s odd.”

“That’s what he
says. He thinks something’s going on.”

“Like what?”

“He’s not sure,”
Kyle said. “But I wanted to confirm his statistics.”

“Which, I presume,
is where I come in.”

“Right,” Kyle
said. “Do you think you could quickly check and see if the numbers match up? I
mean, it’s all public information right? I could get it through a Freedom of
Information request.”

“If you wanted to
wait a few months.”

“Which I don’t.”

Tom sighed. “I’ll
see what I can do.”

“Thanks, Tom,”
Kyle said. “If it’s easier, you can just shoot me an email. And I definitely
owe you a few.”

After they hung
up, Kyle leaned back in his chair and thought about what it would mean if Tom
came back with confirmation that Liam’s numbers were accurate. Would that mean
someone was behind the hemorrhage deaths? That someone was causing them? He
thought back to the man in the alley, trying to think of anything out of the
ordinary. But there was nothing. From the little Kyle saw, the man could’ve
been anyone, and could’ve been doing anything in the alley. The only thing odd
about him was that he was there to begin with, and hadn’t stuck around.

But maybe he’d
already been leaving. Or maybe he’d just been taking a leak and was
embarrassed. Maybe he hadn’t even noticed Allie.

Still, Kyle knew
he should tell the police. But once that happened, the questions about why he
was there would open up the can of worms he desperately wanted to keep shut.
And when he thought about how the conversation would go, he wondered how
helpful the information would even be. He’d say there was someone in the alley
when Allie collapsed. That’s it. Big deal. The hospital had to already have
assumed that possibility anyway when they ruled out any trauma or drugs in her
blood system.

So what on earth
could the man have done?

Kyle didn’t know.
Couldn’t think of anything.

But he also
couldn’t get that nagging feeling out of his mind. Couldn’t shrug away the
sense that there was definitely more to the man in the alley, that there was
some kind of connection.

He just had no
idea what the hell it was.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Kyle received a text from Tom the
following day while he was on his way to meet Bree for dinner. He hadn’t been
sure what Tom was going to come back with, didn’t know if the actual number of
aneurysm ruptures would match Liam’s count or not. But what he
didn’t
expect was what Tom sent him.

Liam was wrong.

There hadn’t been
four deaths of people in their twenties over the last few months.

There’d been six
.

Kyle stared at the
BlackBerry’s tiny screen, wondering what that meant. Was there actually merit
to what Liam was saying? Could something completely undetectable have been used
to cause the strokes? And if so, what? It couldn’t really be an energy transfer
 …
or could it?

It just didn’t
seem possible. But something was going on, Liam was right on that account. It
had to be more than a coincidence. But Kyle still had absolutely no clue what
it was.

He slipped the
BlackBerry into his pocket and continued to cut his way through the thick
humidity that’d been hovering over the city all day, the clammy mess having him
wondering if the city had reached that defining day when the weather seemed to
change for good, that moment in the summer when the sporadic bouts of cool weather
disappeared and the stifling cloud of humidity descended and remained well into
September. The stench of garbage filtering its way throughout the streets, the
subway stations heating up like ovens, the sidewalks and concrete starting to
melt as sweat-soaked T-shirts clung to backs everywhere
—
the Manhattan that those with the means and opportunity
sought to flee each weekend. It was June and still seemed too early for the
change, but the thick air gave off that feeling that the change had indeed
arrived, that summer had descended upon New York. It simply had that feel.

As he made his way
over to Amsterdam, it wasn’t lost on him that the neighborhood still felt like
home, like he should be walking a few blocks over to Riverside to the apartment
he had shared with Sheila and Bree for almost a decade before the divorce.
Stores and restaurants he used to take for granted
—
the diner where he and Bree would eat breakfast every
Sunday morning, the bookstore where they’d spend hours browsing through the
aisles, the pizzeria where she graduated from having Kyle cut her slice into
pieces to being her hangout after school
—
now brought back a wide array of emotions. It was the
neighborhood where he saw Bree grow up.

He often wondered
what her childhood would have been like if they’d moved to the suburbs,
concerned that perhaps her life in the city was too urban and structured. It
was just so different than his own childhood, where there was little
supervision and he and his friends would bike to each other’s houses in the
sprawling town without anything more than a “see you later” to their parents.
Bree’s childhood was nothing like that. Everything was scheduled—school,
sports, theater. They were all organized events. And every parent knew exactly
where their child was at all times. Not that Bree seemed to mind, perhaps
because she had the summers away at camp. He didn’t know.

He spotted Bree
immediately when he crossed over to Eighty-third Street. She was already
waiting at one of Fred’s outside tables. The place was one of their mainstays,
and this dinner would be their last before Bree left for sleepaway camp.

She hadn’t seen
him yet as he neared. She was too engrossed with something on her iPhone.
Probably texting her friends.

He was about to
call out, but stopped and just looked at her, at the young woman she was
becoming, at his thirteen-year-old daughter sitting there at a restaurant table
by herself. It seemed like just yesterday he and Sheila were there with her in
the baby stroller as she slept through the entire meal. He remembered how he
felt she was getting so big just when she was able to sit at the table without
a highchair. Then the conversations started to become less one-sided, less of
him asking questions and more questions from her. Real questions. Tough questions.
And she had his demeanor, his pensive, reflective process of analyzing answers
internally before just accepting them as fact. Each year he enjoyed spending
time with her more and more. He knew that was one of the reasons he and Sheila
had drifted. Bree had become the center of his life, and raising her became his
top priority. He was concerned about the curse of being a therapist’s child,
about the neuroses and problems they developed. Psychologists and psychiatrists
too often seemed to treat their children either too clinically, coldly handling
them as if they were another patient, or went the other way and completely
failed to recognize the signs that they treated each and every day themselves.
He didn’t want to make that mistake. And he hadn’t. Not with Bree.

But he did with
Sheila.

She became Bree’s
mother, not his wife. Their conversations centered around two things, and only
two things: work and Bree. And he admittedly tuned her out when it was work.
Not that Sheila was completely innocent in the whole thing. Not at all. But he
hadn’t helped. He hadn’t recognized what was happening. Not until it
did
happen. Not until it was too late
and Sheila was gone. Maybe if he had done something about it earlier,
recognized it or acknowledged it, they’d still be together. They’d at least
have had a shot. Or maybe not, he thought. Maybe it was what she wanted more
than he realized. Maybe it wasn’t just their drifting apart. Maybe she truly
just didn’t want to be with him anymore, and no amount of attention on his end
could have altered that.

He didn’t know.
That question was never answered. She never gave them a chance to reach that
stage.

He looked at
Bree’s grin as she read something on her phone.

Their only child.

They had discussed
having another one. Money wasn’t a problem; they could afford another one on
Sheila’s nearly seven-figure annual bonus alone. But the discussions never
resulted in any final resolution. They were just discussions, neither wanting
to shoot down the idea completely, but neither fully embracing it either. There
was the argument that it was selfish to not give Bree a sibling, a companion.
But that argument went by the wayside by the time she hit four. Then there was
the argument that Sheila worked too much and barely had time to spend with
Bree, let alone a new baby, and she wasn’t ready to slow down and didn’t want
another child just because they could afford it. That half-hearted excuse
continued to linger, never resolved. And then there was the guilty confession
by both that they just didn’t know if they could ever love another child as
much as they did Bree.

That one, he
thought, might still be true.

Whatever the case,
by the time Bree hit eight all of the discussions became muted as the
underlying reason behind their failure to commit to another child started to
become clear, even if it was never discussed or acknowledged. At least by him.

They had their own
issues to deal with.

He now knew that
Sheila had known it. And, on some level, he must have known it as well.

As he kept watching
Bree look at her phone, seeing her long straight brunette hair hang over her
eyes, he felt his BlackBerry vibrate. He slipped it out, wondering if it was
Eddie again asking him about going down to the shore, or his attorney calling
about the mediation. But it wasn’t. It was a text:
R u gonna just keep staring @ me?

He smiled and
looked up. Bree was now looking up as well, a sly smirk on her face, the bridge
of her nose all scrunched up. “I saw you as soon as you turned the corner,” she
said, wanting him to be impressed with her observation skills.

He made his way
toward the table saying, “And maybe I saw that you saw me.”

“Yeah, right,” she
said as he sat down. “You couldn’t have.”

“No? And why’s
that?”

“Because you
didn’t know I had it on video. I was recording you the entire time.” She
smiled. “See?”

She handed him her
iPhone and he watched himself from a few seconds ago just staring at her. “Very
nice,” he said, noticing the phone was longer and slimmer than her old one. “I
see you have the new iPhone. What was wrong with the old one?”

“It was like a
year old and slow,” she said, taking the phone back. “And the screen is a half
inch smaller.”

Kyle always tried
as best he could to keep Bree from being spoiled. But with an investment banker
mother, and now a stepfather who was a partner in one of the largest
crisis-management firms in the city with no kids of his own to spoil, it wasn’t
easy. It was even tougher right after the divorce, when both he and Sheila
tried to shower her with attention and gifts to blunt the emotional devastation
of seeing her parents divorce. But they managed. The solid foundation they had
laid before the divorce helped, as did the simple fact that she was just a good
soul. Kyle always kept that fact in mind and never patted himself on the back
too much when people complimented Bree for being such a good kid. He knew
parenting could only do so much; a child’s innate personality often dictated
who they would become, and how they would react to what the world threw at
them. That was the basic building block all parents were given to work with,
and what you got was just the luck of the draw.

“Greg thought it
would be a good idea to get me a new phone before I head to camp next week,”
Bree said about her stepfather. “You know, so I don’t have any problems video
chatting with him and mom.”

“I thought cell
phones weren’t allowed up at camp.”

“They’re trying
something new this year. All the phones are going to be stored away except for
once a week when we’re allowed to call home. This way we don’t all have to wait
on line to use the same phones.”

“And they’re going
to let you video chat?”

“They haven’t said
yet.”

“And did you tell
Greg that when you asked for the new phone?”

“I didn’t
ask
for it,” she said, quick to correct
the statement. “He surprised me.”

Kyle’s brow
arched. “Really? You didn’t ask at all?”

“Well,” she
dragged out the word. “Not exactly. I think I may have mentioned to him
beforehand that no one in school had a phone as old as I did, and that FaceTime
on the newer iPhones was so much clearer and didn’t need wireless and then
added something like, ‘How cool would it be if I had a new iPhone for
video-chatting from camp?’” Then she raised her eyebrows and shrugged her
shoulders. “But I never said I could definitely do that. I was just saying how
cool would it be
if
I could do that.”

“I should hire
you
as my attorney.”

The statement
caused Bree to awkwardly shuffle in her seat. “That case is still going on?”

Kyle didn’t talk
to her much about the lawsuit, didn’t even tell her about the mediation he had
coming up in only a few days, and was angry with himself for letting the quip
slip out. “Yes.”

“But it’ll be over
soon, right?”

“Right. Soon. Very
soon.”

She opened the
menu and looked down at the selections, even though they both knew she’d be
ordering macaroni and cheese. Just like she always did.

“So,” Kyle said,
opening up his menu as well. “Are you excited about camp?”

“Are you going to
prison?”

He looked up from
his menu. “Prison? Why would you think that? I told you what kind of case it
is, honey. Remember? We went over that. It’s a civil case. A case about money,
not a criminal case. No one’s going to jail, okay?”

“I know,” she
said, her eyes still focused on the menu, not looking up. “But what if they
find that you were responsible for that man’s death? Can’t they come after you
criminally as well?”

Responsible for that man’s death.
He
hated hearing her say that, and felt even worse about her thinking it.

“I’m not going to
jail,” he said. “And no one is going to try and put me there.”

She looked up. “I
don’t think you caused his death,” she said after hearing Kyle’s terse
response. “I’m just saying what if a stupid jury does?”

“They won’t,” he
said, looking at the menu, not meeting her eyes. “It’ll probably be settled
soon, and even if it isn’t I don’t even want you to think about it while you’re
up at camp, okay? It’s just a lawsuit about insurance money. That’s it.”

“That reminds me,”
Bree said, digging into her bag and pulling out a box. “Here. This is for you.”

Kyle looked up and
saw what she was holding—an iPhone box.

“Since the iPhone
doesn’t video chat with BlackBerries,” she said, “Greg thought it’d be nice if
you had one too. You know, so we can video chat without you needing your
computer. He even set you up with your own account and new number so you don’t
have to transfer everything over from your BlackBerry. He said he and mom are
taking care of the bill.”

Kyle tried as best
he could to conceal his grimace. They all knew his salary was no match for
Sheila’s and Greg’s. He didn’t have the luxury of carrying two phones,
especially not one just to video chat with his daughter when she only lived a
few subway stops away. But he was used to their over-the-top purchases. The
more entrenched Sheila became in her circle of work and friends, the less in
touch she became with normalcy in terms of spending. First-class plane tickets,
luxury box seats at Yankee games, tens of thousands of dollars to rent a house
at the Hamptons for only one month
—
it
had all become her new normal. And it had created a rift between them. Kyle
earned a city college professor’s salary, one that wasn’t even supplemented
anymore by the salary he used to draw from his practice. A salary he could
quadruple and it still wouldn’t even scratch the surface of Sheila’s world. He
was sure that was one of the reasons that had caused them to drift apart. She
had to see him as less successful, and maybe even less of a man, than the
industry tycoons she constantly worked with. But he never received confirmation
of that theory as the marriage, from his standpoint, had gone straight from
internal doubt to external confirmation when she told him she was in love with
someone else. The divorce came shortly after.