Six Years - Harlan Coben Page 0,68

some kind of Ponzi scheme. A state comptroller was accused of ethics violations.

This didn’t help. Or maybe it did. Maybe Natalie had been part of the Ukrainian gang. Maybe she knew the hedge fund manager—the surveillance photo looked like the lobby of an office building—or the state comptroller. Where was I on that day six years ago? May 24. School would have been coming to a close. In fact, classes would probably be over right around then.

Six years ago.

My life had been in turmoil, as Benedict had recently reminded me at the Library Bar. My father had died of a heart attack a month earlier. My thesis wasn’t going well. May 24. That would have been right around the time Professor Trainor had thrown his graduation party with the underage drinking. I had wanted him seriously censured, putting a bit of tension between Professor Hume and myself.

But my life wasn’t the point here. Natalie’s was.

The surveillance photograph had been taken May 24. I thought about that for a moment. Suppose there had been some kind of crime or incident on May 24. Okay, right, that was certainly the possibility I had been going on, but now I was following through on the thought. If the incident took place on May 24, when would the papers report it?

May 25, not May 24.

This was not a brilliant insight, but it did make some sense. I found the papers for May 25 and again searched the metro sections. Top stories: Local philanthropist Archer Minor was gunned down. A fire in Chelsea kills two. An unarmed teen was shot by police. Man kills his ex-wife. High school principal arrested for embezzling school funds.

This was a waste of time.

I closed my eyes and rubbed them. Giving up sounded really good right now. I could lie down and close my eyes. I could keep my promise and honor the wishes, it seemed, of the woman I thought was my true love. Of course, as Benedict had pointed out, maybe Todd and Jed thought that Natalie was their true love. A flush of something primordial—let’s call it jealousy—whooshed through me.

Sorry, I didn’t buy it.

Jed wasn’t attacking me as a jealous lover. Todd . . . I didn’t know what the hell was going on there, but it didn’t matter. I couldn’t back away. I wasn’t built that way—who is, really? How could any reasonable person live with so many questions left unanswered?

A small voice in my head replied: Well, at least you’d live.

Didn’t matter. Couldn’t be done. I had been attacked, threatened, assaulted, arrested, and I had even killed a man . . .

Whoa, hold the phone. I had killed a man—and now I knew his name.

I leaned forward and googled a name: Otto Devereaux.

I expected to find an obituary on top. I didn’t. The first hit was a forum for “gangster enthusiasts.” Yes, for real. I clicked into the discussion boards, but you had to create a profile. I quickly did.

There was a topic called “RIP, OTTO.” I hit the link:

Holy crap! Otto Devereaux, one of the toughest mob hit men and extortionists, got his neck snapped! His body was dumped on the side of Saw Mill Parkway like some piece of garbage. Respekt, Otto. You knew how to kill, bro.

I shook my head. What next—a fan site for convicted pedophiles?

There were about a dozen comments from people remembering some of Otto’s most horrible deeds and, yes, praising his work. They say that you can find any sort of depravity on the Internet. I had stumbled across a site devoted to admirers of violent gangsters. Some world.

On the fourteenth comment, I hit pay dirt:

Otto is being laid to rest at the Franklin Funeral Home in Queens this Saturday. The funeral is private, so you can’t go to pay your respects, but admirers can still send flowers. Here’s the address.

The post listed an address in Flushing, Queens.

There was a sketchpad on the desk. I grabbed a pencil and leaned back with it. I wrote down Natalie’s name on the left. I wrote down Todd’s beneath it. I jotted down other names—mine, Jed, Cookie, Bob, Otto—any name I could come up with at all. Delia Sanderson; Eban Trainor; Natalie’s father, Aaron Kleiner, and mother, Sylvia Avery; Julie Pottham; Malcolm Hume even. All of them. Then on the right side of the page, I drew a timeline from top to bottom.

Go back as far as I could. Where did this first start?

I didn’t know.

So back to the beginning.

Twenty-five years