Strictly for appearances’ sake, Alex assumed a stunned look. She had anticipated worse. Koenig continued.
“I should be asking for a lot more than that. I’ve only got four files for you, but one of them is worth it all by itself. Easily.”
“I’d like a figure.”
Koenig considered his response carefully. “More than six figures. That’s the last I’ll say until I see cash.”
Silence gripped Alex by the throat as Koenig let it all sink in. She felt a trickle of sweat run down her neck. More than six figures? The implication was obvious. And
barely believable. “Are you saying you have a million-dollar estate?”
Koenig frowned, noncommital. Alex could see that she would get no more information until payment was rendered.
“Usual terms, Lloyd?” she finally asked. “One week?”
“Return the file to me in exactly a week and there’ll be no problems. Seven days or we never do business again.”
“We know how it works,” Alex replied. “We’ve never been late before.”
“Just be sure to keep it that way.” He leaned back in his chair. “A Bank of New York is right across the street. You have the funds to cover it?”
“I’ve got it all right here, Lloyd. Anything else we need to discuss?”
He frowned and shook his head. Alex rose to her feet and removed the envelope. She dealt out five thousand, then reached into her purse and counted out the rest. Koenig gathered it up like a miser when she was done.
“Give me a minute,” he said, rising to his feet. “One other thing: I don’t want you looking at the files here. Take them back to your car and get out of here. Understand?”
“No problem.”
He left the office, closing the door behind him. Alex felt positively giddy. A seven-figure estate! If what Koenig was saying was true, they were indeed making out. A deal? Hell, this was an outright steal. She leaned forward on the desk and waited.
T
HE MEMORANDUM CAME
in a routine and innocent enough manner—the ringing of the telephone followed by a solitary beep and the winding of a paper through the facsimile machine. Memos arrived every minute in the Washington, D.C., office of the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and this single sheet, the latest in an incessant stream of information exchange, sat untouched in the plastic fax tray for nearly an hour before the occupant found the appropriate ten seconds to examine it.
Arthur K. Gordon, acting FBI director, was sixty-seven years old and top man in the Federal Bureau of Investigation for the last two years. A former federal prosecutor and judge, Gordon was a towering man with cotton white hair and closely aligned gray eyes who seldom saw a memo that he judged worthy of his immediate attention. This latest arrival was an exception. Upon reading it, he reached for his phone and instantly had Edmund Arminger, his deputy director in New York, on the line.
“Tell me what you found and when you found it.”
“Per the directive,” replied Arminger, “my field agent sought to establish weekly voice contact with Jacobs this previous Friday. When Jacobs could not be contacted after a dozen phone calls, I dispatched two agents to his home in Hudson. They gained entry that night when Jacobs
failed to respond to the doorbell. They found him facedown in a bathtub full of water. From their initial inspection, it appears Jacobs slipped entering the tub, hit his head, and drowned. County coroner’s got him now.”
“Hmm. Any signs of foul play or forced entry?”
“None. The house was locked tighter than a drum.”
Gordon leaned forward on the massive desk and tapped his fingers on his temples in an effort to gather his thoughts. “Any noticeable wounds or injuries?”
“Pretty solid gash on the right side of the head,” replied Arminger. “Looks like a slip to me.”
“So other than the head wound, no other visible signs of trauma?”
“Not that they could see, Arthur. We’ll have the full coroner’s report in a little while. Do we have reason to suspect anything other than an accident?”
It took Gordon a moment to reply.
“We don’t have reason to suspect anything,” he finally said. “If the coroner finds anything suspicious, we may take another look at it, but I don’t expect anything unusual to come of that autopsy. One thing I want to make clear, Edmund: under no circumstances are we involving the local police.”
“Fine. We can close the book on Mr. Jacobs, then?”
“I don’t anticipate anything out of the ordinary on our end. Do what you need to do to close it out.”
“Jacobs was a strange one,” said Arminger quickly. “Did you look the file over? It’s very incomplete. I don’t understand why this man wasn’t screened better.”
“We’ve got the same file. It is a bit . . . lacking in some regards.”
“Why exactly were we hiding this man?”
“I don’t have the specifics in front of me,” replied Gordon. “I assume there’s a reason we weren’t provided with the particulars, and I don’t have a reason to feel interested at this point.”
“I’m
very
interested, Arthur. I need to know about all WP’s in my jurisdiction.”
“He’s not your problem anymore,” said Gordon. “A death in Witness Security means less work, not more. Bury your curiosity with the old man and move on.”
“That’s not easy with this one.”
“But it’s smart. Don’t get preoccupied with this, Edmund. When you’re in my seat, you’ll learn more than you want to know. Close this out by the book and forget about it.”
“That’s what I intend to do, Arthur.”
“Good. Call me if you have any other questions.”
He hung up and ran his hand across his face. Of the hundreds in witness protection, something was distinctly different about this eighty-seven-year-old. Gordon frowned as he reached for the phone. He knew enough about the Jacobs file to suspect he wasn’t about to be enlightened.
N
ICK AWOKE FROM
dreamless sleep and squinted into the half-darkness of his bedroom. The clock indicated he had slept for nearly an hour, a solid nap but not nearly enough to make up for three nights of neglect. He let his head fall back to the pillow as a police car screamed by on the street. As it always did, the wail of the siren brought him back.
He turned his head to the framed picture on the nightstand, a three-by-five-inch portal to a previous life. He studied his expression in the photo, the smile of a twenty-three-year-old rookie cop in his department-issued black uniform, shaking hands with a proud father who had worn the badge himself for twenty years. Bill Merchant would have gladly worn that piece of metal another ten years if he hadn’t discovered his true passion.
He had read about heir finding in a PI magazine article and proceeded to build Merchant and Associates from nothing, turning his company into a tiny yet persistent thorn in the behind of General Inquiry, Hogue and McClain, and all the other big players. With his only son moonlighting from SFPD as his part-time partner, forty-seven-year-old Bill Merchant had found himself a calling. And what a wonderful calling it had turned out to be. For eight years, father and son had the time of their lives finding
people and telling them all about inheritances they never knew they had.
But it had all ended quickly one night. Despite what Nick had told Emma McClure, Bill Merchant hadn’t retired at all. That wasn’t even close to the truth.
Somehow Nick knew the drinking would have a hand in it. It didn’t matter whether it was behind the wheel, on the street, or in bed; the bottle would have its final say. As chance would have it, it happened outside a bar, a dive Bill Merchant probably shouldn’t have been in by himself. A knife was pulled, and William Merchant—cop turned PI, widower turned drunk—was dead in the gutter. A handful of witnesses to interview but ultimately no arrests. Four years had passed since that terrible moment-no arrests, no new leads. Just another unsolved homicide gathering dust in a file cabinet.
For Nick, quitting the force was really no decision at all. Merchant and Associates had been orphaned just as the son had been. He decided in his grief that if there was anything he could do to ease some of the hurt, it was preserving and maintaining this final piece of his father. Merchant and Associates would exist—would
thrive—as
an ongoing tribute to its founder. This was a promise he had dedicated himself to keeping.
Nick pulled himself from the bed and opened the living room blinds. He studied the joggers and dog walkers going about their business on the grassy Marina Greens. Alcatraz sat in the middle of the bay like some immense freighter at anchor. Another black-and-white cruised Marina Boulevard toward the wharves. Nick focused on a shapely brunette jogging along the gravel path by the bay. The water was gray, a tinge darker than the fog-choked sky.
He entered the bathroom and turned on the faucet. He had always considered heir finding a bizarre line of work, more suitable for Sherlock Holmes than Dirty Harry, but he had come to see that he was better suited for finding
people than he was for handcuffing them. The track record seemed to prove that. A four-year tally revealed that he and Alex had solved over two hundred cases and signed over five hundred heirs in fourteen countries. And even now, even after four years of it, the entire business remained wonderfully strange to him, kind of like working for the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes, only instead of one winner a year he found several dozen. All that and he got paid for it too.
He leaned over the sink and splashed frigid water on his face. He needed to wake up. There was no telling what Alex would find in Columbia County. He dabbed himself dry as he surveyed himself in the mirror. His face remained youthful despite the creases around the eyes, the lines in the forehead. He smiled at himself weakly. He was doing fine. Four years after the murder and he was finally doing okay.
The doorbell rang. He glanced at his watch. Noon. Alex’s call was long overdue, but at least his secretary was on time.
“How can you live out here?” Rose asked as she stepped inside. “I had to park almost four blocks away.”
“This is where all the successful young people like me live,” answered Nick, with a wink.
Rose dropped a stack of files on the kitchen table. “You’re not so young anymore, Nick. Look at Doug. He’s barely older than you, and he’s got two kids already. Time for you to stop acting young and start thinking about settling down.”
“You have someone in mind for me? A young Raquel Welch who can cook? I’m all for that.”
“I might be able to arrange something,” she said as she took a seat at the kitchen table. “My niece Patricia is single, and she’s very sweet. She’s a big girl who’ll keep you well fed and happy. I think it would be good for you to meet someone new.”
“I meet someone new every day.”
“I’m not talking about old dead people, Nick. I’m talking about someone young, someone with a
pulse
, for goodness sake.”
Nick smiled and shook his head helplessly. Taking on Rose two years ago as full-time secretary had been one of his better moves. With nearly thirty years of executive secretarial experience behind her, she had quickly made Merchant and Associates a fortress of organization.
The phone rang. Rose grabbed it, drawing an amused look from Nick. She held it out to him after a moment. “Alex. She’s hyperventilating.”
“She’s what?”
She shrugged. “She’s excited about something.”
This was nothing unusual. Nick took the phone. “Hey, girl.”
“Nick! Nick, you aren’t going to believe this!”
“That good?” he asked, taking a pen and paper from Rose. “How many estates?”
“Only four, but you are not going to believe the fourth.”
“Lay it on me.”
“The name’s Gerald Jacobs. Gerald Raymond Jacobs. That’s J-a-c-o-b-s. Died five days ago upstate, and I’m not kidding you about this figure. Are you by your fax?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Because I’m sending it now. I’m not even going to waste my breath telling you about this one. You need to see it for yourself.”
“Well, quit yakking and start faxing.”
“Call me the second you’re done reading it. No—book a flight out here first. We’ve got to get moving on this, Nick.”
“I’m hovering over the fax, sweetie. Talk to you in a few.”
Nick placed the phone down and rubbed the side of his
face. Alex’s enthusiasm was a strong point. It was one of many reasons he enjoyed their partnership so much.
Rose was staring at him. “Well?”
“She’s excited, all right. Must be a nice one.”
Rose dismissed this with a wave of her hand. “She gets excited doing her nails,” she commented dryly.
Nick smiled and grabbed an apple from the kitchen. The fax suddenly rang. He approached it as a sheet slowly began humming through. He snatched it before it could fall to the tray. One part only he needed to see—the Inventory and Appraisement section. He found it on the third sheet.
“Oh my God . . .”
He let himself fall backward onto the couch. His mouth was locked open. Rose watched him from the kitchen doorway.
“Nick?”
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, not looking up. “Is this right?”
“What is it?”
His eyes were seeing it, but even with the act of reading it, of holding it, he found belief to be lagging. But there it was, as undeniable and real as a punch to the jaw. Was it a typo? He narrowed his eyes into slits and read the number again.
Twenty-two million, three hundred forty-six thousand dollars. And change. He leaned over the documents and continued reading.
The decedent, Gerald Jacobs—a.k.a. Gerald Raymond Jacobs—had died at his residence, which was located at 198 Michael Drive in Hudson, New York. The death had occurred just five days ago, and the county public administrator had been authorized to handle distribution of the estate assets. It was a scenario Nick had seen in hundreds of cases. After a cursory search for blood relatives, the PA would in all likelihood find no related heirs. Being bogged down with dozens of other estates, he would then file
away the Gerald Jacobs case until time would allow for further examination.