Broken: A Billionaire Love Story (2 page)

“That's wonderful,” said Heck. “And how many mountain tops are caught in your crosshairs?”

Heck had a difficult time trusting the men and women who promised to do great good in the world. They always positioned themselves into the public trust—and that was where all the damage got done to the world.

The company head had him fired from that job, citing poor professionalism, something like that.

Heck didn’t care about these external things, however. Why would he? For the longest time, he believed stories sold themselves. Work could always be had. He didn’t have to work at that, he just had to find them.

And then it all dried up.

Exile didn’t happen very much anymore. It was mind-boggling, a little bit, to think of how common it had been even just hundreds of years ago. Someone was held in a trial or before judgment somehow, and the punishment that came down would be to kick that person out of the city forever. Forever! It was a rough slot, exile, going away from everyone and everything you ever knew. No way to support yourself, no way to be around those you cared for.

Heck had seen enough to believe firmly that humanity in general was a barbaric business, and everyone only ever lived on a thin layer of decency and habits before descending into the cruel foundations of the evils underlying human nature.

Anyway there was no real way to exile someone anymore. Everything was connected, and Heck had been in the business long enough to have contacts basically everywhere. And like with any other business, in reporting, money came first.

If he had a story that would sell, then he would be back in.

That was a big word, that “if.” He had been pouring his whole soul into working at it, trying to convince himself that “if” was in fact a “when.”

Until that time that he was able to find a story, however, he pretty much
was
exiled, in so many words. No editors wanted to talk to him, no other reporters wanted to be seen socializing with him, and no one of any importance in the political or social world would even humor him. Reporting was a tough business when no one wanted to talk to you anymore. Contacts dried up, treating Heck like he was some contagious disease. Even being seen with him, they said, could cost him their jobs.

In a sick way he was proud of that. Pride was pretty much all a man had if he didn’t have a job or a family.

Oh sure, Heck could go the way of the times and get himself a blog, start posting tripe like, “Seven Things You Won’t Believe You Knew About Gas Prices” or cat videos or pictures of llamas snuggling with newborns, or whatever it was that people clicked on these days.

But, again, he had his pride.

A few weeks ago he had seen on a message board a few bloggers posting back and forth about some scandal breaking out in the United Kingdom about a princess and a baby’s father not being who he was supposed to be. One blogger cautioned another, “Careful about your sources. Make sure you get the story right. Otherwise you’ll end up Parsoned. Or, maybe you’ll be Parsoned anyway!”

A joke.

His once-good name, known all over the world for society-shattering stories, had been transformed into a joke, because of his suspect reporting on a state governor a little over five years ago.

He hated every single second of that being true.

To this day, Heck didn’t view his downfall as his own fault. Great walls of bitterness had been erected around the incident in his mind, and the only way he knew how to deal with that was to not think about it. Yet like a concrete block on a rope, dragging after a moving car, it followed him, waiting for him to stop so it could run up underneath his tires.

Even as he avoided the memories of reporting that story—believing that man he shouldn’t have, not able to stop himself from reporting that juicy story, getting overwhelmed in debt and needing to deliver something to get paid soon—they drove him forward, controlling his life as he desperately tried to exonerate himself.

And the only way he could see to clear his name was to do something huge, something big. Solve a mystery.

How did the pyramids get built? Where did they bury Jimmy Hoffa? Who really shot JFK?

Or, even better, where in the hell was Shane Conway?

The Conways were an old family in America, and had their business dipped into everything from agriculture to typewriters to computers to nanotechnology. They were old, old rich, a family almost as old as the country itself. During the nineteenth century, there were rumors they had arranged the election of at least four U.S. Presidents following the Civil War, but these rumors had never been founded in fact.

Heck often thought he could have proved them true if he had been around, of course.

The disappearance of Shane Conway was a story with everything, he hoped. Shane had rejected his family every step of his life since turning eighteen and pursuing a degree in poetry—publicly declaring several times that he had no interest in running the family business. The wicked-looking expanse of ink up and down his chest and arms and neck were proof enough of his disinterest for most. Of course, the family always denied this—owning such an enormous public relations department—saying they had smoothed things over with Shane yet again, and yes, he was still the heir apparent.

Shane disappeared three years ago, at the age of twenty-six, after a hell of a row with his French supermodel girlfriend. She showed up to the police station with bruises on her wrists and shoulders—but a sweep of their apartment revealed puddles of blood—Shane’s blood. The supermodel, Paulette Moreau, had no explanation for it, nor why the bruises on her wrists didn’t match with Shane’s handprints (well-documented, at this point, as Shane had possessed a rather tumultuous relationship with the law since he was sixteen. Barely a month went by without another story of his run-ins).

There were no real leads. Everything Shane’s old girl said pointed to addiction—and addictions could take a person down any old path.

There was no way for Heck, a citizen, to look at Shane’s bank records to see where he had been spending—and it wasn’t like Shane was starting up businesses somewhere. He kept a low profile, wherever he was, and the family wasn’t speaking up. The police questioned the Conway family and pestered them for a few months, but the family kept their collective mouths closed. There were not many of them left—the uncle Arthur, the mother Cassandra, and Shane’s younger brother Hunter. The patriarch of the family had died in a jet plane crash when Shane was eight years old, and Hunter just three.

Some really fascinating questions were brought up in the investigation without any good answers, but then, abruptly, it was all abandoned. A more interesting murder case cropped up, requiring substantial police involvement. In the Conway case, there was no actual murder that anyone could see—just a missing person, a sexy model, and a lot of unidentifiable blood.

Internet rumors followed, of course, and abounded. There was talk of Shane joining the French Foreign Legion, doing service work in Africa, running a sweatshop in Belize, and even joining a circus in Russia—his face photoshopped on trapeze artists, strongmen, and even elephants and passed around in various memes.

So, Heck followed his instincts. He pored over the police report, questioned the other residents of the rundown apartment complex where Shane had been staying (an odd choice for the billionaire heir), shot emails back-and-forth with the Paulette Moreau’s agent for a long enough time to arrange a short, twenty-minute interview in which he had learned practically nothing new, just that she despised his poetry and had always encouraged him to get more serious.

He dug deeper—and decided finally on a desperate sort of strategy that had nearly bankrupted him so far. He abandoned his apartment and all worldly possessions that he couldn’t fit inside of his car, and he started to tail Arthur Conway.

By now, he had been doing it for quite a while—close to a year, in fact. He figured that if anybody knew where to find the missing billionaire’s heir, it would be Arthur Conway, Shane’s uncle.

Over the years, Shane had blown up a number of times on his family members. He had a temper and a way with words that allowed him to carve his anger into the hearts of others. The one man who continually seemed to forgive Shane and take him in was Arthur. Their relationship seemed, if not loving, then at least congenial.

Arthur was the one who ran the day-to-day of the Conway Corporation, who seemingly had a great deal invested in protecting his family. Heck did not know how sincere this was. He believed that it was possible Arthur would go out of his way to protect a good product line of televisions or sports equipment in the same way he protected Shane—but Heck had no proof of this. It was just a feeling.

And now, as Heck Parsons watched in his burnt-out car, in the middle of the night in the terrible winter storm, Arthur Conway leapt into a car parked out in front of his home, squealing tires and roaring off into the icy night.

Heck followed, of course. He took his time, and tried to stay as far back as possible. In the ice and snow, it was hard to tail someone not only because of the driving conditions, but also because another car on the road was such a weird sight.

Thankfully, Arthur Conway did not seem to notice. Perhaps he was caught up in whatever emergency he was looking after. Heck, always leery of the motivations of the upper-class, suspected that Arthur had spent so much time in his protected bubble that he didn’t even consider that someone “beneath” him was worth his consideration.

Downtown, in a shady and particularly poor part of the city, he watched Arthur Conway arrive at the hospital and rush inside. Just as Heck had decided to follow Arthur in and sneak around—maybe use the spare doctor’s coat he had in the trunk (disguises were always useful for a freelancer)—Conway burst out from the hospital, with someone—a young man, looking beat all to hell—limping out and using Arthur as support.

And unless Heck was terribly, terribly wrong, he was about to bust open the story of where Shane Conway was.

Chapter 3:

Olivia, tired and frustrated, had low hopes for the day. She stepped out of her small, five year-old sedan, beginning the slow ascent up to the steps to the Edgemont Heights Rehabilitation Facility where she worked. The building was on top of a long hill—the folks in the center had taken to calling the path upward the “Hundred and Forty-Four Steps.”

It was an inaccurate moniker, of course. The idea was, jokingly, that the stairs were twelve times as long as the process of recovery should take.

A cold wind ripped against her, pressing her jacket against her slender frame. Tendrils of unwieldy brown hair swept over her face and down her neck. She was a small woman—short and slight, and often felt as if she was too small to face the problems she faced in her occupation.

At twenty-four, fresh out of college just two years before, she thought she would have grown into herself more by now, maybe even been able to present a proper professional image, but still every day she was learning what she actually looked good in and how to appear attractive but not slutty; professional but not bitchy; aloof but not cold. Every piece of clothing was a gambit for a woman. Today she dressed in an old stand-by—gray slacks and a dark blue sweater, with another small button-up sweater over that, and a heavy coat again. It was cold, after all.

Her job at Edgemont Heights was equal parts fulfilling and frustrating, two intangible forces often in a battle with one another. Working with addicts often was this way. She referred to anyone in the facility that way—as an addict, whether their drug of choice was booze, pot, cocaine, or whatever else. If it had brought them here, then it had broken their thinking and their happiness, and that was the basic definition of an addict for Olivia.

The work surprised her in the most wonderful ways—like when an old patient stopped by to tell her how much she had helped him in the past, or when she saw old patients out in the city, shopping with their families and the like, everyone all smiles and gratitude. These sorts of moments happened several times a year, in fact, and Olivia was always delighted when she could take part in them, and indeed had been working the job long enough to expect them to happen, in the back of her mind.

After months of keeping her nose to the grindstone, too wrapped up in the realities of the poor chances of every sordid soul she came across, the path of her soul would enter a kind of a pit—and then she would come across these old patients, doing well, and the pit would be inflated again.

But those moments were not often enough, and the highs were dragged down by the severe lows of watching relapse after relapse as promising patient after promising patient crashed and burned.

Still, she tried to stay positive. The important thing was that, if someone did relapse and break themselves a little bit more, they came back to try and get help again. Each person was coming back to get treatment.

Edgemont Heights was a voluntary facility, so a person technically could leave anytime they liked—though often many men and women had parents or spouses that forced patients to stay in one way or another. As well, if someone snuck out in the middle of the night, orderlies would be sent out after them to check on their safety and try to convince them to return.

Olivia’s shift was from ten to four, every weekday. At fifteen dollars an hour, it was just barely enough to push her over the poverty line alongside every other part-time job she could manage, as she tried desperately to earn more cash with a seemingly never-ending chain of waitressing and retail jobs. This job at Edgemont was the kind of job she had gone to college for and earned her Bachelor’s degree in, and still she felt boxed in by her education.

There were no high-paying jobs in social work for the kind of degree she had, and at the same time, getting a better job in the field would require a lot more income to pay for more education.

Or, perhaps, some kind of scholarship—but she had never had any luck with those. Filling out the form for a scholarship, just like a job application, was a lot like tossing a homing device into a black hole. How much had already been flattened out and sent through the portal? A whole universe’s worth of anticipation and expectations, of which Olivia was just an incredibly small part.