“I—I—” he sputtered, too overcome by shock to articulate anything.

“Bryce, this has to be some kind of mistake. Right? I mean, you loved Shannon.…But it’s right here in black and white. All the other board members have been getting copies, too. These documents—God, here come more of them—they all imply you emptied the foundation’s bank account just before the holiday. This is some kind of forgery, right? Or maybe a bad New Year’s joke? Please, Bryce, say something. I’m frightened—”

With a click, her voice was cut off. Harriman realized that, involuntarily, his fingers had curled into fists, ending the call.

A moment later, it rang again. After rolling over to voice mail, it rang again. And then again.

And then came the chirrup of a text message being received. With the slow, strange movements of a bad dream, Harriman looked down at the screen of his phone.

The text was from Anton Ozmian.

Almost against his will, Harriman opened the messages pane of his phone and Ozmian’s text sprang onto the screen:

Idiot. Proud pillar of the fourth estate, indeed. In your smug satisfaction at uncovering this story, you never thought to ask yourself the most germane question of all: why I beat up that priest. Here’s the answer you should have dug up yourself. When I was an altar boy at Our Lady, Father Anselm abused me. I was serially raped. Years later, I returned to that church to make sure he never preyed on his charges again. Here’s another good question: why was I charged only with a misdemeanor, which was quickly dropped? Sure, there was a courtesy payment, but the church refused to cooperate with any criminal investigation because they knew what damaging information would come out if they did. Now, ask yourself: if you publish this story, where is the public’s sympathy going to lie? With the priest? Or me? Even more germane, what will DigiFlood’s board of directors do? What will the world think of you for exposing my youthful abuse and its predictable psychical aftermath, which I overcame to found one of the most successful companies in the world? So go ahead and publish your story.

A. O.

P.S. Enjoy prison.

But even as he read the text with mounting horror, the lines began to shimmer and grow faint. A second later, they were gone, replaced by a black screen. Harriman frantically tried to take a screen shot, but it was too late—Ozmian’s message had disappeared as quickly as it had arrived.

He looked up from his phone with a groan of disbelief and panic. This was a nightmare, it had to be. And sure enough—just as would happen in a nightmare—he saw, about half a block down West Street, two uniformed NYPD officers looking in his direction. One of them pointed at him. And then—as he stood rooted to the spot, unable to move—they began running toward him, releasing the thumb breaks on their holsters as they did so.

46

LONGSTREET, WITH PENDERGAST a silent shadow at his side, stood at the door to the garage of Robert Hightower’s row house on Gerritsen Avenue in Marine Park, Brooklyn. The door was open, allowing a chill wind to blow in—the short driveway was covered in a dusting of snow that had fallen late the night before—but Hightower seemed not to mind. The space was filled with beat-up worktables; personal computers of varying degrees of obsolescence; circuit boards spewing rivers of cabling; old CRT monitors missing their glass tubes; battered tools hanging from pegboard walls; band saws and compression crimpers and table vises; an assortment of soldering guns; half a dozen small-parts organizers, most of their drawers open, spilling screws and nails and resistors. Hightower, fussing over a worktable, was in his late fifties, solidly built, with short but thick iron-gray hair covering the dome of his skull.

He picked up a tin of soldering flux, pressed the cap onto it, and tossed it toward the back of one of the tables. “So of all the people he screwed, destroyed, ruined, or otherwise fucked over, Ozmian claims I’m the one who hates him the most.”

“That’s correct,” said Longstreet.

Hightower barked a sarcastic, mirthless laugh. “What a distinction.”

“Is it true?” Longstreet asked.

“Consider a man who had everything to live for,” he said, busying himself at the worktable, “nice home, beautiful wife, great career, happiness, success and prosperity—and then the bastard ripped all that away. So do I win first prize in the hatred category? Yeah, I probably do. Guess I’m your man.”

“This algorithm you devised,” Longstreet said. “The audio codec for compressing and streaming files simultaneously. I can’t pretend to understand it, but according to Ozmian it was original and quite valuable.”

“It was my life’s work,” Hightower said. “I didn’t realize just how much of my own self was wrapped up into every line of that code until it was stolen from me.” He paused, surveying the benches. “My dad was a beat cop, just like his dad and his dad. Money was tight. But he had enough to buy the parts for a ham radio set. Just the parts. I built it myself. And that’s how I learned the basics about electrical engineering, telephony, audio synthesis. Got a college scholarship on the strength of that. And then my interests turned from hardware to software. Same melody, different instrument.” Finally, he rose from his fussing and turned toward them, looking from one to the other with eyes that Longstreet could only describe as haunted.

“Ozmian took it away from me. All of it. And here I am.” He swept a hand around the garage, laughing bitterly. “No money. No family. Parents dead. And what am I doing? Living in their house. It’s like the last decade never happened—except that I’m a dozen years older, with nothing to show for it. And I have one cocksucker to thank for all that.”

“It’s our understanding,” Longstreet said, “that during and after the takeover, you harassed Mr. Ozmian. You sent him threatening messages, said you were going to kill him and his family—to the point where he had to get a restraining order.”

“So?” Hightower replied belligerently. “Can you blame me? He lied under oath, cheated, lawyered me to death, stole my company, fired my employees—and you could see he loved every minute of it. If you were half a man, you’d do the same. I could take it, but my wife couldn’t. Drove off a cliff, drunk. They said it was an accident. Bullshit.” He laughed harshly. “He did that, too. Ozmian killed her.”

“I understand,” Pendergast said, speaking for the first time, “that during this difficult period—before your wife’s tragic death—the police were called to your house on several occasions, responding to a domestic disturbance?”

Hightower’s hands, which had been roaming over the top of the workbench, suddenly went still. “You know as well as I do that she never filed a complaint.”

“No.”

“I’ve got nothing to say about it.” His hands began to stir once again. “Funny. I keep coming out here, night after night, puttering about. I guess I’m trying to come up with a second brainstorm. But I know it’s useless. Lightning never strikes twice.”

“Mr. Hightower,” Pendergast asked, “may I ask where you were on the evening of December fourteenth? Ten PM, to be precise.”

“Here, I suppose. I never go anywhere. What’s so special about that evening?”

“That was the night Grace Ozmian was killed.”

Hightower wheeled back toward them. Longstreet was surprised at the expression that had suddenly appeared on his face. The haunted look had been replaced by a ghastly smile; a mask of vengeful triumph.

“Oh, yeah, that December fourteenth!” he said. “How could I forget that red-letter night? Such a crying shame.”

“And your whereabouts the following night?” Longstreet asked. “When her dead body was decapitated?”

As he was asking the question, a shadow appeared in the doorway of the garage. Longstreet glanced over to see a tall man in a leather jacket standing in the snow. His stony expression, the quick and impassive way with which he sized up the situation, told Longstreet the man was in law enforcement.

“Bob,” the man said, nodding at Hightower.

“Bill.” Hightower indicated his guests. “FBI brass. Here asking questions about the night Ozmian’s daughter lost her head.”

The man said nothing, betraying no expression.

“This is William Cinergy,” Hightower explained to Longstreet and Pendergast. “NYPD, Sixty-Third Precinct. My neighbor.”

Longstreet nodded.

“I grew up in a police family,” Hightower said. “And this is a police neighborhood. We members of the blue fraternity tend to nest together.”

There was a brief silence.

“Now that I think of it,” Hightower said—and the unnerving travesty of a smile had not left his face—“Bill and I were out drinking the night Ozmian’s kid was killed. Weren’t we, Bill?”

“That’s right,” Bill said.

“We were at O’Herlihey’s, around the corner on Avenue R. It’s a cop bar. As I recall, a lot of the boys were there—weren’t they?”

Bill nodded.

“And they’d all remember me buying them a round—say, at about ten PM?”