Sidney Sheldon's After the Darkness (12 page)

“I don't see no other Brookstein. Visiting hours almost over, so you better get your ass inside now or you'll miss her.”

Her?
Grace wondered who it could be.
Honor. Or Connie, perhaps. They've realized they were too tough on me. They're going to help me file an appeal.

The guard led her into the visitors' room. There, sitting at a small wooden table, was Caroline Merrivale. In an oversize fox-fur coat, her fingers glittering with diamonds like Cruella de Vil, she looked uncomfortable and laughably out of place in the dismal box of a room, a visitor from another world. Grace sat down opposite her.

“Caroline. This is a surprise.”

During the trial, when she had stayed with the Merrivales, Grace had sensed a growing hostility in Caroline. John, darling John, had been staunch in his support from first to last. But Caroline, whom Grace had once thought of as such a dear friend, almost a surrogate mother, had been aloof, even cruel at times, as if she were enjoying Grace's suffering. She had not bothered to hide her irritation about the unwelcome press attention Grace's presence in the house attracted. “It's intolerable, like living in a cage at the zoo. When is all this going to end?” The deference she had once shown Grace as Lenny's wife had been replaced by a haughty coolness. Grace tried not to resent it. After all, if it weren't for Caroline and John, she'd have been out on the streets. She wouldn't have
had the great Frank Hammond to defend her. She wouldn't have had a thing. But Caroline's bitterness still stung. She was the last person Grace expected to see at Bedford Hills.

Caroline looked around, like a nervous flier searching for the nearest emergency exit. “I can't stay long.”

“That's okay. It was good of you to come at all. Did John get my letter?”

Grace had written to John a week ago asking him about next steps: What should she do about an appeal, should she hire a new attorney, how long did he think it would be before they agreed to review her case, etc.? He had yet to reply.

“He did, yes.”

Silence.

“He's been very busy, Grace. The FBI is still looking for the missing money. John's been helping them as best he can.”

Grace nodded meekly. “Of course. I understand.” She waited for Caroline to say something else, to ask her how she'd been holding up, perhaps, or if she needed anything. But she didn't. Desperate to prolong the encounter, her first with the outside world in weeks, Grace started babbling. “It's not too bad in here. I mean, of course it's
bad,
but you try to get used to it. The worst thing is how tiring the days are. It makes it hard to focus on anything. I keep thinking about Lenny. About how any of this could have happened. I mean,
someone
framed us, that much is obvious. But after that it all gets so tangled. Hopefully, once John starts my appeal, there'll be some light at the end of the tunnel. But at the moment it's so dark. I feel lost.”

“Grace, there won't be any appeal.”

Grace blinked, like a mole in the sunlight. “I'm sorry?”

Caroline's voice grew harsh. “I
said
there won't be any appeal. At least, not with our help, or our money. Look, John stuck with you for as long as he could. But he's had to face the truth now. We all have.”

“The truth? What do you mean? What truth?” Grace was shaking.

“You can stop with the Little Girl Lost act,” Caroline spat. “It won't wash with me. Lenny ripped off his investors
and
his partners. He betrayed poor John. You both did.”

“That's not true! Caroline, you must believe me. I know Lenny changed the partnership structure, and it's true I don't know why. But I know he would never have done anything to hurt John intentionally.”

“Oh, come on, Grace! How stupid do you think people are? Why don't you come clean and tell the FBI where the money is?”

This was a nightmare. A sick joke.

“I don't know where the money is. John knows that. John believes me!”

“No,” Caroline said brutally. “He doesn't. Not anymore. He wants nothing more to do with you. I came here today to ask you to stop contacting him. After everything you and Lenny have done to him, to all of us, you owe us that much at least.”

She stood up to leave. Grace fought down the urge to throw herself into her arms and plead for mercy. Inside, her throat was hoarse from screaming:
Don't leave me! Please! Don't take John away from me. He's my only hope!
Outwardly she kept her mouth clamped shut, afraid that if she opened it the screams would never stop.

“Here.” Caroline pressed a small, tissue-wrapped package into Grace's hand while the guard's back was turned. “John wanted me to give you this, weak, sentimental fool that he is. I told him you're hardly likely to get much wear out of it rotting your life away in here!” She laughed cruelly. “But given that it's hideous and of no earthly use to me, I suppose you may as well take it.” She turned on her heel and was gone.

Numbly, Grace followed the guard back to her cell. She'd slipped the package inside her sleeve and kept it hidden till she was safely back on her bunk. Her hands trembled as she opened it, carefully unfolding the tissue paper. John Merrivale had been Grace's last true friend.
My only friend.
Whatever this package contained, he had wanted her to have it.

It was a brooch. A butterfly brooch, in rainbow-colored glass. Grace's eyes welled up with tears. Lenny had bought it for her last Christmas from a secondhand store in Key West. When the police froze Quorum's assets, they'd seized all of Lenny's personal effects, including Grace's
jewelry. The brooch must have slipped through the net, perhaps because it was valueless. But it could not have been worth more to Grace if it had been made of solid diamonds.

It was a last piece of Lenny. A last symbol of happiness, of hope, of everything that she had lost forever. It was her passport to freedom.

Eternal freedom.

Gently, lovingly, Grace released the brooch's pin from its clasp and started slashing her wrists.

S
HE WAS SURROUNDED BY BRILLIANT WHITE LIGHT.
Not the peaceful kind. The blinding, painful kind that burned her eyes, shining into the darkest recesses of her memory, leaving her nowhere to hide.

She heard voices.

Frank Hammond:
“Someone framed Lenny and set you up to take the fall. Someone with inside information on Quorum.”

John Merrivale:
“Trust Frank. D-do everything he tells you and you'll be fine. Don't worry about the FBI; I'll d-deal with them.”

The light faded.

 

W
ARDEN
M
C
I
NTOSH FELT BEADS OF SWEAT
trickle down his back as he watched the flat green line on the heart monitor.

Please
,
God
,
let her live.

If Grace Brookstein succeeded in killing herself on his watch, his career would be over. He could wave good-bye to his pension, his retirement, to everything he'd worked so hard for these past eight years. None of his achievements, his good intentions, would count for a damn. In that moment, James McIntosh hated Grace Brookstein more than he had ever hated another human being.

The doctors applied shock paddles to Grace's heart. Her tiny body
leaped off the bed. The green line flickered, then jumped to life, pulsing in a slow but steady rhythm.

“She's back.”

 

T
HE HEAD OF THE
N
EW
Y
ORK
State Department of Corrections took the call at his golf club.

“I should be firing you, James. No questions asked. You do realize that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“If word got out we'd allowed Grace Brookstein access to a sharp object
in her own cell..
.”

“I know, sir. It won't happen again, sir.”

“Damn right it won't! And what was she doing on A Wing in the first place? We sent her to Bedford Hills so she could be protected.”

Warden McIntosh fought down his irritation. Grace Brookstein didn't deserve to be protected. Even now that she was in jail, she was getting special treatment. It stuck in his craw.

“When she's well, I want her on twenty-four-hour suicide watch. She gets psychotherapy, she gets decent food. What's her work detail?”

Warden McIntosh braced himself. “She's been on the farm, sir. Early shifts.”

“She's been
what
? Are you out of your fucking mind, James? I want her in the children's center, with the nuns, as soon as she's well enough.
Capisce?
Whatever you may feel about her personally, from now on I want you walking on eggshells with Lady Brookstein. Am I clear?”

“Yes, sir. Clear as crystal.”

 

G
RACE WOKE UP TO A WORLD
of pain. It came in waves.

The first wave was physical: the throbbing in her wrists, the parched dryness of her throat, the dull ache in her limbs. Whoever had inserted the needle in her arm had clearly done so in a hurry. Whichever way Grace turned, she felt a sharp stabbing in her vein. The entire surrounding area was badly bruised.

The second wave was emotional: she'd tried to kill herself, and she
had failed. She was not in heaven with her darling Lenny. She was here, in Bedford Hills, living the nightmare. Depression washed over her.

But it was the third wave—the mental anguish—that made Grace sit bolt upright in bed and tear at her hair until the doctors came and sedated her. Somewhere deep in her unconscious mind, between death and life, darkness and dawn, the truth had jumped out and grabbed her by the throat. In her mind, she heard Caroline Merrivale's voice, smug and spiteful.
There will be no appeal. John wants nothing more to do with you.

At the time, Grace had thought,
No, not John. It's
you
. You're the one who wants nothing more to do with me. You've poisoned him.
But now, finally, she realized. Caroline was just the messenger.

It
was
John. It was John all along!

John was the one who'd betrayed Lenny. He'd betrayed them both. The more Grace thought about it, the more obvious it was. John was the only person close enough to Lenny to have been
able
to steal that money. When the SEC started looking into Quorum, he must have panicked. Somehow he persuaded Lenny to change the fund's partnership structure so that he, John, wouldn't be liable when the money was discovered missing. Of course, Lenny's sudden death must have raised the stakes dramatically. Exposure was always likely, but after Lenny disappeared it became a certainty. Quorum investors started asking for their money back and the fraud was exposed. But by then it was easy for John to shift the blame to Grace. She was Lenny's partner now, not him. Better still, Grace trusted him. He'd made sure of that. When everyone else had deserted her, John Merrivale stayed close.
Not because he cared for me. Because he wanted to stage-manage the whole thing! The FBI investigation. My trial.
It was John who had dealt with the police, “protecting” Grace from their questions. It was John who had insisted she fire Kevin McGuire and hire Frank Hammond, the attorney who had let her down in court. Now that she was safely behind bars, John had washed his hands of her.
He wasn't even man enough to come himself. He sent Caroline to do his dirty work for him.

Looking back, Grace was astonished at her own naïveté. The way she'd begged John to believe her about the partnership, to believe that she knew nothing about Lenny cutting him out and transferring his shares to her.
How could I have been so stupid? It was in his
interest
not to
be a partner! If John had been a partner, he'd have been legally liable for what happened at Quorum. He'd be in jail now, not me.

Grace had no idea how John had done it. How he'd managed to dupe Lenny into changing the company structure, never mind how he'd stolen all that money and kept it hidden. But she knew that he
had
done it somehow. If it took her the rest of her life, Grace Brookstein was going to find out how.

I'll discover the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And when I do, I'll tell the world. I'll clear Lenny's name and my own. I'll get out of the hellhole.

Grace slept.

 

G
AVIN
W
ILLIAMS FELT DIRTY.

Just being here, inside a prison, surrounded by deviants, was enough to make his flesh creep. Of course, the fact that the wrongdoers were women made it all the more disgusting. It was unnatural. Women should be chaste and clean and subservient. They should be good and loving, like his mother. Gavin Williams's mother had adored him.
“You're so handsome, Gavin,”
she used to say.
“You're so smart. You can be anything you want to be.”

Gavin bolted into the men's room and washed his hands for a third time, scalding them under the faucet until his skin was red raw.

Women should be like his mother. But they weren't. In the real world, women were greedy, dirty bitches, whores who only wanted to have sex with you if you were rich or powerful. Hedge fund guys, billionaires like Lenny Brookstein, they spent their lives
drowning
in pussy. How Gavin Williams loathed those men, with their flashy cars and their model girlfriends and their beach houses and their private jets. He, Gavin Williams, was better than the Lenny Brooksteins of this world. He was an incorruptible patriot, a modern-day Robespierre. He was a revolutionary, bringing justice to America.

I am the righteous sword of the law.

The Lord Almighty says
,
“I will punish them. The young men will die, their sons and daughters starve. Not one of these plotters will survive, for I will bring disaster upon them…”

“Mr. Williams?”

Gavin stood in the hallway of Bedford Hills infirmary. A pretty young nurse looked at him strangely.

“Yes? What is it?”

“Mrs. Brookstein is awake. You can talk to her now.”

 

G
AVIN
W
ILLIAMS WAS CERTAIN THAT
G
RACE
Brookstein held the key to finding the stolen Quorum money. The rest of the FBI task force had given up on her as a potential witness. Harry Bain told him, “Forget about Grace, Gavin. She's a dead end. If she were going to tell us anything, she'd have done it by now.”

But Gavin could not forget about Grace. Her dirty whore's face haunted his dreams at night. Her voice mocked him during his long days spent poring over the complex paper trail that Lenny had left behind:
I know,
she taunted him.
I know where that money is, and you don't.

The press continually compared the Quorum fraud with the Madoff case, but the two could not have been more different. Madoff's returns were so ludicrously consistent. It was plain to anyone with the brains to look that he was a fraud. Either he was doing insider trading, or running a Ponzi scheme. Those were the only two logical possibilities. Given the fact that
nobody
traded with Madoff, none of the major banks, no brokerages, nobody, it had to be a Ponzi.

Quorum was different.
Everybody
had traded with Lenny Brookstein. There wasn't a firm on Wall Street that had seen through the guy, not a whisper of the scandal that was to engulf him and his fund so spectacularly. The missing Quorum billions were not just the figment of some creative accountant's imagination. They were real. But Brookstein had been so secretive about his trades, even flying paper records to Cayman and Bermuda to be burned, it was virtually impossible to follow any transaction to its end point. Not unless you were an insider. Not unless you
knew.

When Gavin Williams got word of Grace Brookstein's suicide attempt, he knew it was an opportunity not to be missed. Like the last time he interviewed her at the morgue, she would be in a weakened state. But this time there would be no lawyers to protect her, no phone calls, no escape.
This
time, Gavin Williams would squeeze her till she
couldn't breathe. He would get the truth from Grace Brookstein if he had to make her vomit it out.

For today's interview Gavin had dressed as he always dressed: dark suit and tie, his short, gray hair neatly parted, black shoes so shiny he could see his own reflection in the leather. Discipline, that was the key. Discipline and authority. Gavin Williams would
make
Grace Brookstein respect him. He would bend the deviant to his will, and expose Harry Bain, his so-called boss, for the shortsighted fool that he was.

When Grace saw Gavin Williams, her pupils dilated with fear.

Gavin Williams smiled. Her terror aroused him. “Hello again, my dear.”

She looked weak. Dwarfed by her white prison nightgown, still pale from blood loss, she seemed as insubstantial as a ghost or a wisp of smoke.

“What do you want?”

“I'm here to make a deal with you.”

“A deal?”

Yes, a deal, you greedy bitch. Don't pretend you don't understand the concept. You're as corrupt as hell and one day you will rot in hell for your sins.

“It's a deal you can't refuse. The procedure is simple. You will provide me with three account numbers. All refer to funds held in Switzerland. You are familiar with all of them.”

Grace shook her head. She didn't know any account numbers. Hadn't they been through this the last time?

“In return, I will see to it that you are moved to a mental health facility.”

“Mental health? But I'm not crazy.”

“I assure you, the conditions at penal sanatoriums are considerably superior to those at correctional facilities such as this one. The account numbers, please.” He handed Grace a piece of paper with a Credit Suisse letterhead. Grace glanced at it and sighed, closing her eyes. The drugs made her sleepy. As frightened as she was of this man, it was a struggle to stay awake.

“John Merrivale,” she croaked. “It's John Merrivale. He took the money. He knows where it is. Ask him.”

Gavin Williams's eyes narrowed.
How typical of a woman! To try to shift the blame, just as Eve blamed the serpent when she polluted the world
with her sin. How stupid did Grace think he was? Did she think the FBI hadn't looked into Merrivale, into all the staff at Quorum?

“Don't play games with me, Mrs. Brookstein. I want those account numbers.”

Grace was about to reason with him, but then she thought,
What's the point? He won't listen. He's insane. If anyone needs the sanatorium, it's this guy, not me.

“I know what you're doing. You're holding out for more.” Gavin Williams positively glowed with rage. “Well, you won't get it, do you understand me? You won't get it!”

Grace looked around for the nurse but there was no one.
I'm alone with this nutcase!

“There will be no appeal. No parole. It's the sanatorium or you will
die
in this place.
Die!
Give me those account numbers!”

“I told you! I. Don't. Know. Them.” Exhausted, Grace fell back on the pillow. She was losing the battle for consciousness. Sleep engulfed her.

Gavin Williams watched her eyes flicker and close.

Her neck is so tiny. So fragile. Like a willow twig. I could reach out and snap it. Just like that. Put my hands around her lying, thieving throat and crush the devil inside.

There were no other patients. No staff. He and Grace were alone.

No one would know. I could do it in a split second. Smite the wicked, purge the evildoer of sin.

In a trance, Gavin Williams reached his hands out in front of him, flexing his long, bony fingers open and closed, open and closed. He imagined Grace's windpipe collapsing beneath them, felt his excitement building.