At Kruger-Brent, I’ll have to be more careful.
Lexi brought her thoughts back to August Sandford. At least he’d stuck up for her against Max today, which was more than those other stuffed shirts had done. Lexi was well aware that 99 percent of Kruger-Brent’s senior management had written her off. Kate Blackwell’s will favored her over Max for the chairmanship, but then Kate Blackwell had never known that Lexi would grow up to be deaf. In any event, a unanimous board decision could see Max usurp her position. Most people at the company, including Max himself, not to mention Lexi’s own father, seemed to view this as a foregone conclusion. It drove Lexi wild with rage.
How dare they write me off? My GPA has always been higher than Max’s. I’m smarter than he is, I have more business sense. Okay, so I can’t hear. But Max can’t listen. That’s the real handicap. He loves the sound of his own voice too much.
Lexi rubbed soap under her armpits and breasts with a sponge. Men were all the same. So impressed with themselves, beating their chests like baboons. August Sandford, Jim Bruton, Max…they were just grown-up versions of Christian Harle and the other Andover jocks. They patronized Lexi, the way they patronized all women, only in Lexi’s case her deafness seemed to make it worse. That and the fact that she was beautiful, rich, famous and smarter than all of them combined.
August Sandford might have thought he had his poker face on today. But Lexi could see the envy in his eyes.
He hates me because I’m better than he is. He hates me because he wants to sleep with me and he can’t. He hates me because-
A flashing light on her PC screen in the living room caught her attention.
New message.
Grabbing a towel, Lexi leaped out of the bath and ran, dripping, across the polished walnut floor of her apartment. Unlike mommie’s-boy Max, who still lived at home with Eve, Lexi had her own place on the Upper East Side and reveled in her independence. A sleek, modern two-bedroom in a classy building on Seventy-seventh Street, between Park and Madison, it was decorated in neutrals and whites with huge floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city. A delicate Christopher Wray chandelier in glass and stainless steel hung from the living-room ceiling above a cream pony-skin rug. In the far corner, perched on a Danish Modern desk was Lexi’s white Mac-her portal to the hearing world. She’d often wondered how on earth the deaf had managed before the advent of the Internet and thanked God she’d been born in the age of the text.
Scrolling past e-mails from Robbie and her father, her Harvard professor Dr. Fairford, and countless lovers, Lexi said a silent prayer.
Please be from him.
Finally, she reached the new message. Clicking it open, her heart gave a little leap of excitement. The subject heading read:
I’ve found him.
Tommy King did not like Thailand.
There was only so much Asian pussy that one man could enjoy. Once you’d seen the first hundred girls fire Ping-Pong balls out of their assholes, smoke cigars with their pussies, and exhaust the rest of their repertoire of bizarre sexual party tricks, it actually got kinda tame. And then what were you left with? Fried bugs, stinking hot weather and friggin’ dysentery, that’s what.
Tommy King wanted a Big Mac, Monday Night Football, Fox News and sex with a white woman over thirty who considered her asshole to be an exit not an entrance. After five long years, he wanted this godforsaken assignment to be over. The guy was obviously dead, like his two buddies. Why couldn’t the Templeton girl just accept that?
When Tommy King first met Lexi Templeton at her sixteenth birthday party, he thought he was onto a cash cow. Little had he known that the search for the girl’s kidnappers would take five long, fruitless years. Years that had seen the sallow-skinned PI clock up more air miles than Henry Kissinger, and for what? Sure, the job had netted him a tidy little nest egg. But he was sixty-two already and tired as all hell. Besides, what use was money in a dump like Phuket?
Agent Edwards, the FBI hero (schmuck) who pulled Lexi out of the burning mill all those years ago had tried to warn him. Tommy King went to visit Agent Edwards at his place on Long Island, a huge French Country pile paid for by the girl’s grateful father. Crunching his way up the graveled drive, Tommy King thought: Jeez, Blackwell money goes a long way. Then he saw Agent Edwards’s barbecued face and thought: But not far enough.
“You’ll never find them. Believe me, we’ve tried.”
They’d sat outside in the garden on a joyously warm spring day. A maid brought them fresh lemonade. Tommy King watched Agent Edwards sip it with what used to be his mouth and tried not to wince.
“What makes you so sure?”
“The fire destroyed everything, all the physical evidence. All we had to go on were Lexi’s own descriptions. They were fairly detailed in some respects, but it wasn’t enough.” Agent Edwards shook his head sadly. “We’re as sure as we can be that none of the major crime syndicates were involved.”
“No Mob?”
“Definitely not. We looked into everyone close to the Blackwell family who had a grievance. Real or imagined. It’s a long list.”
“I’ll bet.” Tommy King took a sip of his own lemonade. It was ambrosial.
“Kruger-Brent employees, household staff. We even looked at Dr. Templeton’s old patients. He was a psychiatrist, you know, before his marriage. We figured maybe some whack job with a thing for little kids?”
Tommy King shivered.
“Anyway, after two years and a pretty much unlimited budget, we dropped the case. I wish you luck. But you’re looking for three needles in a haystack the size of Canada.”