After the Darkness

Chapter Eleven

SHE 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.

WARDEN MCINTOSH 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."

THE HEAD OF THE NEW YORK 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."

GRACE 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 naivete. 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.

GAVIN WILLIAMS 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."

GAVIN WILLIAMS WAS CERTAIN THAT GRACE 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.