The Traitor's Story (20 page)

“I don’t understand, how . . .” Sam stopped, his thoughts shifting. “You said going to the police was one of the options?”

Finn nodded. “The other is that you don’t go to the police, and the verdict will be suicide, though you’ll know differently. You don’t go to the police, and you accept my promise that I’ll track down the people who did this and I’ll kill them, every one of them.”

Sam stared at him, open-mouthed. Perhaps because of that single intercepted punch, he didn’t seem to doubt that Finn was serious, or that he could do it.

“I can’t make a decision like that. And you don’t have any real evidence, not yet.”

“I’ll get the evidence, and you don’t have to make a decision as such. Just tell me you won’t be going to the police. Answer from the heart, Sam, and tell me if you want to make that call.”

Sam nodded, certain of the kind of justice he wanted, but still said, “I don’t know, I . . . you know, if you were certain . . . but Maria—she couldn’t know—”

“What are you saying, Sam?” They both looked to the door. Hailey was standing there with a woman who Finn presumed was Maria, Jonas’s mother. It was Maria who’d spoken, with sorrow and pity and love. She looked at Finn now and said, “Mr. Harrington, I’ve just overheard your exchange. My husband is upset, as you can imagine, but the reason he doesn’t want me to know is that we do not believe in an eye for an eye, just as we do not believe in capital or even corporal punishment.”

She stepped into the room. Once again, there was a slight resemblance to her son, most notably in the striking eyes, but it seemed that two averagely attractive people had combined to produce a beautiful child. Maria Frost looked less battered than her husband, no doubt thanks to the sedation.

Finn noticed that Hailey stayed in the doorway, looking on with a mixture of concern and awkwardness.

When Maria reached them, she looked down at her husband and smiled, then back to Finn as she said, “So you think Sam has been right all along, that our son was murdered?”

“I’m afraid I do.”

“You’re basing this on the result of some Internet searches he made?”

She sounded skeptical but he said, “Yes, and I’m also aware of how flimsy that sounds, but I’m still certain of it.”

She nodded, accepting his certainty if nothing else. “And you could do these things that you talked of to my husband?”

“I could and I would, but not without your approval, and not until I know the truth of what happened.”

“The truth? The truth is that our son died, and nothing we do will ever bring him back.”

She rested her hand on Sam’s shoulder and gave it a light squeeze. He looked up at her and smiled.

“I made our beliefs clear, but a belief is nothing until it’s tested. I wish we could have remained high-minded our whole lives, I wish it so much, but this is where we are. We won’t be going to the police, Mr. Harrington.” She turned and looked at him, and gave him a faint smile, something that looked like gratitude. And then she left the room.

Hailey remained still in the doorway, looking at Finn as if he’d transformed into a new person before her eyes. Finn gave her a reassuring smile, but she continued to stare blankly. He turned back to Sam.

“Sam, did you find Jonas’s Moleskine notebook? In his pockets or his jacket, maybe in his bag?”

Sam shook his head. “We searched everywhere, just for a note. It didn’t occur to me that the Moleskine was missing, but now that you mention it . . .”

“Maybe they took it.” Finn looked around the room, wondering where they’d picked him up. The Post-it note suggested he thought something might happen, but Finn couldn’t imagine them coming to the apartment. It was more likely that they’d waited for him as he got back from school. “Can I see where it happened?”

Sam nodded and stood, looking like an old man getting to his
feet.

“And do you have a flashlight?”

“There are lights down there.”

“Even so.” Sam nodded and walked out of the room.

Hailey was still staring at Finn and he said, “You don’t have to come down to the basement. In fact, maybe you shouldn’t.”

“I’d like to.”

“Okay.”

“Did you mean what you said?”

“You weren’t meant to hear that.”

“But I did.”

He took a step toward her and noticed that she couldn’t help but brace herself, as if she no longer felt entirely safe with him. He stopped a few feet from her.

“The people I think did this, I have unfinished business with them, but even if I didn’t, and even though I only met Jonas a couple of times, I meant every word of what I said—I will find them and I will kill them.”

“Have you killed anyone before?”

He smiled a little and shook his head, and she seemed to understand and accept that it was a question he wouldn’t answer.

Sam appeared, holding out a flashlight, and Finn nodded and reached out for it.

And as they left the apartment, he realized that Jonas had not only played a part in helping Finn to see where he’d gone wrong these last years, he was now, inadvertently, helping him go back further still, to complete what should have been done in Kaliningrad.

Chapter Twenty-Six

When they got down to the basement, Sam pointed to an open doorway and said, “It’s through there. The light’s just inside. If you don’t mind, I’ll leave you here.”

“Thanks,” said Finn.

Hailey looked for a moment as if she’d changed her mind about seeing it herself, but she smiled sympathetically at Sam and said, “We’ll come up before we go.”

Sam nodded sadly and left.

Finn waited for Sam’s steps to reach the top of the stairs, then walked through the door and turned on the light. It was a big room, and though the central floor space was extensive, it was far from empty, with various wooden boxes and other old items stacked around the edges of the room, some of them under sheets.

There were wooden beams in the ceiling, and he guessed that Jonas had been tied up to one of them. There was a smell of disinfectant, and a patch on the stone floor that had been washed down and still looked damp, even now.

Hailey spotted it and said, “They washed the floor. But there wouldn’t have been any blood, would there?”

“Maybe they were just being cautious, not knowing how long the
body had been there, but chances are there was urine on the floor.”

She stared at him in disbelief, as if the violence of what had taken place here was only just becoming apparent to her. She’d probably imagined Jonas being drugged, his body hanging serenely as the rope starved his brain of oxygen. Perhaps she was only now beginning to imagine that he had struggled, that he had probably soiled himself, that his face would have been disfigured.

If she hadn’t come down to this basement, she might have held on to all kinds of romantic notions about Jonas and the way he’d died, but any such dreams were shattered now. Jonas had died a miserable and frantic death, and even if he’d realized he was courting danger, he’d almost certainly failed to anticipate the violence that would be done to him here.

Finn turned on the flashlight, aiming the beam along the passageway that linked the basement stairs to this room. Then he moved into the center of the room and pointed the beam at ground level, among the boxes and crates that had been stored there.

Hailey watched him, her attention finally drawn from the trauma of that disinfected patch of floor, and said, “What are you looking for?”

“His Moleskine notebook.”

“Why would it be down here?”

He made a mental note of the point he’d reached with the flashlight, and turned to her, saying, “It wasn’t anywhere else. I think he was too smart to let them take it. But I think once he was in here, once he knew what they intended to do, he might have tried to hide it, throw it aside, in the hope that someone else would find it.”

“You mean you?”

“Not necessarily.”

“He left the note for you on his computer. It’s like he knew he was in trouble, maybe even that they’d kill him, and he left all these clues for you to follow.”

Finn doubted that even Jonas had foreseen his own death. She had a point about the messages, though, because since leaving that note under Finn’s door it seemed that Jonas had been working exclusively as his agent.

He said, “I wish I’d been here, or that I’d seen him again before I left, because I would have told him to stop.”

“It wouldn’t have made any difference—once he got something into his head he couldn’t let it go.”

Finn remembered what Jonas had said about puzzles, and about Hailey not having the same kind of mind, how she could just leave a puzzle unsolved. Then he looked at her and realized she was resentful in some way, perhaps because Jonas had been her best friend, that secretly they had been in love with each other, and yet in his final days and hours Jonas had thought of leaving messages only for Finn, whom he had hardly known.

“Hailey, he left things for me because mine was the puzzle occupying him at the time. For days before that, he’d been obsessing about you and where you’d gone. For all I know, he thought this was part of the same thing. The simple fact is, he didn’t plan on dying here—if he had, I’d have been the last person he’d have thought about contacting.”

She nodded. “I guess you think I’m being selfish.”

“In a good way.” She smiled a little. “When I was leaving, I told Jonas I’d probably see him when I got back, and he looked slightly freaked out and said, ‘It’s not like we’re gonna be hanging out.’” She laughed now, crying at the same time, wiping away the tears.

Then, quite abruptly, she stopped and pointed to a corner. “There’s something on the floor over there.” He aimed the flashlight in that direction, seeing nothing, but she said, “No, move over here. It’s between those two crates.”

He moved toward the middle of the room, standing almost where the floor had been cleaned, and now he saw it, what looked like a small black notebook. He moved closer, keeping the beam on it, as if he feared the darkness might swallow it up.

And he only turned off the flashlight once he’d picked it up—the Moleskine. He could imagine Jonas waiting for his moment, throwing the book toward this corner. The thought of that simple little act of bravery only reinforced the cowardice of the crime committed here.

“Is that it?”

He nodded and opened the book, turning through the pages of dense script before finding the last page Jonas had written on, in block capitals—a code in itself, Finn now sensed. At the top of the page was the name
GIBSON
, and below it were two addresses in Geneva. Next to one address he’d written
BGS OFFICE
, next to the other:
APARTMENT WHERE GIBSON IS STAYING
.

Finn tore the page out, then looked at the previous pages, but could decipher nothing of interest. There were a handful of comments about the Cayman Islands, which Finn knew would be a false lead—he doubted anyone from BGS had ever set foot there—and a line in which he’d written
Karasek—mafia?
, but the barely legible script didn’t offer Finn anything he didn’t know.

Possibly, Jonas had understood that, too. That was why he’d written only the final two pieces of information in capitals. By the time he’d done that, he might well have suspected they were on to him, so much so that he’d had time to share only the bare facts.

“Well?”

Finn looked up at her and nodded, and held up the torn page, saying, “If this is right, it gives me the first step.” She looked ready to ask another question, but he cut her off. “I’m not teasing anymore, Hailey. I don’t believe for a minute that you’re in any danger right now, but these people are so tightly wound that they killed a teenager for digging into their whereabouts. People that afraid are unpredictable, so I just don’t want you being involved any more than you already are.”

She still looked ready to object, but backed down and said, “Okay. Do you think I could keep the notebook, just as something to remember him by?”

He held it out. “I don’t see why not, as long as his parents don’t mind.”

She took the Moleskine and Finn turned out the light, and they went back up to the Frosts’ apartment. Sam opened the door, looking expectant, and it was Hailey who said, “We found it. He’d thrown it into a corner.” She handed the book over to Sam, who looked at it sadly, perhaps seeing its discovery as the final proof that Jonas really had been murdered.

He looked back up at Finn and said, “Did it have anything useful?”

“I’ve torn one page out, something that should help me a lot. I won’t say more than that for now.”

Sam nodded. “How’s the face?”

“Stings a little, might have a bruise in the morning. Nothing serious.”

Hailey glanced between the two of them, trying to make sense of the exchange, studying Finn’s face and seeing nothing. If nothing was visible now, maybe it wouldn’t bruise.

She appeared ready to speak, but before she could, Sam held out the book again and said, “Hailey, I know you bought this for Jonas for Christmas, and he loved it. Would you like to keep it? You know you can have something else from his room, any keepsake you want.”

She nodded and took the book back, and now Finn understood why she’d asked for it. She appeared unable to speak, but kissed Sam on the cheek and walked through into the apartment, presumably to say her goodbyes. Finn realized he hadn’t seen Alice at all.

“Would you like to come in, Finn?”

“No, thanks all the same. And you won’t see me again for a while, but that doesn’t mean I’m not doing anything.”

The words felt like an echo of what he’d said to Debbie and Ethan at some point in the week, except it was too late to do anything for the Frosts. There would be some retribution, but this problem would not be solved.

“Yeah, I get that.” He looked into Finn’s eyes for a moment, searching, and said, “Why are you doing this, Finn?”

Finn looked to the side, making sure that Hailey wasn’t on her way back, then said, “Honestly? A lot of reasons. I do feel angry about your son, and I do feel it was my fault in some way, but if I’m being straight, the fact that they killed Jonas makes me think they’ll never leave me alone unless I get to them first.”

He thought Sam might object to that admission, but he merely nodded. Perhaps an unsatisfactory explanation was better than none at all. And Finn had probably undersold himself—he was acting out of self-preservation, out of revenge for everything that had gone wrong in the past, but he was also acting out of conscience and a sense of moral outrage, traits that until that moment he’d believed he no longer possessed.