WIN by Coben, Harlan (best book reader txt) 📕

build and maintain, small profit margin, they take up too much space…and there are often problems.”

“What kind of problems?”

“People store their valuables—jewelry, paperwork, birth certificates, contracts, passports, deeds, coin or stamp collections. But sometimes, well, they forget. They’ll come in, they’ll open their box, and suddenly they’ll start yelling that a valuable diamond necklace is missing. Usually they just forgot they took it out. Sometimes it’s outright fraud.”

“Claim something was stolen that they never put in the box in the first place.”

“Exactly. And sometimes, rarely, we mess up and it’s our fault. Very rarely.”

“How would you mess up?”

“If a client stops paying for their box, we have to evict them. We give many warnings, of course, but if they don’t pay, we drill open the box and send the contents to our main branch downtown. One time, we drilled the wrong box. The man came in, opened his box, and all his belongings were gone.”

It is starting to make sense. “And when you have a real break-in like this?”

“You can imagine,” she says.

And I can.

“Suddenly, every client is claiming they had expensive Rolex watches in their boxes or rare stamps worth half a million dollars. Clients never read the fine print, of course, but the bank’s liability for any loss for any reason shall not exceed ten times the cost of the annual rent for the box.”

“How much do you charge to rent?”

“It’s rarely more than a few hundred dollars a year.”

Not very much, I think. “So now you’re reaching out to clients,” I continue. “Many are claiming that they lost way in excess of what you are legally obligated to pay out, correct?”

“Correct.”

But alas, I think I may be putting this together. Yes, people store valuables, as she’s described. But they store more than that.

They store secrets.

“What’s your largest-size box?”

“In this branch? Eight by eight inches, with a two-foot depth.”

No way to hide the Picasso here, then, though I didn’t think Strauss would. That wasn’t the point of the box. That wasn’t the reason for his panic.

I take out a photo still frame from the Beresford surveillance video—the clearest shot I have of pre-murdered Ry Strauss. “Do you recognize this man?”

She studies the photograph. “I don’t think so. I mean, it’s hard to make out much.”

“The clients you notified about the safe deposit boxes,” I begin.

“What about them?”

“How did you reach them?”

“By certified mail.”

“Did you call any on the phone?”

“I don’t think so. That wouldn’t be us anyway. We have an insurance branch in Delaware that handles that.”

“So there is no chance someone from this branch would have called a client and invited them to come down here to discuss the theft?”

“None whatsoever.”

I ask a few more questions, but for the first time since this mess began, I feel as though I have some clarity. As I exit, my phone rings. I’m rather surprised to see that it’s Jessica.

“You busy?” she asks.

“Shouldn’t we work our next rendezvous through the app?”

“You blew your chance.”

“You wouldn’t have gone through with it,” I say.

“Guess we’ll never know. But I’m not calling about that. Do you know they just announced Ry Strauss’s identity?”

“I knew they were going to, yes.”

“Well, I was ready for it. I pitched the New Yorker a follow-up story on the whole Jane Street Six. Update my previous ‘Where Are They Now’ piece.”

“I assume they bought the pitch?”

“I can be charming when I want to be.”

“Oh, I’m sure.”

“So anyway, I’m going right now to interview Vanessa Hogan, the victim’s mother who was the last person to see Billy Rowan. Want to come?”

*  *  *

Jessica says, “I can’t believe Windsor Horne Lockwood the Third is taking the subway.”

I hold on to the bar overhead. We are on the A train heading south. “I’m a man of the people,” I tell her.

“You are anything but a man of the people.”

“I’ll have you know that I recently flew commercial.”

Jessica frowns. “No, you didn’t.”

“No, I didn’t. But I thought about it.”

The reason for the subway ride is simpler. I don’t want whoever is following me to know where we are going. I had Magda make a quick turn so that the car was out of sight for a few seconds. I used those seconds to get out and vanish into the Davenport Theatre lobby on Forty-Fifth Street, exit out the side, head into the back entrance of the Comfort Inn Times Square West, and then I reappeared on Forty-Fourth Street. I headed east toward Eighth Avenue and met up with Jessica by the subway entrance on Forty-Second Street.

You can figure out the rest of my plan, methinks.

Most likely, the black Lincoln Town Car—could you choose a more obvious vehicle?—is tailing Magda through the Lincoln Tunnel into New Jersey whilst Jessica and I take the A train to Queens where another car driver will whisk us to the home of Vanessa Hogan.

Vanessa Hogan had remarried and moved out of the modest two-family Colonial where she’d raised Frederick into a sprawling contemporary in the somewhat ritzier Kings Point village. Her son Stuart, Frederick’s half brother born eight years after the Jane Street Six, opens the door and grimaces at us.

“We’re here to see Vanessa,” Jessica says.

“I know about you,” Stuart says, giving me the fisheye. “But who’s he?”

“Ms. Culver’s personal assistant,” I tell him. “I take wonderful dictation.”

“You don’t look like you take dictation.”

“Flatterer.”

Stuart steps onto the stoop with us and lowers his voice. “I don’t know why Mom agreed to see you.”

He waits for one of us to reply. We don’t.

“She’s not well, you know. My dad died last year.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Jessica says.

“They were married more than forty years.”

Jessica tilts her head and nods and gives off waves and waves of sympathy, which when mixed with her beauty, makes Stuart go weak at the knees. I try to move out of view; this is clearly a time to let her work alone.

“That must have been hard on both of you,” Jessica says with just the right amount of empathy.

“It was. And now, well, you