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

“To?”

“To when you and Ry Strauss decided to steal the paintings.”

Patricia almost smiles at that. “Okay, why not? So this is after Ashley Wright. Your father had already thrown my father out of the family, but my dad would still sneak into Lockwood to see Grandmama. She was, after all, his mother. She could never say no to him. One day, my father comes back furious and frantic because the family—your father—had agreed to loan the two paintings to Haverford for an upcoming exhibit. I couldn’t figure out why he was so angry about this. When I asked him, he started ranting about how your father had cut him off and taken what was rightfully his. A lie, of course. I’m now sure it was about the negatives. Anyway, I was a senior in high school. We were in this small house while you all lived it up in the grand Lockwood Manor. I was looked down upon at school, the subject of whispers and innuendo. You know how it was. A few days later, Uncle Ryker came to visit again. I’ll be honest. I wanted him. I really did. I think we would have, but once he heard me talk about the paintings, he hatched the plan.” She looks up at me, baffled. “How did you figure it out?”

“Ian Cornwell.”

“Ah. Poor sweet Ian.”

“You seduced him,” I say. “Slept with him to gain his trust.”

“Don’t be a sexist, Win. If you were eighteen and needed to sleep with a female guard to pull off a heist, you wouldn’t have given it a second thought.”

“Fair point,” I agree. “More than fair, actually. I assume that Ry Strauss was the man with the ski mask.”

“Yes.”

“He saw you once years later. Ian Cornwell, I mean. You were on The Today Show promoting the Abeona Shelter.”

“I had long hair when I was with him,” she says. “Dyed it blonde for those three months. After the robbery, I cut it and never let it grow back again.”

“Cornwell claims that he still wasn’t certain you were his Belinda—but even if he was, what could he prove?”

“Exactly.”

“And you didn’t tell Aldrich about the robbery?”

“No. By then, I knew Ryker was really Ry Strauss. He confided in me. We grew close. We even got the tattoos together.”

She turns to the side and pulls down on the back of her top, revealing a tattoo—the same Tisiphone abeona butterfly that I’d seen on the photographs of Ry Strauss’s corpse.

“What’s the significance of that butterfly?” I ask.

“Beats me. That was all Ry. He ranted about the goddess Abeona, of rescuing the young, I don’t know. Ry was always full of such passion. When you’re young, you don’t realize how thin the line is between colorful and crazy. But the planning and execution of the heist was”—her face breaks into a wide grin—“it was such a high, Win. Think about it. We got away with stealing two masterpieces. It was the best thing I’d ever done in my life.”

“Until,” I say, arching an eyebrow for effect, “it turned into the worst.”

“You’re such a drama queen sometimes, Win.”

“Again: Fair. When did you find the negatives?”

“Six, seven months later. I dropped the Picasso in the basement, believe it or not. The back of the frame broke. When I tried to fix it…”

“You found them,” I finish for her.

Patricia nods slowly.

When I ask my next question, I hear the catch in my throat. “Did you shoot Aldrich or did Aline?”

“I did,” she says. “My mother wasn’t home. That part was true. I sent her out. I wanted to confront him alone. I still hoped for an explanation. But he just snapped. I had never seen him like that. It was like…I had a friend with a really bad drinking problem. It wasn’t just that she would fly into a rage—it was that she would look straight at me and not know who I was.”

“And that’s what happened with your father?”

She nods, but her voice is oddly calm. “He slapped me across the face. He punched me in the nose and ribs. He grabbed the negatives and threw them in the fireplace.”

“The broken bones,” I say. “Those were the old injuries the police found on you.”

“I begged him to stop. But it was like he didn’t see me. He didn’t deny it. Said he did all this and worse. And I mean, those negatives, the images on them…”

“You now knew what he was capable of,” I say.

“I ran into his bedroom.” Her eyes are far away now. “He kept the gun in his night table drawer.”

She stops and looks at me. I help her out.

“You shot him.”

“I shot him,” she repeats. “I couldn’t move. I just stood over his body. I didn’t know what to do. I just felt, I don’t know, confused. Unmoored. I knew I couldn’t go to the police. They’d figure out I stole the paintings. They’d learn about Ry for sure—he would go to prison for life. The negatives were ashes in the fire, so where was my proof? I also thought—I know this will sound weird—but I worried about the family too. The Lockwood name, even after we’d been kicked to the curb. I guess it’s ingrained in us, isn’t it?”

“It is,” I agree. “You said my father came to see yours the night before he was murdered. That wasn’t true.”

“I was just trying to throw smoke at you. I’m sorry.”

“And the part about two assailants kidnapping you?”

“Made it up. Same with that story about the kidnappers giving me hope and letting me think I was being let go. Some of the rape and abuse stories I told came straight off those negatives, but none of that happened to me.”

“You just wanted to muddy the investigation.”

“Yes.”

I want to get her back to her story: “So you’d just shot your father and you felt confused. What happened next?”

“I was in shock, I guess. My mother came home. When she saw what happened, she totally freaked out too. Started ranting in