Theo’s voice was echoing inside my skull. Caroline wasn’t just out for a jog the morning she died. We both know that, don’t we? She was meeting someone. The news reports about Caro had mentioned her dying across from the United Nations. I’d stood in the spot that morning, at the foot of that grand stone staircase. It had led up to Tudor City.

“That doesn’t mean anything,” I said defensively.

“She told me Teddy liked him. They bonded over zoos and exotic animals.”

I was quiet for a minute, processing that. You didn’t introduce someone to your kid unless you were serious. I bit my lip. “Why is he calling you?”

“It started the day after Caroline died,” Jude said. “He thinks Theo was involved.”

“I hope you have Ben’s address,” I said. “Because I’m going to need it.”

CHAPTER 17 THEO

CHAPTER 17

THEO

My father’s office was a floor above Juliet’s, at the south end of the building. Standing guard in front of it was his man Harris.

When I was a boy, I thought Harris was a brooding giant. He was a solid six foot four and broadly built, with tree-trunk limbs and a bald head that shone like a bronze bullet. When he spoke, which was seldom, it was with clipped vowels and an accent that was hard to place. He was from Bermuda, but he’d served in the British military at some point before he’d come into my father’s service. He’d never been married and had no children. He was solitary as a stone castle, with the cold, predatory eyes of a reptile guarding a moat.

He ignored me as I stepped inside. My father’s longtime secretary, Olga, was probably the only person in that building who was glad to see me. She got up and embraced me. “I’m so sorry about your wife, Theo. The service was beautiful. Caroline would have loved it. She was such a good girl.”

I opened the door that led into my father’s domain. It was a corner office, of course, with a spectacular panorama of the broad tree-lined boulevard that was Park Avenue. Angels would weep at a view like his. But my father had black screens installed over the glass walls, which permitted one to see the outline of the buildings but allowed no sunlight in. It was permanently twilight in his world. In his youth, my father’s obsession had been with visiting archaeological sites in sun-drenched climes. He’d paid for that passion with two bouts of skin cancer. The world had once been his oyster, but my father had been forced to retreat into a dark shell.