“I don’t think your brother is a client—at least in the usual sense. It doesn’t sound like you can approach—what did you call them?”

“Leo called them HRG. It’s easier.”

“Okay. HRG. They don’t sound like the kind of firm that lets you pop in off the street with a will problem. So I’m willing to bet that one of their existing clients—an important one—told HRG to handle this ‘minor matter’ for them. We connect Thomas to one of those clients and we may answer some questions.”

She shook her head. “So obvious. But how do we connect—?”

“I follow him. But that’s all later. Right now, I need you to fill me in on some details.”

“Like what?”

“Like how your father died.”

“He was on Flight 27.”

The words jolted Jack. “Flight 27? When you said he was killed in a plane crash, I thought you meant some little Piper Cub or Cessna. But Flight 27… jeez.”

JAL Flight 27 from LA to Tokyo had crashed into the Pacific with no survivors, and not too many of the 247 bodies recovered either. The TV and papers had talked of nothing else for weeks. Still no clue as to why. It went down in one of the deepest parts of the Pacific. The black box was never found.

“Did they recover his body?”

Alicia shook her head. “No. They say sharks got most of them.”

“I’m sorry,” Jack said without thinking.

“Me too,” she said matter-of-factly, looking straight ahead. “For the shark that ate him, that is. Probably died of food poisoning.”

You are a cold one, Jack thought. I hope you’ve got a good reason.

“How about your brother? You said he quit his job. What did he do before he began devoting his life to getting that house?”

“What I know I learned from that private eye before he was killed. He said Thomas had been stuck for years in a mid-level electrical engineering job at AT&T.”

“Not the genius his father was, then?”

Another shrug. “Hard to say with Thomas. As a teen he always tended to take the path of least resistance. Under constant supervision and cornered like a rat in a cage, he could do work. But give him any slack…”

New York cabs will be signaling whenever they change lanes before Thomas gets any slack from his sister, Jack thought.

Not that he deserved any after kidnapping her tonight.

“Here we are,” she said, pointing through the side window as the cab swung into the curb.

Jack stepped out, paid the driver, then checked out the building.

The Hand Building was chiseled into the stone along the apex of the high-arched entrance. Impressive carving wound around the supporting columns. And inside…

“Look at that ceiling,” Alicia said as the revolving door deposited them in the long, bright marble-walled lobby.