M. Ferguson/The Daily Mail/39092930

Grant presumed the numbers were some sort of account the newspaper had with the delivery service.

Of more interest, and a trifle bit more concern, was what Monte Ferguson had sent him via overnight delivery.

Grant thought about calling Frankel and Rachel but knew he couldn’t sit and just stare at the crate until they got themselves together and came over.

So Grant went down to the basement.

He found a crowbar he hadn’t used in ages and climbed back up the stairs to the living room. He wedged the tool under a couple of the crate’s corners and lifted the lid.

Prior Silver had made good on his word that Grant would be hearing from him directly after Christmas.

The man that Grant, Frankel, Scotland Yard, and the NYPD had been searching for in two major cities was curled up in a heap at the bottom of the crate.

Prior Silver was dead to the world.

With a Roman numeral VIII carved into the center of his forehead.

Chapter 28

28

Suicide.

Frankel stood beside Rachel and her father in the Grant living room as Jeffries, the FME he’d first met in Esher, shared his preliminary findings.

“We’ll run a battery of tests back at the morgue, but everything we’re looking at so far seems to be consistent with Silver taking his own life.”

“Any idea how long he’s been dead?”

“It’s only a guess at this point,” said Jeffries. “But with rigor mortis still in effect, I’d have to say some time in the past twenty-four hours.”

Frankel looked around the room that was wall-to-wall cops and techs. Grant stood beside the open crate, staring deep inside it. He’d been in pretty much the same position since Frankel arrived with Rachel a few hours earlier.

He looks like he’s in shock. Can’t say I blame him—starting Boxing Day with a dead body dumped beneath his nicely trimmed Christmas tree.

Rachel had been in the shower when Frankel answered Grant’s phone call. When she emerged wrapped in an oversized bath towel while drying her hair with another, Frankel had hung up in the same stupor that Grant was now exhibiting.

“Who was that?” Rachel had asked.

“Prior Silver is dead,” he had simply answered.

Hearing himself speak the words aloud hadn’t made it easier to believe. And now standing over the dead man himself, Frankel felt it was completely surreal.

He suddenly realized what he was feeling was disappointment.

For a search that had consumed them for the better part of a month to end this way, without being able to ask Silver a single question, was beyond frustrating.

It actually seemed unfair.