Devine’s attention was then drawn to a cab that pulled slowly down the street and stopped in front of the house. Two people got out, a man and a woman. They looked to be in their fifties. The man was bald and dressed in slacks and a white dress shirt. He looked like death itself. The woman’s face held the anguish of the recently bereaved. The man pulled out a large roller suitcase from the cab’s trunk and then the cab drove off.
The man put his arm around the woman, supporting her, and they slowly headed up the steps, where they were met by the cop. After each of them showed him something, probably ID, the cop spoke into the mic Velcroed to his shoulder pad. The door opened a few seconds later and the same suit appeared. He ushered the couple inside and closed the door.
Devine took all this in. Obviously, Ewes’s parents had just shown up from wherever they lived outside of the country. He wondered if they knew that the official verdict had changed to homicide. If they didn’t, things were about to get far more difficult for the couple. There was guilt in thinking your child had killed herself. You would find yourself in What signals did I miss?, What could I have done? sorts of mind games.
But with murder came horror. Knowing that someone out there had killed your kid. Your first instinct was to avenge your child. Then, when that emotion died down, things would be looked at more rationally. At that point, the understanding that someone had violently taken your child’s life could make you delve into all sorts of personal spaces where most parents would probably rather not go.
But if Ewes indeed had been murdered, it was someone at Cowl and Comely who had done it. And that meant everyone there, including Devine, was now a suspect.
CHAPTER
20
DEVINE GOT UP A LITTLE late since it was Sunday. By 6 a.m. his workout was complete, and he went back to bed for more sleep. He listened to his body, and it was telling him to slow down and catch up on some rest. He woke at eleven, showered off the remnants of his sweaty workout, and then prepared breakfast: veggie omelet, toast, protein shake, coffee, and a chocolate chip cookie thrown in just for the hell of it.
After that, he went back to his room, fired up his laptop, and did some digging. The deeded owner of the Upper East Side property the WASP had gone into was listed as the Locust Group. He googled Locust Group and came up with a ton of results, including variations thereof. Some looked legit, with office addresses and websites and lots of info about what they did. But there were simply too many for him to run them all down.
As a little diversion he looked up the term locust online. They were defined as short-horned grasshoppers belonging to the Acrididae family. They were not known to be harmful to humans.
Devine rubbed his sore shoulder and injured face.
They may have to rethink that part.
But if the sole purpose of this Locust Group was to own the New York brownstone, it was reasonable to have no business address and no website. And he knew it was common practice for the ultrawealthy and/or famous to use shell companies to buy property for privacy reasons. Maybe that was all this was.
He next ran the license plate on the BMW. Valentine had earlier shown him a nifty and pretty straightforward way of accessing this information. When he’d asked him about it, the Russian had waved a slice of meatball pizza around and snorted, “The New York DMV? Please. They suck. My nephew can hack DMV and your FBI and your fuckin’ CIA and other letter people. And he is still little bay-bee.”
The guy really was a pill.
The car was registered to a Christian Fullerton Chilton, with the address being the brownstone. Devine looked Chilton up online. There was more than one, but he quickly narrowed it down by the middle name and the fact that he knew what the man looked like.
He had a Facebook page, but it was private, and thus restricted regarding what he had access to.
But there were ways around that. And he hadn’t needed the Russian to show him how.
He checked the HTML source code, got the Numeric ID off that, plugged it in, did a few more steps of “URL manipulation,” as it was known in the trade—because of Facebook’s nonstop battles with nosy jerks like him—like copying profile attributes of some of Chilton’s actual friends listed on the page and then injecting them into his own profile, and Christian Chilton’s page was fooled into thinking Devine was his best “friend.” And since Devine was using a fake online identity of his own to do this, it was highly doubtful that Chilton would be able to reverse engineer to the real Devine. At least he hoped he couldn’t.
He quickly looked through the photos and posts. He saw some very famous young people and some very famous old people. Chilton apparently got around. He was in a dream car, or on a mega-yacht in the Med, or striding confidently onto a Gulfstream 650. Devine wasn’t guessing; Chilton helpfully provided the type of plane in large cap letters. Devine had never ridden on a set of wings like that. For him, an ass-buster seat on a C-130 or C-17 transport plane was the way Army grunts traveled. You could tell your perch was first class if it actually had a seat and a harness to keep you there.