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“I’m thinking about the timing,” Myron said. “Greg started DMing your mother. He travels to Vegas. Then Jordan gets murdered and Greg disappears.”
“Greg didn’t disappear,” Bo said. “He and Mom fell hard for each other. They decided to travel the world. When he died, she was crushed.”
“I don’t think Greg is dead.”
“Of course he is. You said you were Greg’s manager or something?”
“His agent. We’d known each other since we were kids.”
“Well, you must not have been very close,” Bo said.
“Why do you say that?”
Bo started wiping the bar with a rag. “Why do you think Greg quit his job and ran off in the first place?”
“He said he wanted to get out of the rat race.”
Bo shook his head. “No, man. Greg was sick.”
Myron said nothing.
“He got a bad diagnosis. The Big C. That’s why Greg quit coaching. That’s why he and Mom ran away. Because he didn’t have much time left.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The next step was obvious: Find Bo’s mom.
They did. Fast.
By the next day, Myron was in Pine Bush, New York. Win had offered to come, but Myron decided to handle it himself. Pine Bush was classified as a hamlet rather than a town or a city and while the definition was confusing, it really just meant “pretty dang small.”
Bo/Brian had put on a convincing performance, but something about it kept bumping Myron. The kid was lying. Not about everything. But once Myron realized that some level of deception was at hand, he stopped pushing him for information. He let Bo talk himself out. Myron nodded along as though he was buying every word, and then he apologized to Bo for the mistake. He never told Bo why he’d been looking for Greg. He didn’t inquire—though man oh man he wanted to—where Bo’s mom resided now that Greg was dead. He figured that Bo either would lie to him or tip her off or more likely, both.
He wanted to catch Bo’s mom unawares.
They—Myron, Win, and Esperanza—found clues fast. Bo and Spark’s mom had been named Grace Konners. Five years ago, right around the time she and Greg presumably ran overseas, she changed her last name to Conte. She kept the Grace. That was not uncommon. It is hard to change first names, to not react when you hear your name called and, of course, to react when you hear a name that was not yours. It can trip you up.
Once Grace changed her last name, boom, she vanished off the so-called grid. No credit cards. No mortgages. No employment records. No social media accounts. All Grace Konners activity stopped, and no Grace Conte activity took its place.
That fit.
But more recently, probably because several years had passed and she felt somewhat safe, Grace Conte risked using her Social Security number to open a cash management account with Bank of America. She was still careful. The account had been opened online, and the address used was a post office box in Charlotte, North Carolina, right near the bank’s headquarters—clearly a move to hide her whereabouts on the rare chance someone would discover the account.
It took a bit more digging and triangulating locations and history. Your life is on your mobile phone. Most people realize this by now. It’s not much of a shock. But perhaps we don’t quite recognize the depth of that technology. Companies know everything. All movement. Bo used burner phones, so he was somewhat less conspicuous. It made sense. Bad guys like Joey the Toe were searching for him. His brother Spark was more of an open book. He traveled a lot, but it almost exclusively fit into the Amherst College basketball schedule. If the team was playing Bowdoin, his phone showed that he was in Brunswick, Maine. When the team played Middlebury, Spark was in Vermont.
But there was no reason for him to have visited Pine Bush, New York, three times.
The rest fell into place. Grace Conte never wrote checks. She never used the credit card that came with her account either. But she did make cash deposits at a variety of bank branches in Newburgh and Poughkeepsie—both larger towns near Pine Bush. Grace Conte also owned car insurance for a blue Acura RDX. She used the North Carolina address, but now that they had zeroed in on Pine Bush, it was just a matter of time.
Myron hadn’t gotten an exact address yet, though judging by Spark’s phone, she lived on a large rural plot of land off Route 302. He’d driven by it and spotted two possible driveways that could lead up to a house that might match the coordinates. One had a chain-link gate blocking the entrance. The second was open, so Myron risked driving up. Near the house, he spotted four cars—none of them a blue Acura RDX—and he figured that with that many people and that many non-Acura cars, this was probably not the right house. He took another look at the chain-link fence property from a distance. There was a camera attached to a tree.
Hmm.
He texted the address to Esperanza. She texted back.
Back to you within the hour.
No reason to wait here and look conspicuous. Myron drove back to the “hamlet’s” center to grab something to eat. He chose Larry’s Chinese Restaurant and Bar because it had over four hundred Google ratings and 4.5 stars and because, to quote Elton John singing “Levon,” he “likes the name.”
