Mask Market by Andrew Vachss Read Free Book Online

portfolio, weighted in favor of biotech stocks, managed by…Daniel Parks, MBA, CPA, CFP.
    So this woman had—what?—skipped out on a big pile of money she owed to this guy Parks? That didn’t add up. Walking away from all those assets would have to cost her a cubic ton more than any commission she could owe a money manager.
    I shrugged my shoulders at Clarence.
    He tapped a key, and another screen popped up, displaying a whole page of thumbnails. “Put the pointer on the one you want to see, double-click, and it will blow right up, like enlarging a photograph.”
    The first one was a young woman—hard to tell her age without a tighter close-up—standing next to a fireplace, one hand on the mantel. She was fair-skinned, willowy, with long, slightly wavy dark hair. I couldn’t see much else.
    I scanned the thumbnails with my eyes, looking for a full-face shot. Found it. Clicked it open.
    And went back twenty years.
     
    “Y ou know her, mahn?” Clarence said, reading my face.
    “Let me look at a few more,” I told him, moving the cursor and clicking the mouse.
    I flicked past the ones with her in outfits—everything from French maid to English riding costume—and the nudes, which were all posed as if she was sitting for an artist’s portrait. It was the close-ups that sealed the deal. Those icy topaz eyes hadn’t changed at all.
    “Yeah, I know her,” I said.
     
    B eryl Eunice Preston had just turned thirteen when she disappeared from her parents’ mansion in one of Westchester’s Old Money enclaves. It was her father who came to see me, back when I had an office carved out of what was once crawlspace at the top of a building in what the real-estate hucksters had just started to call “Tribeca.” I lived in that office, in a little apartment concealed behind a fake Persian rug that looked like it covered a solid wall.
    Where I lived may have been the top floor, but it was so far underground it made the subway look like a penthouse. The Mole fixed it so I could pirate my electricity from the trust-fund hippies who lived below me. I used their phone, too…but only for outgoing. So long as I made my calls before noon, there was no chance any of them would catch wise. They were on the Manhattan Marijuana Diet—no coherency allowed before lunch.
    The narrow stairway that led to my place was on the other side of the building from the regular entrance, and I kept my car stashed in a former loading-bay slot that was concealed from the outside by a rusted metal door.
    That was back when I worked as an off-the-books investigator. I could go places a licensed PI wouldn’t even know existed, and I found all kinds of things during my travels. One thing I stumbled across had been an address for the building owner’s son, a professional rat who was doing very nicely for himself in the Witness Protection Program. The little scumbag had a federal license to steal—he cheated everyone he dealt with, then turned them all over to the law, and got to keep the money, like a tip for a job well done. I found more than just his address, too. I had his whole ID trail…and a real clear photo of the new face the Law bought for him.
    Hard to put a price on something like that, but the landlord agreed that making a few minor structural changes to his building would be a fair trade. He didn’t charge me rent, but it wasn’t like he was losing money on the deal.
    Pansy lived with me then. We would have stayed in that place forever, but the landlord’s son eventually got exposed, and the stupid bastard blamed me for it—as if I’d queer a sweet deal like I had just for the pleasure of playing good citizen.
    So the landlord had called the cops, said he had just discovered the top of his building was being illegally occupied by some Arabs. I wasn’t there when the SWAT guys hit the building, but they tranq’ed Pansy and took her away. They could have killed her, but they were afraid to just blast through the door, so they sent