What Bart learned, in the next twenty minutes, was this:
His half-brother, Charles Webb, was wanted for questioning in connection with a series of murders in three states - New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut - over the past eighteen months. Six victims. No apparent pattern in demographics - the victims ranged from a twenty-two-year-old graduate student to a fifty-eight-year-old retired electrician - but a consistent method: blunt force, isolated locations, late at night, no witnesses. The investigation had been stalled for most of its duration; the connection between the six victims had taken eight months to establish, and the profile that had finally emerged had pointed law enforcement toward a small number of persons of interest. Charles Webb was one of them.
Charles had been on the peripheral edge of the investigation for four months without Bart's knowledge. Edward had only discovered it two days ago when a contact at the FBI - a former colleague from Edward's years at a federal public defender's office, a fact about his past that Bart had never had reason to think about - called him directly.
The attack on Bart had been attributed by the investigating officers to a professional. Not opportunistic. The angle, the method, the location: someone had known where Bart would be and had been waiting. Targeted.
Charles had fled two days before the attack. There was a warrant out for his arrest, federal, for the murder investigation; the flight itself had added additional charges.
"The police believe the attack was connected to the murder investigation," Edward said. "Someone wanted you out of the picture. Either you were getting close to something - some connection to Charles, some information that would have been damaging - or someone believed you were, or were about to be. Or-" He paused. "Or someone simply wanted you dead for reasons that have nothing to do with the investigation. We don't know yet."
Bart stared at the ceiling. Charles. He thought about Charles - his mother's second son, his half-brother by law and by blood and by nothing else whatsoever, the boy who had grown up in the same house as Bart after his mother's second marriage and who had never, in Bart's estimation, particularly liked him. The feeling had been mutual, which was honest. They had coexisted in a household for eight years with the polite, armed neutrality of two countries sharing a disputed border, and Bart had left for college at eighteen with the genuine relief of someone who had concluded that the proximity was no one's fault but that the distance would be better for everyone, and they had not been in the same room more than twice a year since.
What Bart had not anticipated was this.
"He could have just asked me for money," Bart said. "If he needed money."
"Bart." Edward's voice was as close to gentle as it got, which was not very close. "We don't know that it was Charles. We know he's a suspect in the murder investigation, and we know he fled before you were attacked. We don't know that the attack was his doing."
"He's the only one with a motive."
"We don't know that either. We know very little about what's actually happened." Edward let the silence sit for a moment. "What we do know is that you cannot stay here. If whoever did this learns you survived, they may try again. A hospital is not a secure location - too many people, too many access points, too many staff who change every eight hours and cannot all be vetted. I need to move you somewhere quiet, somewhere there's no public connection to your name, and I need to do it in the next forty-eight hours."
"Where."
"I've identified a property in rural New Jersey. A farmhouse. Private road, leaseable under a shell company, no neighbors within a quarter mile. We can have security installed on all entry points within twenty-four hours. The location is not connected to you or the company in any visible way."
"And then."
"And then you recover." Edward folded his hands. "The problem is staffing. You need medical care for the next six to eight weeks. The shoulder surgery was significant; the wound care alone will require daily attention. The ribs will take time. A professional nurse creates a liability - NDAs hold up until they don't, and the right amount of money or pressure can make anyone talkative, and if someone is motivated to find you, the nursing placement channels are not difficult to work."
Bart was quiet. He understood the logic. He also understood, already, that Edward had someone in mind, because Edward never raised a problem without having at least the outline of a solution. In sixteen years, Bart could not remember a single instance of Edward walking into a room with a problem and no solution. The solution might be inadequate. It might be the kind of solution that came with costs he hadn't fully calculated. But it existed.
"Who," he said.
Edward looked at him steadily. "Before I tell you, I want to be clear that I've considered the other options and discarded them. Your executive assistant is loyal but not discreet - she talks when she's anxious, and an unusual situation makes her anxious. Your housekeeper is sixty-seven and cannot physically manage what you'll need. The board members I trust are too visible to disappear for six to eight weeks without generating the exact kind of press attention we're trying to avoid." He paused. The pause was deliberate. "I want to contact Zoe."
The name sat in the room between them like a piece of furniture that had suddenly appeared where the floor should have been.
Bart said nothing for long enough that Edward continued.
"She knows your routines, your medical history, your temperament. She's lived with you - she knows how to manage the particular challenge you present as a patient, which I am not understating when I say is significant. She's not connected to the company in any visible way. She wouldn't attract attention if she appeared in your orbit. And-" Edward stopped.
"And," Bart said.
"And Dylan is three years old. He has spent almost no time with his father. If there was ever a window for that, it might as well be now."