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."