The Match (Wilde, #2)(24)

“Don’t bother. I won’t need it until noon.”

“Okay.”

“You know where the key is.”

Wilde nodded. “Thank you.”

“Good night, Wilde.”

“Good night, Laila.”

She turned toward her home office. Wilde grabbed the key from the basket by the door. Laila had traded in her BMW for a black Mercedes-Benz SL 550—the same kind of car Darryl drove. He frowned at that, flipped the radio onto a classic rock station, and drove toward the city. The traffic across the George Washington Bridge was shockingly light. Wilde took the upper level and slowed in the right lane. Even from here, more than a hundred blocks north of Central Park South, he could make out Sky jutting into the clouds.

He parked in the lot under the Park Lane Hotel. Sky was a pure, emotionless glass tower. The lobby was all gleaming crystal and white and chrome. During the ride, Wilde had wondered about how to approach this, what he could really hope to accomplish by coming here. He entered.

A male security guard looked at Wilde as though he’d been phlegmed out of a vagrant’s throat. “Food deliveries are in the back.”

Wilde held up his empty hands. “Do you see me carrying food?”

A well-dressed woman who’d been behind the front desk came out and said, “May I help you?”

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. “Apartment seventy-eight, please.”

The receptionist shared a knowing glance with the security guard.

“Your name?”

“WW.”

“Pardon?”

“Tell them it’s WW.”

She flicked another look at the guard. Wilde tried to read their expressions. A building like this would have tight security. That was hardly a surprise. Even if he somehow got past this guard, there were two others by the elevators. Their expressions and mannerisms seemed born of something more akin to weariness and resignation than alarm or worry. It was as though they had been here before, played this role repeatedly, and were just going through the motions.

The receptionist went back to the desk and picked up the phone. She held the receiver to her ear for maybe a minute and said nothing. Then she came back over and said, “No one is home.”

“That’s odd. PB told me to come over.”

Both the guard and receptionist said nothing.

“PB is my cousin,” Wilde tried.

“Uh-huh,” the guard said, as though he’d heard the same thing a hundred times before. “Aren’t you a little old for this?”

“For what?”

The receptionist said, “Frank.”

Frank the Guard shook his head. “Perhaps it’s time you left, uh”—small eye roll—“WW.”

“Can I leave him a message?” Wilde asked.

“Who?”

“PB.”

They both stared at him.

“You realize,” the receptionist said, “we can neither confirm nor deny who lives in this building.”

He tried to read their faces. Something odd was up.

“So can I leave a note or not?”

Wilde was not sure what he would write. The simple answer was to explain that he was the WW from the DNA website and put one of the untraceable phone numbers. But did he want to do that? Did he want to put himself on the radar like that? Now that he thought about it, what was he doing here? He didn’t know PB. He wasn’t responsible for him. Wilde had spent his entire life just fine not knowing all the answers to the mystery of who he was.

What was he doing here?

“Of course,” the receptionist said and fetched a pen and paper. “May I see an ID please.”

He had one under the alias of Jonathan Carlson, but that would just lead to questions about WW and his being a cousin, and really, what was the point? Did he want to kill a perfectly good alias for this?

He did not.

“I’ll try his cell later,” Wilde said.

“Yeah,” Frank said, “you do that.”

Wilde headed west on Central Park South. Some might think he would be uncomfortable on the streets of Manhattan, the so-called Boy from the Woods, but it was actually the opposite. He loved New York City. He loved the streets, the sounds, the lights, the life. Was that a contradiction? Perhaps. Or perhaps it was the change that won him over. Perhaps, in the same way you can’t have an up without a down or a dark without a light, you couldn’t appreciate the rural without the urban. Perhaps it was because this city, crowded and massive as it might be, left you alone, let you stroll and observe in solitude while surrounded by throngs.

Perhaps Wilde needed to shut down the philosophizing and grab a cup of coffee and a chocolate croissant at the Maison Kayser on Columbus Circle.

He stopped at an ATM on the way and picked up his daily max of eight hundred dollars. He had a plan of sorts: Wait for one of the employees, like the security guard or the receptionist, to get off work and bribe them for information on the occupant of the apartment. Did he think it would work? He did not. The guard seemed more likely to go for the bribe than the receptionist, but that could be sexism talking.

He crossed to the park side of the street and set up near the stone wall where he could keep a view for exiting employees. He drank his coffee. It was fantastic. He took a bite out of the chocolate croissant and wondered why he didn’t leave the woods more often. He wondered what PB had wanted, what had made PB so desperate, what had led a man who lives in this gleaming tower to reach out to a total stranger, even if that stranger shared some DNA.