Long Way Down Read Online Free PDF Page B

used.
    I laughed.
    “That was a joke,” he said quite seriously.
    I laughed again and he frowned. Could he have been mocking me? Teasing? It would have been a first. It was too much to hope for.
    “Knock, knock,” I said.
    He ate another molecule of zucchini before answering.
    “Who’s there?”
    “Olive.”
    “Olive who?”
    “I love you!” I said, with a smile and a vocal flourish.
    He took a large bite out of the sandwich and chewed ten times. Heather had explained to him that it was possible to choke and die on food that was not sufficiently chewed. He had decided that ten chews was the exact number required for grilled cheese and stuck to it. I thought ten chews was a tad overkill for a grilled cheese, but I kept that opinion to myself.
    I had finished my grilled chicken Caesar salad with the lite dressing and no croutons. I would much rather have had the spaghetti carbonara from Piccolo, but Skeli had, rather gently, I thought, pointed out that my prison-honed physique was losing some of its edge. Curves were developing in places that had been planes.
Maybe I should join a gym,
I thought. I hated gyms.
    The Kid was drawing. I checked his plate. He had eaten almost all of the zukes. A miracle. A very small miracle, but we take ’em any way they come. I stacked the dishwasher and stood for a moment, peeking over his shoulder.
    It was a picture of a Camaro. No surprise. He had been drawing Camaros for two weeks. Cars were his passion. All cars, from Kias to Ferraris and everything in between. His pictures weren’t great art; he was no savant. But they were recognizable, which I thought was outstanding for a six-year-old. They were better than I could have done.
    “You sure you don’t want to take lessons?”
    He didn’t look up, he just shook his head once. Negative.
    “I think you’ve got talent.”
    He blew air out and covered his ears. I was distracting him. Annoying him.
    “Heather says there’s a great art class for kids your age at theJCC. You guys could go there together after school. Like one day a week. Want to try it?”
    My son growled at me.
    I sat down and opened my laptop and began to learn about the new client. Rather than begin the search by Haley’s name alone, I started with Arinna Labs. It was a mistake. I got the official biography. The sanitized version that had been told countless times in the
Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune,
and dozens of other media outlets. Farther down the page there were links to articles in
People, Us Weekly, Slate,
and even the
Onion
. I ignored them and concentrated on the business magazines.
It would be another week before someone directed me to the rest of the story. If I had read those stories first, the case would have taken a very different turn.
    Philip Haley—born to Christina Haley, a waitress, just outside Georgetown, South Carolina, forty-six years ago. Exactly my age. Father unknown. Brown’s Ferry Elementary School. J. B. Beck Middle School. Phillips Exeter Academy.
    That was a jump. Exeter was among the toniest of New England boarding schools. Not many kids from that kind of background made it that far. Philip may have been unique.
    I backed up and approached the issue sideways. A moment later, I found it. Football. Halfback. His middle school stressed both athletics and academics. An Exeter alumnus saw him play at state level playoffs and paid his tuition for the next four years.
    Football carried him through undergrad, too. Princeton. Again a full scholarship, though he only played two years. His knee blew out during summer training before his junior year. It gave him more time for his studies. He finished a biotechnology degree—with a minor in economics—in four years.
    Then there were two years at Prentiss Labs in Lincoln, Nebraska, working on various grains, where he must have saved every centhe made, because his next move was back to the East Coast and Harvard for his doctorate. His thesis had something to do with optimization of