Boston, Massachusetts
April 30
Elizabeth Brewer entered her Brookline home, a massive burnished stone gothic revival, and tossed her keys into the Steuben bowl on the hall table. Her great grandfather, John Reardon, had been dead for nearly two decades, but his presence still loomed, dwarfing the cavernous space. Elizabeth dismissed her housekeeper with an approximate dinner time and strode purposefully to the back of the house.
When she was a child, the little nooks and crannies of the architecture had fascinated her. She loved finding secluded alcoves and hiding places where she could escape or spy on the adults. The best secret spot of all, though, was her great grandfather’s gallery. The space was long and narrow and could only be accessed through a hidden panel in the library—not a swiveling bookcase, although Elizabeth had toyed with the idea—and unless you studied the floor plan with an engineer’s precision, the room was undetectable.
She stopped at her desk in the library and absently flipped through the mail placed carefully at the center: invitations, birth announcements, and society rubbish. Important correspondence came to her office. Aside from her pet project, her company was the only thing that mattered. Her careful groundwork and well-disguised income streams had already begun to reestablish Brewer-Reardon in the commercial shipping industry. She was strategic, perspicacious, and meticulous. She was also ruthless.
While competitors and rivals had been criticizing her looks or questioning her qualifications, she had been gathering information and pinpointing vulnerabilities. She knew exactly where to hit her enemies where it hurt—the heart, the gut, the wallet—a veritable voodoo doll of tactics. In her world it wasn’t about bad guys and good guys; it was bad guys and worse guys.
She glanced around the oak-paneled room, absorbing its history, the greatness that was John Reardon. She would restore his legacies, and hers, no matter the cost. Her gaze landed on one panel in particular on the far wall, and the treasures it had hidden and would hide.
For all her careful patience and planning, this hiccup with Reynard was a burr under her saddle. He had admitted to her that the contents of her package, Degas’s Study for the Programme #1 and #2, had been misplaced. Despite the fact that she hadn’t received an update, she had complete faith in Reynard’s abilities. However, complacency was simply not in her repertoire.
She was aware of the players—the journalist, the SEAL, and Reynard’s man of many faces—but not the game. She would find that out soon enough and retrieve her prizes. Those drawings, and the other pieces, belonged to her, and she had every intention of bringing them home. She had seen some of the pieces with her own young eyes more than twenty years ago, and her great grandparents had told her every miraculous detail of their acquisition as if recounting a bedtime fairytale. Their story wasn’t a fairytale, though. It was the birth of a legacy.
Elizabeth’s mother Imogen’s family had run Boston for nearly a century, and like the city’s history, her family’s was deliciously sordid. In the late nineteenth century, the Reardons were low-level hitmen and muscle for the Boston mob. Six brothers fresh off the boat scratched and clawed—and shot and strangled—their way to positions of power. By the time Prohibition rolled around, Reardon sons and cousins were bootlegging their way to millions. John Reardon, Elizabeth Brewer’s great grandfather, took his ill-gotten gains and started Reardon Imports and Exports.
Reardon hadn’t gone legitimate. He was simply tired of handing over a cut of his profits to a business where the retirement plan was, more often than not, a bullet to the brain. His older brother Seamus thought John didn’t have the stomach for the mob. The truth was John Reardon was more ruthless, more cold-blooded, and greedier than any mobster anyone had ever run across. Let those Irish flunkies run their backroom gambling halls and brothels. John Reardon had bigger fish to fry.
And what better way than through import/export. He never got his hands dirty, and his charitable efforts, an obvious but successful attempt to buy his way into Boston society, rendered him nearly above suspicion. Nevertheless, if anything, anything, needed to be moved internationally, John Reardon was the man to do it.
It took brains and a particularly brutal skill set to pull it off. Rumor had it that John gutted three different hitmen sent to dispatch him. Each time, John had sliced the man from gut to gullet and dumped his body on the front lawn of his former employer. Eventually, the Irish mob, no doubt fearing they were running low on hitmen, accepted his notice of resignation with no further incidents. John’s older brother Seamus rose to the top levels in the Winter Hill Gang. In 1931, Seamus’s wife gave birth to their only child, a son, Patrick. Wherever Patrick went, trouble followed like a shadow. No matter the con, the heist, or the scam, if Patrick had a finger in it, it was sure to go sideways. Until, one day, it didn’t.