Chapter 2
“The woman who came with you?”
“Yes.”
“Left after we stabilized you.”
“She give you a number?”
“No.”
The nurse entered with a clipboard.
“Mr. Baron, we tried your emergency contact.”
Elias knew before she finished.
“Margot Ashford?”
“Yes. Someone answered and disconnected.”
For the first time in four years, Elias asked for her name to be removed.
He signed himself out the following afternoon against medical advice.
By five o’clock he was back in the converted printing warehouse that served as headquarters for the Baron family’s legitimate businesses and the collection of less legitimate relationships no annual report ever described accurately.
Warren Pike, his sixty-eight-year-old attorney, watched Elias place the pharmacy bag on the conference table.
“You look terrible.”
“Thank you.”
“You could still be in a hospital.”
“I could also be dead in a cemetery. Today is full of alternatives.”
Warren did not smile.
Eleven men waited around the table.
Elias handled payroll disputes, a union contractor’s missing pension payment and an argument over riverfront freight rights before asking the question he had deliberately saved for last.
“Kestrel Harbor.”
Nobody moved.
Elias looked slowly around the room.
“Who has spoken to them?”
Silence.
Interesting silence.
Kestrel Harbor Partners was planning the largest waterfront redevelopment Philadelphia had seen in a generation—apartments, hotels, offices, retail space and a landscaped promenade across twenty-two acres.
Unfortunately, St. Vincent Cemetery sat directly in the center of their plans.
Margot was Kestrel Harbor’s executive vice president for development.
Elias had known she was working on the project.
He had not known exactly how.
Warren waited until everyone else left.
Then he put two folders on the desk.
“Before you decide what happened to your relationship,” he said, “you should understand what happened to your father.”
That got Elias’s attention.
Warren opened an old property map.
A black line ran through several parcels along the waterfront.
May you like
“Your grandfather acquired this easement when the old freight spur existed. Your father later transferred it into the family trust. Access, drainage, utilities, construction egress. Kestrel cannot excavate St. Vincent without crossing land controlled by that trust.”
“Controlled by whom?”
