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Holy crap! Otto Devereaux, one of the toughest mob hit men and extortionists, got his neck snapped! His body was dumped on the side of Saw Mill Parkway like some piece of garbage. Respekt, Otto. You knew how to kill, bro.

I shook my head. What next—a fan site for convicted pedophiles?

There were about a dozen comments from people remembering some of Otto’s most horrible deeds and, yes, praising his work. They say that you can find any sort of depravity on the Internet. I had stumbled across a site devoted to admirers of violent gangsters. Some world.

On the fourteenth comment, I hit pay dirt:

Otto is being laid to rest at the Franklin Funeral Home in Queens this Saturday. The funeral is private, so you can’t go to pay your respects, but admirers can still send flowers. Here’s the address.

The post listed an address in Flushing, Queens.

There was a sketchpad on the desk. I grabbed a pencil and leaned back with it. I wrote down Natalie’s name on the left. I wrote down Todd’s beneath it. I jotted down other names—mine, Jed, Cookie, Bob, Otto—any name I could come up with at all. Delia Sanderson; Eban Trainor; Natalie’s father, Aaron Kleiner, and mother, Sylvia Avery; Julie Pottham; Malcolm Hume even. All of them. Then on the right side of the page, I drew a timeline from top to bottom.

Go back as far as I could. Where did this first start?

I didn’t know.

So back to the beginning.

Twenty-five years ago, Natalie’s father, who taught here at Lanford, had run off with a student. According to Julie Pottham, dear old Dad had relocated and remarried. The only problem was, there was no sign of him anywhere. How had Shanta put it? Like father, like daughter. Both Natalie and her father had seemingly vanished into thin air. Both were completely off the grid.

I drew a line connecting Natalie and her father.

How could I learn more about this connection? I thought about what Julie had said. Her information about her father’s remarriage came from her mother. Maybe Mom knew more than she was saying. Maybe she had an address for Dad. Either way, I needed to talk to her. But how? She was in a home. That was what Julie had said. I didn’t know which home and somehow I doubted that Julie would be forthcoming. Still, it couldn’t be too difficult to track Mrs. Avery down.

I circled Sylvia Avery, Natalie’s mother.

Back to the timeline. I moved up through the years until I reached twenty years ago when Todd Sanderson was a student. He had nearly been expelled after his father’s suicide. I thought back to his student file and his obituary. Both had mentioned that Todd had made amends by launching a charity.

I wrote down Fresh Start on my pad.

One, Fresh Start had been birthed on this very campus in the wake of Todd’s personal turmoil. Two, six years ago, Natalie told her sister that she and Todd were going to travel around the world doing good works for Fresh Start. Three, Delia Sanderson, Todd’s real wife, told me that Fresh Start had been her husband’s passion. Four, Professor Hume, my very own beloved mentor, had been the faculty adviser during Fresh Start’s creation.

I started tapping the paper with my pencil. Fresh Start was all over this. Whatever “this” was.

I needed to look into that charity. If Natalie had indeed traveled for Fresh Start, someone there might at the very least have a lead on where she was. Again I started doing web searches. Fresh Start helped people get new starts, though the work seemed a bit unfocused. They worked with kids who needed cleft palates repaired, for example. They helped with political dissidents who needed asylum. They helped people with bankruptcy issues. They helped you find new employment, no matter what issues you’ve had in the past.

In short, as the mantra on the bottom of the home page said, “We help anyone who truly, desperately needs a fresh start.”

I frowned. Could that be more vague?

There was a link to donate. Fresh Start was a 501(c)(3) charity, so all contributions were tax deductible. No officers were listed—no mention of Todd Sanderson or Malcolm Hume or anyone. There was no office address. The phone number had an 843 area code—South Carolina. I dialed the number. An answering machine picked up. I didn’t leave a message.

I found a company online that investigates various charities “so that you may give with confidence.” For a small fee, they would send you a complete report on any charity, including an IRS Form 990 (whatever that was) and a “comprehensive analysis with full financial data, mission-driven decisions, officers’ biographies, charity holdings, money spent on fund-raising and all other activities.” I paid the small fee. An e-mail came to me saying that the report would be in my e-mail the following day.