The Stranger
Page 48

And then, when he was at his lowest, John Kuntz found salvation.
Isn’t that always the way?
A friend of a friend hooked up Kuntz with a young Ivy Leaguer named Larry Powers, who had developed some new phone app that made it easier to find Christian guys to do home repair. Something like that. Charity and Construction, that was the pitch. The truth was, Kuntz didn’t really care about the business angle of it. His job was to run both personal and company security—protect the key employees and all trade secrets—and so that was his single focus.
He was good at it.
The business, it was explained to him, was a start-up, and so the initial pay was crap. But still it was something, a job, a way to hold his head up. It was also more about the promise too. He was given stock options. Risky, sure, but that was how great fortunes were made. There was a back end—a big, juicy back end—if things went very well.
And they did.
The app caught on in a way no one had anticipated, and now, after three years, Bank of America had underwritten their IPO—initial public offering—and if things went just okay (not super great, just okay), two months from now, when the company started trading on the stock market, John Kuntz’s stake would be worth approximately seventeen million dollars.
Let that number just sink in for a second. Seventeen million dollars.
Forget a comeback. Forget salvation. With that kind of money, he’d be able to afford the best doctors in the world for his son. He’d get Robby home care and the best of everything. He’d be able to get his other kids—Kari and Harry—into good schools, quality places, and maybe set them up in their own businesses one day. He’d get Barb some help around the house, maybe even take her away on a vacation. The Bahamas maybe. She was always looking at ads for that Atlantis hotel, and they hadn’t gone anywhere since that three-day Carnival cruise six years ago.
Seventeen million dollars. All their dreams were about to come true.
Now, once again, someone was trying to take it all away from him.
And from his family.
Chapter 32
Adam drove past MetLife Stadium, home of both the New York Giants and New York Jets. He parked in an office-building lot about a quarter of a mile down the road. The building, like everything around it, was on old swampland. The smell was pure New Jersey lore and the reason for much of the state’s misconception. The odor was part swamp (obviously), part chemical from whatever had been used to drain the swamp, and part dorm bong that never got rinsed out.
In sum, seriously funky.
The 1970s-era office building looked as though someone had taken the Brady Bunch’s house as inspiration. There was a lot of brown and the kind of rubberized flooring that might have been snapped into place. Adam knocked on the door of a ground-level office overlooking the loading dock.
Tripp Evans opened it. “Adam?”
“Why did my wife call you?”
It was odd to see Tripp out of his normal element. In town he was popular and well-liked and important within the small worlds he inhabited. Here he looked strikingly ordinary. Adam knew Tripp’s story vaguely. When Corinne was growing up in Cedarfield, Tripp’s father had owned Evans Sporting Goods, located in the center of town where Rite Aid now was. For thirty years, Evans was the place where all the kids in town got their sports equipment. They also sold Cedarfield varsity jackets and practice gear for the high school teams. They opened two other stores in neighboring towns. When Tripp graduated college, he came home and ran the marketing. He made Sunday circulars and came up with special events to keep Evans relevant. He paid to have local pro athletes come in and sign autographs and greet customers. Times were good.
And then, like for most mom-and-pop operations, it all went south.
Herman’s World of Sporting Goods came in. Then Modell’s opened on the highway, and Dick’s and a few others. The family business slowly withered and died. Tripp had landed on his feet, though. His track record helped him nab a position at a big Madison Avenue advertising firm, but the rest of his family suffered greatly. A few years ago, Tripp moved out to the suburbs to open his own boutique firm, to quote Bruce Springsteen, here in the swamps of Jersey.
“Do you want to sit down and talk?” Tripp asked.
“Sure.”
“There’s a coffee shop next door. Let’s take a stroll.”
Adam was about to argue—he wasn’t in the mood for a stroll—but Tripp started on his way.
Tripp Evans wore an off-white short-sleeved dress shirt flimsy enough to see the V-neck tee underneath. His suit pants were the brown of a middle school principal’s. His shoes looked too big for his feet—not orthopedics but one of those comfortable, less expensive brands that aimed for faux formal. In town, Adam was used to seeing Tripp in his clearly more comfortable coaching gear—the polo shirts with the Cedarfield Lacrosse logo, the crisp khakis, the baseball cap with the stiff brim, the whistle around his neck.
The difference was startling.
The coffee shop was an old-school greasy spoon, complete with a waitress who kept her pencil in her hair bun. They both ordered coffees. Just coffees. This wasn’t the type of place that served macchiatos or lattes.
Tripp placed his hands on the sticky table. “You want to tell me what’s going on?”
“My wife called you.”
“How do you know this?”
“I checked the phone records.”
“You checked . . .” Tripp’s eyebrows jumped up a bit at that. “Are you serious?”
“Why did she call you?”
“Why do you think?” Tripp countered.
“Was it about this whole stolen-money thing?”
“Of course it was about this stolen-money thing. What else would it be?”
Tripp waited for a reply. Adam didn’t give him one.
“So what did she say to you?”
The waitress came by, dropping the coffees with a thud that caused some to splash onto the saucer.
“She said that she needed more time. I told her I’d stalled long enough.”
“Meaning?”
“The other board members were growing impatient. Some wanted to confront her more aggressively. A few wanted to go to the police right away on a more official basis.”
“So how long has this been going on?” Adam asked.
“What, the investigation?”
“Yes.”
Tripp put some sugar in his coffee. “A month or so.”
“A month?”
“Yes.”
“How come you never said anything to me?”