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JAMES PATTERSON

Over tea in his town house, she noticed, Epstein ate all the finger food that had been put out for both of them. She found it odd that the only book this supposedly brilliant man had left for her to see was a paperback by the Marquis de Sade. And then there was the call afterward from one of Epstein’s assistants—a woman Ward did not know—who told her, “Jeffrey wanted me to tell you that you looked so pretty.”

Ward is pretty, with fine English features and flowing blond hair. She was also very pregnant then, with a bad case of morning sickness. She threw up often, sometimes in public, and these clumsy advances on Epstein’s part only added to her ever-present nausea. For a man who was supposedly brilliant, he’d struck her, oddly, as not very smart.

“Epstein is charming, but he doesn’t let the charm slip into his eyes,” she wrote. “They are steely and calculating, giving some hint at the steady whir of machinery running behind them. ‘Let’s play chess,’ he said to me, after refusing to give an interview for this article. ‘You be white. You get the first move.’ It was an appropriate metaphor for a man who seems to feel he can win no matter what the advantage of the other side. His advantage is that no one really seems to know him or his history completely or what his arsenal actually consists of. He has carefully engineered it so that he remains one of the few truly baffling mysteries among New York’s moneyed world. People know snippets, but few know the whole.”

The testimonials Epstein’s friends gave were glowing: “I think we both possess the skill of seeing patterns,” Les Wexner told her. “Jeffrey sees patterns in politics and financial markets, and I see patterns in lifestyle and fashion trends. My skills are

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