Chapter 24

Julie woke with a snort, straightened too quickly, and almost toppled over. Fortunately, the bed was large. She grabbed her laptop before it hit the floor.

She remembered someone waking her downstairs in the library and leading her to her room. She must have brought her laptop with her and continued working in bed, then fallen asleep again, sitting upright. She clicked the computer open to see where she’d left off, and the battery manager gave her a notice of imminent demise.

Dragging herself from the warm bed, she tottered to the tiny bathroom, splashed water on her face, and finally recalled what she’d been working on—the videos, the months of appalling videos.

Drying her face, she ran back to her phone and checked her messages. Last night, she’d hated texting the dwankie, but Lucas was the only person crazy enough to go back to the park. She wouldn’t send Zander.

This morning, Lucas had sent her an image of a blueprint from Gregory’s office that meant nothing. . . .

Jislaaik! She widened her eyes as she understood what he was telling her with this complicated image. She needed tea. Her mind was working too slowly. Without changing from yesterday’s clothes, she dashed into the hall to check Zander’s door, but the overachiever was already up and about. Since she was safe now, he had no reason to be working so hard, but he’d dug his teeth into the park puzzle and wouldn’t let go.

She was grateful, because the authorities were certainly operating on backward time. Lava couldn’t move slower. She ran downstairs to find Zander in the library.

He had acquired another monitor and computer. He glanced up from his eternal spreadsheets in concern when she rushed in. “You should still be sleeping!” he scolded.

“So should you.” She slapped her phone down in front of him. “Tell me what this looks like.” She opened the blueprint image first, then the image from her video camera that she’d sent to Lucas last night.

Zander shook his head. “Big room,” he said, shrugging at the drawing. Flipping to the shadowy night photo she’d clipped from the video, he wrinkled his forehead. “A pallet of crates.”

She zoomed up the image to show lettering on the crates. “This comes from my camera at the back of the park, near the Jesus cave, where the park has no security cameras. I thought the cave would make good footage, but I think I’ve caught thieves. These crates are being transported by forklift—at night—on the video. The park is supposed to be closed at night.”

He studied her phone some more. “I see a large G and a large D but I cannot read the small letters in between.”

Clenching her teeth to keep them from chattering, she sat down at the table, fiddled with his computer, then called up the cloud account where they’d been storing images for everyone’s use. “Patra and Graham were working on General Defense’s warehouses yesterday. Here’s a shot from there.”

He turned the monitor so he could see what she’d called up. “This shows large crates prepared for shipment,” he said, not understanding. “That is what factories do.”

She pointed at the extra large G and D imprinted on the sides of the crate.

Zander flipped back to the night picture from the park. “They’re storing weapons underneath Jesus?”

I woke up beneath Graham’s suffocating—naked—weight. A warm, strong body in my bed felt so good that I chose to wallow in sensation for a moment. He had one arm over my—bare—breasts and a leg pinning my thighs. I was pretty certain I had been dressed the last time I remembered being awake—in the bathroom of the 701. I blocked that and returned to enjoying naked pleasure.

I thought I’d remember being ravished, and I didn’t. That was a shame. Graham and I had never slept together, but I was willing to have my space invaded if this was the result.

His breathing changed, and I figured he was waking up.

I opened my eyes to check, and the first thing I saw was a ceiling made of midnight with galaxies swirling across it. I was in Graham’s bed. No wonder I was comfortable. My futon left a lot to be desired in comparison to his cushy mattress.

“Why am I here?” I asked aloud, just because.

His big hand played an amazing tune on my breasts. He lifted himself over me so all I could see were wide, muscled shoulders and pectorals—and his perpetual scowl. Then he kissed me, and I forgot the question.

I lost track of time as well. At some point, I became vaguely aware of an occasional pinging chime, but not until we were fully satiated and sprawled amid the twisted covers did the noise begin to annoy. I lay there in almost contentment and admired the ceiling again.

Graham growled and sat up. “Four. They’re all loose in the wild.”

I considered that, but thinking meant remembering last night, and I wasn’t ready yet. “Not computing.”

“Your family.” He dragged the sheet off and wrapped it around his waist, not out of modesty but because it was cold up here. Leaving me the comforter, he stalked like a lion toward the bathroom. “Every one of them is out of their cage and roaming free.”

“You track when my family leaves their rooms?” I asked in incredulity, flinging a pillow after his broad, scarred back.

“Servant bells, so they know when to make up rooms,” he called over his shoulder. “The attics used to be for servants. That’s the original purpose of the hidden staircase. It has a door in Max’s old room if you don’t want to be seen.”

Really, the man needed to be put out of my misery. He had just given me the most incredible sexual experience in my life—not that we’re saying much here—and then he walked off as if it was nothing.

I’d take an ax to his head, except I was pretty sure he had brought me here last night to comfort me, so I didn’t have to be alone with my horror.

Curmudgeon that I am, I preferred to be distracted by irritation. Yanking on last night’s little black dress, I gathered up the rest of my clothes and sauntered down the hall to his office. It was good to know that Graham actually slept occasionally.

I could hear voices carrying up the main stairs, but I was more curious about the hidden exits.

I knew that the spiral steps behind the office wall went down to the closet in the bedroom Magda was currently occupying, two floors below. It made sense that the stairs would also connect to a room on the level in between. I just hadn’t realized it, and Graham had never told me. I was so going to kill him—or I would, except I was pretty sure the stairs didn’t connect to the study I slept in. Score one for me.

I took the stairs down, found the door, and entered Max’s old bedroom from behind an ancient wardrobe, of course. I didn’t emerge from a snow-covered Narnia, but this uninhabited room was close enough to a dusty old attic. The wardrobe hid the sliding door but someone had conveniently left enough space between the wall and the wardrobe for me to get out.

My grandfather’s chamber was stuffy. The ancient bed probably could use a new mattress, and the fading gray covers were moth-eaten. But it was private, and no one saw me make the walk of shame to my own room in the adjoining study. Nice.

As I showered and regained a few of my neurons, I let last night creep back to me. Melissa and Rebecca had deserved better, much, much better, than ignominious death by greedy thugs who treated them like disposable napkins. My guess was that it wasn’t the hired help who’d killed Melissa last night in that fancy venue, not by a long shot. But no matter how wealthy their killers might be or what justified their actions, they were no better than common criminals. I couldn’t bring the women back to life, but I could avenge their deaths. Anger felt better than grief and shock. I knew how to use anger.

I stepped out of the shower, knowing it was already too late to see EG off to school. I was pretty certain she had only half a day of school today, and then she was on vacation until after New Year’s Day. I had to solve this mess now. Melissa’s death, practically in my arms, had made it personal.

Downstairs I grabbed tea and toast, waved at a groggy Tudor, looked in on Julie and Zander safely bent over their computers, and dashed down to my office. I needed to see what had come in last night, if anyone had chased the shooter.

I read through Nick and Patra’s reports, combed all the videos, read the police reports, and sat up, more furious than ever.

The police didn’t have bullets for George Paycock or the woman we were assuming to be Esther, so they were operating in limbo. Lacking our information about CAD, they had no reason to associate those bodies with Melissa’s murder. Yet.

Whoever Graham’s security guards had chased had escaped before they could catch a look at him, or her. Witnesses had reported that the shooter hadn’t been large and had blended instantly into the fleeing crowd. The cowardly guests had panicked the instant they’d heard a commotion and left the building.

I thought the size of the shooter might eliminate most of the armed security brutes I’d noticed around the room. A man using the women’s room might have been noticed, but I couldn’t be certain of that. That the shooter had blended so well into the crowd indicated he or she was most likely one of the rich party-goers. The catering staff would have been noticeable shoving out the door. I needed to know if security had identified those allowed to conceal carry. I shot a note to Graham.

Family/spouse/lovers were usually first to be suspect in any murder. According to these reports, at the time of the shooting, Melissa’s sponsor, Ed Parker, had been talking to Hammond, the oil magnate, in full view of the entire room. I’d seen them myself. I doubted either of them would have had time to make their way through the crowd to the women’s restroom. And if Melissa really was just Ed’s beard, then there was no emotional involvement to elevate him to any special status.

I continued hunting for names of others associated with CAD. Tony Jeffrey had been surrounded by Paul Rose and his entourage. Even Rose had been in full view, much as I hated his manipulative guts and wanted him behind bars.

With her dying words, Melissa had mentioned George Paycock, who was already dead, and GenDef. General Defense is a company, not a person, and couldn’t kill anyone—not point blank anyway.

The JACAD contractor’s employee who had confronted me at the hospital had been arrested. I verified he was still behind bars. That had been about my visiting Arden. I couldn’t see how artistic Melissa fit in with skinheads and construction workers.

I checked police files on Tony Jeffrey’s skinhead bodyguards, the ones who had attacked Julie and her friends at the hotel. The punks had been let loose on bail. Excrement. GenDef’s good lawyers had reduced their bond, thus verifying the thugs had been employed by the weapons manufacturer. They could have been among the hired brutes circling the room last night, and I might not have noticed. I trusted Graham to review the security camera videos because I didn’t have time or his obsessive acuity.

George killed Esther. . . and probably Owen, Melissa had said.

I ran a search on my files in the Jesus World folder and found Owen Black, the construction worker who had died of a broken neck last spring and whose body had been found in a shallow grave in October. The police case had gone cold, with some speculation that he might have fallen or been shoved and someone covered it up.

George Paycock had been a highly paid CFO, an embezzler, and a womanizer from all reports. Why on earth would he kill a construction worker? How would Melissa know that Paycock had killed Esther? The police hadn’t even confirmed the identity of Esther’s body yet.

So many events were tied to October. . . .

I began another spread sheet. Owen Black died of a broken neck, approximately in April, about the time Melissa left school to live with Ed Parker. Melissa must have known Owen to mention him in her dying words.

I added Mrs. Overcamp, the school’s marketing administrator and mother of William Gregory, the general contractor, to my worksheet. She had introduced the school’s second year students to predatory board sponsors like Ed Parker and George Paycock. Julie’s overheard conversation indicated Gregory was somehow getting kickbacks from the party arrangement and Overcamp knew about it. Or the school received contributions, not kickbacks, that paid the contractor—the more likely scenario. The women would chat up rich old men and the old men would pull out their checkbooks to impress them—morally deficient but not much different from lobbyists promising legislation, sports tickets, or other perks for contributions to their candidates.

Back to my chart. Sometime after Owen Black disappeared from the picture, Melissa hooked up with Ed, Esther connected with George Paycock, and Rebecca was chumming with William Gregory. The three women rode high all summer, escaping the school slum of a trailer park to live in fancy digs and attend parties with the likes of Tony Jeffrey and other wealthy corporate types.

Then their high life came tumbling down in the fall. In October, Owen’s body was found in a shallow grave, and George Paycock was accused of embezzling from GenDef. Rebecca’s body was found in the Potomac.

In early December, Paycock went missing, and Julie captured the image of man’s body being bulldozed. I was uncertain of the timeline on Esther’s disappearance. Julie had said she’d left the school in September. I should have asked Melissa when she’d last seen her friend.

In late December, Joshua Arden was shot at, Julie and Maryam were threatened, and I was accosted by an idiot at the hospital, outside Arden’s room. And just a day or two ago, Paycock’s body was found buried in the park, along with a woman who might be Esther. The DNA and dental reports were still out.

But Ed and Melissa had safely been an item until now, until I started interfering. Anger nicely squelched my guilt.

I pulled up Zander’s financial spreadsheet. He’d started tracing the companies receiving large funds from the park. Gregory’s construction company received an extortionate share. Could rusted dinosaurs or giant holes in the ground cost that much?

Zander had dug into the construction company’s expense accounts, good boy. My eyes almost popped as I recognized the lobby groups and super-PACs Gregory was paying into. No wonder the guy was going bankrupt! Million-dollar political donations made no sense for a construction company barely keeping its head above water.

It only made sense from the standpoint of the park’s sponsors: Gregory’s construction firm was no more than a money-laundering account.

My guess was that Gregory didn’t even control his own funds.

GenDef, Hammond Oil, Goldrich Mortgage, et al, contributes huge sums to JACAD, a charitable organization promising to build schools in third world countries. Their boards approve. The IRS approves. Everyone is happy.

JACAD turns around and invests in charitable projects, like the schools and park construction. The IRS again approves because the money is going for the non-profit’s stated cause. Nice. They’re not about to audit the value of rusted dinosaurs. That was the duty of JACAD’s board.

But JACAD’s board of directors was made up of officers from the same companies contributing to the park. And the board approved expenditures and financial statements and never questioned exorbitant invoices—probably because they had undercover deals that bloated them on purpose.

Gregory’s construction company probably wasn’t the only one receiving large sums for services not performed. I assumed the modus operandi would be the same for the others. The smaller, non-public companies the park was paying for catering or lumber or construction equipment turned around and donated the excess to super-PACs supporting Paul Rose, the park board’s candidate of choice. Such political donations would never have been approved by the boards and stockholders of the large, for-profit companies the park board represented. But these small, non-public businesses and private persons could pour money into lobbies to their hearts’ content. No one would be irate to see a small firm like WGCI contributing to the gun lobby’s PAC. No one knew who the heck they were or cared.

Jesus World was just a funnel for lobbying money. A few stray dollars occasionally got spent on the intended purpose of the amusement park and schools.

Josh Arden was an idiot.

He was also a sitting duck, if the police reports were any indicator. On the surface, the only person benefitting from the cooked books would be Arden—he was getting a park out of the subterfuge. Paycock would have known what was happening, could possibly have objected, so his death could be attributed to Arden. The police would automatically associate all the deaths they knew about at CAD to one killer—leaving out Melissa and Rebecca because they wouldn’t grasp the connection to CAD.

Until Arden was shot, he’d been their main suspect. He might still be, for all I knew. That old “falling-out among thieves” cliché worked to cover his shooting.

Arden probably should have shot Paycock and most of his thieving board, but I was pretty sure he hadn’t. His kind prayed, then called the law, instead of seeking revenge.

And that was probably a clue right there—had Josh Arden threatened to call the law and got himself shot? Who had he threatened? Unless I was missing something here, he hadn’t reported anything to anyone before or after the shooting.

I checked my email box. Magda, of course, had sent me nothing. In typical Magda fashion, she’d jumped in when she’d seen one of her offspring threatened, handled last night’s adventure by covering up everything, and then vanished into the mist. I was accustomed to benign neglect and expected no more.

My mother worked alone—or occasionally with the CIA or other shady organizations, I suspected. I didn’t know how I felt about her shoving me out of trouble last night. I can take care of myself pretty well, but I’d been pretty shattered. Calling the cops had been my honest reaction, but maybe not the smartest move. I didn’t want to have to hide in Graham’s mansion fortress until the killer was found.

So for my anonymity, I was grateful.

The police were happy with the grainy video and recording from my fascinator. It only showed the toilet stall, but it had picked up Melissa’s message to Arden before the two pops. That gave them direction—probably a wrong one, again. I couldn’t have told them any more than they knew—except maybe her last words. The whisper had been less than clear on the recording.

The police were still scouring Melissa’s apartment, looking for anything she might have on Arden. They’d probably find my Linda Lane card. I forwarded the phone number to an answering service in India. That would take them a while.

Judging from the frustrated reports obtained by Graham’s inside police contact, Ed Parker had hired a lawyer to guard the apartment while the police searched it. I wished them all well. Given the level of chaos Melissa lived in, they’d be lucky to find her car keys.

I did stumble across one item in the file—a photo of Melissa with a young man in jeans and t-shirt. They had their arms around each other and looked blissfully happy. His face seemed familiar. I have a retentive memory when it comes to faces but not names.

But I’d just drawn up a timeline with the name Owen Black. . . .

I dug deeper into my folders and came up with the police report on Owen. There was his high school photo. He was younger, leaner, with longer hair, but I was pretty darned sure that this was the man in the photo with Melissa.

Damn.

Ed Parker had probably been a rebound after Owen disappeared off the face of the map. Given her lack of news knowledge, when had Melissa learned they’d found his body? Last night? I could very easily imagine grief rocking her world. So, what had she done to get shot—blackmail? Revenge? Blind fury? All of the above?

I didn’t have time to dwell on what I might never know. An email from Patra joined the others streaming in. Wanting to find out what she’d learned about Tony Jeffrey, I opened hers first.

It merely contained a domestic violence report on William Gregory, the park’s general contractor. Charming jerk. His first wife had taken a restraining order out on him. He’d been convicted of assaulting a girlfriend and spent time in jail for threatening a police officer afterward. And he was working with Jesus World, how?

Because no one else would hire him, because his mama worked with the board, and he would agree to anything to keep his daddy’s company open.

I didn’t think I was making too far a leap in that judgment.

Julie had said the construction trailer on site seemed to be his only office. Which meant the accounting books Zander was accessing weren’t there, since the trailer had contained no computer. More evidence that Billy-Boy didn’t control his own funds, just the bulldozers.

And then I remembered poor Rebecca, the strangled girl in the Potomac, last known as a companion of William Gregory. Bingo. Bully-Boy had just become a major suspect. I ran a search and found a William Gregory with a boating license at the same address as the construction company. Melissa had said Rebecca’s boyfriend had a boat—and Rebecca had ended in the Potomac. All signs pointed to a fight on board that led to Rebecca going over the side. I sent the domestic violence file along with my notes about Rebecca to Graham. He could feed them to the police.

My gut was churning. Would a man who beat his wife and assault his girlfriends shoot a powerful executive like George Paycock? The police reports showed a brutal man who liked to use his fists. Shooting didn’t seem to be his routine. And he’d have no reason to shoot at Arden—his bread and butter. Or poor Melissa.

But he controlled the bulldozers and could very well have buried Owen and George and the unknown female, if ordered to by the man or men writing his paycheck.

Realizing none of the email filling my box was from Zander or Julie, I dashed up the stairs just to reassure myself of their safety.

The library was empty.