Chapter Twenty-eight: Pater and daughter

The house was quiet when I got home at four a.m. No muffled screams from the basement. No smell of burning flesh. Was the Pater slacking off?

He was in the kitchen. Tiny tools were arrayed over the kitchen table with a surgeon’s precision. An old Timex watch with a leather strap lay before him.

Before I asked, he answered.

“He didn’t know his bosses,” he said. “Claimed they always wore masks and paid in cash. The number he had for them no longer works.”

“And you believe him,” I said.

“He was given much incentive to tell the truth.”

Translation: a lot of nasty, brutish things had been done to Redman.

I spread my fingers wide and pushed at the wall beside the fridge. Clenching one’s fists is cliché. So is punching a wall – not to mention hand-uglyfy-ing.

“What if they escalate to snipers just to get it done?” I asked.

“Then whoever wants the land will never get it. The Reyeses have a lot of relatives. Probate court. Etcetera, etcetera,” said the Pater.

“But they tried to torch the farm house while the family was inside,” I pointed out.

“They would have had time to get out of the house. The men were ordered to set the fire and pull back. Redman oversaw that bit of theatre.”

I chewed the inside of my lower lip. Something didn’t add up. “The farm is mortgaged. If they kill Mina’s parents, the loans don’t get repaid. Evil bank forecloses and the land gets auctioned.” The news had been clogged with mortgage meltdown stories for years. I even knew what a CDO was.

“The biggest lien on the Reyes’ farm was paid off last week. County recorder’s office doesn’t have the budget to secure their servers against a ten-year old.” The Pater wasn’t the world’s most elegant hacker, but he could get it done.

“Where did they get the money?” I asked.

He inserted a tiny microphone, recording chip and transmitter into the guts of the watch. “That’s a good question. But not one we can get answered in Chatham. They used one of the big banks.”

Large banks, especially international institutions, have sophisticated systems to protect their data and their money. It didn’t mean that some hackers weren’t successful. A few had made spectacular forays into some of the world’s largest digital vaults, transferring billions into little banks in little countries without extradition treaties. But we couldn’t attempt such a hack in Chatham. Things evolve rapidly in the cyber-sphere; if we missed a trick we would have to ditch the place and burn everything to the ground behind us – again.

“If we can’t get information the sneaky way, I’ll just ask Mina. Give my tiny honesty muscle some exercise,” I said.

My father screwed the back of the Timex into place. The second hand swept over the white background and black numbers. He brought up an application on the modified i-Pod hung around his neck and said to the watch: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

He pressed a spot on the i-Pod’s flat screen and Winston Churchill’s quote replayed. Then he handed me the watch. “For your boyfriend.”

“Thanks but he has a very nice one that’s about a thousand times more expensive than this heirloom, even after the internal pimping.” I placed the watch on the table and pushed it back with a finger. There was no way in hell I was going to let the Pater place another bug on Logan. I was already feeling enormous stinking piles of guilt over the tracking device on his car and the cameras and listening devices my father had put in and around his house.

“He’ll wear it because it’s from you. Logan will walk through fire for you.”

It was a disturbing to hear the Pater talk about my love life. It was even more disturbing to want him to be right. Analyzing other people and protecting me were his primary, self-appointed objectives. If anyone could tell me what Logan really felt about me, it would be my father.

“Why?” I wanted to know why he thought my boyfriend would immolate himself for me.

Instead, Dad-from-Hell said, “His father will find out he’s in Chatham sooner rather than later. His sitters should have pulled him out after Mina’s home was attacked. But they’re short-staffed and they haven’t done their homework on his Oxford High friends – lucky break for you. This is also the fourth place Logan and his mother were moved to. The government is running out of places to hide them.”

He pushed the watch back at me. “This will help me track him and protect him.”

I stared at the round white face and black numbers. Then closed my fingers around it and stuffed it into a pocket of my jacket.

I took pulpy orange juice out of the fridge, poured myself eight ounces and changed the subject. “Is he in the house?”

“No. Didn’t bring him here,” said the Pater.

I didn’t ask what he did with Redman. I didn’t ask where he put Redman. I didn’t ask if Redman was alive. I kept seeing his gun’s muzzle pressed to Logan’s head. Redman could burn in hell.

“It takes one to know one.” Riley’s words echoed in my head.

I was nothing like Riley. I was far, far worse.