by Meli Raine
The grateful expression on Jane’s face says it all. “Thanks.” They leave.
“Here’s the big question,” Drew says as I watch the dark hallway swallow them. “What do El Brujo and Nolan Corning’s secret dealings have to do with Senator Bosworth now?” From his tone, I can tell the question is rhetorical. I almost don’t care. Jane’s in a pool of anguish, and I just want to fix it all for her.
“El Brujo, John, Stellan, and Blaine are dead. Corning’s career is ruined. Now all the women who turned against Lindsay are dead, too. Someone’s systematically trying to kill Jane,” Mark adds, tapping his pen against his notes. “Jane is Bosworth’s daughter. Someone is trying to keep that very secret.”
“Or use that secret for their own reasons,” Drew muses.
He’s thinking about Monica Bosworth.
We all are.
“It’s too loose and too tight at the same time. Corning knows Jane is Harry’s daughter. Is that connected to Lindsay’s paternity? Or not? Corning was working with narco-traffickers to find backchannel ways to cross borders. I assume he got a cut. Used legislation to make it easy. When Harry wouldn’t play, he – what? What did he do?” Drew asks before swigging more beer.
“He ordered the guys to attack Lindsay.” I take a piece of pizza and start in.
“But not until Harry made it clear he was going for a second Senate term and was on a path to the White House.”
“Which was Monica’s goal all along,” Drew notes.
“Daddy’s, too,” Lindsay adds.
“But what about my mom?” Jane asks from the doorway, holding a very full glass of wine, this time rosé. “Sometime around that meeting in 1993, my mother was pregnant with me. Harry was sleeping with her. What did she have to do with all this back then?”
“I think the answer to that is really, sadly simple,” Mark says with sympathy.
“Sad?” Jane asks.
“I think Harry truly loved her.”
The wine in Jane’s glass starts to slosh as she trembles.
“She loved him. Devoted her entire life to him. Organized, coordinated, made his life smooth. All my childhood she told me that people with his kind of power needed to have all their little obstacles removed so they could tackle the big issues. That’s how she viewed herself. The person who made it possible for Harry to be Harry,” Jane says sadly.
“Monica must have hated every minute of Anya’s involvement,” Mark notes.
Jane startles. “You’re right.”
“And Monica strikes me as someone who doesn’t tolerate situations she doesn’t like,” Carrie adds.
“No kidding.” Jane points to herself. It makes my shoulders roll, neck cracking, tension leaking out.
“Then why, for all those years, did she let Anya work for Harry? Give her unfettered access to her husband, knowing they were in love? Monica’s as territorial as an un-neutered cat. She wants what she wants and isn’t afraid to mark her territory. And clear all the people who are in her way.”
“Maybe it was Harry? He insisted?” Jane’s voice is plaintive.
“Maybe.” Drew isn’t convinced.
“Or maybe Monica was playing a long game. A very long game. She knew that if Harry left her, she’d never get where she wanted to go. Maybe –”
Carrie cuts Drew off. “Maybe she went out and got pregnant on purpose.”
“Excuse me?” Lindsay’s tone is so haughty. It almost makes me laugh.
“What if she found out Anya was pregnant, but Harry didn’t know? Monica knew her days were numbered. Somehow knew Harry was going to leave her. So she slept with someone to get pregnant. Maybe Harry left her. Maybe getting pregnant with Lindsay brought him back.”
“That sounds like a Heart song from the 1970s.”
“Or a bad soap opera,” Drew says.
“What part of all this isn’t a bad soap opera?” Lindsay cracks.
The group makes sounds of acknowledgment, a series of snorts and hums and grunts that somehow settles me. It feels crazy because it is crazy. It feels over the top because it is over the top.
None of that matters, though. The bottom line is that someone is trying to kill everyone around Jane – and also Jane – and the longer this goes on, the more pain she experiences.
My job is to stop this.
I can’t until we know more.
“My mom went out and fucked some dude so she could get pregnant and convince my dad it was his, and keep him?” Lindsay speculates. “That sounds very desperate. Very calculated.” She sniffs exactly once. “That’s the definition of my mom.”
“We can’t know the facts until we learn more. It’s a decent working theory,” Mark says, giving her a respectful, somber look. “I’m sorry. I’ve always known who my birth father is, even if he wasn’t in my life.”
Jane flinches. “And I’ve always had him in my life, even if I didn’t know who he was,” she says bleakly.
I reach for her, taking her hand. She lets me. She squeezes.
“All this emotion,” Carrie whispers. “When my dad was accused and sent off to prison, I felt so betrayed by Mark.” Their eyes meet. The look between them carries an intensity I know too well.
“I was undercover,” he says apologetically.
“I know that now. I didn’t then. And when it all came out – El Brujo, how he’d used the university in town as his own drug factory, how his entire drug and sex-slave trafficking operation was happening right under everyone’s noses – after a while, I realized that pain was the real currency.”
“What do you mean?” Jane asks.
“Our pain is a kind of wealth. It has value. We are people capable of empathy. The ones manipulating and using violence and fear to gain power – they don’t have it. Not one drop. But they know we do. They use it against us. Our pain isn’t an accidental byproduct. It’s not some extra thing in these power plays as people try to skirt the law to get money or fame or control.”
“It’s not just a means to an end,” I say, understanding her point with a clarity that makes my already-bruised heart hurt more.
“No. It’s not. For some of these people, it is the point. They just don’t know it.”
Mark, Drew, and I all stare at Carrie. It’s Drew who speaks first.
“You mean they trade other people’s pain like they bribe or blackmail? The pain they know they trigger is a kind of currency.”
“It’s like Bitcoin. Or other cryptocurrencies. You have to mine it,” Jane blurts out, her voice unfocused and hushed. “You can buy it on an exchange now, but the way you make new cryptocurrency is to spend a lot of effort mining it.” Her head turns, eyes on Carrie, who looks back with a piercing gaze. “The pain is part of their empire. They mine it.”
“Yes.”
“That is fucked up,” Drew spits out.
“A moral person knows that,” Carrie continues. “And these people who eat pain and crave power know it on an intellectual level. But they don’t feel it. They don’t care that it damages people. That the pain rattles around inside us like a marble stuck in a piggy bank.”
“They’ve never cared,” Drew says, shrugging. “That’s why this is so black and white. They don’t care. People are important. Therefore, it’s our job to stop the ones who don’t care.”
“Sure. It’s your job. I would say it’s more, now that I’ve been with Mark for long enough to see it’s not just a job for you. It’s your mission. I would even say it’s your calling. You guys turn this into an ethical platform that drives you well beyond anyone else’s idea of what it means to keep people safe. It’s in your blood. You can’t not do this.”
“Right,” Drew, Mark, and I mutter at the same time.
“But the Nolan Cornings and El Brujos and Monica Bosworths of the world can’t help themselves, either,” Jane says with dawning horror. “It’s all they know.”
“It’s all they choose,” Carrie corrects her. “We have free will. We can choose how we channel what drives us.”
>
“Can we? Really? Because I don’t think people who are drawn to manipulate other people’s emotions are really making a choice. It’s like they don’t know better,” Lindsay says.
“They don’t want to know better,” Drew amends.
“This is getting deep,” I point out. “I thought I left political psychology class back in college.”
Drew snorts. “Left it behind? Gentian, you live it every day.”
“All of this philosophizing has to bring us back to nuts and bolts.” I smile at Carrie. “That’s not to say this isn’t important. It’s a critical linkage. But knowing they are manufacturing pain as an intentional product in these schemes needs to be connected to the bigger why. It’s not enough to say the why is their need to manipulate. That’s too tautological.”
Carrie’s eyebrows go up. “Now who is philosophizing? Bringing out the SAT words?”
“It’s circular,” Jane says, nodding. “They manipulate to create pain they can use to manipulate. We need to know the real why. The operational why.” She runs her hand along the white scrape and cut marks on her arms, left there by glass shards created by manipulators trying to cause physical pain.
Carrie looks at Jane’s arms, her eyebrows turning down, as if she feels the past pain, too. “They hurt our bodies.” Mark touches Carrie’s shoulder. “They take our limbs. My best friend has only one arm because of El Brujo. They steal our souls.”
“We refuse to let that happen. There is no understanding of the why that is going to work better than just stopping them. We can’t think our way out of Tara being bled out in a bar under our noses. Or Mandy being gutted by a van in broad daylight,” Drew announces.
Lindsay’s eyes close, her face processing emotional pain in real time.
“This is hard,” Carrie confesses, reaching for Lindsay’s hand. Her eyes fly open and she gives her a grateful half smile.
“When did you get so smart?” Mark jokes with Carrie. He doesn’t give a shit about lightening the mood. He does, however, fiercely love his woman.
She gives an aw shucks grin and shrugs. “I went to Yates University.”
“So did I,” Jane says, “and I didn’t figure all that out there.”
I check my phone as it buzzes. Text from someone in the data-mining department. There’s a PDF attached. It’s a spreadsheet, rows of numbers, deposits in a bank account. I text the guy back, who then loops Drew in.
“Hah!” Drew says from across the room, reading on his own phone. “Bingo!”
“What the hell is this?” I ask him. Everyone else in the room is confused.
Join the club.
“We may have figured out our why, Carrie,” Drew says, eyes on his phone, words directed to her. “New info.” He waggles his phone in the air.
“Well?” Mark demands.
“We’ve been sifting through every financial record we can get our hands on for Ignatio Landau, Claudia Landau, Nolan Corning, Blaine Maisri, Harry, Monica – you name it. Data analysts are all over every piece of info we can find. And they found patterns that led to this.”
“And this is...”
“Money laundering. Nolan Corning, Blaine Maisri, and Harry Bosworth’s campaigns were used to launder drug money from El Brujo’s drug trafficking operation.”
“Harry, too?” Jane asks in a small voice.
“Looks like it. We need to spend a lot more time with this information. Pin down exact dates, deposits, withdrawals, track down offshore accounts, trace everything.”
“Nowadays field work is more about data mining than going undercover,” Mark points out.
“Preliminaries, man. Preliminaries. Look at this,” Drew says, scrolling on his phone. He’s elated, grinning like a kid at his own birthday party eyeing the presents and cake. “We got ’em.”
“Got who?” Lindsay asks. “My dad?”
Jane catches my eye, moving closer to me, almost leaning. Almost. I want her to. I want her to use me for support. To relax against me. To find refuge.
Let me be here for you, I want to shout.
Instead, I squeeze her hand and give her the space to come to me.
But those eyes. Those haunted eyes. I know what she’s saying with those eyes.
My dad?
Chapter 13
Two weeks later
Jane
“Clear the table,” Duff huffs outside my door as I open it to find him standing there, holding two file boxes in his arms. I’m back at my apartment, stuck in limbo. Silas has been out of town for the last two weeks, completely incommunicado. All he told me about his trip was that he can’t talk about it, but Duff will take care of me.
And so far, Duff has.
By standing guard while giving me space.
Until now.
“What?”
“Move! These aren’t light.” I get out of his way as he hauls the boxes and hefts them onto my dining table.
“What’s all this?”
“Your requested delivery from Alice Mogrett’s ranch.”
“How many boxes are there?”
“Fifty-three. This round.”
“Fifty-three? And what do you mean, ‘this round’?”
“You asked for her personal records. Her staffers are complying.”
“My apartment isn’t big enough for this!” I protest.
“Then get a bigger apartment.”
Fifty-three boxes later, my living room looks like a law firm’s file-storage vault.
Duff didn’t bring it all in, but he brought enough. I know there is more, either en route or in a storage place. I offer him coffee. He declines.
“You are such a coffee snob, Duff.”
“We all have our flaws.”
I sigh, looking at the neatly stacked white boxes, blue lids uniform and intimidating. “I’ve got my work cut out for me. At least I won’t be bored.”
“Your life is never boring.”
“I’m ignoring all social media, never online, and Silas is gone.”
Duff squints at me. “I thought you said you hated him. Why would you care that he’s gone?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Life is complicated.”
“Well, then whatever I think about Silas is quantum-physics-level complicated.”
“No one deserves that level of complexity. Bet it’s simpler than you think.”
“Why, Duff, I do believe you just ventured into talking about feelings.”
“Like I said, Jane, flaws. We all have them.” He backs out of the apartment with a wry grin and closes the door gently.
Leaving me with nothing but Alice.
Not literally; she was cremated, her ashes stored in her studio until a proper memorial can be scheduled. I’m sure I won’t be able to attend that. I’m her heir. The media’s died down, slightly, in its frenzy about me. I wasn’t anywhere near Jenna when they found her in that crack house, so while the spin doctors keep the story alive, there’s no real hook.
I’m background noise in the media landscape.
Not the main melody.
I pour myself a glass of water and pull one box off a stack, setting it on the coffee table in front of the couch. Each box is numbered. This is number thirteen.
Let’s start with bad luck, shall we?
I open it, my nose tickled by the scent of old paper and a distinct odor that makes me think of Alice. I smile. She was so kind. So firm and unyielding in her opinions.
So... Alice.
This first box is slow going, filled with the same kind of stupid clutter we all struggle with – offers in the mail, newspaper clips about interesting art, science, self-help. Alice clearly loved The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and other magazines with in-depth, long-form journalism. As I sort through the box, I make stacks. Most of this will be recycled.
I’m looking for a specific paper regarding Alice’s intellectual property. All that art has enormous value, and I’ve been told there is a form Alice signed years ago that ensures property r
ights transfer to the trust that was created for her works. When people come from the kind of wealth Alice’s family had, the byzantine twists and turns in paperwork and legalities that make the wealth make sense are breathtaking.
Lottie Crenshaw at Hedding Stuva offered to have law clerks go through this for me. As I stare at the stacks, a sense of overwhelming anxiety starts to take over.
Maybe I should have said yes to her offer.
“No,” I tell myself. “I need to do this. This is Alice. I need to be with her. She gave me so much. I can give her back this show of respect. This actual respect.”
I’ve reached a point where I’m talking to myself.
By the time I get to the bottom of the first box, I realize I need a few supplies. A paper shredder, for one. Blank file folders, to re-organize information.
And a lot more coffee.
The impulse to get up and do twenty different things at once is hard to curb.
My phone rescues me.
A text from Lindsay: We need to hang out.
I’m sorting through fifty-three boxes of paperwork from Alice’s estate. Want to rescue me?
Are you stuck doing it no matter what? Because if the answer is yes, I’m busy. I get a silly emoji at the end.
No deadline. Just steady work. Alice had a weird obsession with magazine articles about psychopaths, I add.
Makes sense. Her dad was a politician, too.
I burst out laughing, the feeling such a relief. I’ve done nothing but binge-watch television and read dead-tree books, avoiding two-way media.
It feels good to connect with someone and just laugh.
How about tonight? I text back. I’ll have made headway into all this. Looking for estate documents. I have an actual task to perform.
Don’t let it go to your head now that you’re richer than me.
That doesn’t make me laugh.
I stare at the words, twenty-five years of not being rich weighing down on me. Technically, I have no money. Hedding Stuva is working to release the first wave of money to me, an allowance that will help me get as much of this overwhelming estate in a position for me to take over control as needed – and as allowed.
