Twin Genius

by Patricia Rice

  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 adventur
e 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.

  Chapter 25

  “You should have stayed home,” Julie whispered at her brother. “It does not take three of us to look for doors in dirt.” As far as she’d been able to tell from Lucas’s explanation, there was a concealed door in the back of the artificial hill that disguised the workings of the Jesus Cave, one of the park highlights.

  “I wouldn’t trust that skelm with a blade of grass,” Zander muttered as they followed Lucas along hedges in the direction of the back of the park. Under heavy clouds, the late afternoon light was gray enough to turn them into shadows. “For all I know, he’s a killer. Do we know where your FBI informant was last night?”

  “Not attending an invitation-only party for the rich where Melissa was killed,” she said scornfully. “They murdered his sister. He’s on our side.”

  “What exactly is our side?” Zander asked in exasperation as Lucas halted to peer through the sticks of the winter-barren hedge.

  “Reverend Arden, of course. He is in danger, and so is his school program. And now, Ana may be in danger as a witness, just the way I am. We must stop this killer.”

  “For all we know, Arden is a criminal who is hiding in a hospital bed,” Zander said with scorn. “You are too trusting. We should just tell the police what we suspect and go home.”

  “The police have been all over the park and have not found this room even though they had the blueprints. Lucas is the one who is helping!”

  “That is because there are two sets of blueprints,” Zander argued. “We should show the police the ones we found in Gregory’s files.”

  “Too late. They should have found them on their own. I bet they didn’t even know what they were. Lucas does.” Julie picked up speed when Lucas waved at them to proceed. She was being defensive because she was starting to feel the same as he. . . that they were doing something dangerously foolish.

  But Ana had already risked enough for them. Julie needed to learn the same courage.

  “The blueprint shows a door in the hill behind the cave,” Lucas said when he caught up with them. “We’ll need to go around the high side of the mound, and it would be best to stay off the road.” He pointed to the tractor path on the lower end. “We’ll have to go to the left to stay out of sight.”

  “All I see is a mound of dirt piled over a concrete arch,” Zander complained. “How can there be a door? And even if there is, how would we unlock it?”

  “I have Arden’s keys, but we won’t know what we can do until we find it.” Lucas began easing through the overgrown bushes surrounding the mound.

  Julie thought there might once have been a lovely hedged garden here. The digging had destroyed all but the remnants.

  Zander had his phone out. “We should call the police.”

  “Not until we have something to show them.” Lucas held up his hand to halt them.

  Julie peered around his shoulder. From their vantage point on the hill, she could see two men using a forklift to load a crate onto a rental truck on the far side of the mound. She zoomed up and took a quick photo but didn’t have time to do more before they climbed in the cab and drove off.

  They waited, listening, but Julie only heard the wind rustling in the hedge. Lucas slid out from under cover and started down.

  Cursing, Zander trotted off after him. With trepidation, Julie did the same, scrambling around the mound with thick brambles to conceal them.

  They found the door in the mound easily. Tire tracks led straight to it, although the door itself appeared to be solid rock. They eventually located a concealed hinge that hid a keyhole behind a rock-like plate. Lucas jiggled through his key
s until he found the ones he needed. After a few attempts, the lock clicked.

  Handing Julie the keys, he used both hands to tug the heavy door open. “It’s built strong enough to keep out an army,” he complained. “What the hell do they have in here?”

  He pulled out a flashlight and beamed it into the opening. “Shit.”

  Zander pushed past Julie to peer inside. His response was the same, only in a more familiar dialect. “Kak.” He began snapping photos with his phone.

  “Wait,” Julie said, grabbing his arm in panic. “I hear something.”

  The low roar of a heavy motor rumbled closer. Zander and Lucas repeated their imprecations.

  “If there’s evidence in there, I need to find it. I’m going inside. You two lie low.” Lucas jogged into the interior, taking his flashlight with him.

  Before Zander could imitate that macho stupidity, Julie grabbed her brother’s arm and tugged him toward the safety of the leafless hedge on the hill.

  The cave had been filled to the two-story ceiling with crates labeled General Defense. She had a very bad feeling deep in her belly as she started sending messages to Ana.

  I will not worry, I will not worry, I chanted inside my head as I once more caught the Metro for Alexandria and Arden’s hospital. He was still heavily guarded but no longer in intensive care, so I’d been given permission to visit again. I wanted to know how much he’d known or suspected about his board’s operations, but the visit would also put me closer to the park, where Julie and Zander had apparently gone.

  I didn’t like what they were up to, but I understood the urgency. I’d skimmed over their messages, knew what they were doing, and agreed it should be done. A large room under a make-believe mountain where gun crates had been unloaded sounded suspicious to me. I just didn’t want the twins looking into it, which was why I was trying to dial back my mother hen instinct.