I opened mine just to be certain it wouldn’t explode.
Inside was a box from a leather store. Gingerly, I lifted the lid. A sleek black leather case larger than a wallet but smaller than a clutch lay nestled in protective paper. An emblem of some sort was embossed into one brass-protected corner. The case snapped together on nearly invisible edges. It looked like an extremely expensive day planner, which would be typical of Magda’s non-technical mindset. But I was pretty certain it wasn’t a calendar.
I unsnapped the case, and with one finger, lifted the top edge.
A photo of my father, Magda, and me as a toddler stared back at me. I studied it for a long time. I couldn’t remember ever seeing Brody Devlin’s image, although, since I recognized his devastatingly handsome face and daredevil smile, I must have seen photos at some time. I was only four when he died. Could I be remembering him from all those years ago? I had no childhood scrapbooks to call up memories, but this image of me with long black hair and a fringe across my brow was unmistakable. I didn’t look particularly happy to be posing, but I was wearing a frilly dress and hair bows. That would make anyone frown.
I turned the vinyl page and found a photo of Nick and me next. He was probably two, so I must have been seven. He was a grinning golden-haired imp in cute overall shorts. I was a scowling, black-haired guard dog in torn denim.
I don’t know where Magda had found these photos, but I was misty-eyed by the time I flipped through images of me with my siblings at different ages. There was even one of the twins playing with a lion cub while I stood to one side, holding a big stick. She’d chosen photos that displayed all my best and worst traits. I wanted to hate her for understanding me so well.
But she’d gone to a lot of work to prove she cared.
Shattered, wiping back tears, I wrapped the box back up again and returned it beneath the tree. I might have to order everyone to save Magda’s gifts for last or we’d all weep through our first Christmas together.
I turned off the lights and trudged upstairs. Graham met me in my room. Graham never showed himself in public spaces below his attic level. I would have been worried, except he held out his arms as he never had before. It was all the encouragement I needed. I fell into them, weeping. I never cry. It’s a policy of mine. But for just this moment of weakness, I poured like a teapot.
He held me against his muscled chest until I recovered.
“Like Max, and you, she hides the soft bits,” he murmured.
“And maybe, like you,” I suggested, wiping my eyes.
“Don’t hold your breath on that one,” he said dryly.
He led me up the secret stairs to his war office, where he punched a few keys and set up a video on his biggest monitor. When he pushed the forward button, I knew this was a recording, not real time. The camera view of Jesus World being lit by police lights unfolded.
The police and feds had been busy over the past few days while I hadn’t been watching. There were now gaping ditches and construction equipment everywhere.
I knew from Graham’s missives that, so far, the police and the feds had dismantled strategically planted IEDs under fence posts and uncovered stashes of weapons and explosives, all in GenDef crates. The entire park was riddled with hiding places.
The complete paper trail didn’t exist yet, but forensic accountants were working on it. They already knew that George Paycock the Embezzler had been siphoning General Defense’s funds into the park. The feds had been assuming he was stealing money, but the motive was no longer as clear as they’d believed. With Zander’s and Graham’s help, the authorities were far down the trail of proving the park board had been transferring the stolen funds to Paul Rose contributors, who then gave it to Rose PACs.
GenDef was essentially buying themselves a presidential candidate who would support more wars and promise not to ban guns, thereby assuring their existence for another millennium or two.
But along with funds, the park board had also been accepting, and concealing, shipments of weapons, with the aid of Gregory’s construction company.
Tony Jeffrey was on the park board and had to be aware of what was happening. Laura Jeffrey hadn’t been a director, and she was claiming the shipments were perfectly legitimate from the company’s end. But either she was lying or Georgie had been shipping weapons even after his death. And that didn’t even touch on the illegality of unlicensed weapon caches.
Now that the police had enough evidence to convict Laura of poisoning Arden and shooting Melissa—she’d kept the gun she’d used in her bedroom drawer—they weren’t much inclined to believe her protestations of innocence. Tony had lawyered up. We weren’t hearing much from him.
“They’ve found shipping manifests,” Graham said, halting the film to show the peaceful park in a light layer of this evening’s fresh snow. “The weapons and explosives were leaving GenDef’s warehouse as defective materials scheduled for recycling. The park has no record of receiving them, but enough of Julie’s film shows trucks arriving at night, after the gates were secured.”
“Gregory allowed them in the back gate, where there were no security cameras,” I suggested. “They didn’t know about Julie’s cameras. They stored the weapons—for what?”
“Some of them went to domestic paramilitary wingnuts willing to pay outlandish prices for arsenals to save them from our own government. The majority, however, appear to have ultimately been sold at hugely inflated prices on the world market, to terrorists on the banned list. GenDef more than covered the donations they made to the park.”
“Then George Paycock started blackmailing Laura?” I guessed.
“Eventually,” he agreed. “They’ve finally found a bullet in the foundation where they found George. It matches Laura’s gun—not enough for conviction but telling.”
“What about Esther and the other guy buried there?”
“Owen was working on the underground bunkers. We found texts on his phone asking his boss pointed questions. Gregory claims he forwarded those questions to the board, and his phone reflects that.”
“So we’ll never know who killed Owen and Esther unless someone confesses?” I kept staring uneasily at the peaceful park scene on the monitor, looking for answers.
“George Paycock was Laura’s lover,” he said baldly. “We have evidence and witnesses.”
“Uh oh.” I sighed and leaned back against him. “The plot thickens. Laura got tired of George and found someone new. George started blackmailing her about the weapons.”
He nodded against my head. “Among other things. But while they were still happily together, they discussed the problem of Owen being too smart for his own good.”
“So Paycock promised to answer questions and met with him at the back of the park, out of sight of the cameras. Shoving Owen over the brink of one of those holes could have broken his neck.” I hated having an imagination. I could almost visualize the whole scenario.
“That’s the most likely story. We have evidence that George was Laura’s go-to guy for anything she needed done, but I don’t know if we can pin Owen’s death directly to her.”
No wonder I had more bodies than suspects if the killers started killing each other. “Owen may have talked about the bunkers with Melissa, who could have said something to Arden.”
“She was a particularly clueless young woman, but you’re right, she told Arden. He’s starting to talk. He could turn out to be a key witness,” Graham said. “Ed Parker swears he was merely supporting Melissa’s art and knows nothing of anything, but they’ve searched his hunting lodge and found more crates of weapons. He might not have killed anyone, but he knew what the board was doing. He’ll talk too.”
“By eliminating Owen, and passing Melissa on to Ed, who may actually be supporting her career. . .” I pondered that, decided my head might explode, and gave it up. “Without Owen, Melissa shut up, and Arden wrote her off as just another crazy who disappeared from his radar. Cover-up continues as planned. But then Georgie got greedy,
right?”
“Keeping both a wife and two mistresses is expensive,” Graham said, hugging me tighter. “He wanted a bigger cut. Laura probably broke off any relations with him when she learned about Esther. But what really undid him—and Laura was spitting mad when she told this—was that Esther learned about his embezzling. When she and George had a fight, Esther reported it to Arden. Laura says Arden told her he’d been praying over what he should do.”
“Which was why Esther had to disappear.” I groaned at Arden’s idiocy and Laura’s arrogance in believing what she wanted was more important than the lives of others. “I don’t suppose she would also admit to killing her?”
I leaned into Graham, waiting for the moment he started playing the park video again. The falling snow frozen on the screen said the film had been taken this evening. I already knew I wouldn’t like whatever he was building up to.
“The DNA report verified the woman buried in the same area as George was Esther, but her wounds were from a different size gun. They found some of George’s DNA beneath her fingernails. My assumption is that once Laura heard that Esther had revealed the embezzling, she would have told George to get rid of her. With Owen’s successful murder under his belt, there was nothing to stop George from ending the problem of an expensive mistress and snitch in the same way. The police are going over Esther’s phone records and possessions now that we have ID, but we probably don’t have a case against Laura there.”
I shuddered. “George had his lover dumped in the park, then Laura did the same to him? Not very creative of her.”
“He’d already been accused of embezzling. He had become a liability who could easily have spilled her involvement. With him gone, she could persuade her father to let her take over his position, eliminating the middle man.”
“And then Arden started asking questions, finally and at long last. The man is just too dumb or too trusting, I can’t decide which.”
“Whatever, he’s not of our world.”
Amen, I thought, before asking, “What about the yahoo who tried to strong-arm me at the hospital? Wasn’t he Gregory’s employee, not Laura’s?”
“But he was working under orders from GenDef. He was their security guard at the gate. He just had Gregory’s ID tag. Gregory might be abusive scum and willing to take money under the table and turn a blind eye, but the board—and his mother—kept him out of everything else.”
“Mrs. Overcamp? Just exactly what part did she play?” I liked snuggling. I liked that he was talking instead of simply sending me police reports. I was willing to postpone the inevitable all night.
“She’s been an ardent Arden supporter for years and probably the person he trusted most. If she told him not to worry his pretty little head, he believed her. She helped choose the photogenic candidates. The photos Julie found in the trailer were Overcamp’s—she was once a professional photographer. Some of the men admitted she used the photos for a little discreet blackmail.”
“Wow, and I suppose all in the name of Josh Arden and his holy mission. I almost like it,” I said in admiration. “The rich sleaze balls had to pay for their sins.”
He snorted at my interpretation of blackmail and continued. “She kept the construction company books. She knew if the students played their parts right, donations poured into the park, so she doled out the concert tickets and party invitations to those who played their part best. She had all the links to the board’s wrongdoing right in front of her, but we have no proof that she understood anything beyond the money keeping the construction company and the park alive.”
“She understood enough to bug Julie’s phone,” I pointed out. “She knew her son’s history of violence. She’s no innocent, but she’s probably not a murderer. How did Tony’s bodyguards get involved in shooting Arden?”
“Laura had her father hire the bodyguards so she had someone to do her bidding after George was gone. They’re blabbing everything they know to lessen their sentences. She told the guards to get rid of Arden, and when they failed, she sent them after the witnesses. Julie’s friends would probably have been killed and framed for Arden’s shooting. Laura’s attorneys are claiming their client is under the care of physicians who prescribed the wrong medications.”
I snuggled into his arms and closed my eyes. “Who’s to say that arrogance isn’t a mental illness? Allowing too much power into the hands of a few leads to Caligula.”
He chuckled. “Only you could make that leap of judgment.”
“I’ll wait for the newspapers to explain all the connections. Show me what you want to show me and then let’s go to bed. EG will be up before dawn.”
He held an arm around my waist as he pressed a remote. The park film flickered to life. Snow fell on the Ferris wheel and dinosaur skeletons and coated evergreens and tree limbs. A police security guard climbed into his car and drove away, heading in the direction of the market coffee house. Couldn’t blame him there. It was Christmas Eve, and he had a boring job on a cold night.
The security lights flickered and died.
“Pulled the plug, did she?” I asked in resignation.
Graham hugged me tighter and said nothing. The film was short. One moment, the park was peaceful and dark. In the next, small strategic fires developed simultaneously near all the weapons bunkers. The feds had still been inventorying the arsenal and hadn’t moved them all.
The bunkers, predictably, exploded.
“Timing devices?” I suggested wearily.
“No other way.” He clicked off the film as sirens sounded and flashing red-and-blue police lights lit the screen.
“Magda or Laura?” I asked cynically. They were both capable. Arden sure knew how to pick them.
Graham hit the keyboard and set another film rolling. Miraculously, he’d turned off all his other monitors so I only had to concentrate on one. It showed the exterior of General Defense’s warehouse. A corner street light revealed flapping yellow police tape cordoning off the entrance.
A second later, the roof blew off the warehouse in a pyrotechnical display to rival anything the National Mall produced on the Fourth of July.
“Nice. Another weapon manufactory down the drain, and suspicion falls on the murdering arms dealer covering up evidence. Magda wins again. Can we go to bed now?”
I had no proof that my mother had blown up the factory as a Christmas gift to herself, but I could almost bet my fortune on it.
“General Defense was the company our fathers were dealing with,” Graham said softly. “They’ve always been assassins and double-dealers.”
“There is always someone to take their place. She’s accomplished nothing,” I argued angrily. “Don’t get me started.”
“Okay, I won’t, not on this, at least. Want to unwrap another gift?”
I punched him for spying on me, then wrapped my arms around his neck. Ours isn’t a perfect relationship, but it works for us.
Chapter 28
Julie and Zander were wearing the Irish fisherman’s-knit sweaters I’d bought for them in hopes they would decide to stay in DC. Nick had three new neckties wrapped around his neck, each one more outrageous than the next. Patra sported a red feather boa from EG and was excitedly stuffing a real Birkin bag from me and Nick. I was wearing a rather dashing black leather jacket with almost as many hidden pockets as my army jacket—Nick understood me well. Tudor and EG were already embattled in a new video game.
For the obvious reason, I’d made them all save their Magda gifts for last. Once we had all our packages to each other opened, EG passed around Magda’s. Cries of excitement soon settled into silence as each of us studied the gift of our pasts. Patra swiped at her eyes as she showed me a photo of her handsome investigative reporter dad bouncing her on his knee. Like Magda, Patrick Llewellyn had spent most of his time in war zones, and Patra had known very little of him before he was killed.
Julie came over and hugged me, as if I’d had anything to do with Magda’s gift: pictures of her father dancing with
our mother in some gorgeous ballroom. Awkwardly, I hugged her back.
“Maryam is safe at home,” she murmured. “She sent me texts. Says she met someone interesting at the airport.”
“It’s best that she learned what she wanted while she’s young,” I said in sympathy. “Perhaps you can visit her someday.”
She smiled brighter and settled back in her chair with her picture book.
Tudor shrugged at the photos in his album—his father was still alive and visited once a year. The next time I looked at him, he was smothering a grin that I knew meant trouble. I leaned over his chair and discovered him holding a slender, oddly-shaped pen. It took me a moment before I recognized it from one I’d seen in the hands of one of Magda’s many military contacts.
She’d given Tudor a tactical pen—one that wrote but could substitute as a bone-breaking weapon when used correctly. Tudor innocently flashed the light that also made it useful as a flashlight—until he used it to break someone’s jaw. Shades of James Bond!
He slid the pen back into the compartment hidden by the leather hinge of the album. It would most likely even pass airport security. I shuddered.
EG was already digging around in the hinge of her album. Did I really want to know what was stored there? I could hope for a unicorn-shaped thumb drive.
I explored my album and uncovered a folding finger spike baton, much more lethal than the roll of quarters I’d used in the past. I could take out eyes with the thing. I carefully re-folded it and slid it back into its hiding place. I couldn’t imagine using such a weapon—or carrying a photo album around with me—but one never knew.
I’d check on EG’s secret gift from Magda later, but I preferred not to know what other surprises Magda had hidden. There was still a stack of gifts left unopened, because Graham and Mallard had declined to join us, as usual. I had a plan for that.
Twin Genius Page 26
