Twisted Genius

by Patricia Rice

  Traffic had stopped as people spilled into the street to admire the towering screen. They stood there slack-jawed in disbelief at nearly naked, mile-high giantesses. In neon technicolor, Rose’s non-smiling visage finally revealed his whiteness.

  For the first time that day, I giggled and felt better, a lot better. The real Senator Paul Rose revealed in all his stunningly callous stupidity for all the world to see—I loved it.

  “If Magda was behind this stunt,” Graham intoned in that voice of doom of his, “they’re going to kill her, in a lot of unpleasant ways.”

  Chapter 8

  Men had been trying to kill my mother for decades, rightfully so, most of the time. But if she was behind the stunt with Gertrude, it was more public than most of her schemes. I was guessing that and the balloons were a public declaration of war. If Graham was right, I wanted to know how Magda knew Rose.

  It wasn’t as if I was in any position to go after Russians and assassins.

  So, instead of going to bed, I sat down in my basement office with Graham’s electronic files and my big computer and began organizing by date. Since Magda had spent the last twenty-five years out of the country, I started with the oldest files, the ones from before my father’s death.

  As Graham had said, he’d only been ten at the time, and these files were from the early 80’s, in the era of primitive personal computers. I doubted that my grandfather could have scanned and copied all these papers back then, so someone must have compiled them later.

  Graham may have added a few of these documents once he reached a position of power and could dig into official government files. I could see his fine hand in the detailed dossiers of all the members of my grandfather’s Top Hat cabal, before and after Max had left it. Given what I knew, I assumed Top Hat was the gates of hell to which Graham referred when he claimed Max had opened them.

  I was familiar with a number of the people in the secretive group. Broderick, from the conservative media conglomerate, supporter of the white man’s Al Qaeda, was now sitting in jail on corruption and murder charges. Personally, I thought Broderick’s corruption of the news was a hanging offense.

  The execs at MacroWare who murdered their boss, spied on the public with their software, and made fraudulent government deals were either dead or in jail.

  Edu-Pub, the book company that had brazenly changed history in school textbooks was defunct. It had been owned by several of the politicians supported by Top Hat, who were now facing charges of conspiracy and fraud. Too bad there weren’t laws against incompetence, stupidity, and evil.

  Tony Jeffrey at General Defense, the weapons manufacturer that had been caught selling surplus military weapons to terrorists, was up to his ears in financial and legal trouble. His daughter was in jail for murder.

  Goldrich Mortgage and its blackmailing owner was under indictment for fraud, and a few execs were up on murder charges along with the MacroWare guys. A lot of people were now homeless because of these greedmeisters, but at least some justice would be meted. Not that the homeless can live under a roof of justice.

  With the loss of major members, the Top Hat political and corporate cabal that my grandfather had helped form was gradually crumbling. I liked to think I was partially responsible, because these were the men who had coldly and calculatedly poisoned Max after he’d left the group—and possibly killed my father.

  I was hoping powerful bad guys like these were now too busy with lawyers, jail, and salvaging their ill-gotten gains to seek revenge. Unless they had a profit motive, they generally didn’t engage. They’d already stolen Max’s measly millions once and lost them—to me. I just didn’t think them stupid enough to go after us again.

  There were a few names on Graham’s old Top Hat list I didn’t recognize, and I noted them for further research. Senator Paul Rose’s name wasn’t mentioned in these early notes. I calculated in the early 80’s, he was still in his twenties and banging Gertrude. I couldn’t find anyone in Top Hat who might have been Rose’s father. A lot of these older guys had handed their legacy over to their sons. Rose had to be a new introduction.

  Just out of curiosity, I looked up Rose’s father. He’d been a congressman representing West Virginia back in the day, the heir to a coal company. Rose’s father had graduated from some Podunk college and didn’t look like Top Hat material. How had he and his son got in with them—other than the son graduating from Harvard? And his father didn’t even have that going for him.

  Magda had been a teenage bride, married and pregnant with me in 1981, so the present day senator was about my father’s age at the time. Could he have known Magda?

  I read through my grandfather’s early memos, mostly handwritten, then scanned into his files later. In the early 50’s, the original founders of the cabal were all young men. They apparently thought of themselves as the smiling, wealthy tycoon of the Monopoly game—hence the Top Hat label. Competition had all been a game to them—until at some point it had turned ruthless. Competitive rivalry was only fun when peopled abided by rules. Unchecked, it became anarchy and war.

  I skimmed through the group’s tirades about regulatory commissions and government interference, winced as they worked to buy the votes on government regulatory committees, then advanced to bribing Congressmen to appoint the officials they wanted.

  Money could buy almost anything, including judges, apparently. Men who didn’t cater to the cabal’s wishes often found themselves in hot water legally and politically. That’s what they’d done to EG’s senator father. Tex would never win another election after he’d turned on the politicians involved in Edu-Pub.

  I skimmed to the time of my father’s death. The material became voluminous. I could see why Graham thought I’d be occupied for a while. There was a dossier on Hugh O’Herlihy, Sean’s father. Here was another on Dillon Graham, and of course, one on Brody Devlin, my father and Magda’s first husband.

  I’d spent years reading all the material I could find on my father. Brody was the original fiery Irish charmer who had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in support of the Irish Catholic fight against oppressive Protestant rule. He apparently had support from many wealthy Irish-Catholic-Americans, including Hugh O’Herlihy and Graham’s father, Dillon.

  Max, my grandfather, probably wasn’t a true church-going type of Catholic, and he certainly wasn’t Irish. My grandmother may have been both, for all I knew, only she had died when Magda was young.

  But Max was a millionaire businessman with the connections to weapons manufacturers like General Defense that my dad needed to gain more funding and buy weapons. I totally got all that.

  The rest was murky and left me to fill in the blanks. Brody stayed here, wooed my grandfather and my mother, got her pregnant, married her, and they had me. Somewhere along the line, from my mother’s own admission and things I learned from people who knew her, my mother turned against the weapons deal.

  She was very young, idealistic, and a new mother. I would have done the same thing. Of course, I’d been raised by that mother who detested guns, so it was easy for me to understand why she’d oppose what her father and husband wanted.

  But there was almost nothing in this file about Magda. Had she found the file and edited herself out? Or had Max deliberately kept out his daughter’s involvement? Why would Graham do the same—because I knew he’d added some of this material. Or had my mother really been that invisible?

  The file contained police and FBI reports on the bombing that killed three promising young men in a parking garage—not unlike the explosion that had almost killed Nick and Guy. I printed out some of the dense verbiage and took it to bed with me, since it was fairly obvious I would be sleeping alone.

  I woke on Sunday morning to my phone pinging. I unburied my face from the paper-strewn pillow and saw a string of texts from Nick whining about the kids. Did I really want to know if his babysitting arrangements had fallen through? No sirree. My beloved brother could find his own babysitter. I’d been my mother�
��s doormat for too many years. I noted that the sun was up and then dived back into senselessness.

  Continual pinging prevented oblivion.

  With a sigh, I pushed out of the pillow and eventually, out of bed.

  I had no direction. After reading through the file on my father’s death last night, I couldn’t focus on giants in pink bikinis or drug lords or Nick’s babysitting problems.

  So I showered and went on the hunt for protein.

  Patra and Sean were already downstairs in the dining room, helping themselves to Mallard’s sumptuous Sunday morning brunch. EG was at the table, curled up around her tablet computer. I hoped it was with a good book and not manuals on world domination.

  Patra scooped up a bowl of berries and pointed at the stacks of newspapers scattered across the massive mahogany table. My grandfather used to give dinner parties here. The table could sit twelve—without the extra leaves.

  I don’t read newspapers, not even the comics. My life had enough going on that I didn’t need someone else’s problems to entertain me. I poured tea and deliberately sat at the opposite end of the table from the papers.

  Except for the curly hair, Sean O’Herlihy is a young Pierce Brosnan look alike, with Irish high cheekbones and piercing blue eyes. He makes a striking match for Patra with her tall, curvy good looks and shampoo-model chestnut hair. But they’re journalists, and apparently chameleon camouflage is their dress order. They wore jeans and baggy sweaters and looked as if they’d had about as much sleep as I’d had.

  “Rose’s popularity plummeted overnight,” Patra reported, carrying her unnaturally healthy yogurt-berry parfait to the table. She shoved the Times under my nose.

  “People don’t care if he supports letting the poor die without health care and letting the rich get richer by cutting their taxes, but they care about giants in pink kitty ears?” I asked with a growl of disgust. “Is there even proof that the story is true?”

  “Doesn’t need to be,” Sean said with annoying good cheer, taking the seat across from me. “The public loves sensationalism. Economics are a huge yawn.”

  “So if I want to run for office, I should wear kitty ears?” I sucked my tea down boiling, then got up for more.

  “Well, no, you should be male, have silver hair, and look good,” Patra said with my cynicism. “Like the candidate benefitting most from Rose’s embarrassment—Bill Smith.”

  “Bill Smith? You have to be kidding me.” I took a strawberry-filled pastry to go with my tea. “Did he have to change his name to get any more white bread? One-syllable names are a selling point?”

  “Work better in headlines,” Sean acknowledged, scooping up a hunk of omelet.

  “Lacks character,” I countered. “I mean, how many Bill Smiths are there in the world? They’re invisible. It’s like being a Bob Jones. So who’s backing the white bread man and is he capable of setting up women in kitty ears?”

  My reporters fell silent and looked at each other speculatively.

  “Oh, c’mon.” I sat down again and glared at the pretty lovers. “Surely you had to wonder who staged that event?”

  “Well, no, we figured it was Magda who found Kitty Ears,” Patra admitted.

  “Magda is not into presidential elections.” I didn’t tell them Magda was probably avenging old wounds and somehow Rose had to be bound up in her vendetta. They already suspected that. But kitty ears? That sounded political. “She’s more likely to hire assassins than look for old flames.”

  Well, that was a lie. She hated violence. But it was enough to send Sean to his phone. Mission accomplished. They would dive down another rabbit hole and leave Magda and her dangerous games alone.

  If Magda was involved, I wanted to take her down on my own, leave the kids a few illusions.

  “How are you faring with our drug lord?” I asked. Last night, I’d realized I had too many angles for approaching the garage bombing and Nadia’s accident. I needed to narrow my focus. Sean and Patra had better resources for looking into Scion Pharmaceutical. I was the one with the Top Hat car bombing file, and it drew me like ants to honey.

  “Zander just sent a file about Scion’s financial assets,” Patra said. “It should be in your box too. We’ve not had time to dig into them, but it looks as if he has a lot of foreign investments.”

  My phone buzzed angrily. I sighed and glanced at the screen. Nick again. I put him on speaker out of sheer meanness.

  “Anika is screaming for her mommy and Vincent refuses to eat and I swear, there are goons lurking in the shrubbery!” he wailed through the speaker.

  “Give the kids to the goons or call Juliana, not me. Don’t give them sugar. Do give them kiddy videos. Go watch the giant pink kitty and tell us if you think Bill Smith did it.” I hit the Off button.

  “You are awesome mean,” Patra said in admiration.

  The phone buzzed again. I handed it to EG, who looked startled, then evil.

  I went back for the protein I should have got the first time. I needed energy to face the day, and a sugar high just encouraged meanness. I heard EG tell Nick that I hadn’t had my tea yet. He’d settle down once the initial panic was over.

  Nick could take care of himself as well as I could. It was the new responsibility of family that was making him crazy.

  “Goons in the shrubbery?” I repeated Nick’s fears aloud.

  “Not mine,” the candelabra retorted.

  Sean had only recently been introduced to the house. He studied the ornate silver in fascination. I whacked his hand with a silver fork when he started to check under it.

  “Only I get to mess with Graham’s head,” I told him. “Are there reporters lurking in Guy’s shrubbery?”

  “We’re the only ones working the story as far as I’m aware.” Sean didn’t look repentant for his intrusiveness. “I’d guess Feds.”

  “What, the law thinks Guy tried to blow himself up? Or they think the mafia is stupid enough to make a second try and blow up the neighborhood, so they’re hiding in the bushes, waiting?”

  “What if the goons really are bad guys?” Patra asked worriedly.

  I was trying hard not to think that. “Stupid villains are the worst,” I muttered. “They already broke in once. What more can they want?” I took a bite out of my boiled egg, chewed, then retrieved my phone. Nick was still on it. “Back and front yard?” I asked. “And have you thought about getting a pit bull?”

  “For the kids or the goons?” he asked wearily. “Different places, different times, not always in the yard.”

  “Unless you’re still contemplating Alaska, use your brains, Nicholas.” I knew he knew how to do this, but love had apparently scrambled his thinking apparatus. “Have Juliana start a doggie daycare in the backyard. Keep Guy inside. Have someone take the kids out, preferably while they’re screaming. Hire a guard who can sneak up behind your suspects and isn’t too proud to torture info out of them.”

  “My men don’t torture,” the candelabra informed me coldly.

  “I heard that,” Nick said with a grim intonation. “I know torture, and right now, I’m furious enough to try.”

  “Good. The rest of us are working the other end. You just keep your valuable assets safe. The kids will be in school tomorrow. Gear up.” I punched out.

  Everyone at the table stared at me. I shrugged. “He just needed a pep talk.”

  “He won’t really torture strangers on the street?” Sean asked with interest.

  “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” EG piped up from her end of the table.

  My little poppet. I’d look on her with pride and approval, except I’d really been trying to teach her to be normal.

  “Oh wow,” Patra exclaimed, staying out of the conversation by perusing her telephone. “Oh double whammy wow.”

  Sean grabbed her phone, grew wide-eyed, and passed it on to me.

  Harvey Scion, Senator Rose’s chief campaign strategist, contributor, evil minion, and our number one suspect in Nadia’s murder, had been killed in
his own home while we slept.

  Chapter 9

  Graham dug deeper into police files. He had footage from security cameras around Harvey Scion’s home flashing on half a dozen monitors. The pharmaceutical exec had been shot on his own grounds while surrounded by heavy security. Given how many people were gunning for Scion, he had obviously been right to be paranoid.

  Other than wanting to stay one step ahead of Ana and her family, Graham had no particular interest in yet another wart on the face of the earth, but this murder was an Agatha Christie stumper.

  Graham stopped on a shot showing Scion stepping out on his patio to sneak a smoke at a few minutes before nine last night, according to the video. Guards patrolled the perimeters in other footage, but the patio was private, surrounded by clipped yew hedges. The landscaping was meticulous with potted evergreens amputated into perfect cones, hedges regimented into linear rectangles, and a single magnolia blocking the view of the mansion on the next street.

  If someone wanted to kill Scion on his patio, they’d need a gifted sniper. One might climb the wall, into the magnolia, and wait for the moment Scion stepped outside, but study of earlier videos showed the wily old man followed no routine. A sniper could starve to death waiting for him to emerge at any particular time or place. It was January. If the weather hadn’t been unseasonably warm, Scion probably would never have stepped out at all.

  That left the security guards as the only people inside the grounds. Scion lived alone. His housekeeping staff had left for the evening. Graham set the video in motion again.

  Scion turned abruptly, as if he’d heard a noise in the hedge. Three white balloons tied to a bush bounced in the chilly air. It wasn’t easy to see, but they appeared to have the caricature on them that had appeared at Rose’s rally.

  Magda’s work? Or just a fan of the balloons?