by Rachel Grant
She was stiff but then relaxed into the unexpected embrace. He kissed her forehead in a brotherly fashion and released her. “Now, if I’m going to give you custody of Lee, you’re going to have to promise to take good care of him.”
She laughed. “So Lee is a puppy now?”
JT ruffled Lee’s hair, undaunted he had to reach well above his own head to do so. “I’m going to miss having Skippy around.”
Lee gave his stepbrother a good-natured glare.
“We can negotiate visitation privileges,” she said.
“Cute,” Lee said and kissed her nose. “I’ve got to get back to work. The FBI is gutting the computer system, and I need to do what I can to contain the damage. You,” he said firmly to Erica, “are taking the week off. Go home. Go furniture shopping, clothes shopping. Whatever you want.” He handed her a credit card.
She studied the card. Her name was embossed on the surface. “When did you get this?”
“I had you added to my account the day after you told me about your mother.”
Tears welled just beneath the surface. She heard the door click shut and knew JT had left them alone. Lee pulled her to him and rained kisses on her face. She breathed deeply and tried not to break down.
“I’m looking forward to making love to you tonight,” he murmured. “We’ve never been together without lies.” His smile was crooked. “Tonight I get to be me, all me, only me.”
Heat replaced the threatening tears. His method was effective. She slid fingers through his expensive new haircut and kissed him. “Hurry home,” she said against his lips.
“You can count on it.”
She turned to the door, then stopped. “Lee, the FBI told me what you were doing, but I don’t understand who else was involved. Who was working with Jake?”
“At least one person in the office worked with Novak. We suspect Ed Drake. He hasn’t been arrested because the FBI doesn’t have anything concrete. The FBI recovered a cell phone from Novak—the one he used to communicate with his Talon & Drake contact. They traced the number to a prepaid cell phone.” Lee paused and winked at her, and she knew this must be the phone he’d recovered the photos from. “But a search warrant of Drake’s belongings hasn’t turned up the phone. He probably ditched it in the Chesapeake the moment he saw the raid on the Andvari. At this point, the FBI is hoping they’ll find evidence in the computer system—Drake wasn’t nearly as careful as Novak. In the meantime, the senator is distancing himself from Drake, hoping to limit the damage to his reputation. If Riversong ends up being involved, it’ll get dicey.”
“The campaign isn’t dead?”
“No. Joe hasn’t done anything wrong. Right now it looks like a few bad apples who worked for the company.” He grinned. “The press spent so much time tying you to me and Joe that yesterday, when you became a hero, you boosted Joe’s image by ten percentage points.”
She cringed every time someone called her a hero. The fight had been brutal, violent, and ended with death. “I’m afraid the FBI still suspects me. With Jake and Marco dead, I’m scared they’ll rush to round up conspirators and come back to me.”
He slid his fingers through her hair. “You know, I miss the hairpins in the weirdest way.” He played with the long strands for a moment. “Have you been honest with the FBI? Did you tell them you were on the boat Sunday morning?”
“You knew I was there?”
“I helped set up the raid. I saw you.”
“They know everything. I don’t have any more secrets.”
There was a knock on the door, then JT said, “Lee, we need you. Now.”
“Am I allowed to return to my office?” she asked.
“It’s been searched, and your computer’s been confiscated. You’ve been questioned. You’re cleared.” He handed her her company ID card.
She kissed him, slipped her tongue into his mouth for a brief but deep kiss. “I’ll see you tonight.”
She left him with JT and used the stairs to reach her office, swiping her card in the stairwell lock to access the eighth floor. In the last days, her emotions had been up and down on a wild roller-coaster ride. She needed to catch her breath. Get her equilibrium back. She pushed open her office door and flopped down in her chair, feeling exhausted and drained but happy.
She stared off into space for several minutes, absorbing the unusual quiet. Most employees must not have been cleared yet, because the floor was empty. After a few minutes of meditative silence, she noticed the FedEx envelopes on her desk. From the broken seal, she knew the FBI had searched the contents.
The first envelope had to be the DNA test results. The second one surprised her—she’d forgotten all about her request for information on Thermo-Con from the law offices of Morton, Fairfield, and Lawson.
She decided to save the best for last and put the DNA test results aside and opened the packet from the law office. She flipped through the pages, most of it information she’d already copied at the patent office. In the file, she found a better copy of the article published in the army post newspaper, and a January 1953 article published in the Baltimore Sun, which contained the same text as the Citadel article but included a photo of the house being poured. Several ERDL engineers who worked with Higgins employees stood in the foreground and were named in the caption. Surprise spread through her as she recognized a very young Edward Drake’s eyes staring back at her from the old photograph.
CHAPTER FIFTY
AFTER EVERYTHING EDWARD DRAKE had done for Joseph Talon, the man had dumped him at the first sign of trouble. To think he’d ever felt guilty for what he’d done to Ricky Guerrero all those years ago. And look how little Ricky had turned out. The boy would take his so-called Indian heritage all the way to the White House, never knowing Ed was the one who made his rise to power possible. But Ed could also take it away.
Joe didn’t know he was Ricky. He knew nothing about his past or who his parents really were. The man had no idea how badly he’d fucked up in letting Erica Kesling send off his DNA to be compared to the DNA from the bones found under the Thermo-Con sump. Christ, of all people to provide a comparative sample, she got one from Joe.
Her research could uncover Ed’s work on the Thermo-Con house all those years ago. Would she then realize he’d denied knowledge of Thermo-Con because he didn’t want anyone to connect him to the house, to the bones, to Regina?
He remembered his horror that November day in 1952, when the senior engineer placed the sump in the northeast corner, not the southwest one, as indicated on the plans. He’d dug only a shallow grave, expecting the concrete pour to hide her forever. He’d had to go back in the night, after the cement set, to undermine the concrete surrounding the sump and push her body into the soil under the slab. It was the best he could do.
At first, Regina and Ricky Guerrero’s disappearance caused hardly a ripple. One person raised an alarm, but people knew Regina had planned to take Ricky to Montreal to live with her parents. She was a flake and didn’t say good-bye. Problem solved.
But six weeks after she disappeared, Claudio Guerrero died in Korea. The colonel tried to contact her through her parents, and they discovered no one knew where she and Ricky were.
Another soldier’s wife had known about his affair with Gina, and he was questioned. Fortunately, the MPs believed Regina had left her husband. Years passed, and Ed stopped worrying. But sometimes, in the dead of night, he remembered what he’d done. He remembered Ricky’s eyes as he left him on the front steps of the school.
He’d believed Regina had been trapped in a loveless marriage to a man who abused her, but with age came understanding. Regina had gotten off on manipulating a sixteen-year-old kid.
He made a choice to make up for his mistakes and tracked the kid down. He learned Joe was living with the Menanichoch and attending community college. At the time, Ed was a college professor at a Maryland university. A man, shaping the lives of other men.
He started a program to recruit Indian kids into the engi
neering program and arranged for a full scholarship for Joseph Talon if the boy would study engineering. The boy was smart and had great potential. From there Ed became Joe’s mentor and eventual business partner.
But Ed never gave Joe a hint of their shared past.
Talon & Drake had started as an equal partnership, but early on, to Ed’s great amusement, Joe wanted to use his Indian heritage to win contracts. To receive minority-owned-business status, Ed couldn’t own fifty percent of the business, so his ownership was reduced to a third. Ed didn’t mind. He preferred to work behind the scenes and let Joe be the face of the business. Ed’s backseat role to Joe had worked well over the years, as Joe gained power but Ed was the force behind the man, the puppet master.
Until yesterday, when Ed had been locked out of his own company by Joe’s son and then, even more insulting, been replaced by Joe’s stepson—a kid who knew nothing about engineering. As if Ed’s vital role could be replaced by just anybody.
But Joe had no idea how deeply embedded the strings were; he thought he could make Ed the scapegoat and save his campaign. He was wrong. The senator had made a huge mistake.
Now he had to deal with the slut who was screwing the upstart who’d replaced him. If only he’d managed to kill her when he’d trapped her in the Thermo-Con basement.
But nothing had gone right. He’d destroyed the electrical system at the house so the plumbers would remove the sump and give him the opportunity to dig out the rest of Regina’s bones. But the bitch had shown up and nearly caught him in the basement. On impulse, he’d trapped her there. If Erica had died, no one would have pursued the bones—they’d have been written off as an old burial and ignored, as he’d been urging Sam Riversong to do.
But Scott had saved her. Another reason to hate the bastard.
He hadn’t known then that she’d worked for Novak, or that Novak had let such a dangerous loose end escape. Novak must have known she was after the artifacts, but he didn’t tell his partners who she was, what she was doing. He’d had some sort of sick obsession with her. Novak had gotten what he deserved.
But Erica was still a problem. He’d trashed her office in a rage after searching for the Thermo-Con project file and coming up empty. Afterward, he’d had to destroy other offices so no one would guess which was the real target. Then she’d gone searching for the patent, and he’d methodically vandalized her apartment to cover his search for the file there. He’d hoped the destruction would distract her, but the woman had gone after the project with the intensity of a bitch in heat.
He hadn’t been able to read the file until she finally left it in her office on Friday, when, to his horror, he read the article about the missing mother and son published on the same page as the Thermo-Con article. Even worse, he found her notes and learned she’d mailed the DNA test, with results expected on Monday.
The fix was simple. He would intercept the DNA results and destroy them. But before FedEx arrived, she’d become a hero and the FBI had evacuated all Talon & Drake employees from the office. Only now were they letting employees in, but Ed wasn’t one of them. He’d been publicly named a suspect and wasn’t allowed to enter.
He knew damn well the FBI had nothing to link him to the smuggling. He’d been careful. If Scott had hacked the disposable cell, anything he’d found couldn’t be used against him. All evidence there was tainted by the illegal methods Scott had used.
No. His primary concern was the damn DNA test. Thirty minutes ago, he’d watched Erica enter the building through the garage. She could be reading the test results now. She needed to be silenced. There was no statute of limitations on murder. He would not spend his retirement years in prison because that lying bitch Regina couldn’t keep her footing after receiving a well-deserved punch.
He didn’t have to do the dirty job himself, though. No. Joseph Talon had more to fear from Erica’s revelations than anyone.
He intended to tell the senator everything. Even after the man discovered his business partner had killed his mother, he wouldn’t do a thing about it, because Joseph Talon would be ruined if the world learned he was really Ricky Guerrero.
Ricky had been born in Canada. His father was Cuban and mother French Canadian. Ricky wasn’t a natural-born American. Hell, he wasn’t even an American citizen.
By constitutional law Ricky Guerrero couldn’t be President of the United States of America.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
ERICA LOOKED AT THE PICTURE of Edward Drake in shock. He should have told her he’d worked on the Thermo-Con project. He could have saved her hours and hours of fruitless research. She considered bringing the photo to Lee but stopped herself. Here it was, only his second day as top man in the office and the FBI was wreaking havoc. This could wait.
She reached for the second envelope. Funny, but the results of the DNA test hardly mattered now. The FBI was collecting their own evidence and had already told her they weren’t interested in this because the results wouldn’t be admissible in a court of law. Regardless, she would now find out if a Menanichoch tribal member had licked the envelope she’d found on Jake’s boat.
She broke the seal and carefully read the cover letter. The lab technician explained an abnormality in the results. While they were looking for genetic markers of the same heritage, they’d noticed substantial overlap, to the degree that they’d run a second test. The second test was conclusive: Sample A, the bone found in the Thermo-Con basement, was a matrilineal match with the DNA of Sample B. She felt lightheaded and oddly afraid as she understood Sample A was Joseph Talon’s mother.
Sample C was even more disturbing. Sample C was an exact match of Sample B. Sample C, taken from the envelope she’d recovered in Jake’s cabin, was none other than Senator Joseph Talon.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
LEE SAT IN A CONFERENCE room with two FBI agents, watching as they dissected the network. He pointed to a section of code and told the agent to stop. “That line is broken. Ninety-nine percent of the time it wouldn’t matter, because the line isn’t usually run on startup, but when a user forces the program to run that bit of code, the program must skip this whole sequence.” He pointed to hundreds of lines of code that followed.
“What’s the sequence that’s skipped?”
He studied the following lines of code. “Network Log-in,” he said after a long pause. “If a hacker can access that line, they can bypass security and enter the network without anyone knowing they’d been there.”
The younger agent looked at him with suspicion.
“I’m good at what I do,” he said.
He glanced up to see Erica waving to him from the window next to the door. He got up and met her in the hallway, closing the door behind him. “You going home?”
“Yeah. The Thermo-Con research arrived, but it can wait.”
She looked upset, but given everything that had transpired in the last few days, he couldn’t blame her. He pulled her against him and held her for a long moment. He couldn’t quite believe how crazy he was about this woman. “I love you. I’ll be home as soon as I can.”
“Good,” she said. “I need you.”
This was real. The lies were behind them.
“Thank you,” she murmured against his lips. “For everything you’ve done for me.”
“For us.”
She looked unsure but repeated, “For us.”
“Sweetheart, what’s wrong?”
She gave him a melancholy smile. “I’m still figuring things out, I guess. It’s going to take some time for me to process all that’s happened.” She paused. “Lee, I’m curious, did the senator know you were pretending to be an intern?”
“No. He didn’t know a thing. I nearly had a heart attack when you showed up at the restaurant where Joe and I were having lunch. I was worried you’d call me your intern and introduced you as my girlfriend because he thought we’d met through JT, not the office.”
“Why didn’t you tell him the truth?”
“We didn’t wa
nt his opponents to claim he had anything to do with the business or investigation. The last thing Joe needs is to be accused of being part of a nonexistent cover-up.”
“You were protecting him.” She flashed a wry smile, then shook her head.
“It’s over now.”
“But no one from the company has been arrested.”
“When the employees in Iraq start talking, we’ll know who was involved.”
“Lee, have you considered the possibility Joe is involved?”
Her words hit him like a lightning rod, and he dropped his arms, releasing her. Alarm crossed her face, followed by hurt, and worst of all, fear.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I’m tired. I should go.”
“No, I’m sorry. You just surprised me, that’s all.” He reached for her, but she was stiff, tense, and didn’t relax against him. “The answer is no. I’ve never considered Joe a suspect. He wouldn’t be involved in something like this.”
“But if Sam Riversong could be involved, why not Joe?”
He shrugged. “I know Joe. He’s a man of integrity. But I don’t know Sam.” He saw the shuttered look in her gray eyes, and a disturbing thought occurred to him. “Erica, you need to be careful who you say things like this to. It’s okay to talk to me, of course, but every reporter in the country wants to interview you. Anything you say—to anyone—could be quoted to a reporter. You can’t say you suspect Joe. He’s innocent, but your suspicion could kill the campaign.”
She cupped his face between her hands. “I should go. I love you, Lee.” She kissed him with surprising urgency. “Remember that I love you.”
He watched her leave, feeling troubled. She sounded like she didn’t expect to see him again.
ERICA SLIPPED THROUGH the parking garage and made it to her car without any of the reporters noticing her. She supposed wearing her hair down was a disguise of sorts. On the drive home, she considered what she would do, reeling from what she’d discovered.
