Authors: Patricia Rice
The rich execs and power brokers in Top Hat didn’t know
people like Bill’s mother existed.
I reminded myself to keep an open mind. Smitty could have
hated Reggie for personal reasons. A crooked lawyer who did drugs wouldn’t be
high on the Most Liked list of righteous people.
I needed to focus on Bill’s murder and not toplofty tales of
political intrigue. One baby step at a time. I had to wait on others for the
analysis of Llewellyn’s recording and a list of what was in Bill’s CD vault.
So I decided to research local gangsters, starting with Toreador
and DeLuca. If I couldn’t find websites, then I’d have to make a few personal
visits.
Patra’s perspective
Patra finished up her article and video of Rhianna, posted
it off to her boss, and began lining up her next story. An email flashed in her
box from SAdams. She’d yet to meet her anonymous correspondent, but she opened
it out of curiosity.
A photo of her and Sean outside his newspaper office
appeared on her screen. Rats. Broderick really did have spies everywhere, although
she blamed this shot on Riley the termite.
She tapped in a reply merely reading YEAH, AND? And sent it
back. One did not survive high school without a meaningless retort.
She was packing up at the end of the day when SAdams
replied:
WE MEET IN THE BAR DOWNSTAIRS.
With a pick-up line like that, this was one seriously
unsophisticated nerd, pretty much confirming her suspicions of IT geek. Who
else would have access to his information?
Just in case she was wrong, she took her time leaving her
cubicle and primping in the restroom until a crowd had time to gather in the
bar. Using family tactics, she didn’t take the elevator all the way down.
Instead, on the second floor, she found the stairs, and came out behind the crowded
downstairs lobby where the elevator emptied. Unobserved, she located the staff
entrance to the bar down a side hall and entered as if she owned the place.
Kitchen staff glanced up, but no one stopped her. She could
be new management for all they knew. That ploy won her a view to the bar from a
doorway customers wouldn’t notice.
Sure enough, there were the usual singletons hanging out
around a semi-sophisticated glass bar wearing their conservative office suits
and letting down their hair, pretending they were God’s gift to womankind, repeating
uproarious stories of one-upmanship. If they’d been the only ones down here,
she would have turned around and walked out.
But there, at the end of the bar sipping a beer, was a
bespectacled nerd in narrow tie, white shirt, and no suit jacket.
She wanted the guy with the information, not the ones with
ego. Ego and two bucks wouldn’t even score her a Starbucks. But there was no
way of approaching the nerd without passing the herd of buffalo. Oh well.
She flashed her red suit into the room, deliberately
stalking past the watering hole without a glance. If stools swiveled, she
didn’t notice. A shout of “Hey, New Girl,” went unheeded. Crass, that. With
satisfaction, she took the empty chair on the far side of the nerd from the
pack.
“Sam?” she asked, signaling the bartender.
The nerd spluttered in his beer. He turned his horn-rimmed
spectacles in her direction and actually studied her face, not her cleavage.
“How did you know?”
“Process of elimination. Patra Llewellyn.” She stuck out her
hand. “Are you really Sam Adams or is that your nom de plume?”
He wiped his hand on a napkin and shook hers quickly, as if
she might be too hot. “Samuel Adams. My mother was a history nut. Your father
was my hero.”
“Then I can count on one ally in the cubicle wars?” she asked
as she ordered a pink martini.
“You know they’re out to crucify you?” He tipped his head in
the direction of the buffalo herd.
“They want to screw me first. Tell me more, and let’s see if
we can work together.”
His eyes widened behind the thick lenses at her bluntness.
But then he started to talk, and Patra drank her martini and bought him
another.
Nick tapped his spoon on his poached egg as we gathered
around our morning buffet on Tuesday. “I’m interviewing with the British
embassy this afternoon. Any last requests of the senator’s office, should I
hand in my resignation this week?”
“That’s overconfidence,” Patra grumbled, looking hungover.
“That’s a rat deserting my dad,” EG pointed out, although
she didn’t sound particularly upset as she scanned the morning comics on her
iPad.
I swatted both their heads with my newspaper as I passed by.
“That’s an opportunity. Pay attention and be appreciative.” I took my place at
the end of the table, opened my newspaper, and sipped my coffee.
“What, no requests for the address books of D.C.’s rich and
powerful?” Nick asked, sipping his tea and lifting his expressive blond
eyebrows.
“Unless the senator has an address book of D.C. gangsters or
Top Hat, I’m good,” I said. “I doubt that Tex has enough influence left to get
his bar tab picked up, much less help us get our money back. Good luck at the
embassy.”
“Tex isn’t without his resources,” Nick said, buttering his
toast. “Gangsters may be beyond his scope, but I’ll see what I can do. I’ll
truly miss his files.”
“Does he have one on Broderick?” Patra asked, finally
understanding the extent of Nick’s invitation.
“I do,” I said. “And no, there’s nothing you can use or I
would have told you. Tex is good for the connections behind the connections. If
you want to know what lobbies Broderick hid behind to finance Tex’s campaign,
Nick’s your boy.” I pondered that half a second. “Maybe we could use Tex’s
entire campaign finance file. One never knows where the names might take us
someday.”
“I have that,” the candelabra said dryly. “Miss Llewellyn,
you have a Samuel Adams attempting to access your email password. I’ve sent him
a highly sophisticated virus that will no doubt destroy his computer within ten
minutes if he does not desist.”
I snorted orange juice. Patra swore and ran for her room
looking like the Wicked Witch of the West in her shabby robe, with her hair
still down.
“That wasn’t very nice, Mr. Graham,” I said in the same tone
he’d used. “You may have unleashed a deadly new virus upon the world if Mr.
Adams is a techie.”
“I know who Samuel Adams is and the virus will self-destruct
before he knows what hit him. Your sister has entertaining friends.” The
candelabra clicked off.
I used to be annoyed by our morning interruption, but I
insanely wanted to giggle today. I was starting to understand Graham’s dry
humor better. Or maybe that hot kiss had deranged my suspicion-ometer.
“What?” I asked innocently as both Nick and EG stared at me.
“You didn’t punch the silver,” EG explained. “Does this mean
Adams is friend or foe?”
“I haven’t the foggiest notion who Adams is. I want that
virus. I have a whole roster of people I’d like to set it loose on.” I was
happily making lists in my head when Patra returned, still talking into her phone.
She didn’t look any less green than earlier, but animation had returned.
“Sam was only trying to verify the safety of my password,”
Patra said, clicking off and returning to her seat. “Will you please call off
your pet vulture?”
“Graham has moved on to more interesting entertainment. If your
friend quit his quest, he’ll be all right,” I promised. “As long as you’re
wired into our network, you don’t have to worry about having a watchdog. You’d
best tell your friend to cease and desist or
I’ll
sic a virus on him. Hacking is a nasty bad habit,” I added virtuously.
Patra narrowed her eyes at me but refrained from commenting
in front of EG. Nice. She’d grown up and learned manners.
“Does Sam have an apartment big enough for you to move
into?” Nick asked with devious motivation.
“I’ll look into that,” Patra grumbled. “I don’t know how you
endure this prison. Can I even think without being overheard?”
“Presupposing you can think…” EG started to say. I pointed a
knife at her. She caught on quickly and returned to her comics.
“Think of this as our hive,” I said. “No, you cannot think
without being overheard. Given our talents, that’s a good thing. It means if
you’re out with Sam Adams and he tries to murder you, we’ll have some idea of
where to find your body. Who is Mr. Adams and why is he playing your watchdog?”
I asked.
Patra gulped her black coffee and swallowed a piece of dry
toast with a look of distaste. I pretended the look was for her breakfast and
not my analysis of life with Graham.
“He’s an IT person at Poo Manor and sees all the good gossip.
He idolizes my father, despises Broderick, and is willing to share. Believe it
or not, I have a few enemies in the cubicles already.”
I bit back a grin at her creative appellation for BM. “Any
person of intelligence has enemies. Practice basic Machiavelli.” I processed
her news while I added fresh blackberry jam from a local farm to my toast, far
more appreciative of Mallard’s repast than our resident journalist. “Is Sam
helping you hack Broderick’s archives?”
Finally, Patra grinned. “Yep.”
We all punched our fists into the air.
* * *
I had more of Patrick’s decoded notes loaded into my
spreadsheet, and I was starting to discern the pattern of dates, places,
initials, and odd numbers. The dates started nearly ten years ago — before
Graham had given him information — and continued up to the time Patrick
was killed — not too long after Graham’s interference. The first date was
a month after the September terrorist attacks and about the time of Graham’s spectacular
descent into hell.
If the pattern represented meetings, I hadn’t found the
decoder for any of the initials that I assumed would tell me who attended,
although I was fascinated to note that a
PR
was included in many of the old ones. I had a grudge against Paul Rose, the
conservative presidential candidate.
I did a quick search and lo and behold,
Rose had been serving in the army nine years ago
— early in
the war, when a horrific American military atrocity in Iraq had left the nation
stunned.
It was before my arrival in Atlanta, so I couldn’t say I’d
experienced a horrified nation first hand. But I did remember the ugly mood all
over Europe at the time. The guys in the white hats weren’t supposed to kill civilians
and blow up religious edifices, even in wartime.
Scanning through the news files, I could tell the story had
disappeared quickly, buried under stories of a crazed gunman running amuck in a
mall. There were private websites dedicated to war atrocities, but the
mainstream media dropped the military story like a hot potato. My paranoia
radar detected media manipulation, but conspiracy theories are a dime a dozen.
More recent dates in Patrick’s files corresponded with
different initials: DS, EB, and LR stood out, but I’d have to do a lot more research
to determine if Broderick exec David Smedbetter or Leonard Riley might have
been in a war zone back then. The only EB I knew of in this case was Bill’s dad.
I couldn’t explain the coded numbers yet, although my bet
was that they referred to topics discussed. Or like Bill, had Llewellyn kept
numbered disks? I left the file where Graham could get at it.
Just as I was debating contacting the Seattle speech analyst
and asking how far they’d gone with Patrick’s recording, Sean called.
“We’ve sorted the material in Bill’s vault. Given what’s on
these files, the little worm was in a nice position to blackmail a few powerful
folks. Any number of people might have wanted him dead if they knew he had
these files. What we want to know is who was making the recordings and giving
them to him?”
“I don’t think Bill was in a position to record powerful
people,” I reminded him. “He was just a dumb schmuck who was starting to learn
about the real world. From the memos we’ve read, I’d have to say his clients
made the recordings and gave them to him.”
Sean growled almost as nastily as Graham. “We don’t need
speech analysis to identify half a dozen conservative senators and even more
representatives on these recordings. His clients must have wanted to identify
the lesser known quantities to whom they’re speaking. I need an index to Bill’s
files, but most of them aren’t here. They probably went up in the fire or were
stolen with his computers.”
“Judging by the recording we’re working on,” I told him,
“I’d say the R&P trusted Bill, and that the unknown voices belong to some
of their members. Do your recordings sound like interviews or arguments or
what?”
He took a second to access a computer file. “We have a lot
of promises being made, so those are probably your R&P people lobbying for
legislation in return for campaign financing. One of these congressional idiots
actually promised to shut down a local CBS station that had irritated a local
millionaire, in exchange for a substantial contribution. Not sure which side of
that conversation was stupider, but given the current political situation in
that state, they’d both pay money not to have that little meeting revealed.”
“Interesting.” I was pulling up Bill’s bank account
information and studying deposits. “Unless Bill was stashing cash elsewhere,
I’m not seeing riches. From everything I’ve learned so far, I’d bet that the killers
took out the last honest man in town. Bill kept everyone’s secrets.
Personality-wise, I’d say he hoarded them just for the pleasure of possession.”
“What, you’re a psychiatrist now?” Sean asked incredulously.
“Just finished an on-line course on psychology,” I told him
with smug satisfaction. “Piece of cake. I’ve been studying people all my life,
mostly so I can avoid them. Bill’s choice of a reclusive occupation and lack of
friends was a classic trait of borderline personality disorder, and hoarding is
a symptom. Did you hear any journalists conducting interviews in those files?”