Tampa, Florida
February 13
Milo Graves sat at the smoked glass bar nursing an eighteen-dollar house brand whiskey. He sipped it through the cocktail straw—earning him an eye roll from the beefy bartender—but he couldn’t risk the alcohol touching the spirit gum that was holding the goatee in place. He faced the front of the establishment and had a clear view of the palm trees that lined the wide expanse of Tampa’s Channel Walk, the hostess stand, and, more importantly, the group of six fatcat assholes who laughed and talked at a round table next to the plate glass window. His stool, a ridiculous, uncomfortable thing with a plexiglass disk for a seat and a lightning bolt stem, was the last along the row, and Milo had to lean away when the staff lifted the gated end of the bar to come and go. It was a necessary inconvenience.
God, it was trite; Milo almost spat his drink on a laugh. He tapped an index finger to his lips in mock deliberation. Let’s see. He already knew the ten thousand dollar Brioni suit and the Sapphire martini belonged to tech billionaire Calvin Landry. Good ol’ Cal. The woman to his right in Chanel and guzzling a forty-dollar glass of cabernet would be his attorney—and mistress, Milo guessed, based on the leg play. The Asian man and frazzled-looking woman, both well-dressed, would be the COO and CFO of Landry Orbital. The twenty-something guy in the ill-fitting rack suit would be the other attorney, probably a friend sitting in for moral support and, no doubt, way out of his league. And the millennial in the fuck-the-establishment Sonic Youth T-shirt and ripped jeans? Well, that had been Milo once upon a time.
Milo could write the kid’s bio without knowing anything more. He had most likely dropped out of MIT or CalTech after sophomore year, already writing code more sophisticated than his professors could teach. He had developed a dating app with a breakthrough algorithm or a cryptocurrency with a more stable blockchain. And if negotiations started at this “casual” dinner continued as planned, the kid would be a hundred millionaire before his twenty-fifth birthday.
They had been best friends a lifetime ago, Calvin and Milo. Their start-up, Obsidian Corp, was going to be the bellwether of cybersecurity. They were going to rule the world. Together. That was when they had been young and naive; before they got a taste of greed and power.
Before Calvin Landry had stolen Milo’s life.
It hadn’t been an accomplice-free crime. There were a handful of people who had assisted in executing his demise. Regina Phelps had already paid the piper. Her body dropped like a very large bread crumb for the right person to find.
Milo’s plan was meticulous, an interlocking chain of events, the solution to each future event dependent on the predecessors. The equation couldn’t be solved without all three parts. He wasn’t one step ahead or ten steps ahead; he was the only one on the track. It was a metaphor that both delighted and disturbed him.
At twenty, Milo had been roguish and handsome; thick, dark hair and tortoiseshell glasses obscured beady, black eyes and a slightly hooked nose. As he succumbed to the stress of the scandal and the male pattern baldness passed down from his mother, he had morphed into an average-looking man at best. He maintained a slim, if unmuscled, physique and wore a toupee, but he had come to terms with the fact that he was no longer the ladykiller he once was.
Now he was just a killer.
Milo was churning out a real-life whodunnit. The problem was he was so good in his role as the killer in his tale he was uncatchable. He knew every mistake killers made, and he carefully avoided them. There was only one common link, and the time and distance would prevent even the most astute detective from uncovering it. Did it bother Milo that his genius in this matter would be forever unacknowledged? No more than all the other ideas and inventions that others had stolen from him over the years. Well, maybe a little more.
This particular death would garner attention, as planned. Calvin Landry had taken a spot in the pantheon of tech giants. Taken, not earned. When the incident occurred, he had snatched Milo’s ideas and innovations and run, leaving Milo to shoulder the humiliation and blowback.
Something broke inside Milo Graves that day. It wasn’t so much the technological failure as it was the abandonment. Like his mother when he was a child, the people he had considered a second family had packed their proverbial bags and left him.
When the press had finally removed its boot from his neck, Milo had returned home to find his live-in girlfriend, an aspiring model named Breeze, gone. The only trace she had ever lived in his Cupertino home was the pile of empty designer shopping bags and shoe boxes littering the back of the closet.
Standing in the grandiose master bedroom, staring at half-full drawers and a half-empty closet, a calm washed over him, and Milo began to plot. His Harvard professors had taken his early work. Cal Landry had taken his company, and Breeze had taken, well, if not his heart, certainly his naivete.
Then there was the girl. The catalyst for the chain reaction that had led to his demise. The cheating little trickster who had tipped the first domino. She had taken his dignity. Well, guess what? Now it was Milo’s turn to take.
God, he had been nervous that first time, but Regina Phelps had made it easy despite the one minor hiccup. Like everything he did, the plan was artful. There was symmetry. Like code, where a wrong letter or misplaced punctuation mark could ruin the line, everything had to be perfect. If there was a lingering sense of impotence, Milo pushed it down.
One down, two to go.
At the table, Cal waved the waitress over and ordered another round. Showtime. The waitress came to Milo’s end of the bar and placed a circular tray at the service station next to him. Following the routine, she relayed the order to the bartender, grabbed a silver water pitcher, and turned back to her station.
The bartender placed one drink after the next on the tray. When he bent down to fetch a bottle of chardonnay from the little fridge, Milo removed the plastic saber with the garnish from Cal’s second cocktail and replaced it with another.
Milo had known Cal for nearly twenty years, knew his habits, his routines. He knew Cal’s drink order, a dirty Sapphire martini. Well, back in the day, it had been Popov and Red Bull, but Cal’s tastes had evolved with his status. He always drank two, no more, no less. Always paid the bill making a show of pulling the black AmEx from his Gucci wallet. Always carried a pre-filled epi-pen.
But not tonight.
The waitress delivered the tray of drinks to the six-top and gathered up the empty glasses with practiced ease. As was his habit, Calvin Landry took the little plastic sword from his cocktail, pulled off one olive and plopped it into the drink, then ate the other. He set the skewer on the side plate that held the remnants of his dinner roll, all the while telling a story that involved a lot of big hand gestures and was apparently quite funny. Laugh it up, jackass.
Other than the doorman and concierge in the lobby of Tampa’s chicest highrise, Cal Landry’s security was entirely electronic. The tech CEO had to walk the walk and use his own products, after all—products developed using Milo’s blueprint. From disabling the elevator’s penthouse restriction to opening the digital lock on the front door to bypassing the biometrics on the wall safe and jamming the security cameras, breaking in had been child’s play; Milo’s code had been the basis for all of it.
The most challenging part had been getting through the unwired ground-floor fire door (a problem solved by a maintenance man with a two-pack-a-day habit). Milo had slipped into the penthouse, positioned his clue, and taken Cal’s prized Cartier cufflinks—diamond-encrusted panthers circling black onyx disks—from the state-of-the-art wall safe. Cal had purchased them after their first infusion of cash from the VCs. Pretentious, unethical prick.
In the cavernous, white marble bathroom, Milo had switched out Cal’s supply of EpiPens with a tampered box. Finally, in a devilishly clever attempt to confuse the investigators, Milo had programmed the front door to unlock again at just after midnight, triggering the rebooted alarm hours after his intrusion. Those poor bastards in blue would be chasing their tails for months.
At the table, Calvin Landry repeatedly cleared his throat. That pesky peanut allergy was going to be a problem.
Cal Landry shot to his feet with such urgency that he knocked his chair into the plate glass window at his back. Grabbing the autoinjector from his breast pocket, he jabbed the needle into his thigh. When no relief came, Cal scratched at his throat, gasping. He dropped to his knees. Milo scanned the room. Several patrons had their phones out calling 9-1-1. The bartender was shouting for a doctor.
Milo knew the bark and wail of the sirens wouldn’t be enough to save Cal Landry. The concentration of peanut in the martini olive most likely would have killed him even with a shot of epinephrine.