It was extremely odd that Jax’s biological father had crossed the country to work for a shady law firm. She didn’t want his father to be one of the bad guys.
After delivering the last dog to its owner, Evie clambered down the cellar steps into the playground Reuben and Roark were currently calling home. At least they appeared to be working and not playing with her aunt’s ancient Pac-Man machine.
The document file from the safe deposit box was on the pool table. She feared they’d opened Pandora’s Box.
Jax had the papers lined up in stacks. Reuben the tech nerd was taking apart the circuit board they’d found at the mine site. And the Cajun former military intelligence officer sat in a space-age gaming chair with three computers, streaming information across screens while his fingers flew over the keyboards.
Not one of them was speaking—typical.
“I can’t read auras on computer screens. I’ll have to go back to California once you have a list of suspects.” Throwing ammunition on the fire to get them talking, Evie helped herself to the first stack of papers in Jax’s arrangement.
“No crime, no suspects,” Jax muttered, not looking up.
“Suspects right here in River City,” Reuben corrected. “Too many rich old men. We need a revolution.”
“Uh-huh, so we can put rich young men in their place. Unless you want poor ones with guns. Revolutions always work so well.” Evie sat cross-legged on a fat decorator pillow and tried to focus on the contract in her hands. As before, the namesStocktonandIvesstood out, along with the Sovereign Machinery part. The rest made no sense.
“First rule of the revolution, no lawyers allowed,” Reuben said absently as he tested whatever mechanical contraption he was messing with.
“Who writes the laws, then? The army?” Jax had out his electronic notebook, making notes.
This wasn’t going anywhere.
“Will y’all stop it?” Evie shouted at them. “Tell me what you found.”
They looked at her blankly. All right, they didn’t know where to begin. She had to orchestrate. She pointed at Reuben. “What’s with the circuit board?”
He brightened. “This PCB you found is for an early electronic voting machine. It’s primitive but the basic components are the same as today’s models. These are embedded systems, so all the info is on the board with the electronics to submit it. The microchips require silica, which presumably came from the Ives Mining Company.”
“Along with the silica mine”—Jax pointed at one of his stacks—“my father had contracts to create the microchips. Sovereign bought his chips to install in the PCBs of their voting equipment.”
PCBs? Circuit boards? But Evie deduced the gist of it. “This is all about thirty-year-old voting machines? That might have been exciting back then but is anyone using those machines now?”
“Hope not.” Roark finally spoke up. “Some genius discovered da machines could be programmed to switch votes a quarter of the time. Dat’s easy enough to make a difference in any race. Sovereign got sued and shut down.”
“So this is all past and done?” Evie gestured at the projects they were working on. “We can close up and go back to raccoon hunting?” That had been the job her Sensible Solutions Agency had taken on before she left to track Jax.
“Opossum,” Reuben corrected. “And baby possums. The lady wasn’t happy but she paid us anyway. She really wanted ghosts.”
Danged good thing she was good at processing different topics at high speed. “I trust we got paid?”
“Mais oui. Used it to replace da tires on our van.” Roark returned to scanning screens.
“So why are we still working on voting machines?” She made a mental note to see what kind of machine Afterthought was using. Buying used machines would be just the kind of thing the council would do.
“Because Stockton and Stockton wrote these contracts, Franklin Jackson examined them, and Aaron Ives was supposed to fulfill them.” Jax looked grim and tired. “As we now know, S&S is better known for making money than being cautious. And Aaron Ivesdidn’tend up in the bottom of a mine but went to work for S&S, and Franklin vanished.”
“So, we can deduce that either your father murdered his partner to make a killing in the microchip market, or he got furious about his friend’s death and decided to pull a switcheroo to catch a murderer?” Evie wanted thepeopleunderpinnings of this case. “Gotta say, I’m not liking either alternative.”
Jax scowled. “We can assume that using his partner’s identity, my father accepted a job at the company hired to draw up the contracts, maybe a job Franklin had already been offered. We have no idea why. At the time he was hired, Sovereign had not been caught with fraudulent machines. That came much later, well after the mine closed and the microchip company shut down.”
Jax’s aura had returned to murderous. He was too honest to cover up criminal possibilities, even when it came to his newly discovered father. If they didn’t solve this puzzle, he might strangle to death controlling all that boiling fury. Or explode. That would be messy and not good for Loretta.
“So, it looks as if your father, posing as Franklin Jackson, was rewarded for keeping his mouth shut about the mine collapse?” Evie watched, but Jax’s aura only got tighter.
Relentlessly, she continued. “So, what happened a dozen years later, when he died? You thought he was investigating Stephen Stockton’s Ponzi scheme and got himself killed. But your adoptive father claims he didn’t even know he was being investigated, and that your father got fired because the firm uncovered his real identity.”
Evie scrunched up her nose to puzzle that out. If Jackson and Ives were in California, and S&S was in Savannah, chances were the law firm had never actually met the pair. The switch was possible. Who had connected the California company with a Savannah law firm? She studied the documents again but they used corporate names that meant nothing to her.