Evie wasn’t so polite. “Your grandmother says he’s working with the feds, just like her. He has resources we don’t.”
Looking incredulous, Stacey kept shaking her head. “No, that’s impossible. After Mom died, he needed distraction, started taking visiting professor seats, speaking at conferences, just to escape the empty house. If you knew him, you’d understand. He’s presiding over a conference in some small European country right now, or he’d be here.”
A lamp crashed to the floor.
They all stared.
When nothing else went flying, Evie shrugged. “I don’t think your grandmother agrees. Even if you can’t call him, you should probably stay elsewhere. Your gran was on the trail of a rather large gang of criminals. You don’t want them suspecting you’re a danger to them too.”
“Me? I don’t know anything? I—”
Jax interrupted. “One of those nice old people may have spiked your grandmother’s drink with antifreeze. Go home. Call an estate sale company to deal with the rest of the furniture. The cost of their commission isn’t worth your life. Lock up and hide the keys. I’ll email you a power of attorney to sign and handle the estate for you. Evie isn’t the police. She can’t protect you more than that.”
The air filled with an old-fashioned perfume Jax recognized from his late, adoptive mother.
Granny giving her blessing to his suggestion?
Good Lord, he sounded like a psychic medium groupie.
Seventeen
Roark roved restlesslythrough the woods after dark. He should be sleeping. Or tracking his father’s villainy. Or his brothers’ activities. But he was a physical man and needed physical outlets. He’d caught up with a few old girlfriends over the summer. They’d had a little fun, but he wasn’t eager to make them permanent. He hadn’t enjoyed his home’s narrow parameters when he was a kid, and after traveling the world, he certainly couldn’t handle the limitations now. Marriage and babies were not his goals in life.
So, yeah, maybe he was a hypocrite. He was learning to enjoy the weird mindsets of Afterthought, so all small towns weren’t alike. Maybe cotton fields were better than swamps. Besides, two big cities were just a short drive away. All he needed was transportation.
He jogged around the nearly dry pond a few times, working his injured leg muscle. Then he chinned himself on a few branches. The mosquitoes didn’t bother his Cajun hide, but the knowledge that the enigmatic female on her computers could watch what he was doing had him on edge.
Over this past year, he’d observed Jax’s fragile sister from a distance with fascination. Elegant, contained, graceful, and super intelligent—Ariel was everything he’d dreamed of growing up. Of course, no one from her country club set would ever look at a rough nobody like him—but Ariel didn’t seem to needanyone.
And now that he was living with her—he’d learned that she was an irritating witch. Yeah, she had issues. Didn’t everyone? He accepted that. But she’d spokenan entire sentencetoday. That proved that shecouldcommunicate. She simply didn’t want to be bothered.
She preferred sitting in the dark and silence to living.
Nowthatwas a severe irritation, wasting all her beauty and brains.
He chinned himself a few more times in frustration. There wasn’t any way he was sleeping while his blood was running hot. But after passing his sap-sticky hands through his thick hair and dislodging enough debris for a robin’s nest, he conceded a shower might help. He needed to shave these damned curls but he traveled light and only had his straight edge.
He knew how to be silent. His life had depended on it too many times. He actually preferred silence. That’s when he could hear the sounds of the earth and people breathing. The one true advantage of small towns was the relative quiet. Cities where the noise never stopped were painful.
He thought Ariel might be a little like that. So he showered as noiselessly as he could and tried not to disturb her as he prepared their midnight snack.
Sitting at the kitchen table, nibbling half a sandwich, he opened his laptop. He’d already looked up Professor Gump, no surprises there. Reuben had been spot on. The prof was a spook.
He hunted down a few of the Sunshine officers out of curiosity and habit. The HR director was from Russia. He had her pinned as FSB in disgrace, but that was instinct. He couldn’t read Cyrillic if he hacked it.
He checked to see if anyone had sent him anything new and interesting to work on. Tracing Pris’s call had been a dead end leading to a cheap dumb phone, as he’d suspected. Still, knowing the location of the call was his hometown in Louisiana—and not Atlanta, where the caller purported to be—had given them evidence that they were on the right track.
Give him enough time and incentive... He could figure out a hack with that money app. It niggled at the back of his mind while he concentrated on other things.
Ariel had sent him a collection of bank statements from the Sunshine employees Evie was investigating. Weird. If he didn’t know better, he’d swear banks had hired Ariel to hack their security. If she was anything like Jax, she hacked first, then warned the banks of their security breaches.
Why had she sent him these instead of his father’s case? He scanned the statements first, looking for anomalies. He compared the names on the accounts to the staff chart Reuben had compiled—all upper management. Routine salary deposits, odds and ends of trifling deposits. No big entries of any sort—just the usual middle-class paycheck-to-paycheck survival. These clods were definitely working for the feels, not the money or glory.
Reuben the PhD had established a cloud account for the Gump files. Roark uploaded the bank statements there and looked to see if anything new had been added . Solving a puzzle was just a matter of fitting the pieces together—once they had all the pieces. They were just establishing the framework.
Apparently Ariel had grown bored with Pris’s case and moved on to Evie’s. As he watched, his mailbox filled with credit reports on the same employees he’d just looked at. These were a little more interesting. Comparing the property value of the houses people owned to the mortgage payments to the bank accounts... Unless they all had rich uncles, something did not compute. A tiny $40,000 mortgage on a $400,000 house was highly unusual for a young person. A $360,000 down payment?
Substantial down payments had to come from somewhere.