Jane minimized the browser. “Stop looking at it.” She found a spreadsheet app on the desktop, opened it. She pulled the spreadsheet printout from her pocket, smoothed it flat. She entered in the names and abbreviations from the spreadsheet against a catalog of files. HFK. Alpha. On the same dates as the entries she found listings. Payments funneled from…her mother’s charity. Helpful Hands Reaching Out was a front, one of many channels to clean the money sent to this online marketplace.
Her mother was part of this.
“My dad must have found this when he was looking for proof of their affair. Then we found it…” Jane’s voice cracked.
“Are you saying Cal came here when Kamala told him you were here…and found that you two had discovered this?” Perri pressed her fist against her mouth.
“No,” Cal Hall said, standing in the doorway. “That’s not quite what happened.”
54
STEP AWAY FROM the computer,” Cal said. There was a gun tucked in the front of his pants. He had a Taser in one hand; he gestured with it.
“Don’t you point that at us,” Perri said. “Explain yourself.”
Cal pulled a cheap, orange phone from his pocket. Orange. Like the one missing from the crash, the one Brenda had knelt on when she went to help David. Cal pressed a button, listened, said, “It’s OK. We have a situation, but it can be handled. But I need you to be ready.” Then he hung up and put the orange phone in his jacket.
Jane stared at him, and it was as if shards and slices of memory cut into the here and now, pierced her brain. This room. This terrible room. David sliding the hacker drive into the computer, finding a password, discovering the distant server, entering the username and the passcode. And then the terrible truth of the dark market.
“David went through the logs, the data records on the little hacker flash drive. He found the traces that my dad found. My dad was just looking for proof of e-mails or texts or something on my mother’s computer to prove you two were having an affair. What he found was the spreadsheets with far more money than anyone would expect moving through my mother’s charity accounts. So, being an accountant, he went looking for the source…”
“He found Babylon. I had no idea how he had done it…I thought the leak was Laurel. I didn’t realize he must have had a hacker drive until it was too late. She told me she’d tossed all his stuff. I didn’t know she’d given some of it to David. She didn’t realize the harm she’d done.”
“Our son. You let our son see this? Why would you do this, Cal, why?” Perri demanded.
“I don’t ‘do’ anything,” he said. “I help move money. That’s all. I don’t…I don’t touch anything illegal.”
“No, you just make it possible…” Jane said. She staggered back from him and it was as if the walls holding the hell at bay fell in her mind. “You. Oh. You. It was a chain reaction. David found the hacker kit. Maybe there is something on there that points to your affair with my mom. Then he found the money trail on your computer, too? This is what had to do with my dad. Both our parents breaking the law. What do we do? Talk about running to Canada. So we wouldn’t have to face you all. Then we think, where would this be? We’ve found the locked doors in the lake house, maybe already when we’re there being together sometime before; maybe there’s proof behind them. Something we can use to protect us. Protect me, David, and Perri from you. We buy the crowbar. We break in. We find this. It’s so much worse than simple money laundering. Then…”
“Then what, Jane?”
Jane shook her head, staring at Cal. “You put us into my car. You made me drive. You had the gun on me. To my head. You…you were in the car with us. You were there.” Her voice rose into a shriek.
Cal fired the Taser. The needles slammed into Jane Norton and she screamed and collapsed. For a few moments Perri stood frozen in shock as Jane writhed on the floor. She threw herself at Cal, who shoved her to the floor and yanked the crowbar from her grip. When she came at him again, he hit her.
It was unimaginable. The father of her son, the man who had said “I do” to her.
55
SHILOH DROVE, LOOPING through Lakehaven, the burn of revenge hard in his heart. After the adrenaline had faded from the attack last night, he’d felt at odds, loose, restless. He had tried to call Mimi, to inch his foot onto that thin ice, but she had told him to drop dead and not to call her again. She had been the one good thing in a long time, his reason to get up in the morning, his reason to (usually) not chase after a woman he wanted. And she was gone.
The rage needed an outlet. He had taken out the pretty black girl he’d seen Jane Norton talking to, and the guy who was with her…that reporter. They were both on his list of people who had been quoted in the old series of articles about Jane’s accident and amnesia. The follow-up story would be about Jane and the Halls. Even if Jane wasn’t Liv Danger, well, if she hadn’t driven so recklessly, there wouldn’t have been a wreck, Shiloh wouldn’t have responded, and then none of this misery would have happened. He tried to tell himself he was doing it for poor Brenda and her burned-up house, too.
But now Jane had vanished and Perri Hall was gone; he’d driven past the circle and seen a police car at the Norton house. They must be questioning Laurel, or looking for Jane, about the attack on Bowman and Vasquez. It hadn’t gone how he planned it and perhaps he needed to stage another attack. He had the list from the article of people who Matteo Vasquez had interviewed in the aftermath of the crash. There was the lawyer, Kip Evander, but he had a wife and kids he was around a lot and he hadn’t gone to his office. There was this Kamala Grayson, Jane’s best friend. Yeah, maybe her. She was pretty but he hadn’t yet figured out where she lived.
But he did have an address for one of them. One easy-to-find target was this friend of Jane’s and David’s, this blond boy, Trevor Blinn. He had been interviewed in one of the articles, his picture taken along with Kamala Grayson as mutual friends of David and Jane. According to the news reports, Amari Bowman had been at a party and he’d called a police officer friend and gotten the address of the party she’d been at—a detective had talked to the boy. Shiloh was restless and curious. When he drove by the house once the next day, he’d seen the boy from the old news article getting into a black truck, wearing a shirt that said Security. He was a big kid, bigger than Shiloh, but he was weak. You could tell he was weak, he wouldn’t stand up in a fight. Shiloh prided himself on his ability to read people’s capacity to really fight, which very few had. Shiloh had driven off then, before he got noticed parked on the residential street. Neighborhoods had Faceplace pages now and they loved to warn each other when a stranger or a door-to-door salesman was around.
Shiloh had the crowbar. A crowbar could take care of the blond boy real quick. Blond boy could be the dot under the exclamation mark of Bowman and Vasquez. He was tied, loosely, to the crash. He would fit the pattern of Liv Danger’s attacks.