White Lies

by Jayne Ann Krentz

  “Oh, wow,” Clare said. Excitement bubbled up inside. “Good stuff, huh?”

  “There is a fair amount of information that will be useful in other, related J&J investigations,” Jake said, “but not nearly as much detailed data on the new cabal as Fallon wanted.”

  Clare rolled her eyes. “Jones is a difficult person to please.”

  “No argument there,” Jake said. “But in this case, I can understand his frustration. Looks like this new cabal is very good at keeping its secrets. Unfortunately Shipley was not high enough in the organization to know much.”

  “Bad news for Jones & Jones,” Archer observed.

  “True,” Jake agreed. “But Fallon says Shipley’s diary did provide a lot of details about the project here in Stone Canyon. That is proving extremely helpful because from that information he’s getting a fix on how the new organization works and its probable agenda.”

  “Owen was the cabal guy all along?” Elizabeth asked. “The one you were sent here to find?”

  “Right,” Jake said. “According to his notes, the cabal recruited him a year and a half ago. His first major assignment was to take control of Glazebrook, Inc. They figured that if anyone could do that, he could because he enjoyed Archer’s trust.”

  Archer grimaced. “He sure did. For damn near thirty-five years. Still hard to believe he was the bad guy in all this.”

  “Shipley came up with what can only be called a breathtaking strategy,” Jake continued. “Among other things, he was promised by his superiors that success would enable him to ascend to the next level of power.”

  “What the hell did the cabal want with my company?” Archer growled.

  “One word,” Jake said. “Money. Lots of it. Glazebrook, Inc., is nothing if not a cash cow. As I told Clare, your company also had other distinct advantages. It’s a privately held firm. There would have been no stockholders or outside board of directors to answer to when the money started to get funneled into the cabal’s own secret projects.”

  Clare wrinkled her nose. “Define ‘secret projects.’”

  Jake looked at her. “Shipley didn’t know what they were. But Fallon believes that the new cabal is in an acquisitions mode and is probably trying to take control of a number of privately held companies. He thinks it is assembling a strong financial base that will generate a reliable cash flow for the next several years.”

  Elizabeth frowned. “The cabal is just out to make money? They didn’t need to form a secret club and kill people to do that. All that’s required is a business license.”

  “It’s not quite that simple if you’re trying to put together a corporate empire that will generate an ongoing revenue stream that can be used to fund secret parapharmaceutical research,” Jake said.

  They all stared at him. Every mouth was open.

  Archer whistled softly. “Damn. These guys aren’t just out to re-create the founder’s formula. They’re planning to take it into full-scale production.”

  Myra frowned. “It’s not just the Arcane Society that would look askance at an illicit drug lab doing unregulated pharmaceutical research. The Feds would be down on the new cabal in a nanosecond if they found out about it.”

  “Any way you look at it, the cabal has a lot of good reasons to keep their empire-building secret,” Jake said.

  Archer exhaled heavily. “I thought Owen was my friend. Hell, after all we went through together.”

  “His resentment of you began years ago,” Jake said quietly. “Fallon found that in the diary, too.”

  “What the hell did I ever do to Owen except help him make a ton of money?” Archer demanded.

  Clare waited a moment for one of the others to state the obvious. When no one did, she shrugged.

  “You got the girl,” she said. “Mom told me the whole story about how Owen tried to persuade Myra to marry him. But Myra chose you, instead.”

  There was a short, startled pause. Everyone looked at Myra again.

  “I was never in love with Owen and he never loved me,” she said briskly. “Not really. He was only in love with the notion of marrying the senator’s daughter. He wanted the connections and the lifestyle that he thought I could bring him. I knew that from the start.”

  “Then why the hell did you date him?” Archer demanded, outraged.

  Myra raised her brows. “To make you sit up and take notice, of course. It was very hard to get your attention in those days, Archer Glazebrook. You were too busy building your precious company.”

  For an instant, Clare thought Archer was going to roar. Then he surprised them all with a thoroughly wicked grin.

  “I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again.” Archer leaned back in his chair and hooked his thumbs in the waistband of his jeans. He looked smugly satisfied. He also looked like a man very much in love with his wife. “Never play cards with this woman.”

  Clare could have sworn that Myra blushed.

  Jake cleared his throat. “Getting back to Shipley, his resentment of you may have started when he didn’t get the girl, as Clare said, but it was fed by the knowledge that you were the real genius behind Glazebrook. At the same time, he wanted very badly what the company’s success gave him.”

  “Money, connections and a degree of power,” Clare said.

  Archer shook his head. “He got all three but apparently they didn’t satisfy him.”

  “No,” Jake said. “His envy festered over the years. In short, by the time the cabal identified him as a potential recruit, he was more than ready to leap at the opportunity not only to take revenge, but to become a more powerful talent than you. The cabal gave him a variant of the formula genetically engineered just for him along with the promise of advancement within the organization to clinch the deal. All he had to do was deliver Glazebrook, Inc., on a platter.”

  Clare drank some tea and lowered the glass. “What about the others? How did Shipley find Brad McAllister and Valerie, the mom from hell?”

  “Shipley decided that the slickest way to get his hands on Glazebrook was to promote a marriage with Elizabeth that would ensure that her husband got her share of the company when Archer conveniently died. Shipley, of course, is in his early sixties,” Jake said. “He knew there was no chance he could ever make himself look like good husband material to Elizabeth.”

  “Heavens, no,” Myra said. “He’s much too old for her.”

  “You can say that again.” Elizabeth made a face. “I think of him, or rather thought of him, as an uncle.”

  “Shipley worked out his strategy and then contacted his superiors in the cabal,” Jake continued. “It all hinged on bringing someone who looked like the ideal husband into the Glazebrook circle. The guy had to be able to successfully court Elizabeth and get the approval of her family. The cabal helped Shipley locate a world-class scam artist, one Brad McAllister.”

  “Who was not only good-looking, charming and smart, he was also a strong hypnotist,” Clare said. “I’ll bet that was his biggest asset as far as Shipley was concerned. If charm didn’t work, Brad could always use his talent to dazzle everyone.”

  “What did Owen offer Brad to make him risk getting involved in the conspiracy?” Myra asked.

  “According to the diary, it wasn’t what Shipley offered that convinced McAllister to sign on for the project,” Jake said. “It was what the cabal offered.”

  “Got it,” Elizabeth said. “The cabal made the same offer to Owen that it made to Brad. Power and high status in the organization.”

  “And his very own genetically tailored supply of the enhancement drug,” Jake said. “The diary indicates that Brad McAllister was a level-eight hypnotist before he started taking the drugs. Whatever the cabal gave him boosted him straight off the charts.”

  Elizabeth sighed. “So that was how he was able to manipulate everyone so well.”

  “Everyone except Clare,” Archer said proudly.

  Myra smiled. “Yes, everyone except Clare. Thank God.”

  Clare felt an
odd little rush of warmth. She had to grab a napkin and blot the moisture from her eyes. When she looked up, blinking, she saw that Jake was watching her with an amused expression.

  “It was Brad’s idea to have Shipley marry Valerie,” Jake said. “It was the perfect way to slide Brad into your social circle here in Stone Canyon. What better credentials could a suitor have than being the son of your best friend’s wife, Archer?”

  Archer scowled. “I had McAllister checked out seven ways from Sunday. There was nothing in the member database to indicate that he was anything but what he claimed to be. Hell, McAllister not only came out clean, Arcanematch.com said he was just right for Elizabeth.”

  Jake lounged deeper into his chair. “Here’s one of the really nasty bits as far as Fallon is concerned. He thinks the cabal has managed to hack into the Society’s genealogical records and Arcanematch.com and that it is able to make alterations to the records.”

  Archer exhaled slowly. “That’s going to be a problem for J&J.”

  “A big one,” Jake agreed.

  “One thing I don’t understand,” Archer said. “Why didn’t Owen pull the plug on his scheme after Brad was murdered? What did he hope to accomplish?”

  “He didn’t have any choice but to come up with a new angle,” Jake said. “Traditionally the cabals do not tolerate failure. The revised plan required several additional murders, namely Valerie’s, Kimberley’s, mine and Clare’s, but by then he was desperate enough, or maybe crazy enough, to take the risk.”

  “I can tell you that the drug the cabal gave Owen worked,” Archer said grimly. “He didn’t always have that psychic-freeze trick up his sleeve. No way he could have concealed it from me all these years. Hell, he was only a mid-range sensitive with a talent for strategy.”

  “Fallon agrees with you,” Jake said. “It’s obvious that the new cabal already has a functioning lab up and running somewhere.”

  Archer looked thoughtful. “Owen always was a pretty good shot with a hunting rifle. I assume he was the one who tried to take you out that day at the old ranch house?”

  “Right,” Jake said. “He followed me when I left the Glazebrook offices that day. It was a desperate, preemptive attempt to get rid of me. When that failed he went back to the drawing board and came up with the steamed-veggie plan instead.”

  “Bizarre,” Myra said.

  “Yeah,” Jake said. “So bizarre I wouldn’t be surprised if the enhancement drug had begun to affect the rational side of his mind.”

  Archer’s brows bunched. “How the hell did he know you were going to search his house that night after you returned from Tucson?”

  “He didn’t,” Jake said. “But he was watching my place, waiting for an opportunity to collect Clare and me to cart us off to the spa. He saw me drive away just as he was getting ready to move in on us. He followed me.”

  “Straight back to his house,” Elizabeth said. “Where he took you out with his psychic mind blast.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t circulate that story too widely,” Jake said. “I don’t think it would be good for business.”

  Elizabeth chuckled. “Don’t worry. Who, aside from a few folks at Jones & Jones, would believe us if we told them that Owen Shipley was a psychically enhanced sociopath involved with a mysterious cabal intent on building secret labs to create new versions of an ancient alchemical formula?”

  Myra shuddered. “Don’t even think about telling anyone in Stone Canyon. We would be asked to cancel our membership at the country club, and I would very likely have to step down from any number of boards. I assure you, no one around here would want a person who took psychic cabals and alchemical formulas seriously to be president of the board of directors of the Arts Academy.”

  Archer sat forward abruptly, startling all of them.

  “Hell,” he said, “those injections Owen was taking. I’ll bet that was the para-enhancer.”

  “What injections?” Jake asked.

  “A couple of times when I was with him Owen had to stop and give himself a shot,” Archer explained. “The last time was on the day Valerie died. He told me it was medication for some kind of neurological problem. Said he didn’t want anyone to know about it because he had his image to maintain.”

  Jake drummed his fingers on the table. “Wonder if there’s any of the stuff left at the Shipley house. Fallon would give a lot to get his hands on it to run some tests.”

  “The refrigerator,” Myra said slowly.

  “What are you talking about, Mom?” Elizabeth asked.

  “I went to see Valerie one afternoon about a week ago,” Myra said. “Owen asked me to do it. He was trying to cement the image of Valerie being in need of rehab, I suppose.”

  “What happened?” Clare asked.

  “Valerie was drunk, as usual,” Myra said. “She offered me a cocktail. I said no. She said there was a fresh pitcher of iced tea in the refrigerator in the kitchen and told me to help myself. So I did.”

  Archer gave her an inquiring look. “What are you getting at, honey?”

  “There was a glass vial stored in the very back on the top shelf. It looked like a regular medicine bottle but I remember thinking it was odd that there was no label on it. You know how carefully pharmacies label meds.”

  Jake was on his feet, anticipation flowing off him in waves. “The drug must require refrigeration. Not many places in a household can provide that. Damn. I’ve got to get over there before the cops think to search the kitchen.”

  Chapter Fifty

  No one looked pleased to see him when he arrived at the Shipley house, but he was waved inside.

  “Guess we owe you that much,” the detective in charge said. “And you’re a pro. You know enough to stay out of the way and not contaminate anything. Not that we’re turning up anything useful here.”

  Jake wandered into the kitchen. There was no one in the room. He opened the refrigerator. The unlabeled bottle of clear fluid was still sitting on the top shelf.

  He tucked the bottle inside a pocket and made his way leisurely to the front door. A man stood just outside, trying to talk his way into the crime scene.

  “The name is Taylor,” the stranger said. He sounded edgy. “I’m with the Phoenix Star.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Taylor, no press allowed inside,” the young officer said firmly.

  “Look, my editor is going to be really pissed if I don’t get this story,” Taylor said. “Give me a break here.”

  Jake felt his hunter senses stir. Taylor practically vibrated with tension. Definitely not your typical hardbitten, seen-it-all-and-written-about-it crime reporter. Running hot.

  “Excuse me,” Jake said, moving past Taylor and the cop.

  Taylor swung around abruptly, eyes darkening with sudden suspicion. “Who are you?”

  “Knew the family,” Jake said casually. Clare was right. He did do the truth-veiled-in-a-lie thing rather well.

  He walked back to the car and got inside. Taylor threw him one last uneasy look and then resumed his urgent appeal to the cop.

  Jake reached into the glove compartment, removed the small digital camera he kept there and took a shot of the reporter.

  Might be nothing at all, he thought. But he would e-mail it to Fallon when he got home. Couldn’t hurt.

  . . .

  When he loaded the photo onto his computer a short time later he realized that he had taken a pretty good picture. Taylor’s features were very clear. Fallon ought to be able to identify him fairly easily.

  He studied the picture for a long moment and concluded that he had been right back at the Shipley house. The hunter in him had sensed more than tension in Taylor. What he had detected was fear.

  He picked up his phone and dialed the familiar number.

  “What have you got?” Fallon asked.

  “I think the cabal sent someone out to collect what was left of the drug Shipley was taking. Guy called himself Taylor. Said he was a reporter. I’ve got a photo for you.”

/>   “What about the drug?” Fallon asked urgently.

  “Got that, too.”

  “You just earned that inflated consulting fee that you’re charging J&J.”

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Two days later…

  “Owen Shipley was committed to a psychiatric hospital for observation?” Clare lowered the morning edition of the Stone Canyon Herald and looked at Jake, who had just ended a call.

  “He was sent to one outside Phoenix yesterday.” Jake put the phone down on the counter and went back to flipping the blue corn pancakes on the griddle. “Fallon says the local authorities think he just snapped. Apparently he’s delusional and incoherent and getting worse by the hour. No one expects him to be declared competent to stand trial.”

  “What does Dumbass think really happened?”

  “Fallon says the initial tests on that drug I took out of the Shipley refrigerator indicate that it is powerful but very short-acting. He suspects there are devastating effects if it is withdrawn abruptly. He thinks Shipley started to slip into insanity as soon as his supply of the stuff was cut off. Either that’s an unpleasant downside of the drug or else the cabal lab techs engineered the stuff that way in order to limit the amount of damage that could be done by any of their members who wound up in custody.”

  She shuddered. “Talk about cold-blooded.”

  “But effective. By controlling the drug, they control their people.” Jake lifted the pancakes off the griddle and divided them between two plates. “This way they don’t have to worry about any cabal member giving too much information to law enforcement or to J&J.”

  “The organization really knows how to cover its tracks, doesn’t it?”

  “Looks that way. J&J is going to be very busy for the foreseeable future.”

  Clare thought about that while she used a fork to cut a bite of the pancakes. “They’ll probably need some occasional, expert, very expensive consulting from a hunter and a human lie detector.”

  Jake smiled slowly. “I believe I mentioned on at least one prior occasion that I like the way you think.”