Undercover Genius

by Rice, Patricia

“And then she had a run-in with a limo until the cops ran them off. Are you going to introduce us?” Sean asked with interest.

  My eyebrows reached my hairline as I swung on Patra and ignored the nosy reporter. “What kind of limo and what did they do?”

  “Black Escalade, tinted windows, very men-in-black. They blocked me from taking photos, grabbed my camera, and then the cops showed up, and they moved on. I have a partial license plate number. The street light isn’t working so I couldn’t get more. The guy who took my camera looked more like a hired thug than government, though — bald, massive, over forty, wearing a shiny suit. If I see him again, I’m picking his pocket. That camera costs.”

  “You really need to keep a better eye on your siblings,” Sean interrupted, wearing an impressive frown. “She’s too young to be running around DC alone. I assume from her accent that she’s not local.”

  I swung back to the critic. Behind me, Patra choked on a laugh. I’m just too predictable, but nobody criticizes my family except me. “Patra has robbed thieves in Singapore and driven elephants in India. DC is not the problem. Patra’s imitation of her damnable father is the problem. Are you covering burglary reports these days? Bit of a come down from political reporting, isn’t it?”

  “I got hired at the BBC because I don’t have an accent,” Patra protested, interrupting my rhetorical and irrelevant question. “All those years of traveling wiped it out. Anyway, nosy here followed me from Dupont. I figured he was a cop, he was so bad at it.”

  Sean shrugged, leaned back against the brick wall, and followed the activities across the street. “I had no reason to hide.”

  Single-minded Patra ignored this. “Do either of you know anyone on the force? I really need to see inside Bill’s apartment. He might have left notes about my father’s recording. I need to know what he was so excited about.”

  Moral judgments did not happen in my world. I let the slippery slope of breaking and entering slide by and returned to the practical. “Catch anything with the camera phone?” I didn’t think Patra would miss any opportunity, and Nick’s phone was a dandy.

  “Probably not much,” she said, confirming my suspicion. “Look, I really need to get inside. Any suggestions?”

  With a sigh of exasperation, I answered her plea by morphing from Basement Mouse into Kickass Ana.

  Keeping an eye out for familiar faces I needed to dodge, I crossed the street and took the stairs up to where all the activity was. I didn’t like it. If the beat cops had learned the apartment owner had just been killed, I was opening a can of worms.

  Conversely, if dangerous thugs were on Patra’s heels, I needed to know everything.

  Four apartments to a floor, I noted as I emerged on the third where two men in blue were scribbling notes. “Hello, officers,” I said, swinging my legging-clad hips as I noted door numbers and located Bill’s. Patra and Sean were right on my boot heels. “Neighbors been beating up on each other again?” I reached for Bill’s doorknob as if I belonged there. We were in luck, the door hadn’t been shut.

  “Wait a minute,” one of the officers looked up from his note-taking, “That your place?”

  “Of course not. Have you seen inside that dump? We’re just here to help Sean shovel out his stuff. Why?” I donned my best puzzled innocent expression as I pushed open the door and scoped a glance. The apartment had been trashed, as feared.

  “We had a burglary report, found the place unlocked.” The note taker held up his pad while the other cop tried to block our access. “You got any ID?”

  “I don’t know what good it will do you.” I rummaged in my bag. “I don’t live here. Hey, sis, what did you do with my wallet?” I called as Patra sauntered past the cops.

  “In the car,” she replied blithely, pushing the door open wider and grimacing at the contents. “I borrowed your Amex. Where are the garbage bags?”

  “Shoot.” I handed the policeman a business card with my mailbox drop address and my fake schoolteacher ID. “Will this do? You think Bill’s place was burgled? How could anyone tell? These guys live like bums.”

  “Does he always leave the place unlocked?” The cop noted my fake name and address. I might have to think about changing them.

  “We only have the one key. Sean, didn’t you lock up after that last load?” I obligingly lingered in the hall entertaining the officers while Sean and Patra did a quick reconnoiter inside.

  “I thought I did,” Sean called back, emerging from the kitchen area with a box of trash bags.

  That was good — loading up the burglary bags while the cops watched. Sean’s father had been friends with my father — both good Irish IRA lads. Family experience made him about as trustworthy as I was, which wasn’t much.

  “I don’t see anything missing,” he continued. “TV is still there.”

  “You didn’t see anyone in the apartment?” I asked the policemen with mild alarm. “Not that there’s anything worth taking except the computer, but we’d hate for Bill to blame us.”

  “No one here when we arrived.” The note taker put away his book. “Show me a key and we’ll be on our way. Next time, make sure you lock up.”

  “Sean, where’s your key?” I peered around the door to see Patra sweep a stack of disks into her purse. I could see a couple of computer monitors, but not the hard drives.

  “Right here.” Absent-mindedly patting his jeans pocket, Sean emerged from the bedroom with a stack of file folders under his arm. “I can’t find my good shirt. I know I left it here. If that butthead took it with him…” He dumped the folders in a garbage bag, then dug a ring of keys out of his pocket.

  “Then he’s wearing a shirt two sizes too small,” I said, playing along and taking the keys from him.

  One of the officers was already taking another call while the note taker waited impatiently for me to sort through keys. “All these things look alike. Which one is it?” I shouted back at Sean as he meandered off.

  “Domestic dispute around the corner,” the officer taking the call reported. “Anyone here filing a complaint?”

  The note taker looked impatient. “Look, all of you, get out, take your keys, and I’ll close this place up. If you don’t see anything taken and don’t want to file a report, we’ll be moving on.”

  “Anything missing?” I yelled at my looters. “If not, get thyselves out here and find the damned key.”

  Patra and Sean ambled back to the hall, arguing over the key ring as the cops turned the flimsy inside lock, shut the door, and hurried off on their next call.

  “You’re good,” I commended them with reluctance. I’d never had partners in crime before, unless Nick counted, and he tended to do his own thing. “Did you find what you needed or do we have to get back in there?”

  Sean handed his garbage bag of files to Patra. “Computers are gone. These are the only recent files I found. What are we looking for?”

  “Skullduggery,” Patra blithely answered. “You’re a good person to know.” She pressed a kiss on Sean’s cheek and swung off down the hall toward the stairs.

  Sean raised questioning eyebrows at me.

  “Patrick Llewellyn’s daughter, and that’s all I’m telling you.” I hurried after her.

  Behind us, Sean whistled. As a journalist, he knew precisely what I’d just told him, and could infer the rest. I expected he’d spend the rest of the evening learning who owned this apartment and would be three steps ahead of the overworked cops before dawn.

  * * *

  “Do you have dibs on him?” Patra asked as we emerged from the Metro down the block from our grandfather’s home.

  “Who, Sean? He’s occasionally helpful, but I don’t trust him. He’s spying on Graham. I’m not risking irritating the beast in our attic for a nosy reporter.” Carrying the trash bag of paper files, I unlocked the now spider-web-free front door and made a mental note to have a key made for Patra.

  “You’re awfully protective of that beast in the attic,” she observed with interest. />
  “I have issues, okay? I protect what’s mine and so does he. Move on.” I gestured for her to go in.

  “Sean’s cute,” she said, changing back to her real interest, “and he might be able to help me find my way around the local talent. You don’t mind if I use him, do you?”

  “You sound just like Magda. Tell Sean you’re using him and don’t go giving him ideas. Let’s pretend we’ve learned our lesson.” I handed over the bag and aimed for my hideaway.

  “I think if he’s using us, he knows the score,” she called after me. “And thanks for hunting me down.”

  “It would be easier if you’d tell me where you’re going,” I muttered back, but she knew that. Then I stopped and nodded at her bag. “Let me know if there’s anything on those disks?”

  She grinned and hefted her stolen goods more tightly under her arm. “Will do. That was a pretty good caper.”

  “I refuse to bail you out if you repeat it,” an irritable male voice growled from the chandelier.

  I waved at the camera in the cornice. “Same to you, lover.”

  That shut him up. I do love Graham’s thunderous silences.

  We didn’t need Graham’s bail money, I realized. We had our own little nest egg. I liked having that cushion of cash to fall back on.

  I trotted downstairs to finish up a few projects I’d left hanging. I needed to start a separate file on Broderick Media as related to my family. Would BM actually offer the daughter of Patrick Llewellyn a job or had they lured her here so that arsonists could destroy the rest of her father’s notes? Not that I was jumping to conclusions, mind you. Cough.

  The Bill Bloom incident had compounded my wariness. I booted up the computer and remembered to turn my phone back on. Patra’s phone. Dang, I’d have to run upstairs and trade with her.

  Even as I read the message on the screen, I heard her racing back down the stairs. Nick had texted both of us.

  YACHT BLEW UP.

  Our yacht blew up! I almost cried at the stupid message. I wanted to put my chin up and say easy come, easy go, as I would have in the past. But Nick had risked his life going after Reggie to salvage that damned thing, and my heart broke with his.

  At least Nick had been alive to let us know, which meant he hadn’t been aboard, but probably nearby. I ran upstairs punching in a message and met Patra in the foyer.

  “What does he mean?” Patra shoved my phone at me. I handed hers back after I sent a reply into cyberland.

  “Unless we’ve forged insurance papers as well as titles, it means we’re out half a million dollars and someone doesn’t like us very much,” I said, my hopes dashed lower than my cellar floor.

  I couldn’t tell if it was gloom or triumph emanating from the spider in the attic. I could be enslaved to him forever, or out on my ear tomorrow. If I didn’t have to trust the man, I’d suspect he’d planted the bomb himself.

  Seven

  Tragedy had haunted my life so long that I knew the best remedy was to return to work rather than weep or rage over what couldn’t be changed — no matter how much I wanted to fling myself on the floor and throw a tantrum to end all tantrums.

  The last time I’d been this furious and heart-broken, I’d walked out on my family and disappeared for years. I liked to think I was older and wiser now.

  With resignation, I climbed up to my room while flipping through the phone photos Patra had taken. I found nothing more elevating than the rear end of a black Escalade. It had been a sedan that ran over Bill. I had no evidence other than common sense to prove it was the same people.

  I didn’t sleep well that night. Dreams of providing cozy houses/trailers/tents for all my siblings kept exploding into fire and ash. I’m sure the dreams weren’t that explicit but my memory of them the next morning was Freudian enough. I was getting soft. I should have been forging fraudulent insurance papers before Nick returned.

  But I’d stupidly hoped I could provide an honorable example of good citizenry and its rewards to the rest of my family. Stupid, stupid, stupid. We all grew up understanding that the rest of the world lacked integrity and the best liar won.

  Nick was at the breakfast table looking as haggard as I felt. He glanced up with shadowed eyes, shoved a file folder at me, and returned to inhaling Mallard’s mean cappuccino.

  I sipped fresh-squeezed orange juice, thinking maybe slavery wasn’t too awful if I could always be fed like this. Flipping open the file, I perused the yacht title signed over to us. Brashton was a lawyer, after all, and knew how to handle these things even coked out of his little mind. The insurance and assorted other documents were all still in the name of Reginald Brashton. He’d insured the Patsy for the same amount as he’d paid, which was more than we’d been offered. If he collected the insurance, he could hire lawyers and get out of jail free.

  “What happened?” I asked with a hint of grimness, fighting my Magda tendencies to call in neutron bombs.

  “The cops believe Reggie was transporting drugs and his suppliers blew it up in retaliation for their losses.” Nick gloomily poked at his Canadian bacon.

  “Feasible, if he wasn’t profiting from the loss, which he will be. Maybe drug dealers are too stupid to know about insurance. Your thoughts?”

  “Same as yours,” he said with a morose sigh. “Either Reggie learned how to make bombs from jail — or someone didn’t want us to sell the yacht.”

  Since we were living in the house of one of those someone’s, who could hear everything we said through the bugged candelabra, we didn’t attempt guessing the names of our enemies. They were undoubtedly legion, but my money would be on current enemies and not the sheiks and KGB agents we’d tweaked in our childhoods.

  I tried to fit Broderick Media and Patra into the picture, but it wasn’t happening. Yet.

  “Talk to Oppenheimer,” I concluded, naming the lawyer who was suing Reggie’s old law firm over our embezzled inheritance. “Since the yacht was purchased with stolen funds, maybe he can make a case that the insurance proceeds belong to us.”

  Which probably meant an interminable court fight in which we’d come out with a pittance at best, but we were constitutionally incapable of doing nothing.

  Nick brightened a little at having something to do, which proved my point. Had we been trained to politics à la the Kennedy dynasty, we’d be on our way to running the world by now. Magda had reasonably avoided her father’s political machinations by removing us from temptation. She couldn’t change our genes, unfortunately.

  I heard EG on the stairs, so I switched topics. “How’s Senator Tex doing now that he’s a lame duck?”

  Nick worked for EG’s senator father, who’d been outed as not exactly a family values candidate after he’d acknowledged EG’s existence. He had been married and already had a kid when he and Magda had their impetuous fling.

  “Tex is pushing his own agenda, which won’t go anywhere without the power of his cronies behind him,” Nick said with a shrug. “I think he’s planning on staying in D.C. with one of the local law firms when his term ends, so EG will still have a daddy. I’m not sure he quite grasps my orientation yet, so I’m lying low while keeping my eyes open for a safer position. Wonder what it takes to get on an ambassadorial staff?”

  “Knowing an ambassador?” I suggested as EG slid into her seat. “You mean you want to return to roaming the world instead of lounging in our little corner of paradise?” I had to ask. I hated the idea of taking full responsibility for EG turning out normal.

  “I meant like getting on the Brit staff here. I have dual citizenship.”

  “I like that thought,” I said, immediately feeling more cheerful. “Let’s research current staff and see who we know. Can you talk to your dad about your desire to be a humble civil servant? I’m betting he’ll be happy to help. Beats gambling for a living.”

  Nick shrugged. While Nick’s dad had paid for his bastard son’s education, Lord Terence Arbuthnot didn’t like acknowledging his youthful indiscretions. He’d ditched
Magda so long ago that even I didn’t remember him, but he and Nick checked in with each other every few years. I had no idea if their relationship included calling in favors.

  “I want the MacBook Pro,” EG announced into the silence.

  “You have an iPad. You don’t need another portable device. Look at the low end iMacs. I want it out where I can see what you’re doing.” I’d promised her the computer when I’d thought we were millionaires. I couldn’t renege on my promise now that I was feeling cranky and less generous.

  “I’m not a baby,” she argued. “You don’t need to watch over my shoulder.”

  I gave her the old gimlet eye. She’d gotten herself kidnapped a few weeks back by emailing the universe of evil. Guiltily, she went back to crunching cereal.

  Patra clattered down next, wearing what might be called a power red suit, except the skirt was about a foot too short for professional. I’m a lousy judge of style, but human nature I understand. Patra was not sending the message she ought to be if that was for her Broderick Media interview.

  “They’re hiring hookers?” Nick asked for me. Since he’s our family arbiter of fashion, his words spoke louder than mine.

  “I’m getting that job,” she said, throwing her portfolio on the table. “I’m not an idiot, okay?” she said defiantly at our incredulous looks. “But if Bill died for me, I owe him the respect of finding out why.”

  The three of us familiar with the Power of the Candelabra waited expectantly for Graham’s opinion of that news. The silver remained oddly silent. Or ominously, as the case might be.

  I raised my eyebrows and shrugged. “Are you sure the people interviewing you are men?”

  Patra sent me a look of scorn. “It’s Broderick. What do you think?”

  “Point taken, although it’s a point against working for the sexist pigs.”

  “If Broderick had his way, women would be barefoot and pregnant and never seen in public. Al Qaeda has nothing on him. I’m going for the modern harem girl look.” Patra admired the platters of eggs on the buffet and helped herself to a healthy portion of everything in sight.