Murphy’s Law: Murphy’s Law Book One

by Michelle St. James

  He snorted like it was a funny question, and she had to check a smart-ass retort. She’d been dealing with guys like Clay since college. Most of them meant well. They were just infected with the deeply held belief that men had an inherently stronger grasp on all things tech.

  She’d had the debate more times than she could count, but she didn’t want to have it now. She just wanted to find her sister, and she would happily swallow her pride if Clay could help her do that.

  Besides, she was outmatched in this case, a conclusion that became apparent as his fingers flew over the keyboard of both computers, the code stretching out on the screens becoming more and more unrecognizable to her.

  “Mind if I take a look at Elise’s room?” Ronan asked.

  She had to catch her breath when she turned to look at him. She’d forgotten how piercing his eyes were, how they caught her off guard when she wasn’t paying attention.

  “Sure.” She looked at Clay. “You okay?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “He’s okay,” Ronan said.

  Clay was in another place now, a place where the language was made up of numbers and letters streamed in from minds all over the world.

  “This way.”

  She led him through the small living room and into Elise’s bedroom, pausing inside the door, afraid as always to disturb anything. She was glad when he stopped next to her, letting his gaze travel slowly around the room.

  Elise was alive. Julia felt it in her bones. She didn’t want to be disrespectful of her things.

  “Do you mind?” Ronan asked softly.

  She shook her head. “No, but I went through it already and didn’t find anything.”

  “Sometimes fresh eyes are good.”

  “Okay, but I think I’ll wait in the other room,” she said.

  He nodded like he understood, and she left the room and returned to the kitchen where she braced herself against the counter, trying to blink past the crush of pain in her chest.

  Ronan was nothing but respectful, but seeing him in Elise’s room made it all real. It was too much like a movie where the detective goes to the house of a dead girl to look for clues.

  Except Elise wasn’t dead. She wasn’t.

  Julia drew in a breath and distracted herself by straightening the kitchen. It didn’t take long: with Elise gone and Julia out at all hours, there were hardly any dishes.

  Clay had put headphones around his ears and was tapping at the keyboard on her laptop, seemingly unaware of her activity. She was contemplating cleaning out the fridge when Ronan came into the room.

  “Anything?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Do you have her phone?”

  “It’s the one thing she took,” Julia said. “But she left her charger, which is why I know whatever happened to her happened fast.”

  “She couldn’t have forgotten it?” Ronan asked. “Even if she were in a hurry to disappear before you realized she was gone?”

  “If you knew how obsessive Elise is about keeping her phone charged, you wouldn’t ask. She won’t even go to the movies without her charger.”

  “Got something!” Clay exclaimed from the kitchen table.

  Julia followed Ronan to the dining nook off the kitchen. Clay was staring triumphantly at Julia’s laptop, a web page eerily similar to the one featuring the door open on the screen, except this one had not a door, but a series of symbols running in a single vertical row down the middle of the page against a black backdrop.

  “What is that?” Julia murmured, leaning in for a closer look.

  “It’s some kind of portal buried deep in the code,” Clay said. “I can’t get into anything else right now.”

  There were ten logos in the row, all of them featuring an identical stylized letter “M” in a different color, each one set against a different symbol. She homed in on the third symbol from the top, pulled her phone out of the pocket of her jeans, and took a picture of the screen.

  Clay closed his computer. “I’ll do a deep dive into the code when I get back to the lab. Can’t do anything else here now.”

  “Thanks,” Julia said.

  “I’ll meet you outside,” Ronan said as Clay packed up his stuff.

  He left a few minutes later, the door slamming shut behind him. The room was strangely vacuous without his manic typing in the background.

  “What do you make of that?” Julia asked Ronan.

  A wall had come down over his features, his expression unreadable. “Hard to say."

  “Weird,” she said. “Will you keep me posted?”

  His nod was hesitant, like he didn’t quite believe she was being so amenable.

  “To be clear, I do want to be part of whatever you find,” she said. “I understand you have a job to do, but Elise is my sister. Finding her is my only job.”

  “I understand,” he said.

  “Good.”

  The silence grew into a living thing between them, his eyes like an excavator into her soul. She hated the heat blossoming in her stomach, the flush spreading across her chest, up her neck, onto her cheeks.

  Hated the moisture between her legs.

  “I should go,” he finally said, his voice gruff.

  She showed him to the door and was relieved when he didn’t say anything else, when he didn’t turn that impenetrable gaze on her. She was practically holding her breath by the time she closed the door behind him.

  She leaned against it, exhaling her relief. She’d almost blown it.

  She pulled out her phone and opened it to the picture of the symbols Clay had found. Expanding the image with her fingers, she focused again on the third symbol from the top. It was the same stylized “M” as the others, but this one was rendered in deep green against a symbol that seemed familiar from the beginning.

  And then she’d seen it in her mind — the symbol behind the green “M”, this time behind the words “Whitmore” and rendered on a brass plaque outside a historical building in downtown Boston.

  She knew the Whitmore Club. Had passed by it more times than she could count while walking the city, although she’d never been inside. That was reserved for the rich, for the connected — and maybe for lost girls like her sister.

  Now all she had to do was find a way in.

  13

  A half hour after he left Julia Berenger’s apartment, Ronan stepped into the elevator at MIS and waited for it to take him to the fifth floor. He’d stopped at the house to pick up Chief after parting ways with Clay outside Julia’s house, and the dog sat quietly next to him as the elevator rose.

  He didn’t usually think twice about whether someone could read him. He’d learned to be unreadable in Afghanistan, had perfected the art when he’d come home and founded MIS. Neither industry was one where it paid to be transparent, and maintaining a poker face during times of stress had always come easily to him.

  So why did he feel as if Julia had been reading him like a book? Like she’d been able to see the recognition in his face after Clay had come across the web page bearing symbols representing cities that Ronan had immediately recognized, some of them anyway.

  Los Angeles.

  Chicago.

  New York.

  The Whitmore crest for the Whitmore Club in Boston.

  He still didn’t know what the “M” in front of each symbol meant, but he could only guess it was some kind of private club, the symbols behind the letter representative of their locations.

  He wasn’t a history buff, but like everyone born and raised in Boston, he knew enough about Arthur Whitmore to recognize the name. You’d have to be blind not to see evidence of Whitmore’s history in the city — the Whitmore Memorial Library, the Arthur Whitmore Oncology Research and Treatment wing at Boston General, the Whitmore law library at Boston University, not to mention more schools and parks than Ronan could count.

  And of course, the Whitmore Club, a relic of the past when men (and only men) could gather in private, surrounded by antiques, first edition
books, and the most expensive liquor money could buy to discuss their latest financial pissing contests. Technically the club had opened its membership to women sometime in the past decade, but Ronan would hazard a guess not many who applied made the cut.

  He’d been invited two years after the founding of MIS, not coincidentally, he suspected, after they’d been hired by Mr. G, a high-ranking member of the World Bank, to beat within an inch of his life the affluent hedge fund manager who’d forced himself on Mr. G’s underage daughter at a fundraiser for Alzheimer’s research.

  Ronan had happily obliged, and Nick had worked with Clay to clean out the rapist’s offshore account for good measure.

  Ronan had ignored the invitation. The Whitmore wasn’t his scene. Thanks to MIS, he had money and lots of it: money stashed offshore in numbered accounts, money hidden in expensive real estate around the world, money invested in both the domestic and foreign markets.

  But his money was a byproduct of MIS, an unexpected and not necessarily desired consequence of the work that gave his life meaning. His father wouldn’t accept it, preferring to live on his retirement income from BPD. He said he didn’t need it, but Ronan suspected his father’s refusal had at least something to do with where the money had come from, the details of which they had discussed once and only once shortly after Thomas Murphy’s sons had founded MIS.

  Nora had her own money, not to mention all the money Braden Kane had inherited, plus the money they earned doing work similar to MIS’s for Locke Montgomery in California.

  His brothers were as wealthy as Ronan, although they chose to display it in various ways.

  And Erin and their mother were gone.

  What was the point of money if you couldn’t use it to help the people you loved? He gave plenty of it away to charity. The rest sat in investments, and Ronan had no impulse to hobnob with men who’d either inherited their wealth or who had earned it through varying degrees of moral ambiguity or outright corruption.

  He’d rather be home with Chief.

  The elevator dinged its arrival on the fifth floor and Ronan stepped out into the lobby. Mark Reilly rose behind the reception desk as Ronan strode through the room.

  “Anything?” Ronan asked him.

  “Negative.”

  Ronan continued past him. They’d been in the same unit in Afghanistan. When Reilly had come to Ronan for a job, he’d been honest with Ronan about his PTSD, and Ronan had put him to work as security for the firm, a job that was important but typically peaceful given the discreet nature of MIS’s business.

  Reilly’s position behind the desk in the lobby was misleading. His suit concealed a Glock 19. If anyone tried to get past him they would find themselves seriously injured, and quite possibly dead.

  Ronan stepped into his office with Chief on his heels. Light flooded the room, reflecting off the water outside the window, and he immediately felt the stress in his shoulders lessen.

  The office was a second home, its location on the water chosen both for its proximity to the city and its atmosphere, an atmosphere that conveyed understated wealth and serenity — the former for MIS’s clients, the latter for himself and his brothers.

  Chief went straight to the drawers on the right side of Ronan’s modern walnut desk and waited patiently while Ronan pulled out the bottom drawer and fished out a peanut butter treat.

  “Here you go, girl.” He handed the bone-shaped biscuit to Chief and she took it over to her bed near the windows.

  He leaned back in his chair and let his eyes travel to the glitter of sun on the water in the distance, his thoughts returning again to Julia Berenger.

  Had she recognized the Whitmore crest in the row of symbols on the web page Clay had uncovered? He searched her expression in his mind’s eye, trying to decide if there had been recognition in it.

  It didn’t help. All he saw was her delicate face and full mouth, the deep well of her eyes.

  “Hey.”

  He looked up as Nick walked into the room. “Hey.”

  His brother took a seat in one of the chairs opposite Ronan’s desk and put his feet on the desk. “How’d it go?”

  “Feet.” Nick removed his feet with a sigh. “What do you know about the Whitmore Club?”

  Nick shrugged. “What everyone knows. Bunch of rich fucks drinking expensive Scotch and plotting their continued control of the world.”

  “Nothing else?”

  Nick shook his head. “Why?”

  “Clay turned up a web page buried in the secure code of that web page Julia Berenger came across.” Ronan had filled Nick and Declan in on the details of his run-in with Julia, although he’d left out the part about bringing her back to the house.

  “What kind of web page?” Nick asked.

  “Ten symbols, all seeming to correlate to locations, the “M” in front of each. One of the symbols was the Whitmore crest on the placard outside the club downtown.”

  “That’s weird,” Nick said.

  “Is it?”

  “What are you getting at?” Nick asked.

  Ronan rubbed his cheeks, already growing stubble despite his morning shave. “We’ll have to pull the membership roster to be sure, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Seth Campbell was a member. He fits the profile.”

  “Think there’s something fishy going on there?” Nick asked.

  Ronan considered his answer. The most important thing he’d learned — both in the military and at MIS — was that the world was not limited to what a man could see. Deep down, everyone knew there was more, but it was so far outside their day-to-day experience that it wasn’t a productive use of their time to take a closer look.

  Ronan didn’t blame them. Everyday life was hard enough. There were kids to feed, jobs to do, rent to pay. Who had time to dig into all the conspiracy theories floating around?

  But looking beneath the surface was MIS’s job, and in doing so, Ronan had come face to face with the darkest secrets kept by everyday people, people who looked and sounded like productive members of society, people who donated money and went to work and seemed like upstanding citizens.

  And all those rich fucks at clubs like Whitmore? They had more secrets than most.

  “It’s not out of the realm of possibility,” he said.

  “I haven’t heard anything,” Nick said.

  “We haven’t been looking,” Ronan pointed out.

  “True.”

  “Have Declan pull their membership roster,” Ronan said. “Let’s confirm Campbell’s a member.”

  “And then?” Nick asked.

  “Then I think I’ll revisit the invitation extended by Will Packard last year.”

  “So we’re taking the job?” Nick asked. “The Berenger job?”

  Julia’s face flashed in his mind: her determination when he’d pinned her to the ground in the alley, the fire in her eyes that he sensed was a fortress to keep out anything dangerous — or to keep it in.

  “We’re taking the job.” The words were out of his mouth before he could consider them, before he could consider why they were so easy to say.

  14

  Julia studied the crowd, their conversation hushed, broken only by the occasional burst of laughter. The other guests were familiar with this place, and she watched as they entered the room with the kind of confidence that came from undeniable wealth and power, pausing at the entrance to what had once been an extravagant sitting room before heading toward the people who were familiar to them.

  They mingled in clusters, largely by industry. This tech giant with that one, that financial wizard with this one. It didn’t surprise her that she didn’t recognize them all. The kinds of people who belonged to the Whitmore Club were often people who operated behind the curtain, pulling the levers of power from behind more pleasing and dynamic faces.

  “Whiskey, neat.”

  She turned to Joel Boylston and forced a smile. “Thanks.”

  She’d never liked using her looks to get what she wanted — that had been El
ise’s unapologetic forté — but she’d had no choice this time. Getting into the Whitmore Club wasn’t something she could fake or force, and after an exhaustive search of her contact list, she’d finally chosen Joel to get her in, a venture capitalist who’d hired her the year before to do a routine survey of his network security, something that had at first seemed improbable but had later made sense when he’d invited her to dinner, then suggested they skip dinner altogether.

  It had taken some finagling, her not-so-subtle expressed interest in the Whitmore nevertheless leading to an invitation to the club’s monthly guest mixer. She was trying not to think about what he might be expecting in return.

  “So?” Joel asked. “What do you think?”

  Tall and obviously fit, he wasn’t a bad looking man. His blond hair was thick and well-styled, his suit obviously tailored to his lean, athletic frame. His gray eyes were lit with intellect behind stylish glasses, his manner confident and slightly boyish, like a puppy who was excited to be invited onto the sofa and didn’t expect to be kicked off anytime soon.

  “Nice,” she said. She’d expressed interest in the club under the guise of networking opportunities, and they both pretended to believe she had a shot in hell of getting in, an unspoken agreement between them that he wouldn’t say women were never invited regardless of their qualifications and she wouldn’t admit that she was too poor and powerless to get in, even if she’d been a man. “Who are all these people?”

  His chest expanded as he started pointing people out in a murmur, using clothing and physical characteristics to describe the occupations and connections of the people around them. She pretended to follow his explanations, looking in the right place at the right time and making noises of interest while she catalogued the details of the place.

  There had been two guards at the door, though they’d been disguised as doormen wearing tuxes and greeting members and their plus-one, their eyes traveling over the guests with careful interest before letting them pass.