“Good.”
“So what were you doing while we were out there anyway? Lecturing him on my brain? Trying to predict my next move?”
“That was just his pretense for bringing me here.”
“What was the real reason?” she asks.
“His business partners are turning on him, and he needed to see where my loyalties lie.”
“And where do they lie?”
“With you. And after what I saw him do on your behalf, with him.”
“I see. So it’s going to be like this from now on?”
“Like what?”
“You’re going to be more involved.”
“I think so. But that doesn’t mean you have to forgive me. It just means you’ll have to be able to stand the sight of me now and then without retching.”
“Thanks for clearing that up.”
“I should get back. We’ve got a lot to review. Not the least of which are your test results.”
She doesn’t protest, and mercifully, he doesn’t pat her on the back or the head or give her some other physical gesture of farewell she isn’t ready to receive.
He’s a few paces from the bench when she says, “His business partners.”
Noah turns but says nothing, his face a fixed, blank mask.
“What did they do? Aside from telling me to stand down.”
“There was an attack on your remote dosing system,” he answers.
“An attack?”
“An attempted hack. They were either trying to lock us out of the system so we couldn’t re-dose you or they were . . .”
“Trying to give me a double dose.”
“Perhaps.”
“That could have killed me.”
“We know. That’s why we stopped it.”
Her mouth feels dry, and her heartbeat feels like it’s reduced to a dull patter. She’s always seen Cole’s mysterious business partners as a potential obstruction but never as a direct threat to her life.
“Well, are we going to find out which one it was?” she asks, her voice reedy.
“We think it was two of them.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I’m listening.”
“Are we going to find out if they were trying to stop me or kill me?”
“That’s actually become my job,” Noah says with a smile.
“I see. And if the answer is . . . the latter?”
“Then they’re both going to die.”
There’s not a trace of hesitation in his voice and not a hint of it in his steady stare. As if he’s grown satisfied she’s impressed by this promise, he turns and starts back toward the main house. She’s still watching him depart when suddenly he stops.
“Charley?” He hasn’t turned around.
“Yes?”
At the sound of her voice, he looks back over his shoulder. “My sister.”
Her expression must betray her confusion. Almost a year ago she was given a file on his background. Though it contained some information about the father who’d whisked him out of the country after his mother was murdered by the Bannings, she can’t remember anything about a sister.
“The woman I tested it on before you. She was my sister.”
She realizes her mistake. By letting him know which answers she still wants from him, she’s given him something to bait her with.
“She knew the risks,” he adds.
“Lucky her.”
“No. I’m afraid she wasn’t.”
He wants her to ask more questions, she’s sure of it. Wants her to ask him back to the bench after he made the pretense of politely excusing himself in the interest of getting more valuable, world-changing work done.
She’s not ready to give in.
Not yet.
“See you around, Dr. Turlington,” she says.
Then she turns and makes a show of staring up at the sycamore’s breeze-rustled leaves until she can no longer hear his departing footsteps.
IV
43
La Jolla, California
Cole can’t remember the last time Julia Crispin was in his house. Maybe for a holiday party, but it’s been years since he’s had one of those, primarily because they obligate him to rub shoulders with his mother’s dreadful friends. He’s certainly never hosted her for anything as intimate as brunch for three on his glass and steel terrace overlooking La Jolla Bay. But that’s what they’re doing now. Dining on crabmeat salad in the sparkling Southern California sun just a few weeks after exposing the horrors of Marjorie Payne’s ranch to the world.
He’s shared meals with her before, however, and knows that she’s not moving her latest potential bite of crabmeat around her plate because she’s nervous. She’s just the type of person who assesses every bite of food before she deigns to let it pass her lips.
“I still think it was a bold call,” she says for the third time. “We could have just wiped the farm off the face of the earth, and nobody would have been the wiser.”
“It’s a ranch, and that would have meant wiping the victims off the face of the earth. Their families would have gone the rest of their lives without knowing what happened to them.”
“Still, perhaps we could have concocted some sort of cover story rather than turning it into one of America’s greatest unsolved mysteries.”
“I’m telling you, the condition of the bodies didn’t allow for a good cover story. How many car wrecks do you want me to fake?”
“Which bodies? The victims?”
“No, the killers.”
“We could have vanished them.”
“Then the families of the victims wouldn’t have had the slightest sense of who was responsible. The only thing worse than knowing your loved one’s been buried in a pit of concrete is not knowing what happened to the people who did it.”
“Still.”
“If you’re worried about someone figuring out what actually happened, forget it. People love a mystery. They love it so much they’ll speculate their way past the truth at a hundred miles per hour. A story full of holes invites everyone to fill in the blanks with their absolutely bullshit explanations.”
He leaves out that his own digital services team is currently flooding Reddit threads and any other public forum they can find with nonsense conspiracy theories designed to throw true crime junkies far off the scent of anything truthful.
“I’m seeing stuff online about helicopters in the area that night,” Julia says.
“Men in black. Even better!”
“Cole, be serious.”
“I’m very serious. We’ve honored Charley’s wishes. The remains are being excavated and identified by actual law enforcement agencies, and so far it doesn’t look like we left behind a single shred of evidence that any of us were there.”
Cole lifts his wineglass, and he’s surprised when Julia toasts him back.
Two sets of footsteps approach across the expansive terrace. Scott Durham and just behind him, Noah, looking unexpectedly dapper in a hunter-green polo shirt and beige jeans. Noah takes a seat at the place that’s been set for him, pours himself a glass of wine.