CHAPTER NINETEEN

After a couple of rings Riley heard Van Roff’s gruff voice answer the phone.

“Hey, Agent Paige. What’s up? I take it you’re in a sunny little golf-obsessed town in Georgia. Or more precisely, at the mansion of one late Edwin Gray Harter.”

Riley was startled.

“How did you know?” she asked.

“Oh, I never give away the secrets of my trade.”

Riley thought for a moment, then smiled as she remembered how Jared had found out about Harter’s murder.

She asked, “Might it have something to do with a certain online service called CrimeWidth?”

She heard Van Roff gasp a little.

He said, “Uh … how did you guess?”

Riley laughed and said, “I never give away the secrets of my trade. Now don’t tell me … you listen to CrimeWidth when you have trouble sleeping.”

“OK, now you’re just doing some spooky mind-reading number on me.”

“Yeah, well, I’m known for that kind of thing.”

Roff laughed and said, “When I heard on the alert feed about some rich dude getting knifed to death in Monarch, Georgia, of course I thought, ‘Hmmm … same MO, probably the same killer. I’ll bet Agent Paige is on her way to the crime scene right now.’”

“You’d have won that bet,” Riley said.

In a husky growl Roff said, “I don’t guess you called me directly from a crime scene because you adore the sound of my voice.”

“Well, of course you do have such a lovely voice, but …”

Riley paused and thought for a moment.

“Our killer seems to have a pretty nimble way of getting around security. This time he got into the mansion despite a supposedly unhackable system called SafetyLinks. I wondered what you might be able to tell me about it.”

Roff was silent for a moment.

Then he said, “I’ll tell you what, let me get back to you about that.”

He ended the call without saying another word.

Riley stood staring at her phone for a moment, feeling a little mystified. This didn’t seem like Van Roff at all. She figured his knowledge of high-tech devices of all kinds was pretty much encyclopedic. Hadn’t he ever heard of SafetyLinks?

She realized there was no point in just standing here waiting for the Seattle geek to get back to her. She hoped he’d come up with something useful soon.

Meanwhile, she had asked Chief O’Neill and his team to meet downstairs. It was time for her to join them.

Riley took the elevator down to the ground floor and found O’Neill and his people gathered together in the huge, pristine formal living room. Jared was there too. She wished they’d chosen some smaller sitting area elsewhere in the house, but everybody was already here, waiting for her. She couldn’t help but feel a little amused to see uniformed officers trying to make themselves at home on snow-white furniture that looked like it had never been used.

Everybody looked distinctly uncomfortable.

Riley herself stayed on her feet. She said to Chief O’Neill and the group, “Does anybody here have any new observations or theories?”

O’Neill got to his feet. “Three of my people talked to the whole live-in staff, and I met with them all briefly. The place has got servants, cooks, maintenance people, and even medical personnel. They all had alibis, and most claimed to have been in their rooms when the murder happened. But they’re edgy, and some of them are acting kind of odd.”

Riley didn’t say so, but the fact that they were “acting kind of odd” didn’t especially surprise her. They were surely scared—partly from being close by when a murder took place, partly from being under suspicion themselves.

O’Neill hesitated for a moment, then said, “We’re going to need some technicians to look at the security tapes, check on everybody’s comings and goings. But I’ve got a weird feeling about everyone in this place—including the wife, and also that Bettridge woman—the butler or major-general or whatever she calls herself.”

“Majordomo,” Jared said.

“Right. This might sound weird but … nobody here strikes me as exactly innocent. I think this must have been some kind of inside job. Someone in this house is a killer, or at least someone inside let somebody from the outside get in unseen.”

Riley was interested but skeptical.

“Explain,” Riley said.

O’Neill paused again, then said, “This house seems to have ironclad security—at least everywhere except the third floor. I don’t see how anyone could have broken through it from the outside. It would take someone who knew the system—and that would almost have to be someone who lived and worked here.”

Riley’s doubts were only increasing. But she’d learned from experience how to deal with local cops who weren’t enamored of the FBI. It was best to hear them out as fully as possible.

O’Neill continued, “My theory is that more than one member of the staff was involved. Maybe it was some kind of team or conspiracy or something. Edwin Gray Harter sure didn’t have any friends in this house.”

Then Riley said, “You might be forgetting that two other men were killed in two other locations, apparently by the same killer.”

“Or maybe killers,” O’Neill said, starting to sound a bit defensive now.

One of O’Neill’s cops nodded in agreement and said, “We haven’t had a chance to run down where everyone in the staff was when the other men were killed. We’ve got some work to do there.”

While O’Neill and the cop talked this over, Riley wondered …

Does any of this make sense?

It was partly a question of security systems. She still didn’t know anything about the system in this house. She did know that security hadn’t been a problem for whoever had killed Julian Morse. Just cutting the wires was all it took to disconnect the cameras around his swimming pool—it hadn’t taken any hacking skills to accomplish that. And the truth was, she had no idea how difficult it might or might not have been to crack through Andrew Farrell’s system.

She did have some personal experience with this kind of thing. Just last winter, the security system in her own townhouse had been disengaged by a man who then attacked April, Gabriela, and Blaine. She had put in a new system after that, but was still wary that it might not be impossible to breach.

She wished Van Roff would get back to her about SafetyLinks, and just how sophisticated it was. It still seemed strange to her that he’d ended their call so abruptly.

Meanwhile, she had to admit it wasn’t impossible that one or more of the people in this house were involved in all three of the murders, but even so …

It seems like a stretch.

So far, no connections of any kind had turned up between the victims, their families, their employees, or their businesses.

Finally Chief O’Neill spoke to Riley directly …

“Look, Agent Paige, as far as I’m concerned, every single person who was in the house last night—including the wife—is a plausible suspect. We can check them all out, but that’s going to take some time. Meanwhile every single one of them is a flight risk. I think we need to take all of them into custody.”

Riley could hardly believe her ears.

She didn’t yet know how large the household staff was, but rounding them all up and arresting them struck her as absurd. She could see by Jared’s expression that he felt the same way.

She was on the verge of saying so when a synthesized female voice filled the room.

“Nobody move. The place is surrounded.”