The rest of the team shared looks of shock and disgust, not that I blamed them. What Lanie was talking about was incomprehensible to me; to anyone really who had a moralcompass. From what little I’d overheard, she and Koen showed up unannounced at a local assisted-living home. Instead of investigating reports of fraud, they walked-in on the house doctor performing more than a routine physical on a female resident. He was sexually assaulting her.
“What the hell is wrong with people?” she exploded.
“I bet stuff like this happens more often than you think, RAC Mitchell.”
“Thank you for giving me my next nightmare, Jett.”
I’d met the kid ten minutes before and already liked him. He’d make a fantastic agent one day; I had no doubt.
“What I meant was, most of the people who live in those places are already in a vulnerable state. They’re ripe for the picking, so to speak.”
She visibly shuttered. “Please tell me he resisted when you put him in cuffs, Lanie.”
“He did.”
“Good.”
“What about the rest of the staff?” Keaton questioned. “Any indication they were participants in the good doctor’s extracurricular activities?”
“None that we could see,” Koen replied. “In fact, there was a line of nurses who would have taken matters into their own hands had we not gotten him out of there as quickly as we did.”
“Maybe you should’ve let them. Would’ve saved the taxpayers a lot of money.”
While the agents continued their briefing, I snuck back to Waverly’s office to get some work done. Besides the prosthetics project, Lachlan Industries had its hands in a number of pots. My software development team, for instance, was researching a new anti-cyberattack technology. Our hardware would be programmed to recognizecomputer viruses, then systematically attack them, similar to what chemotherapy does to cancer cells. In theory, the idea was simple enough, though in actuality, it was much more difficult to accomplish.
My eyes were beginning to burn after two hours of doing nothing but answering emails, so when the video request box from Sloane popped up on the screen, I welcomed the interruption.
“Hey. How’s my favorite sister?”
From the copious number of trees in the background, it was obvious she was sitting outside. Sloane loved being in nature, always had. I swore she was going to grow up to be a forest ranger or something of the sort. Instead, she shocked the hell out of me by becoming an accountant. Making her the chief financial officer of Lachlan Industries was only logical. Who better to manage my money than my own flesh and blood?
The squeal of laughter, combined with her mile-wide smile meant the twins were somewhere close by.
“Funny you should say that.”
“Say what?”
“That I’m your only sister.”
“Because you are.”
Her sapphire eyes that matched mine shifted to the right and down. “I’m not.”
“What are you talking about, Sloane?”
“I took one of those DNA tests."
My spine snapped to attention. We’d joked about the possibility of having unknown siblings out there in the world for years. Since Dad had a problem controlling his dick, anything was possible. But I never––not for one second––thought she’d actually do it. This had to be a mistake.
“Why?”
“I had to know.”
“You really didn’t,” I argued.
“Her name is Shannon."
“I’m hanging up now, Sloane.”
