“Where did a twenty-something-year-old kid get his hands on that kind of money?” Asa asked.
Mercer rolled his eyes. “This kid isn’t some gang leader. He used his time in college to make friends with a bunch of rich kids with access to their daddies’ money and then he manipulated them into using their trust funds for everything from embezzlement to Ponzi schemes. Hell, even insider trading. And what do they do with all that money? They give it to him to clean, for a fee. He even makes their books look pretty, which is why it took so long for us to catch him at it. Somewhere, this kid has millions stashed in an off-shore account.”
Levi would almost be impressed if Micah wasn’t a psychotic piece of shit who battered the hell out of Shiloh and Mal their whole lives.
“So, where do we come into play?” Asa asked. “Wasn’t he a big enough fish? Why ask him to get dirt on us?”
“I already told you. He fucking came to me. I didn’t give a fuck about the Mulvaneys until he came to me with an insane theory and just enough evidence to make me believe him. The numbers made sense.”
“Numbers?” Levi echoed.
“Statistics. Micah absorbed a few stragglers from some gang you ran out of town,” Mercer directed this at Jericho. “They told him that you and your kids aren’t the only vigilantes in the family. That the Mulvaneys have blood on their hands.”
The 4Loco crew. It had to be some of them. They’d done their best to punish the ones they could get their hands on, but once enough started dying, they tended to scatter like roaches. It was possible they’d ended up working for Micah.
“Go back to the statistics part,” Thomas said. “Talk to me about that.”
Mercer scoffed. “Man, I failed math. That’s why we have forensic accountants. He came to me with numbers and spreadsheets. Talking about shit like z-scores and standard deviations showing that an unusual number of deaths occur in two separate areas of the city and how Navarro is the nexus of one and the Mulvaneys the other. It sounded like bullshit but my math geeks said the math was solid. He started showing me how it was possible you people were manipulating your GPS data, your social media…everything. Man, it just made sense at the time.”
“You’re telling me Micah came to you?” Levi said. “He was trying to cut a deal?”
“Yeah, but there was no way I could just drop his case, not when too many of his former classmates were going to potentially get scooped up in the net. That was when he suggested we point the finger at Malachi, at least temporarily. Micah even floated the idea of pleading guilty when it was all over for a lesser sentence.”
“This is the most Tom & Jerry operation I’ve ever heard of,” Thomas said. “I expect criminals to be this stupid, but not a district attorney.”
Levi shook his head. “Okay, say all that’s true. Why drag Shiloh into this? Why use him to get Jericho’s attention? Seemskind of like going around your ass to get to your elbow, you know?”
“I mean, it kind of does make sense a little,” Seven said.
They all looked at him.
“What?” Seven asked. “Look, Micah was never going to make inroads with the Mulvaney family. It would be like trying to walk up to one of the Kennedys or something. He couldn’t just hand them a business card and be like, ‘I think you’re murderers. Do you also perhaps need a money launderer?’”
“And?” Aiden said, waving a hand in an out-with-it gesture.
“And how has every single non-rich person in the Mulvaney inner-circle gotten there?” Seven asked.
“Marriage,” Levi blurted. “Or, I guess, being friends with one of their spouses.”
“And who is the easiest, most accessible spouse in the Mulvaney clan?” Seven asked.
“Me,” Jericho said, scrubbing his hands over his face.
“Right,” Seven said. “And what do you collect like Pokémon? Traumatized gay kids.”
“I wouldn’t put it like that…” Jericho muttered.
“I would,” Adam said.
“But how did he know Shiloh would go along with it?” Avi asked.
Mercer shifted in his seat. “The other benefit of framing Malachi was using it to control Shiloh. He said as long as Malachi remained behind bars, Shiloh would do whatever he wanted.”
“You were willing to frame an innocent kid just on the off chance some criminal you were prosecuting was right about a powerful family?”
Mercer scoffed. “A powerful family? That other one was right. The Mulvaneys are up there with the Kennedys. Taking down a family like this not for corporate greed but for cold-blooded murder? I could ride something like this all the way to the White House.”
Asa snorted. “Talk about delusions of grandeur. Did you really think we wouldn’t catch on?”
