“What?” Jerome said, clearly startled.
Karissa didn’t even glance his way. She was too busy watching Glenn, who merely sat there looking stunned.
“I didn’t hire him,” Glenn finally said, his voice barely above a whisper. “I would never do anything to hurt my father.”
“The bank account information says differently,” Karissa said, pointing to Deven’s laptop even as she realized something didn’t feel right. Glenn wasn’t reacting like a bad guy backed into a corner. Her instincts were still telling her that he wasn’t the guy. Which made no sense at all.
“I couldn’t have used this account to pay someone a hundred thousand dollars,” Glenn said firmly, leaning forward to tap the laptop screen. “It’s the old college trust fund account my grandfather set up for me when I was a kid. It had a good chunk of change in there when I was eighteen, but it was drained down to almost nothing after I got my MBA from MIT. There’s probably less than five thousand dollars in there now and there’s no way to get it out without taking another college class. There’s no way to put money in there either. Like I said, my grandfather opened the account, and he was the only one able to move money in or out. He passed away years ago.”
Karissa hated how incredibly rational that all sounded, not to mention how completely truthful it seemed as well. She threw a look at Deven, who only shrugged his shoulders in that way that might meansounds plausiblebut could also meanwhy are you looking at me since I’m only eighteen, don’t have a college trust fund, and likely never will.
A glance at Jerome wasn’t any more helpful. He shrugged in that way that probably meantdon’t look at me, I’m just the security guy.
“Okay, let’s assume you’re telling the truth and you didn’t move money through this account,” she said after a long moment, deciding to go with her instincts on this. “That would mean you’re not the person who hired Bagley. Raising the question of if not you, then who? And why would they go through all this effort to make you look guilty?”
“The real guilty party?” Jerome proposed, and Karissa couldn’t disagree with his logic. “They had to know that sooner or later someone would start looking for the person who hired the killer, so they made sure we’d have someone to find.”
Once again, Karissa found herself agreeing with the man’s logic, while Deven muttered something about Glenn maybe making himself look guilty so they wouldn’t think hewasguilty. She decided her brother needed to stop watching so many Agatha Christie movies.
“So if we assume that Glenn is telling the truth,” Karissa said, giving her brother a pointed look, “I think the first question we should be asking is who else knows about Glenn’s trust fund. And not merely that you had one but knew the details, too. Like the bank and the account number.”
“That’s actually a very small list,” Glenn murmured softly, almost hesitantly. “Beyond my father,the only people who have access to that kind of information are Jolie Washington and Tristan Bond. Between the two of them, they know everything about my family there is to know.”
“Wait a minute,” Deven said with a frown. “I thought they only worked for the company, Washington as lead counsel and Bond as the CFO. How can they do that and still be involved in your personal stuff? Isn’t that an inherent conflict of interest?”
“Probably,” Glenn admitted. “But my father has never cared about stuff like that. Tristan has been my father’s personal attorney for decades and Jolie has been handling the family’s day-to-day financial dealings for maybe five years now.”
“And just to make this clear,” Karissa said, having a tough time believing they’d missed this, “you think both Tristan and Jolie know about this old college trust fund account?”
“I think so,” Glenn said, then shrugged. “They maintain all of the family accounts, and there’s no reason this one would be special.” He looked back and forth between Karissa, Deven, and Jerome. “Do you honestly believe that one of my family’s oldest friends would have something to do with hiring the man who’s trying to kill my father? I have to admit it doesn’t seem possible.”
“We don’t believe anything yet,” Deven said, diplomatic as always. “But we’ll be taking a closerlook at the two of them and digging around enough to see if there’s been any other activity with the account that you never noticed. Anyone who’s savvy with money laundering techniques could have been using that account for years to move money around without you or your father ever knowing it.”
Glenn nodded. “Should I talk to my father about this?”
Karissa shook her head. “Not yet.”
She and Deven left a little while after that, feeling more confused and less enlightened than they had an hour ago. Karissa had thought they were close to wrapping this case up, but it seemed now they were back to square one.
Chapter 20
“I can talk to my contact at STAT,” Deven said as they took the elevator back up to their rooms half an hour later. “But with both Washington and Bond being so well versed in the financial world, I get the feeling that tracking their movements is going to be much more difficult than it was with Glenn’s trail.”
Karissa nodded with a sigh, having already figured that last part out on her own. In theory, she’d come back to the hotel with Deven so they could brainstorm some ideas on how to draw out Washington or Bond, assuming one of them was actually involved in this supernatural murder-for-hire scheme. But she already knew the effort was doomed to failure. They had no leverage on either of them so how could they possibly lure them anywhere?
“The door’s been opened,” Deven whispered softly when they got to his room, reaching a hand out to stop her before pointing toward the toothpick on the floor. “I always wedge one of those in between the door and the frame whenever I leave. And housekeeping never gets to this floor until later in the day.”
Karissa frowned at the tiny sliver of wood on the floor, worried her brother was watching too many spy movies to go along with those mysteries. Maybe he was watching too much TV in general.
But before she had a chance to say anything, a tingling sensation ran up her spine. Someone was in Deven’s room. And whoever it was, they were waiting for them. The hilt of her sword immediately appeared in her hand and she started moving even as her brother quietly tapped the key card to the door to unlock it.
Karissa threw herself into the room and straight into a roll that carried her all the way into the small living room. Then she came up, sword swinging toward the man to her right, Deven directly behind her with his handgun drawn.
She had just enough time to recognize the familiar face in front of her, halting the blade a fraction of a second before beheading her oldest brother, Lorenzo. Remembering what he’d done to Hale, there was a small part of her wondering if she should have stopped herself.
Lorenzo was a big man, probably only an inch or two shorter than Hale, with bulkier shoulders and arms than anyone else in her family, but the same dark hair, although his eyes were deeper green than either hers or Deven’s. He leaned back as far as he could while sitting on the couch, trying his bestnot to look freaked out while she stood there with a sword to his neck.
“Lorenzo,” Karissa said. “I see you’re still showing up unannounced and letting yourself into other people’s rooms.”
