Karissa nodded, shaking his hand, immediately liking the man. She remembered her parents mentioning that Jerome and Glenn were the ones who’dinitiated the contract that had brought her to Dallas. While that wasn’t necessarily unusual—a lot of her more powerful clients entrusted their staff to handle the contractual details—it was an indicator of possible trouble. Patterson wouldn’t be the first extremely wealthy male who had a problem letting someone else protect him. The fact that the person protecting him would be a woman was potentially an added complication.
But her Paladin instincts were telling her that Jerome was someone she could trust. That was one person off her list of suspects.
Jerome signed her in and then got her cleared to enter the plant, complete with a shiny plastic badge that contained an embedded chip that would give her complete access to every locked door in the facility. From the look on the guard’s face, she gathered this kind of free access wasn’t common.
“I hope you don’t take this the wrong way,” Jerome said, glancing at her as they walked across the parking lot toward the main building, “but you’re exceedingly young for the reputation that comes with your name. I thought you’d be older.”
“Don’t worry about it. I get that a lot,” Karissa said with a laugh. “So you’re the one who actually tracked me down for the job?”
Jerome nodded, explaining how he’d used his contacts in the corporate security world to get the name of her family’s business. “Once I explainedthe strange circumstances of how my guards were killed during the second attempt on Mr. Patterson’s life, everyone I talked to suggested that you were the person I needed. It seems you have a knack for dealing with difficult and unusual situations.”
That was a subtle way of saying that Karissa frequently had to deal with supernatural beings that few people in the world even knew existed. And on those rare occasions when the adversary she faced was a plain old everyday human, they tended to be so malicious and violent that most people would refuse to believe they existed, either.
She could tell that Jerome wanted to ask about her experience with thoseunusual situations, but fortunately their entry into the main building, with its crowds of scurrying construction workers, prevented that conversation.
The place looked even bigger now that she was inside. Two stories tall, with overhead tracks and heavy-duty conveyor belts connecting every part of the facility together. She didn’t know anything about automotive manufacturing, but she assumed the plant was designed so that vehicles under assembly could be moved from place to place without ever needing to be touched by human hands. The presence of the high-tech robots mounted all along the production line only reinforced that theory.
But if the substantial number of parts scattered all over the place was any indication—not to mentionthe hundreds of workers running around with panicked expressions on their faces—it seemed like the facility wasn’t anywhere near ready to open.
“I should probably warn you that Mr. Patterson is in a bad mood,” Jerome said in a low voice as they moved through the plant. “The meeting he’s in right now involves last minute preparations for the opening ceremony. Suffice it to say, it’s not going well.”
Jerome led her up a set of stairs to a glass-fronted conference room overlooking the production floor. Inside, there were a dozen people, most of them wearing suits and looking pissed off that they were the ones tasked with trying to get this place operational in time.
“Jolie Washington is the tall woman in the power outfit,” Jerome whispered, stopping short of the doorway but close enough to get a good look at everyone. “She’s the lead counsel for the Patterson Group and is also on the board of directors, which is what we call our premier investors. We’ve tried to keep it quiet, but it’s clear they’ve caught wind that someone is trying to kill Mr. Patterson. Washington is concerned the investors will start pulling their money out if they learn it’s more than rumor. I’d avoid her if you can. She’ll try and pin you down for details when she’s not nagging you to keep out of sight.”
Karissa sighed. It was going to be hard enoughkeeping an eye on Patterson when the man obviously didn’t want her around. Now she had to do it without looking like she was doing it simply so a bunch of rich investors didn’t get spooked and run away with their money?
“Tristan Bond is the ancient man on the left side of the table,” Jerome added, nodding in that general direction. “He’s the chief financial officer and has been since the boss was a kid. One word to describe him would be thrifty. Another word would be cheap. He’s been wearing the same dress shoes since the Eisenhower administration. Instead of buying new ones, he keeps paying to have them repaired and resoled every few years.”
Karissa was ashamed to admit she had no idea when Eisenhower was in office—well before her time obviously. But then again, she also hadn’t realized that people still took their shoes in for repair. So maybe she should have paid more attention in history class.
Jerome opened the door for Karissa, following her inside the conference room. They slipped around to the side of the table, attempting to remain as unobtrusive as possible. It wasn’t necessary, since no one even paid attention to them. Instead, everyone was focused on several large monitors mounted on the wall, some displaying complex graphs covered in glaring red lines, others showing columns of equally red dollar figures anddates. Karissa wasn’t an expert on this kind of stuff, but she was pretty sure red meant over budget and behind schedule. Which probably explained that bad mood the boss was supposedly in.
Leaning back against the wall, Karissa slowly scanned the room, starting at the head of the table. Dominic Patterson was somewhere in his mid-sixties, though he looked older at the moment. He had dark hair, quickly going gray at the temples, and gray eyes that betrayed the aggravation he seemed to be feeling as he sat there staring at the graphs and figures. She reached out with her gift, trying to read the man she’d been hired to protect.
Karissa had once attempted to explain to Deven how the reading process worked, but it had been a total failure, mostly because she barely understood it herself. It would be nice if she could simply read people’s minds, but it was nothing like that. Instead, she picked up on emotions—the stronger the better. So things like hate, love, lust, jealousy, loathing, anger, and greed were easier to pick up on. Beyond that, she simply gotfeelingsfrom people, little bursts of insight that sometimes clued her in on what people were thinking about doing and why. Unfortunately, sometimes she was lucky to get anything more than a general sense of people’s emotions. That was part of what made this particular gift so confusing. And why Deven always threw his hands up in the air and walked away whenever she mentioned it.
It turned out that Dominic Patterson was one of those people who was tough to read. Even standing this close to the man, the only sensation she got was one of intense concentration on the task at hand. The fact that there was someone out there trying to kill him didn’t even seem to register. Seriously, she’d never seen a man so single-minded.
The younger man standing to Patterson’s right was easier to read—and identify. The dark hair and gray eyes marked him as Glenn, the son who’d pushed to bring in outside help to protect his father. Of course, the second Karissa had seen the son’s name on the contract for the job, she’d started digging. It turned out that Dominic Patterson was the majority owner of the company, with his son only controlling fifteen percent. Five more minutes of digging revealed that if daddy were murdered, Glenn would get total control of everything. And wheneverythingwas valued at about ninety billion dollars, it was easy to imagine Glenn being the one who hired the hit man.
But now that she was in the room with him, she wasn’t sensing anything that suggested he wanted his father dead. There was some obvious tension between father and son, to be sure, but it was possible she was picking up on the aggravation associated with the delays in opening the new plant. The one thing she could say for sure was that Glenn wasn’t motivated by money. He seemed to carenothing for the riches that came with the Patterson name. And judging by the looks he kept throwing toward his father, she’d have to say that Glenn was actually concerned about the older man’s health. Maybe he didn’t like him getting so upset.
Karissa turned her attention to Tristan Bond next. The man was at least seventy years old and whipcord lean, verging on emaciated, and wearing a frown like it was a permanent part of his wardrobe. But his eyes were sharp, and she got the feeling he could scan a room and affix a price tag on every single thing in the place, commodity and human alike. Based on his current I-just-sucked-on-a-lemon expression, it was like he thought everything around them was either unnecessary, overpriced, or needlessly extravagant. And from the way he glowered at most of the people around the table, he clearly thought the same of them. Karissa could tell that Bond disliked Patterson, though it didn’t quite raise to the level of hatred. It seemed he simply didn’t care for Patterson’s penchant for going over-the-top with everything he touched.
She had no doubt that if Bond had been in charge of constructing this plant, it would have been finished in half the time at half the price, and it would have been twice as profitable. It probably went without saying that it would have been horribly ugly and likely fallen apart in ten years as well.But being thrifty—as Jerome called it—wasn’t necessarily a reason to hire a hit man.
Karissa studied Jolie Washington and the board members. What she picked up on there wasn’t necessarily horrible, but it wasn’t good either. It struck her that Washington and all four of the members of the board were aware that someone was trying to kill Patterson. And from the covert glances they were throwing back and forth between her and Patterson, it was clear they’d also figured out that she was here to protect the man. That was to be expected, since the guards at the gate had already heard the same rumors.
The disconcerting part of her reading was that none of the people seemed to care that Patterson’s life might be in danger beyond what it might mean for their investments. It seemed some were already planning to reallocate their investments in the event that the killer was successful. It was cold-blooded but practical, and once again Karissa was left thinking that none of these people felt like the type to hire a killer.
The meeting wrapped up a few minutes later with everyone agreeing to a plan that focused on making sure the parts of the plant the press would see during the ribbon-cutting ceremony were completed first. Patterson was still pissed the entire thing wouldn’t be completed on time, but at least it brought the discussion to a close and goteveryone except for her, Jerome, Dominic, and Glenn out of the room.
Karissa watched as father and son argued over a few of the building schematics. She bit her tongue and waited as patiently as she could, but when it became clear Patterson was purposely ignoring her, she decided she’d had enough.
“I stopped by this morning to go over your itinerary, Mr. Patterson, so I can pinpoint times and locations where you’ll be the most exposed,” she said, stepping closer to the table. “But since it seems clear you’re too busy to bother with any of that, why don’t we make it official and cancel the contract? You’ll forfeit the deposit and three days’ worth of expenses, but I’m sure that’s a minor amount of money for your company. That way you can focus on whatever you find important—at least until the hit man decides to finish the job.”
Patterson fell silent but didn’t look at her. Karissa didn’t need her Paladin gifts to pick up on the anger rolling off of him. Or to realize she was wasting her time.
