Sabrina waved a hand and refused to look at anyone until the dust had settled.
Emily raised a hand. “Any chance of getting a breakdown of the events for those of us who aren’t in Raleigh?”
Luke pointed to Tessa. “It’s your party.”
She cleared her throat. “First, I want to say thank you. To all of you. You stood by me when I didn’t have the ability to stand up for myself. You never wavered in your friendship. You prayed for and accepted me, flaws and all, and I’m so very thankful that God led me to Raleigh. I believe he knew this is where I needed to be in order to finally overcome my addictions and heal.”
Faith, who was sitting beside Tessa, reached out and squeezed Tessa’s hand. Tessa continued. “As for the case. What we know now is that Tyson Monteith has drugged and assaulted at least three other women. All before he tried it with me. But he was never arrested, or even formally accused. The women who refused to press charges were either paid off or warned off. And Wendy was the one who took care of that.”
“How could she do that? I mean, he’s her dad, but seriously, he’s creepy.” Emily scrunched up her nose like she smelled something foul.
“Turns out Wendy had an aptitude for fixing things way back in college. She caught Tyson’s friend doing something, and when she confronted him, he thought she was blackmailing him. But instead, she had him pay her to make it go away. She did the same thing for Monteith. She started small, but over the years her influence andconnections grew, and it eventually became her full-time job. So far we’ve found at least thirty well-known men and women who have used her services to help them get out of everything from a DUI to a pregnant girlfriend to tax evasion.”
“How does she do that?” Ivy asked.
“Usually by blackmailing or bribing the people who are in a position to make things disappear. She has a network of informants all along the East Coast who tell her all sorts of juicy information. She pays well and never gives up her sources.” Tessa looked at Luke. “Turns out when Bruce was telling us that he was hearing stuff on the wind, he was talking about Wendy’s network.”
Luke blew out a breath. “How is Bruce?”
“He’s okay. I checked on him this morning. He recited a sonnet that was so beautiful I cried.” Tessa had begged him to let her reach out to his family, but he wouldn’t hear of it. So she’d had to let it go. For now.
“So Wendy’s a fixer, and she fixes the messes Tyson gets in. And she has a reputation with his Janus buddies?” Emily asked.
“Yes. As far as we can tell, she mostly fixed stuff within the Janus group for the first five years or so after going all in with fixing as her profession. Tyson would send his people to her to sort out when they’d fouled up. But eventually she got really good at it, and now she has clients all over the country, and more than a few of them are senators or congressmen.”
“But what turned her attention to you?” Hope asked. “You still don’t remember him. If she’d left it alone...”
“Yeah. I have no clear memory of that night. And even the videos that Sabrina managed to find from that evening haven’t broken anything loose. We would have had our suspicions, of course, because of the cuff link. And after what Zane saw and heard, we would have started investigating Monteith after the president’svisit, but we might not have ever had enough to take him down. And we wouldn’t have had a clue what Wendy was up to.”
“She hired people to come after you? All those attacks were her idea?” Sharon asked.
“Yes and no. She was responsible for the attacks. She started with some low-level informants. People who genuinely had no idea who they were taking orders from. All the way up to the guy who attacked me in my apartment. He was a manager in the security firm that operated security on my building and eight other high-end apartment complexes in the southeast. She had used him before to help her—he’d erased video footage, planted evidence, that kind of thing—using the same method he used to enter my apartment. He created a second keycard, used it after disabling the cameras, and got right back out before anyone knew. He kept his mouth shut until she rolled over on him. Then he sang like a nightingale in exchange for a reduced sentence.”
“So no one who came after you had a personal issue with you? They were all people who had been hired in some way by Wendy Monteith?” This question came from Leslie.
“As far as we can tell.”
“Then where does Hank and the candy basket fit in?” she demanded. “Because that was creepy.”
Luke answered. “Hank won’t be pestering Tessa anymore. We finally got him to confess that he followed her to a talk she did at a high school. One of the kids there asked her about her favorite things outside of work, and she told them she loved candy. She and the kids batted around their favorites for about five minutes. He showed me the footage.”
Tessa groaned. “I didn’t even remember that the kids and I talked about that.”
“Why would you?” Faith said. “You’ve only done that talkabout twenty times in the past year. If Hank hadn’t been stalking you and recording everything you said, he wouldn’t have known.”
“True. But Wendy did pay Hank a visit after he showed up at the property and ran his little newscast. He claims she got him talking about me and he shared about my hatred of snakes and a few other things she used to set up the attacks.”
“Wow. So Hank is just a creep. And that candy wasn’t poisoned?” Gil shook his head in dismay. “Think of all that candy, Tessa.”
She shuddered. “Anyway, Wendy and Tyson are both in jail while the investigations continue. We suspect that part of her performance the night of the president’s visit was to try to get herself to a psych ward. If she’d managed to do that, she would have disappeared. But because no one believed she was as crazy as she was trying to act, she went to jail and stayed there. She’s such a flight risk that her bond is higher than Tyson’s.”
“How are the two men who were injured?” Leigh asked. “Bullets to the abdomen and insulin injections into bodies that don’t need insulin are both extremely dangerous.” And she would know, having worked in the Carrington County Hospital emergency department for the past several years.
“Graham is home and recovering under the watchful eyes of the Carmichaels.” Tessa had gone to see them this morning as well. “He’s very frustrated that they won’t let him get the door. It’s hilarious. As for Rodriguez, he’s back to work. Zane says he got a visit from a woman who looks like the girl next door. Apparently she was a trembling mess in the hospital corridors as she asked to see him.”
Benjamin whistled. “What’s this? I hadn’t heard this story.”
Tessa grinned. “It’s not common knowledge. Zane said she’s supercute, supersweet, and not at all Rodriguez’s known type, buthe allowed her to come into his room and she didn’t leave until visiting hours were over. Rodriguez came back to work this week, and when Zane asked about her, all Rodriguez would say was, ‘You got your girl, leave mine alone.’”
