“Aren’t you going to introduce us to your husband?” one of the others asked.
Alice hesitated a fraction too long before she replied. “Absolutely.”
Annoyed by the brief hesitation, Owen stood and went to the railing. He surveyed the small gaggle of people below. “Friends of yours, I take it.”
“Yes,” Alice said. She glowed. “Some of the staff and a couple of clients from the Aurora Street Dream Clinic. Let’s go downstairs. I’ll introduce you properly.”
Chapter Nineteen
“You fucked up again?” DunstanKelbrook flattened both hands on the surface of his polished desk and pushed himself to his feet. “You lost her three months after we got her locked up at Serenity Gardens and you didn’t even know she was missing until a couple weeks ago. You managed to lose her a second time at the hotel where we controlled the ground. Now you’re telling me you can’t figure out how to extract her from a fucking casino?”
Leonard Twitchell gave himself a moment to assess his boss’s mood. He had been reading Kelbrook for his entire career as the family fixer, but even with his talent for strategy, there were times when he couldn’t be certain of his take on the man.
In the eyes of the public, Kelbrook was the living, breathing image of the noble, philanthropic, visionary founder of a sprawling business empire—tall, lean, broad-shouldered, and square-jawed, he was endowed with a commanding presence and a charisma that he was able to rez atwill. He was the ultimate con man. When he looked at a target with his strong, steady, you-can-trust-me gaze, the target wanted nothing more than to believe that Kelbrook could give him whatever he wanted.
“I could extract her,” Leonard said, “but that won’t do us any good as long as she’s married to March.”
“Then get rid of March.”
“I will, but the timing is critical if we want to keep the publicity tamped down as much as possible.”
Dunstan picked up the old-fashioned amber-and-gold fountain pen on his desk and stalked to the window. “I knew that fucking forensic expert you hired would be a problem.”
No, you didn’t, you lying son of a bitch,Leonard thought. But he wasn’t dumb enough to say that out loud. The reality was that Kelbrook assumed Owen March was exactly what he appeared to be: a reclusive consultant who spent his days on the computer and in the dusty ancestry records collections of various libraries and institutions.
But Leonard had made it his business to know more about March before approaching him. He had discovered that March had published some highly respected peer-reviewed research in a few journals that nobody except other experts in the field read. He led seminars on ancestry forensics and consulted for law enforcement. By all accounts he had a near-flawless record when it came to creating criminal psi profiles. He also did some private ancestry analysis for individuals and families.
On the surface, March was a staid, boring academic type who would take the money, do the job, and then go back to his precious research. However, there were two discordant notes on an otherwise unremarkable résumé. One was the fact that March’s agency-arranged engagement had been abruptly terminated six months ago. He had not yet reregistered. Men his age were usually on the path to Covenant Marriage.
Of course, Leonard thought, the same observation could be made about him. True, his job left very little time for marriage; nevertheless,he needed to add agency registration to his to-do list. He was a VP and had an office in the C-suite at Kelbrook headquarters, but unmarried people his age were never fully accepted into the right social circles, the ones where major decisions got made. Marriage was one of the calling cards of adulthood at every level of society, especially the upper classes. To be unwed at a certain age was to invite the kind of speculation that could destroy businesses and families—was the individual mentally unstable? Did they possess a frightening talent? Was there a serial killer on the family tree?
The second anomaly in the otherwise unremarkable timeline of March’s life was his monthlong disappearance following the termination of his engagement. Technically speaking, the missing weeks were accounted for, because he had notified his clients and the college where he taught seminars that he was going to take the time off to do some research for a paper. Not an unusual move by an academic, but it had snagged Leonard’s attention because of the timing. Sure, ending an engagement was probably a traumatic experience. Still. An entire month to recover?
Now his intuition was shouting at him, informing him in no uncertain terms that maybe he should have looked more closely at that missing month.
But there was no going back. He had to fix the mess. That meant finding a way to extract the targets from a glitzy Illusion Town hotel-casino protected by a lot of state-of-the-art security and a contingent of ruthless casino enforcers—all without upsetting the power brokers of Illusion Town. They were rumored to be even more ruthless than their enforcers. To complicate the problem, everywhere they went inside the casino, March and Radstone were surrounded by a host of tabloid reporters and a mix of gawking tourists, gamblers, and Amber Palace employees. They all had cameras.
So no, making the targets vanish from the Amber Palace would beextremely risky and should be the tactic of last resort. There was a better option.
Kelbrook tapped the barrel of the fountain pen gently against the windowsill. The rare quartz stone in his signet ring heated a little. Leonard knew that was not a good sign. It was one of Kelbrook’s tells. Leonard knew them all.
“March can’t stay holed up in that damned casino indefinitely,” Kelbrook said.
“I doubt that’s his plan,” Leonard said. “This is clearly about money. He’s figured out she’s valuable to us and he’s holding her for ransom. Instead of risking a kidnapping at the casino, let’s try the business approach first. It will be a hell of a lot easier to pay him a reasonable price to divorce her. I had Taylor in Legal take a close look at this. As far as the law is concerned, once an MC is terminated, it’s as if it never happened. A Covenant Marriage, however, exists for life in one form or another. Even if a person is widowed or obtains a divorce, inheritances and family connections still stand. The Radstone woman will always be on the Kelbrook family tree. If she is no longer in an MC and if she is locked up again, the power of attorney goes back into effect and you control the shares.”
“We need Radstone out of her current marriage and recommitted to a hospital for the insane.”
“Exactly. We buy off March, get him to terminate the MC, and then you graciously welcome her back into the arms of her loving family.”
“How do you intend to get her locked up again? That damn video makes it clear she didn’t murder Poole.”
“No,” Leonard said. “It doesn’t. It could have been faked. And any judge would believe that it was if it turns out that Alice Radstone has used her talent to murder another innocent man.”
Kelbrook narrowed his eyes. “Who do you intend to kill off this time?”
“March, of course. The poor woman went mad again when she found out he had divorced her.”
“Huh.” Kelbrook thought about that. “It won’t work unless you can get both of them out of that hotel.”
