Whether that was intentional or not, I guess we’ll never know, but the subliminal message conveyed by his image was loud and clear.
“We will keep you informed of Krassner’s ratings as today’s message reaches the homes of voting Americans. From Flash Elections, this is Phil Fournier, wishing you a good evening.”
...36
...Friday, January 22, 9:27AM PST (UTC-8:00 hours)
...Tom Isaac’s Residence
...Laguna Beach, California
Alex had suggested, and they’d all agreed, that the best location to work on their new case was out of Tom’s home, not the corporate office. Too much sensitive information was in play to allow janitorial services or the corporate building’s administrator to set eyes on any of it. She also had requested a large corkboard and a whiteboard, and Tom had installed those on the wall of his home office. The chic room had lost in style but gained in functionality, giving up elegant wall art and uncluttered real estate in favor of juxtaposed corkboards, a small meeting table, and enough seating for all of them. It made for a crowded workspace, but it was the safest place to have conversations about their new case.
Alex came in carrying colored knitting yarn, a set of dry-erase markers, highlighters, Sharpies, corkboard pins, and post-it notes. She unloaded the supplies on the table and gave a sigh of relief when she noticed the Keurig coffee maker on the small roller table next to the window. They had everything they needed.
“She’s here; let’s get started,” Steve called from the home office doorway, then turned and gave Alex a quick hug. “How are you this morning, doing all right?”
“Yeah, I guess. It all started sinking in, what we’re about to do, and . . . yeah, I’m all right. I think I have an idea where to start,” she said, unsure how to express her thoughts.
“Good morning,” Tom greeted her. “How’s your day so far?”
“Busy,” she responded, gesturing towards the pile of supplies scattered on the table.
Brian and Sam Russell, houseguests of the Isaacs for the past couple of days, took their seats. Louie, still a little intimidated and uncomfortable in Tom’s home, picked the most distant chair to sit on at the back of the room.
“All right, let’s hear your approach, Alex. What are your thoughts so far?” Tom invited her to start.
She took a hurried gulp of fresh coffee and walked towards the whiteboard, marker in her hand. She drew a vertical line on the whiteboard, separating the space into two sections of different sizes, and wrote above the left space ‘Known’ and above the right space ‘Unknown.’
“As you can see, we know very few things at this point. We know there’s this guy, Helms, keeping busy to set things up.” She wrote Helms’s name under the ‘Known’ category. Then she pulled a file folder from her laptop bag and took out a sketched likeness of Helms and pinned it in the higher mid-section of the corkboard. “Steve worked with Robert to get us this sketch. You have talent, Steve,” she complimented him, then went back to the whiteboard. “We know they were behind Melanie Wilton’s transplant. Facilitating it? Definitely. Causing the need for it? Unknown at this point. Do we know what happened to Melanie’s heart? Why did she need a transplant in the first place?”
“She had congestive heart failure,” Sam said. “I probed discreetly with Robert; I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that he might have been set up before we’re absolutely sure of it.”
“Yeah, definitely,” Tom agreed. Steve nodded his agreement. There was no need to add to the man’s internal anguish.
“He said that Melanie started developing heart failure a few months ago, maybe six or seven,” Sam continued. “At first she was more and more tired, unable to sustain the slightest physical effort. For a while she just rested, thinking it would eventually go away. Then they saw a cardiologist, who was able to manage it successfully with medication for three or four months. Then she started congesting, accumulating blood in her extremities, abdomen, and lungs. That only evolved a month or so before the transplant, so it was fairly new.”
“We need to start building a timeline,” Alex said and drew a long, horizontal line spanning across the entire lower section of the whiteboard. She marked the right extremity of it with an arrow and a ‘t,’ symbolizing time. She marked ‘November’ very close to the right end of the time axis. She marked January right about the middle and then went back in time, to the