Just when I thought I was on my way up, I sank deeper in. It was driving me up the wall.
“So where do we go from here?” Runa asked.
“Well, first things first. We’re now in the crosshairs of an assassin firm, so we’ll get attacked. It’s not an ‘if,’ it’s a ‘when.’ I called Matilda’s aunt. Unfortunately, she’s out of town, but she said a friend will be coming by to pick her up. Would you like to send Ragnar with them?”
“No.” She didn’t even pause. “Right now, the last thing he remembers is getting off the plane and he’s so calm, it’s borderline freaky. I don’t know how long this will last, but if his memory and emotions come back, I don’t want him climbing onto another roof. I need to be there to steady him.”
“Okay.” It was her decision. “The next step is to identify your mother’s target. We know he’s male, powerful, and his death would cause an uproar. Diatheke wants him dead, but they don’t want the heat that will come with it.”
Runa shook her head. “No clue. Mom didn’t socialize. Sometimes she didn’t leave the house for weeks.”
“I looked at your mother’s social calendar. The last ten years are backed up. How much do you know about the Texas Assembly?”
Runa sighed. “Just what everyone knows. It’s a legislative body that governs the Houses in Texas. Each House has one voting seat. If you are a Prime or a Significant, you are entitled to view the sessions but only the designated House representative can vote. Most people don’t go to the sessions unless something important happens. Mom usually went. She liked to know what was happening in the political world.”
I nodded. “The Texas Assembly has two main political factions: the Civil Majority and the Stewards. The Civil Majority thinks Houses have enough power and want to keep to themselves. The Stewards want to rule everyone and everything. Every three years the Assembly elects a Speaker. The winning party receives the Gold Staff and the loser is given the Silver Staff. Nine years ago, when the Civil Majority was in power, your mother served as the Gold Staff.”
Runa frowned. “I think I remember that. Isn’t it mostly ceremonial? She would bring the staff out and bang it onto the floor at the start and end of each Assembly session.”
“It is. But it also means that she met most of the Assembly’s members and knew all of the major players.”
Runa groaned. “It could literally be any member of any House in the state.”
“Yep.”
The political undercurrents within the Assembly were so complex it would take a supercomputer to sort them out. I made a note of everyone Sigourney was in office with, starting with the former Speaker Linus Duncan. Linus would take my call. He’d served as a witness to the formation of our House. Whether he’d tell me anything was a different question entirely.
We watched Shadow wander about. Arabella was still MIA and worry gnawed at me. My sister could handle herself, but Diatheke’s roster of killers was nothing to sneeze at.
“My brother is an emotional zombie, my sister is missing, and I found out that my mom was a hit woman.” Runa sighed.
“I’m sorry.”
“I suspected. The math just wasn’t adding up. She didn’t make enough from her forensic work to cover our bills. I mean, it wouldn’t even pay my tuition. When you asked me to go through her bank statements, I went back to the beginning of her records twelve years ago. You know what I found? Large deposits for consulting work. A hundred grand, two hundred grand. One was for half a million. Half a million, Catalina.”
“Must have been a high-risk target.”
“At least she was good at her job, right?” Runa gave a short laugh. “It’s one consulting fee after another, and then eight years ago everything just stopped. This was right about the time she told me that she wanted to spend more time with us. She must have stopped ‘consulting.’”
“I’m sorry,” I told her again.
“I can’t ask her any questions. I can’t say, ‘How could you do this?’ or ‘What were you thinking?’ So I went to my house yesterday. I talked to the ash and then I cried. I might be losing it.”
“No,” I said. “You’re keeping it together just fine. Better than I would.”
Runa shook her head. “I looked at the files on the flash drive. I thought maybe she was a kind of Robin Hood, who only killed bad people.