an unfortunate irony in the fact that she now had two sitters watching her family.
She drove to the coffee shop, parked, ordered a double espresso, and found a seat at a communal table. She noticed the patrol car pull into the lot. She could see the redhead behind the wheel. Their eyes met again. This time Rachel didn’t bother to smile.
Ignore it, Rachel thought. You have work to do.
The Wi-Fi information was printed on her receipt.
Network: BeansNBrew
Password: x6G$d6J0*DNM(c15M’C72#0S!
It took her four tries just to correctly enter the mishmash of letters, numbers, and symbols. She took a quick look around the cafe. It was late morning, so the only patrons were stay-at-home moms and their zeppelin-size baby carriages, unshaven aspiring writers, and a few retirees with nothing to do but enjoy a hot cup on a cold day. Rachel envied their serenity.
Once she was connected, Rachel was relieved to find that the Wi-Fi speed was fast and reliable. She created a folder on her desktop and labeled it “CR.” Then she spent the next two hours digging up everything she could on Isabelle Drummond, née Robles, and her brother, Christopher.
Isabelle was, from what Rachel could tell, a model citizen. On paper. She paid $49.95 to run a full background check on Isabelle, which came up clean. No arrests or convictions, no marriage or divorce decrees outside of Nicholas. She had purchased the house she currently lived in with Nicholas Drummond just under two years ago for $4.15 million. The mortgage was in Isabelle’s name. Rachel was moderately pleased that her initial estimate on the property value was so close.
Isabelle previously owned a three-bedroom, two-bathroom condo on East Stallworth Boulevard, purchased seven years ago for $2.05 million. She sold it right before moving in with Drummond, for $3.14 million, a cool $1,090,000 profit, before taxes and Realtor fees.
She graduated from George Washington University in 2012 (current tuition with expenses: $70,443 per year) with a BA in art history, then spent several years working in public relations for a tech firm that had created a suite of social networking apps. Isabelle’s name was attached as a contact to a number of press releases. It was during that time that her parents, Arturo and Yvette, died.
Arturo had emigrated from Ecuador in 1971, having graduated from Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral with a degree in marketing, communications, and sales engineering. He took a job as a sales rep with Carton-Phipps, a small pharmaceutical company, but rose through the ranks and was made CMO by 1980. Carton-Phipps, or C-P, had a market cap of $37 billion as of 2014.
And when Arturo and Yvette were killed when their Cessna CJ3 jet crashed after takeoff at Toncontín airport in Honduras, Isabelle Robles was the sole inheritor of her family’s multimillion-dollar holdings.
Isabelle Robles had cash in the bank, millions in stock, and no oversight. She had both the time and the means to repay a grudge.
Christopher’s history was more checkered than a flannel shirt. Arrests for possession, possession with intent to sell, possession with intent to distribute, resisting arrest, loitering, and multiple counts of disturbing the peace. He’d spent six months at the Whitecaps treatment facility outside of Vail, Colorado. He had never owned property, which didn’t surprise Rachel. She couldn’t imagine banks were tripping over themselves to lend him money, and even if Isabelle was willing to be a guarantor, Isabelle surely knew Christopher living on his own was a disaster waiting to happen. Which was how he had ended up living with the newly married Drummond couple.
Rachel opened up Facebook. She had no legitimate social media profiles but had created a pseudonymous one several years ago solely for the purpose of spying on her children and, occasionally, doing exactly what she needed to do now. She searched for and found Christopher Robles’s account. She couldn’t see the bulk of his profile—it was restricted to friends—but there were a dozen public photos he was tagged in that she could view.
One photo caught her eye: Christopher Robles standing with two other people in front of a gray-brick, graffiti-covered wall holding the very same SIG Sauer he’d been armed with when he broke into her house. Robles held the gun in front of his crotch, an angry sneer on his face. The caption read, “They’re both locked and loaded.”
Subtle.
But what concerned Rachel more were the two people on either side of Robles. To Robles’s left stood a behemoth of a man. He was Hispanic, at least six feet four, and