other,” she proclaimed. “He should have introduced you to us way sooner.”
“Well, I’m glad to know you now,” Tabitha told her, and then Danny shushed them all back into silence, and Hunter managed—with difficulty—to pull his attention back to the facts.
And the facts were disturbing.
Laslo Hu, Gabriel’s father, had been a highly successful jewelry designer in Chicago. When Gabriel had been sent to rehab—courtesy of Felix and Julia, Hunter suspected, although he didn’t know why—Laslo had relocated to New York but had moved the family home to Springfield, ostensibly to escape all of Gabriel’s old connections.
About two years ago—funny how all things happened two years earlier, including Sergei’s takeover of the business in Chicago—Laslo had left his shop in New York to highly competent and spectacular designers and merchants, and had retired to the family home in Springfield, contributing long distance. His business continued to flourish; Gabriel had taught his journeymen his cutting techniques for gemstones, and he apparently had an eye for talent. But none of the journeymen, according to Danny’s source, could laser cut as much information onto one single rock as they’d seen on the amber flower they’d intercepted in Vancouver.
But there was more.
Felix had contacted their friend Torrance Grayson, with the dates from Artur’s previous deliveries, and asked him to research any particular events that seemed to ripple out from the bullseye of when Artur dropped off the package.
There were always at least five.
Sometimes a struggling campaign—usually of a corrupt public official—would get an influx of much-needed cash about a week after the delivery. Maybe a tech company would suddenly announce a breakthrough, often in a field that wasn’t anywhere near its wheelhouse. A fairly wealthy or influential person in the community would suddenly go broke with no explanation, while at the same time, a nobody would win the lottery. A power company, perhaps, would go immediately bankrupt—rolling blackouts and rate increases happened almost like clockwork after the delivery. Someone who’d been in the papers for a very public, usually heinous, crime would be exonerated by anything from a corruption of the jury pool to the dropping of charges. And sometimes—particularly in places with lots of tech companies, like the Bay Area or Chicago itself—there would be one of those huge, terrible hacks in which a company hemorrhaged people’s addresses.
All within a week or two of a delivery.
“Oh my God,” Lucius murmured. “That’s…. My company alone didn’t provide all those dates.”
“No,” Felix agreed. “The pattern we’re looking at here shows several sources. He’s got a hacker on staff who is giving someone the go codes to get into the tech or credit-card companies, for example. He has more than one tech company with a weasel inside to funnel R and D information. Many of the political allies look like incumbents—these are contacts his predecessor cultivated and he’s keeping on staff. The criminals getting the get-out-of-jail card are often….” He caught his breath and looked at Danny. “They’re younger sons of rich men,” Felix said, as though surprised at the connection.
“Shit,” Danny said succinctly. “Oh, that makes so much sense. I’ll ask Gray if he can hunt that down for us. Excuse me a moment, yes?”
Felix watched him go, eyebrows knit as though he was perplexed. “You know,” he said musingly, “Torrance Grayson was my friend first. I don’t even know how he does that.”
There was a pause then, and Chuck was the one who drawled, “He’s Uncle Danny.”
The laughter was strained, and it took Hunter a moment to realize why. They’d all been waiting for Grace to say it.
He took a deep breath and looked reflexively to the stairway, but no Grace. Then Felix started talking again, and his attention was drawn back to the matter at hand. But inside he still ached a little; his stomach still burned with an emptiness that had nothing to do with the fifteen zillion oatmeal cookies he’d eaten to make one dancer/thief smile.
Hallelujah
GRACE LOOKED at the street sign and frowned. Where the fuck was he?
“Woodward?” He shuddered. “What suburb am I in?”
Josh’s parents lived outside of Glencoe, which was the mansion suburb outside of Chicago. He didn’t know if there was a Woodward Avenue in Highland Park. Great.
His legs ached, because apparently he’d run himself to exhaustion. He was lost, and, thank you motherfucking Chicago, it was starting to rain.
He looked around and saw row upon row of decent, happy family houses. Not mansions, like in Glencoe, but, well, they all had lawns, and all the lawns were well