The Match (Wilde, #2)(52)

“McAndrews was a city cop,” Polar Bear said. “I would imagine he made his share of enemies. So maybe his death is just a coincidence. Maybe it has nothing to do with us.”

“Maybe,” Chris agreed with zero enthusiasm.

“The headline says, a ‘gangland’ slaying. Maybe that’s what this was. Or maybe, hell, this guy was a serious troll.”

“So?”

“So maybe he trolled someone else and they went after him.”

“Right,” Giraffe added. “Or maybe it was a routine breakin. Or maybe, like Polar Bear and Kitten are implying, this McAndrews was just an asshole with a gun, a badge, and the kind of psycho inferiority complex that made him a troll.”

“Right,” Kitten chimed in. “We know Panther would never betray our trust.”

“Do we?” Chris asked.

“What?”

“We don’t know any of us,” Chris said. “That’s kind of the point. And I would agree with you normally. I would think that there was an excellent chance that the murder of Henry McAndrews had nothing to do with us. In fact, an hour ago, I figured there was a sixty-to-seventy-five-percent chance that Boomerang had zero involvement in his death.”

“So what made you change your mind?” Giraffe asked.

“Come on, Giraffe.” It was Kitten with their British accent. “It’s pretty obvious.”

“What?”

Chris handled it. “Panther isn’t here. He’s”—he stopped himself and went back to the neutral identification—“I mean, they are our only no-show.”

“Panther has never missed a meeting before,” Giraffe added.

“In all the times we’ve met,” Polar Bear said, “the entire group has attended. Except that one time when Kitten let us know they wouldn’t be there.”

“Exactly,” Chris said. “It was Panther’s case. And now Panther isn’t replying to our messages.”

Silence.

“So what do we do?” Giraffe asked.

“We have a very specific protocol in place,” Chris said.

Polar Bear: “Are you saying we break the glass?”

“Yes.”

“I agree,” Kitten said.

“It seems extreme,” Giraffe said.

“That’s my take too,” Polar Bear said. “We promised to break the glass only in the direst of emergencies. All of us have to agree. It can’t be four out of five.”

“I know,” Chris said.

This had been Boomerang’s top-level security from the start. None of them knew the others. That was a huge part of it. If one was caught, they couldn’t sell out the others, even if they wanted to, no matter how much pressure was put on them to turn. There was no way to track each other down.

Unless they “broke the glass.”

All of their names were in a secure file with every protection known to man implemented. Each member of Boomerang had created their own unique twenty-seven-digit security code. If all five put in their codes within ten seconds of the others, the five animals could see the name of the sixth member of Boomerang. That was the only way. All five had to put in their individual codes at the same time—and even then, they would only get the identity of the sixth member.

“Let’s go through this step-by-step for a second,” Chris said. “We have a past target, Henry McAndrews, who has been murdered.”

“He wasn’t a past target,” Polar Bear said. “He was a potential target. In the end, we chose not to proceed.”

“I stand corrected. A potential target. His case was presented to us by Panther, who is currently not replying to our messages. There are several possibilities, including several possibilities which can be boiled down to this: It’s a coincidence. We deal with a lot of people who are acting rashly. The fact that one is murdered is no guarantee it has a connection to us.”

“That was the argument we half-heartedly made,” Kitten said, “before we remembered that Henry McAndrews was brought to us by our one missing member.”

“Correct. I think for the purposes of this discussion, let’s put the coincidence possibility to the side. Let’s say that Henry McAndrews’s murder is directly connected to us. More to the point, let’s say the murder is directly connected to Panther’s disappearance.”

“Whoa, that’s a little strong,” Polar Bear said. “Disappearance? We don’t know that. Has it even been twenty-four hours? Look, we are all very engaged in the tech world. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here. I don’t know about you, but when I need a break—and that happens—I go cold turkey. I go on a boat out on the water where I don’t have any mobile service or internet. There is a chance, a decent chance, that Panther has done the same.”

“Without telling us?” Kitten countered. “And by coincidence, they choose to do so at this very moment?”

“So you think what, Kitten? That Panther murdered a police chief because he bothered some pretty-boy reality winner?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Then what are you saying?”

Chris stepped in. “I think what Kitten is saying—or at least, what I’m saying—is that we need to find out what happened here.”