The Long Game (The Fixer #2)(46)

“I’ve missed you guys!” Asher declared. “Except for Emilia. I still see Emilia all the time.”

For fear that Emilia might actually do her brother physical harm, I intervened. “What did you find out?” I asked Emilia.

Emilia turned her attention from Asher to me, and as she did, I saw her guard going up, saw the transition from a much aggrieved sister to a person nothing and no one could touch. “Nothing worth repeating,” she said.

I recognized, in her voice, that Emilia had heard something tonight. I wondered how much of what she’d heard had sounded familiar to her. I wondered how she was holding up with that, but knew she wouldn’t tell me, just like she wouldn’t betray anyone else’s confidences about John Thomas.

“Anyone who might have had a motive?” I asked.

Emilia shrugged. “Motive? Yes. Opportunity? Ability? Not so much.”

“On the subject of ability,” Vivvie cut in, “we should add hacking to the list. If the hedgehog was a student, he or she would have had to figure out how to hack the security feeds via the campus wireless network.”

“The hedgehog?” Emilia asked, wrinkling her brow.

“I approve!” Asher declared. “Though I am somewhat hurt that the lot of you have been hedgehog hunting in my absence. Just because a person is suspected of premeditated murder doesn’t mean they don’t have feelings.”

“What would it take to hack the security feeds?” Henry asked Emilia, ignoring Asher with the expertise of someone who had been strategically ignoring him for a very long time.

“I don’t know,” Emilia told Henry. “But I can find out.”

To say that Emilia was good with computers would have been an understatement. I had very little doubt that given the time and motivation, she could figure out how to hack the security feeds herself.

“Did you get anything out of John Thomas’s friends?” Vivvie asked Henry.

“I discovered how John Thomas found out about my family’s personal issues, how he got ahold of Hardwicke medical records.”

I’d guessed, the day John Thomas died, that he had obtained the information about Henry’s father from his own. I’d overheard enough of Ivy’s conversations to recognize just how easily a person could pick up on things they weren’t supposed to know.

“Congressman Wilcox kept files,” Henry said. “On major and minor players in Washington. Not that uncommon, among a certain set.”

My thoughts went to Ivy’s files. Her program. Ivy’s clients could count on her absolute discretion—until and unless something happened to her. If she went off the grid, the program started releasing secrets.

“What is uncommon,” Henry commented, “is that John Thomas had somehow managed to get access to his father’s files. I suspect his father had no idea.”

No wonder John Thomas had paled when I’d threatened to tell the congressman what he was up to. It would have been bad enough if John Thomas’s father had simply let the information slip in front of his son, but if John Thomas had acquired the information without the congressman knowing . . .

That wouldn’t have gone well for John Thomas.

“What other information do you think was in those files?” Vivvie asked, wide-eyed. “I mean . . . are we talking about blackmail material, or BLACKMAIL MATERIAL, all caps?” She punctuated those words with an elaborate gesture.

“If I had to venture a guess,” Henry said, “I would go with the latter.”

BLACKMAIL MATERIAL, all caps. Silence fell over the table. Emilia was the one to break it. “If John Thomas had access to his father’s files,” she said, “then we’re not just talking about him having dirt on Hardwicke students.”

We were talking about Hardwicke parents, about politicians and lobbyists and power players of all stripes. If John Thomas had opened his mouth . . .

We’re looking for someone with access to Hardwicke, I reminded myself. But I couldn’t help thinking that Ivy had said more than once that Hardwicke was Washington.

And I knew better than most how dangerous this town could be.





CHAPTER 41

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

John Thomas Wilcox was laid to rest on Saturday morning—less than twelve hours after the party had been busted up. Nearly the entire student body attended the funeral, with their parents in tow. It was a Who’s Who of Washington’s elite, and all I could think was that if John Thomas had read his father’s files, he probably had blackmail material on half the people here.

I wondered if he’d tried to use it.

Beside the open grave, the reverend continued talking, the low hum of his voice assuring us that the Lord worked in unfathomable ways. John Thomas’s family stood a few feet away. His mother was shaking, her shoulders rounded, her body on the verge of crumbling in on itself. Beside her, there were two younger boys: one in his early teens and another who couldn’t have been older than seven or eight.

The congressman stood on the opposite side of the boys, his hands balled into fists at his side. He looked grief-stricken—there was no other word for the lines of sorrow etched into the corners of his eyes and mouth. His whole face looked heavy, like the only thing keeping his skin on his face was the tense set of his jaw.

The congressman is very good at paying attention. John Thomas’s statement—his threat—came back to me, and I thought of the way father and son had interacted in the ballroom that night, the look on John Thomas’s face when Henry had said the word disappointment. Congressman Wilcox might have had a gift for ferreting out the skeletons in other people’s closets, but my gut said that he hadn’t paid attention to his son.