“When are you going to wake up?” Dillon butted in, physically sickened by what he’d just heard.
“When are you?” Ryan shot back. “This is our life! Like it or not. Laws were changed — well before any of us were ever orphans. And you’ve got no proof of anything. You have suspicion built on suspicion that only leads to more suspicion. You hand-pick what information you choose to dole out, and it always supports your theories. Then you keep everything else hidden. Sorry, but I personally am not that bad off. She needs to hear the whole story.”
“Annamaria was sterilized! My dad was put away for life for what should have been a few years at most! J’Quarius Jones is dead! Your parents were murdered!” Dillon exclaimed, his voice rising as he spoke.
“That’s enough,” Ryan warned, his glare squarely back on Dillon.
But this time Dillon wasn’t backing down. “And you’re padding the bank accounts of the people who murdered them!”
“My parents were killed in a head-on collision. I saw it,” Ryan insisted through gritted teeth.
Dillon cackled condescendingly. “A fatal car accident involving both of your parents exactly three months before the opening of Avillage? They were murdered!”
“Enough!” Ryan shouted, leaning in inches from Dillon’s face. Dillon matched his stare for a few seconds, and then tilted his head slightly, raising his eyebrows, tacitly questioning whose side Ryan was on.
Ryan took a couple of deep, slow breaths to collect himself and then turned toward Annamaria. “You see what I mean?
“I’ve gotta get out of here. Do you want to come with me?”
“Actually,” Annamaria waffled, holding her gaze to the floor, “I think I’m gonna stay here a little while longer.”
“Oh. Yeah, no problem,” Ryan said reassuringly. “Don’t worry about it. You’ve got my number if you want to talk again. Just… don’t do anything rash.”
“But don’t do nothing,” Dillon added, looking directly at Ryan.
Ryan took one more sharp glance at Dillon, shook his head and started out the door, trying not to be offended that Annamaria had chosen to stay with Dillon. He did understand Dillon’s emotional appeal — especially in the short-term.
Feeling the need to clear his head and organize his thoughts, he headed west toward the Charles River to take the scenic route home.
The brilliant shades of red from the morning’s sunrise had been swallowed up by a monotonous gray that blanketed the sky with a single drab tone, neither portending a storm nor showing any sign of clearing. Perfect weather for introspection.
His dysfunctional team had increased in number by fifty percent, but they still didn’t have a viable face for their cause. He could acknowledge that Dillon genuinely loved his father, but Dillon was driven primarily by revenge and was in no way, shape or form a sympathetic figure. His dad was a felon, implicated in terror — and found guilty. No one would care why he was caught or how that had affected his son.
Ryan himself had started out a tragic figure, having lost both parents at such a young age, but it was hard to feel too sorry for him ten years down the road, nearing graduation from Harvard at seventeen with no debt and with a stable, happy homelife. To an outside observer, he appeared to be the prototypical Avillage success story — which had really been the only point he was planning to make before Dillon started in on his parents’ death.
Annamaria was beautiful, clearly preyed upon by a greedy corporation, and had a potentially heart-wrenching story, but she was so overexposed as a soulless socialite in the basest forms of media that most of the country probably would have been delighted to hear she wouldn’t be able to procreate.
J’Quarius, even in death, still seemed to be their best hope, Ryan thought. He’d tried reaching out to Hansford and Arlene Washington — and to Leonard Weinstien — after the game, but he’d never heard anything back. Maybe it had been too soon. Probably time to revisit that, he thought.
Dillon was right about one thing — Avillage was surrounded by smoke. But Annamaria’s scars were the first time he’d actually seen fire. It was time he personally started doing a little digging.
He quickened his pace to a jog as a light mist began to fall. A band of rapidly-rising black clouds on the horizon announced that the sky had finally committed. A storm was coming, and from the looks of it, he wouldn’t have much time to get home before it hit.
“What!” Aaron Bradford finally shouted after the third knock on his door. With the clock nearing midnight, he should have had the office to himself.
“Sorry, sir” Corbett Hermanson said, leaning in close to the door. “But I found something you may be interested in.”
“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?” Bradford moaned.
“It’s up to you, sir, but I thought it was worth checking with you tonight.”
Tall and thin with close-cropped fire-red hair and perpetually tired eyes, Corbett wore the same pale blue short-sleeve Oxford shirt, black pants and nondescript black work shoes everyday, no matter the season. He was the first head of IT at Avillage that Bradford had actually approved of — someone as meticulous and paranoid as he was — and as part of his standard security protocol, he routinely monitored a few dozen randomly-chosen files a week for activity, always at different times on different days.
“Fine,” Bradford sighed. “Give me a second.”
Three minutes passed before Bradford gave Corbett the ok to come in.
“Will there be anything else Mr. Bradford?” his twenty-six-year-old assistant asked right on cue as the door opened, sitting conspicuously formally in an armchair several feet from her boss, cradling a completely blank notepad.
“No, Ms. Williams. That will be all. Good night,” Bradford intoned robotically.
“Good night,” the assistant whispered as she hurried out of the room, keeping her head down to avoid making eye contact with the IT manager.
“Now what is it, Corbett?” Bradford huffed.
“Well sir, it’s just that I didn’t think that you’d been traveling recently, have you?”
“You’ve seen me here every day this week! What do you think? Get to the point,” Bradford demanded, wishing he’d continued to ignore the knocking at his door.
“I actually didn’t think you had been traveling, which is why I found it odd that a few of your files had been accessed by an IP address in Indianapolis earlier today.”
“What?” Bradford gasped, his attention now undivided. “Which files?”
“Some of the old J files and a some of the BUTY ones off the intranet. My guess is that whoever this is probably isn’t in Indiana but is disguising their IP address. And of course I’ll look into it further with your permission. You wouldn’t have shared any of your passwords with anyone by chance, would you have?” Corbett asked.
“No!” Bradford shot back, insulted at the suggestion. “Now listen. I want you to look into this and find out who’s been snooping around, and I want you to report back directly to me! Do you understand?”
“Yes sir. Of course, sir. I’ll start immediately. In the meantime, I’d strongly suggest that you change all of your passwords.”
“I’ll keep my passwords, thank you,” Bradford said, wondering just who in the hell Corbett thought he was “strongly suggesting” anything to his boss’s boss’s boss. “I’ve got nothing to hide on our intranet — I’ve never trusted it — and I don’t want this low-life hacker to know we’re on to him until we’re ready to nail him. Got it?”