As she continued to study the photo, years peeled away and reality slithered out. Twenty-three years had passed since Samael Roi the teenage Venom Prince had showed up at Ramona’s ranch with his sibs and murdered a crippled boy, indirectly caused Ramona’s death, and shattered Grace’s status quo.
Dressed in black, then as now.
The bastard had changed his name. Wanting to rid himself of his adopted father’s local baggage? If so, it had worked, if you didn’t factor in the overreaching memory and loose associations of Little Mr. One-Eye.
From Roger to Dion...?
As if a switch had been flipped, Grace’s brain decoded, scrambling and reassembling letters as if they were game tiles.
Dion R. Larue.
Arundel Roi.
Perfect anagram.
Forget the man who’d made him wealthy, he was out to honor his birth father’s identity. Prioritizing bloodline over everything that had happened since the shoot-out at the Fortress Cult.
This was more than a psychopath ridding himself of an uncomfortable history.
This was an attempt at reincarnation.
Now the murders of three sets of parents made strange, cruel sense: Samael Roi reconstructing a childhood spent with a madman and his concubines. Out with the old, in with the new.
Specialized bidding, indeed.
An elderly schizophrenic might recall the bad old days of crumbling bridges and splintering soil, the Wetter family’s exploitation of the helpless, but no one else in this city that prided itself on human rights seemed to know or care.
No surprise, Grace supposed, in the Age of Endless Chances and Reinvention.
An uncomfortable truth settled in Grace’s gut: I’ve also benefited from that.
Staring at Dion Larue’s smug smile, she couldn’t help but think of him as her playmate, perched on the other end of a cosmic seesaw.
The two of them, perfect rivals.
She hadn’t chosen to do battle. But now...
Drinking her second refill of coffee — add that to her breakfast caffeine and her heart was thumping and racing — she shifted her analysis to Andrew né Typhon Roi. Surer than ever that she’d been right about the reason he’d sought help.
Needing to sort out his own lineage of evil.
But the question remained: Had he committed evil?
True, Palo Alto being near Berkeley easily accounted for a chance meeting between the brothers. Or did she have that backward and had the sons of Arundel Roi reunited long ago, both agreeing to settle in the Bay Area?
Samael honing his psychopathic skills.
Typhon, brighter, outwardly moral, working on building a professional career.
An alliance set well before the slaying of their adopted families? The thought repelled Grace but she needed to face it: The man she’d known as Andrew may have committed outrages and finally found the guilt too much to live with.
Including the death of his sister, because she’d been judged too bonded to the McCoys to be integrated into the new clan his brother envisioned.
Did Typhon/Andrew’s survival years after Lilith’s demise mean he’d been a co-conspirator? Or simply a silent witness his brother had trusted to maintain silence?
Either way, he’d died because of what he knew and Grace supposed it didn’t much matter. Still... it was time to learn more about the pleasant, pliable man she’d met in a hotel lobby. But first, she needed to educate herself about his sole surviving sibling.
Snapping a bite out of her bagel, she searched for anything related to the new corporation Dion Larue had created. She found no other DRL-Earthmove projects in Berkeley but seven years previous the company had snagged a similar government-funded contract near Gallup, New Mexico, converting a block of derelict shops to an “environmentally friendly” industrial park aimed at enriching “local culture.”
Larue’s partner for that one had been one Munir “Tex” Khaled, a dealer in Indian art. Googling that name brought up a homicide case: Khaled had been found shot to death in the desert near the Mexican border. That location had obvious implications and rumors of a drug connection had endured.
As far as Grace could tell, the crime remained unsolved. Nor could she find any evidence of the Gallup project ever breaking ground.
That despite a golden-spade groundbreaking ceremony attended by hard-hatted politicians. By a hard-hatted Tex Khaled, as well. The former art dealer was a small, dark-haired man in his sixties wearing a brown shirt tucked into daddy jeans secured by an enormous tooled-silver belt buckle and a string tie fastened by an equally oversized chunk of turquoise. Next to him stood a younger, jubilant Dion Larue, also protectively helmeted and wearing a blousy white buccaneer’s shirt that exposed a deep V of smooth tan thorax.
But clothing wasn’t what caught Grace’s attention, or even the likelihood that Tex Khaled had posed happily with his murderer. She’d fixed on a figure standing behind Larue, slightly to the right.
Early thirties, slightly taller than average, coarse features. Not the shaved-head Beldrim Arthur Benn she’d encountered in her garden. The long-haired, shaggy-mustached visage from Benn’s driver’s license.
Despite the smiles of nearly everyone else in the shot, Benn appeared watchful, even grim. Nearly everyone else because of one other exception: a man positioned next to Benn and around the same age and height as Benn but twice as wide.
A bullet-headed rhino with sparse fair hair, a face the shape of a pie tin, squinty eyes, and tiny, close-set ears.
Mr. Beef. Central-casting thug. Maybe that’s why Benn, less obtrusive physically, had been sent to West Hollywood to take care of Grace. Leaving Rhino to dispatch Andrew.
She wondered if the heavy man was still in L.A. — maybe tossing her office — or back here with the boss.
The disposable cell she’d used to call Wayne chirped. His private number. She switched it off and continued to search for info on DRL-Earthmove.
Nothing. Time to switch gears and veer into territory she knew well.
The engineering section of the inter-university peer-review-journal website coughed up three articles authored by Andrew Van Cortlandt during the year of his postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford. All were math-laden treatises exploring the structural properties of conductor metals under various electrochemical and thermal conditions.
All had been co-authored with Amy Chan, Ph.D., of Caltech.
Backgrounding Chan revealed that she’d served her postdoc at Stanford the same year as Andrew before taking a lectureship in Pasadena. But that position had lasted only two years and now she was an assistant professor of engineering right here at UC Berkeley.
The department’s website offered up a headshot of a pleasant-looking woman who could’ve passed as a high school senior, with a small-boned face surrounded by long black hair trimmed into straightedge bangs. Amy Chan had continued to delve into the world of structural integrity and had received high marks for teaching from undergrads.
Grace knew reading too much into a face — into anything — was foolish. But Chan’s portrait projected diffidence by way of soft eyes and a bashful smile.
Time to take a risk. She phoned Chan’s office extension. If she got a bad feeling, she could hang up and ditch the phone.
A woman with a whispery, slightly tremulous voice picked up.
“Is this Professor Chan?”
A beat. “I’m Amy.” Chan sounded like a high school senior.
Grace said, “My name is Sarah Muller, I’m an ed-psych consultant from L.A. who was friends with Andrew Van Cortlandt.”
“Was?” said Amy Chan. “You’re no longer friends? Or...?”
“It’s complicated, Professor Chan, and I know this sounds strange, but I’m worried about Andrew and if you could find the time, I’d appreciate talking to you.”