Axel had been satisfied on that score but he still wanted dirt about Heath Powell, like, yesterday. Not knowing exactly who had Mystery at his mercy made Axel itchy.
Right on cue, his phone buzzed in the console of his rented sedan. Joaquin called, according to the display.
“What you got for me, man?” Axel asked, skipping the typical greeting as he continued to scan the dirt road for any sign of headlights in the dark.
“A lot, and none of it very good.”
“Fuck.” Why didn’t that surprise him? Axel sighed. “Lay it on me.”
“I’ll start with your buddy, Heath Powell. Naturally, most of the good information about him is classified. MI5 won’t confirm his employment, but I called Sean Mackenzie”—Joaquin spoke of the former FBI agent who had recently married Callie—“and Hunter Edgington. The intelligence community can be small. Lots of people know lots of others. It didn’t take long for them to tap into their individual sources and come back with similar stories.”
“After I hear this, am I going to want to kill him?”
“You might. But you might also want to give him a hardy slap on the back. Tough call.”
Axel had a hard time picturing that. At the moment, the murder scenario sounded far more plausible. “What did you find?”
“Heath Powell and a team he’d been assigned to warned of Islamic extremists planning something in the Underground system before the July 2005 attacks. Their theory was dismissed. After the incident materialized, the agency backtracked and offered him a promotion. He stayed a few more years, thwarted a few more terrorist plots, then someone shot his wife in broad daylight in a London market. The murder had the earmarks of a public retaliation for putting a douchebag—they’ve never proven exactly who—behind bars. After that Powell resigned, and a few key criminals wound up gruesomely dead over the next few months. No one pursued their deaths too hard, but whoever took them out was a real pro, so you do the math. Powell then took a few odd bodyguarding jobs, sometimes for the sort of lowlifes and thugs he’d once hunted down. Then Marshall Mullins jetted to London with his young, still-traumatized daughter and hired Powell almost immediately. By all accounts, the guy has been Mystery’s devoted shadow since.”
Axel gripped the phone, his thoughts racing. Yeah, he didn’t like what he heard. But he had to compartmentalize his worry and pray that son of a bitch was too devoted to Mystery to kill her. He understood why she trusted her bodyguard, but Axel would bet she had no idea the Brit had gotten in bed with the enemy for a paycheck and more than likely had committed cold-blooded murder.
“Thanks for the info,” Axel grumbled.
“Don’t thank me yet. Now we come to the worse news. I did some digging about Julia Mullins’s killing and talked to the detective originally assigned to her case. He’s retired now. Once we established that I wasn’t a pesky reporter looking for a scoop or a college student hoping to write a paper that would blow this whole Hollywood drama open again, he admitted that the sheriff’s department hid a few things from the media.”
That happened more often than not, so Axel wasn’t surprised. “And he was willing to tell you about it?”
“Not at first. But we shot the shit over the phone for a while. I had to stretch the truth a little and say that I was helping to protect Mystery while she’s on U.S. soil.”
“If you get me information, then you are, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Well, he hemmed and hawed a bit, checked out my credentials. I guess he’d met Caleb Edgington in the past and finally decided anyone working with or for my stepfather was okay.”
“And?”
“At first, he thought Julia Mullins jumped. The trajectory of the body over the cliff suggested some force behind her fall, rather than a suicide leap, though. And Julia’s actions just before her death didn’t match up.”
“Like calling a divorce lawyer and planning a move to Kansas?”
“Yeah. You knew about that?”
“Mystery told me earlier,” Axel supplied. “I don’t think she knows much else, though.”
“The body placement also ruled out an unintentional fall, which left them thinking murder. But the sheriff couldn’t positively place either of their only two suspects at the crime scene with her. So the case went unsolved. For some reason, the sheriff didn’t publicly classify her death as a homicide.”
“Why the hell not?” Axel demanded.
“To cool speculation in the press maybe. The detective I spoke to said they were under a lot of pressure to figure out what had happened. Calling it a murder would only have turned up the heat.”
That sheriff had done Julia Mullins and her loved ones a really crappy disservice, in Axel’s opinion. “So that’s it?”
“Not exactly. Fast-forward about four months,” Joaquin went on. “Campers in the valley below took some last-minute pictures before heading out, hours before anyone knew there’d even been a death. They finally got the film developed in their camera—remember, this was before everyone had a digital camera—and they spotted something interesting. I’m sending it to you now.”
Within a minute, Axel’s phone dinged with a text message. He put Joaquin on speaker and opened the message. Mountains, some snowcapped, filled the landscape, dotted with a thick forest of trees. The shot was panoramic and showed the majesty of the area. Then something to the left of the shot caught his attention. He peered more closely and expanded the view on his phone. But the old picture pixilated the more he tried to zoom in. Still, two things looked very clear: The date and time stamp on the photo coincided with Julia Mullins’s murder and on the mountain in which she’d met her doom stood not one figure—but two.
“I see a man and a woman on the mountain in the left side of the background,” Axel pointed out. “She’s definitely Julia Mullins. That’s probably the last picture of her alive.”
“Exactly.”
“Who’s that man standing with her?” Though the snapshot only showed the back of a man wearing a navy blue suit, Axel already knew that couldn’t be Mystery’s father. “The guy in the photo is too short and has too much gray in his hair to be Marshall Mullins.”
The man in the photo also wasn’t Heath Powell. He would have been too young at the time of the murder, and school records put him squarely in the UK at the time of Julia Mullins’s death. Axel had checked.
“He’s also too tall to be Akio Miharu, the Asian Mafia enforcer Mullins hired to consult on a movie and, according to rumor, to kill his wife. With their only two suspects most likely eliminated, the sheriff had nothing else to go on. The quality of the photo isn’t fantastic, and the negative is long gone, so we can’t improve the clarity.”
Which meant that using anything fancy, like recognition software, was out of the question. “So she was definitely murdered, and we have a new suspect we can’t identify.”
“Pretty much. The sketchy notes here indicate that the detective asked Mullins if he recognized the man with his wife. He claims he didn’t.”
“Why didn’t they ever release this photo to the press? Get it on the news and see if anyone could identify him?”
“Isn’t that a good question?” Joaquin asked cynically.
“What about records of people entering and leaving the park? Are any kept so we can cross-reference whoever entered that day with anyone Julia Mullins knew?”