Keeping Gemma (Holiday Cove 2)

She twisted to meet my eyes, hers just as fired up as mine felt. “First off, this was before you called me and told me about O'Keefe. And second of all, I think we just spent the better part of the afternoon deciding that I can handle myself. And third of all, my gut instinct was right and if you’d shut up long enough for me to tell you about it, I'd tell you what I found!”

She flung the sheet off of her feet and launched out of bed. I was too angry to even react at the site of her stalking from the room butt-ass naked. Every fiber of my body was revved up and ready to fight. But before I could fully put my argument together, she reappeared, holding a white security envelope in her hand. “From everything you told me about O'Keefe, he's the type to play dirty.”

I snorted. That was an understatement.

Gemma ignored my reaction and continued, “I was at work and I couldn’t stop replaying everything in my head. It was like a deck of cards shuffling over and over again. Something just wasn’t clicking. I got to thinking about his other business endeavors and when I followed that trail I found that his last big development was in Stallion Bay. I did a little digging around online and found out that similarly to Holiday Cove, the citizens of Stallion Bay weren’t exactly waiting with open arms when O'Keefe came rolling into town, talking about luxury resorts and high-rise condos.”

“They didn’t?” I hadn’t paid much attention to the deal, and it was far enough away that it hadn’t seemed relative. Stallion Bay was thriving with the new resort and all the new businesses and residences it had brought in, so I’d assumed it had been embraced wholeheartedly from the beginning.

Gemma shook her head. “No. And I remembered something you told me about a while ago. You told me that when O’Keefe first came here with his proposal, there were protests and petitions at town hall to send him and his blueprints packing. The same thing happened in Stallion Bay. The difference was that it's a bigger city so there was more of a divide. Whereas here in Holiday Cove, it was a flat-out, nearly unanimous ‘no’, it was closer to fifty-fifty in Stallion Bay. Half of the residents thought it would boost commerce and bring in new people—money—which they saw as being a good thing.

“Naturally that crowd was ecstatic when someone of O'Keefe's caliber came forward with an offer. However, the other fifty percent were staunchly against it and took their concerns all the way up the political chain and managed to win the mayor over to their side. He used his political ties to side with the people against O'Keefe and after a little battle, got the proposal turned down and sent O’Keefe on his way.”

I shook my head, not following. “When was all this? Stallion Bay's resort has been up and running for almost a year now.”

Gemma nodded. “I know. It was a year and a half before they broke ground. O’Keefe had to file permits and everything twice.”

“How did he get around the mayor? Did he buy him off too?”

“Not exactly.” At this point in the weaving of her tail, Gemma opened the sealed envelope and handed me the contents. “He died before the proposal went through. I think O'Keefe had him killed.”

Chills ran over me as though the room had just dropped ten degrees.

I took the pages from her hands and began to skim the words on the pages but my mind was spinning and I couldn’t decipher what I was reading. “Okay hold on. Tell me what I’m looking at here,” I said, starting at the beginning again. It looked like some pages had a medical record but I couldn’t see what Gemma was trying to show me.

She sat down beside me on the bed. “After I found the mayor’s obituary online, I left work and drove up to the hospital in Stallion Bay where he had been taken. I pulled a few strings with one of the doctors there and managed to get his autopsy results.”

I turned to glance at her profile, my eyebrows raised. Soldier, nurse…super spy? Who the hell was this woman?

Gemma continued, not even noticing my inquisitive stare. She gestured at some figures on the paper. “Turns out he had high blood pressure, which was a known condition and he’d been taking medicine to control it for some time. However, the medication that he was taking, when mixed with this drug,” she pointed out a line containing a long word that, to me, looked like jumbled nothingness, “would have been fatal.”

“Holy shit. And nobody knows about this?”

Gemma shrugged. “I don’t know. And I don’t know why nobody caught this. And I definitely don’t know who prescribed him this drug. I mean, maybe I’ve watched too many forensic science shows but it seems to me that at this dosage it was a deliberate poisoning. Even if he wasn’t on the other medication for his high blood pressure there’s no doctor that would have prescribed this drug to him, and certainly not at this dosage. Levels this high indicate a massive dose, which might not kill a healthy person, but it certainly wouldn’t be good for them, either. So, after everything you’ve told me about O’Keefe, combined with what the FBI and FAA teams found at the museum, it’s starting to look like O’Keefe is playing a very dangerous game and that he’ll do anything to win.”