After the Golden Age (Golden Age 1)

“I think your resources would be better spent tracking them down than trying to protect me. You heard what Arthur said, they want me alive. Even if they managed to catch me, I’d be safe. Hell, I might even learn something that could bring them down.”

“Don’t get any ideas. You’re not trained for that kind of mission.”

She wasn’t trained for any kind of mission, except auditing income statements. “Don’t worry, I won’t.” She was starting to sound surly. She needed to wrap this up before she said something she’d regret later.

Suzanne said, “We’ll stop the surveillance on one condition: you come back to live at West Plaza, where we can keep an eye on you.”

She didn’t even have to hesitate. “No, Mom. I can’t do that.”

“You didn’t even think about it.”

“Hey, Mom? My stop’s coming up, I really have to go—”

“You’re not still riding the bus, are you?”

“I’ll talk to you later, okay? Say hi to Dad for me.”

She clicked off the phone.

FOURTEEN

WEST Corp’s connection to the Leyden Industrial Park hit awfully close to home. She had the next key to the puzzle, and she could keep going—if she could get access to West Corp’s files. If she did, she could find out if Sito had been working for West Corp, and if West Corp had compensated Sito well enough to pay for Greenbriar. She could maybe even find out what Sito had been doing when he had his initial breakdown.

And if she learned all those answers, what was she going to tell Bronson about it? Not to mention her parents.

Jacob West, her grandfather, had headed the corporation then. Her father hadn’t been born yet. No one could have known back then what Sito would become. It didn’t mean anything. Unless the tabloids got hold of the information, of course.

She made good on her offer to have her parents over for dinner.

Her mother fussed, still worried about Celia after the latest kidnapping attempt. Suzanne wanted to cook for her—in her own kitchen no less—but Celia managed to put her foot down. She ordered pizza to be delivered, as she’d threatened, but Suzanne seemed relieved that Celia wasn’t actually going to do any work.

Her father, on the other hand, was in a snit. “It has to be the Destructor masterminding this. We know these hits are all connected. Only the Destructor is capable of organizing a citywide spree.”

“He’s under suicide watch at the Elroy Asylum,” Suzanne said. “He can’t organize a crime spree under those conditions.”

“He’d find a way.”

Celia toyed with a leftover crust of pizza. Something didn’t ring true about that. The targets of the robberies were too odd. The kidnapping attempts were too haphazard. Like it was all some kind of distraction, a means rather than an end.

“I don’t think it’s the Destructor,” she said.

“Why?” Warren demanded.

“It’s not his MO. The Destructor would have pinned the flayed koi to the mayor’s desk. He’d have sent the Stradivariuses back to the symphony in splinters.”

He said, “Is that a fact?”

“It’s a hypothesis.”

A few moments of silence passed before Suzanne said, “She’s right, Warren. This isn’t how Sito operated.”

“Then there’s someone else,” he said. “A new mastermind.”

Suzanne considered, her brow furrowed. Celia used the pause in conversation to start clearing the table. She wasn’t thinking about the Destructor or masterminds—the less she thought about such topics the happier she was. Instead, she’d spent most of the evening trying to figure out how to ask her father for a favor.

The pause lengthened, and she decided to take the chance.

“Dad, do you know anything about a building West Corp owned about fifty years ago? It’s in the northeast industrial district. It used to be called the Leyden Industrial Park.”