Emerald Blaze (Hidden Legacy 5)

“And he just happened to record this conversation?” Munoz asked.

“No, but she did. You can view it on her YouTube and Instagram, video #468. Titled ‘Should I give him a chance?’ She recorded the phone call and inserted chunks of it into her video with her commentary while doing her makeup. This was over a month ago.”

Munoz looked like he wanted to say something. I would drag him over to our side. Whatever it took. Very well. Might as well kill two birds with one stone.

I turned to Giacone. This would have to be done just right. I looked at him as if he were a dog. A loyal, but stupid, dog.

“How is Amanda, Henry?”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Nevada frown.

Giacone pulled himself ramrod straight. “She’s well, thank you.”

“I understand she’s made quite a lot of progress with her violin.”

Giacone offered me a shy smile. “Yes. She has a recital later this month.”

“Are you considering the Mayflower Academy?” The Mayflower Academy was a high school for gifted students, private, exclusive, hellishly difficult to get into and far out of a typical police sergeant’s range.

“We thought about it,” Giacone said.

Of course you did. “My grandmother believes your daughter would be a good fit.”

Giacone turned slightly whiter. “Thank you.”

“Give us a few minutes, Henry.”

“Yes, Ms. Tremaine.”

He rose, walked out of the room, and shut the door. Next to me on Patricia’s tablet, Britney Hays, one of our security people showed Giacone to a room across the hall and followed him in there.

If Munoz could be any more inscrutable, he’d turn to stone, but I knew he’d caught that “Tremaine.” Henry had slipped. And that’s after he hit his own professional impartiality over the head with a shovel and buried it in his backyard.

I dropped the mask and looked Munoz in the eye. “Detective Giacone is my grandmother’s creature. He’s been bought and paid for. This is a show of trust on my part. I’m giving you a chance to transfer a mole out of your department.”

Munoz leaned back, the nonchalant expression gone. “As long as Giacone is my partner, he’ll be keeping tabs on you and reporting to her. You want Victoria Tremaine out of your hair and you’re using my hands to do it.”

“She’ll know it’s me.” And she won’t like it.

Munoz fixed me with a heavy stare. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can manipulate me, Ms. Baylor.”

Everyone had a pressure point. I knew Munoz’s, but that was the difference between me and Grandma Victoria. I would never use it.

“You don’t believe Leon did it either. If you did, you would have gone about this meeting in an entirely different way.”

“What I believe isn’t as important as what the evidence tells me.”

“Sabrian Turner will shred that recording in court and you know it,” Nevada said.

“Sergeant Munoz, in the last forty-eight hours we’ve been attacked three times. We are in someone’s crosshairs. I don’t know who is behind this series of unfortunate events, but I’ll find out. I have no reason to manipulate you. I just want you to be aware of what’s happening, and I don’t want Houston PD to jump to conclusions, because I expect more trouble. A lot more. I’m asking you to trust me and offering evidence that I’m trustworthy.”

I had served him Giacone on a silver platter. Munoz was too smart not to recognize it as an overture to the alliance. I gave him the mole. In turn, when the next piece of weird evidence involving us crossed his desk, he would view it more carefully.

“Consider me aware.”

“I’m not asking for special treatment. Just a little patience.”

He shook his head. “You’re playing a dangerous game.”

“I have to protect my family, Sergeant.”

He nodded, stood up, and left.

I waited until the camera feed on my laptop assured me that the two officers exited the building under Patricia’s watchful eye and then tapped my keyboard. An image of Bern nestled in the computer room expanded on the screen. Arabella was behind him and Grandma Frida sat on his left, while Mom was on his right. They woke her up. Figured.

Patricia came back and sat in the chair across from me.

“We are being targeted because of Linus’ case I’m working on. Originally I thought I was the primary target, but it doesn’t seem to be the case.”

I told them as much about Arkan as I could without betraying Linus’ confidence.

“Whoever Arkan sent is smart and knows way too much about us. As of this moment, we’re going to proceed as if we are in a feud. Bern, please check our networks, the servers, the cameras, everything. Arabella, please review our financials. Liquidate anything that can potentially result in a crippling loss if someone starts manipulating the market.”

“That would be about thirty percent of our portfolio,” she warned. “We’ll take a hit.”

“Do it,” I said. “We don’t want to be financially vulnerable.”

She nodded.

Grandma Frida threw her hands up. “I’ll dust off Romeo.”

“Thank you, Grandma.”

Grandma Frida subscribed to the philosophy that most problems could be solved by applying a tank to them. I had a terrible feeling that this mess wouldn’t be that simple to fix.

I closed the laptop.

“How did you know about Giacone?” Nevada asked.

Crap. There was no escape. “Victoria told me.”

My evil grandmother had expected me to use Giacone as an asset.

My sister stood up, walked over, and stared at me from across the table. “You visit her?”

“Every other Thursday.” At the start of our relationship, I visited her every other day for a month, but Nevada didn’t need to know that.

“Catalina!”

I looked up at her. “Yes?”

“That woman is evil. Do you have any idea how dangerous she is?”

“Yes.”

“You have to stop talking to her. She’s—”

Nevada’s phone went off. She glanced at it. “Damn it. I have to take this. Don’t go anywhere.” She walked out and ducked into the nearest office across the hall.

“Time to earn my pay,” Patricia said.

“We know they have at least one illusion mage with them.”

“We’ll sniff test everyone.”

“I’ll let you know as soon as I have more information.”

Patricia nodded. “Do you want to talk to the Lone Gunman or should I?”

I got up. “I’ll talk to Leon.”

“What do you want me to do about Prime Sagredo?” Patricia asked.

“I don’t follow.”

She pushed her tablet toward me. A silver Spider waited a few yards away from the security booth.

“How long has he been here?”

“Since 7:00 a.m.”

And nobody told me. Considering that nobody shot him, my family showed remarkable restraint.

“We don’t need to do anything about him. He’s guarding me.”

“Where do the two of you stand?” Patricia asked.

“I’ll tell you as soon as I figure it out.”

I climbed the stairs to the second floor. Leon sat in his office chair. A huge coffee mug with a drawing of an action figure and the slogan “If you’re not shooting, you should be communicating your intention to shoot” waited on his desk.

Leon’s shoulders were rigid, his spine tense. He already knew.

Bern was smart. He vacuumed up data, and his powerful brain sorted it into logical chains. He had excelled at almost every subject in school, because once he learned something, he remembered it forever. Leon had failed most of his classes and limped to graduation with a C average, but he was sharp. When the occasion called for it, he made lightning-fast deductions. If his brother’s mind was a lighthouse beam, Leon’s was a strobe light, firing off unpredictable flashes of blinding brilliance.

“Audrey is dead,” I said.

“I figured that out. How?”

“A single shot to the temple, very quick. They have security footage of someone who looks exactly like you walking in and out of the building.”

“Looks like me or is me?”

“Is you. A high-ranking illusion mage. The clothes were right, the posture was right, and they even sauntered like you.”

“I don’t saunter.”

He said it on autopilot, his voice without any emotion. Oh, Leon.

“They killed her just because of me.”

“No. They killed her because of me.”

He jerked to look at me. His voice was harsh. “Tell me.”

I told him about Arkan. “He’s targeting us to divert attention from Felix Morton’s murder. Nothing you did had anything to do with it.”

Leon looked at me. His eyes were red. “I should have gone over when she called me.”

“Then she would have died half an hour sooner.”

“Or I would have saved her. She called me for help, and I didn’t come.”

“This was a trap,” I said. “They tried to lure you there. They waited to see if you would show up, and when you didn’t, they went with plan B. It was a pretty good plan B but flawed. They didn’t account for our dogs.”