Page 56 of Bastard

“Spill the beans. Why did you come all the way here, David Young?” Georgia glared at all of us.

I held my breath. There was a lot riding on this new information. Sam’s safety was the most important, but finally putting this chapter behind us was a close second.

“Well,” he began, “I want to start off by saying I have no intention of sharing my information on Samantha’s birth record falsification. I don’t see any benefit to punishing you for saving Samantha’s life.”

Georgia visibly relaxed. “Thank you.”

“Because her life was very much in danger. Did you know Calos County was a favorite route for antiquity smuggling in the nineties?”

Well that’s a fascinating development. Georgia didn’t move a muscle, but after a moment she shook her head.

“Alligator Alley became a popular way to move smuggled goods from Miami and quickly get them out of the area. There are also rumors the swamps were used to offload some of the goods away from prying eyes. But that brings us to Calos County. The county history museum became the exchange site. The museum curator was arrested and convicted for this in 2003. One of the reasons he was found out was because some very disgruntled clients got upset when a shipment went missing. Thousands of dollars were lost.” David waved his hands as he spoke, glancing at each of us in turn as he spoke. “This all came out in his trial. It turns out that shipment was supposed to be hidden inside the museum archives as they were relocated—along with most of the county’s other records—from their old storage building to their new one.”

Georgia gasped. “Are you fucking shitting me?”

“No I am not. Not only did you destroy a metric ton of birth certificates, but you also destroyed a significant portion of the historical archives, along with twenty artifacts newly smuggled into the country.”

I got the impression this was just the beginning of a much longer story. “Are you saying the Feyereisens lost money in this exchange?” It felt like there were a lot of pieces that didn’t connect yet.

“They did. And I know this because they used the same members of their Dragons motorcycle club to issue a kill order for Victoria Roark and beat the museum curator up after he lost their antiquities.”

Georgia frowned, Sam cocked her head to the side, and I put up my hand to ask a question, but I didn’t know what to ask. “How do you know that?”

“They actually tried to kill her?” Georgia gasped.

“What job did Excel take that got you this data?” Instead of being upset like Georgia and me, Sam was simply her fascinated self.

But I couldn’t stop hearing David say, kill, over and over in my head. It made me want to murder every member of the Dragons myself, then rake the Feyereisens over their bones until they died too.

“Let me explain,” he said. “Georgia, you saved Samantha’s life that day. The Dragons had a plan in place to kill her that same day. It was supposed to be a car accident on the way home from the parade. Or, if that didn’t work, they would break in that night and kill her while she slept. But instead, you had her kidnapped, taking her out of play. Weeks later, after they learned there would be no recovering the lost artifacts, the Dragons went to Calos County to punish the curator.”

Sam’s brain looked like it was on fire. “But…it was so long ago. How are there records for that?”

David scratched the back of his neck. It was a nervous tick. Uncharacteristic of him to show something like that. “Well this contract I’ve been working on? I may have gotten a bit more involved than I usually do.”

“David Young,” Sam gasped. “That’s how you met your new girlfriend!”

David actually blushed. “The point here is I wound up in a Dragon holding cell for…well a really long time. I got to see how they operated. And afterward, as I was trying to sort through the things my client needed, I realized the missing antiquities in Calos County lined up awfully close to Sam’s disappearance.”

“You’re working antiquities again?” Sam’s eyes narrowed.

“Yes.” David made a point to not look at Sam. “I realized trying to hack Roark tech or Feyereisen servers was a task too tall for the data we needed.”

Georgia laughed. “But the Dragons weren’t? They have fucking computers?”

“Yes. Good enough to be good little henchmen for the Feyereisens, but not good enough to keep Excel Research out.”

“And they had records that go back that far?” I asked, doing the math in my head. Devil’s Wrath had a lot of files saved these days, but that mostly came along with the changes I made. No one in Todd’s circle had any desire to intentionally keep records.

“Dragon Security does. Financial ones anyway. There are contracts for both those assignments, including proof of payment. I’ve spent the last few days verifying the payment came through a company owned by the Feyereisens.”

As close to a smoking gun as we’d ever get. “But how do you know that’s what they paid for? It’s not like the check stub says ‘Murder Victoria Roark’.”

“No,” David shook his head. “It has a cipher. A Caesar Shift, to be exact.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Georgia started laughing. Maniacally. Like this was the last straw and she’d cracked.

Sam sat with her hand over her mouth.

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