Before calling Steve Ruggiero, Rachel perfected her grossest, bubonic plague–esque hacking, phlegmy cough. By the end of the conversation, Steve made her swear on her children not to set foot in the office until she had a clean bill of health. Rachel figured she had two weeks before he started getting suspicious.
Once she dropped Megan and Eric off at school, Rachel went back to the hotel and booted up her laptop. The Wi-Fi took ten minutes to connect. She could have cooked a Thanksgiving turkey in the amount of time it took each page to load. This wouldn’t work. She threw the laptop in her purse and found a coffee shop a few miles down Lakeland where the Yelp reviews praised the speed of their free Wi-Fi and the strength of their espresso.
When Rachel went downstairs, she noticed an Ashby PD patrol car idling in the parking lot. Its wipers were on, brushing back the light dusting of snow gathering on the windshield. A thirtyish female cop with red hair and freckles sat in the driver’s seat sipping a Coke. An overweight, balding cop sat next to her. He was chewing on an overstuffed breakfast sandwich and staring at it like it contained the mysteries of the universe. The female cop noticed Rachel crossing the parking lot and gave her a subtle nod. Rachel cinched up her coat and offered a thin smile. She found an unfortunate irony in the fact that she now had two sitters watching her family.
She drove to the coffee shop, parked, ordered a double espresso, and found a seat at a communal table. She noticed the patrol car pull into the lot. She could see the redhead behind the wheel. Their eyes met again. This time Rachel didn’t bother to smile.
Ignore it, Rachel thought. You have work to do.
The Wi-Fi information was printed on her receipt.
Network: BeansNBrew
Password: x6G$d6J0*DNM(c15M’C72#0S!
It took her four tries just to correctly enter the mishmash of letters, numbers, and symbols. She took a quick look around the cafe. It was late morning, so the only patrons were stay-at-home moms and their zeppelin-size baby carriages, unshaven aspiring writers, and a few retirees with nothing to do but enjoy a hot cup on a cold day. Rachel envied their serenity.
Once she was connected, Rachel was relieved to find that the Wi-Fi speed was fast and reliable. She created a folder on her desktop and labeled it “CR.” Then she spent the next two hours digging up everything she could on Isabelle Drummond, née Robles, and her brother, Christopher.
Isabelle was, from what Rachel could tell, a model citizen. On paper. She paid $49.95 to run a full background check on Isabelle, which came up clean. No arrests or convictions, no marriage or divorce decrees outside of Nicholas. She had purchased the house she currently lived in with Nicholas Drummond just under two years ago for $4.15 million. The mortgage was in Isabelle’s name. Rachel was moderately pleased that her initial estimate on the property value was so close.
Isabelle previously owned a three-bedroom, two-bathroom condo on East Stallworth Boulevard, purchased seven years ago for $2.05 million. She sold it right before moving in with Drummond, for $3.14 million, a cool $1,090,000 profit, before taxes and Realtor fees.
She graduated from George Washington University in 2012 (current tuition with expenses: $70,443 per year) with a BA in art history, then spent several years working in public relations for a tech firm that had created a suite of social networking apps. Isabelle’s name was attached as a contact to a number of press releases. It was during that time that her parents, Arturo and Yvette, died.
Arturo had emigrated from Ecuador in 1971, having graduated from Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral with a degree in marketing, communications, and sales engineering. He took a job as a sales rep with Carton-Phipps, a small pharmaceutical company, but rose through the ranks and was made CMO by 1980. Carton-Phipps, or C-P, had a market cap of $37 billion as of 2014.
And when Arturo and Yvette were killed when their Cessna CJ3 jet crashed after takeoff at Toncontín airport in Honduras, Isabelle Robles was the sole inheritor of her family’s multimillion-dollar holdings.
Isabelle Robles had cash in the bank, millions in stock, and no oversight. She had both the time and the means to repay a grudge.
Christopher’s history was more checkered than a flannel shirt. Arrests for possession, possession with intent to sell, possession with intent to distribute, resisting arrest, loitering, and multiple counts of disturbing the peace. He’d spent six months at the Whitecaps treatment facility outside of Vail, Colorado. He had never owned property, which didn’t surprise Rachel. She couldn’t imagine banks were tripping over themselves to lend him money, and even if Isabelle was willing to be a guarantor, Isabelle surely knew Christopher living on his own was a disaster waiting to happen. Which was how he had ended up living with the newly married Drummond couple.
Rachel opened up Facebook. She had no legitimate social media profiles but had created a pseudonymous one several years ago solely for the purpose of spying on her children and, occasionally, doing exactly what she needed to do now. She searched for and found Christopher Robles’s account. She couldn’t see the bulk of his profile—it was restricted to friends—but there were a dozen public photos he was tagged in that she could view.
One photo caught her eye: Christopher Robles standing with two other people in front of a gray-brick, graffiti-covered wall holding the very same SIG Sauer he’d been armed with when he broke into her house. Robles held the gun in front of his crotch, an angry sneer on his face. The caption read, “They’re both locked and loaded.”
Subtle.
But what concerned Rachel more were the two people on either side of Robles. To Robles’s left stood a behemoth of a man. He was Hispanic, at least six feet four, and closer to four hundred pounds than three hundred. And not all of it was fat. His forearms, heavily tattooed, had ripples of muscle mass. And the single blue teardrop tattooed just below his left eye, ink commonly received in prison, suggested he did not live a life of pacifism.
His right arm was draped around Robles’s shoulders. In his left hand he held a Desert Eagle .50 Mark XIX. One of the most powerful handguns in the world.
In fact, because the Desert Eagle used gas-operated action as opposed to the blowback or recoil action of most handguns, it actually had more in common with AK-47 rifles than most pistols. It was also hugely popular in films because, well, it looked cool. But that cool gun could stop a rhino in its tracks.
On Robles’s right was a woman about five feet six who looked like a living canvas. Her entire body was covered in tattoos. She had a metal stud in her lip, a hoop through her septum, and a chain linking that hoop to one of the ten piercings in her ear. She had green hair styled in a pixie cut and wore cutoff jean shorts and a washed-out purple tank top with an image of bloody knuckles printed on it.
But her look was not what caught Rachel’s eye—even Rachel had gone through a punk phase when she was younger—it was the Ruger AR-556 semiautomatic rifle hanging at her side.
The caption on the photo read Friendz 4 Life. Friendz 2 Death. Bulletz N Blood.
Just the kind of pals you’d want to bring home to meet your parents.
Robles’s “pals” were tagged in the photo. The Hispanic Hulk was Nestor Aguillar, and the girl with the nuclear waste hairdo was Stefanie Steinman.
Rachel clicked on both of their profiles, and her heart sank. They had each posted the same photo that very morning. The photo was of Christopher Robles, and he was wearing a tuxedo. His hair was cut and parted. He was clean shaven, and the smile on his face was bright and genuine. A far cry from the washed-out, strung-out man in her home. There was a time stamp on the lower right hand of the photo. Rachel cross-checked that date with a search for Isabelle Robles and confirmed that the photo had been taken two years prior at Isabelle’s wedding to Nicholas Drummond.