“Edward, you’re drunk—”

As the phone finally went silent, all he could do was shake his head. “There are things that have happened with my family. Things … that are going to come out. It’s not going to get better than it is right now.”

A problem with his ankle was going to be the least of the issues.

As a car pulled up outside, he rolled his eyes. “Qalbi must have forgotten his bedside manner.”

Shelby went over to the door and opened it. “It’s someone else.”

“If it’s a long black limo with a pink Chanel suit in back, tell them to—”

“It’s a man.”

Edward smiled coldly. “At least I know it’s not my father coming to see me. That little headache has been well taken care of.”

When Edward looked over to the open doorway, he frowned as he saw who it was out front. “Shelby. Will you excuse us for a moment? Thank you.”

TEN

Out in the sunshine at Easterly, Lane ended the call to Metro Police and looked at Samuel T., who’d come back out the grand front door.

“Okay, Counselor,” Lane said. “We’ve got fifteen, twenty minutes before the homicide team arrives. At this point I’m on a first-name basis with them.”

“So we’ve got enough time to hide evidence in case you did it.” As Lizzie and Greta pulled a gasp-and-stare, Samuel T. rolled his eyes. “Relax. It was a joke—”

At that moment, Jeff Stern came pile driving out of the mansion. Lane’s old college roommate and U.Va. fraternity brother looked about as relaxed and well slept as anybody who’d been up for too many nights straight, living on coffee and microscoping financial spreadsheets.

An extra from The Walking Dead had a better chance with GQ.

“We got a problem,” Jeff said as he stumbled across the lawn.

Under different circumstances, he was actually a handsome guy, a self-professed anti-WASP with his proud Jewish heritage and New Jersey accent. He’d stood out at U.Va. for a lot of reasons, mostly because of his math skills, and had subsequently gone on to Wall Street to make sick money as an investment banker.

Lane had spent the last two years on the bastard’s couch up in the Big Apple. And he’d repaid the favor by begging Jeff to take a “vacation” and figure out what the hell his father had done with all that money.

“Can it wait?” Lane said. “I need to—”

“No.” Jeff glanced at Lizzie and Greta. “We need to talk.”

“Well, we have fifteen minutes before the police get here.”

“So you know? What the hell? Why didn’t you tell me—”

“Know what?”

Jeff looked at the two women again, but Lane cut that off. “Anything you have to say to me can be done in front of them.”

“You sure about that?” The guy put his palms up and cut off any argument. “Fine. Someone’s embezzling from the company, too. It’s not just whatever happened to your household accounts. There’s a river of money leaving Bradford Bourbon, and if you want to have anything left, you better call the FBI now. There are bank wires all over the place, a lot of RICO shit going on—this needs to be handled by the Feds.”

Lane looked at Lizzie, and as she reached out and took his hand, he wondered what the hell he would do without her. “Are you sure?”

His old friend shot him a give-me-a-break stare. “And I haven’t even gone through all of it. It’s that bad. You need to get senior management to halt all activity, then call the FBI, and lock up that business center behind this house.”

Lane pivoted toward the mansion. After his mother had “taken ill,” his father had converted what had previously been the stables behind the mansion into a fully functional, state-of-the-art office facility right on site. William had moved senior management in, put locks on all the doors, and turned the company’s massive headquarters downtown into a second-fiddle, also-ran repository for vice presidents, directors, and middle managers. Ostensibly, the relocation of the brain trust had been so the man could stay home closer to his wife, but really, who could believe that, given that the pair of them had rarely been in the same room together.

Now Lane was seeing the real reason why. Easier to steal with fewer people around.

“Field trip,” he announced.

With that, he released Lizzie’s palm and strode off, heading around to the soccer-field-sized rear courtyard where the business center stretched out behind the mansion. In his wake, people were talking to him, but he ignored all that.

“Lane,” Samuel T. said as he jumped in front. “What are you doing?”

“Saving electricity.”

“I think we should call law enforcement—”

“I just did. Remember the finger?”

The business center’s back door was locked with a big fat dead bolt secured by a coded system. Fortunately, when he and Edward had broken in a couple of days ago to get the financials, Lane had memorized the correct sequence of digits.

Punching them in on the pad, the entry unlocked and he walked into the hushed, luxurious interior. Every inch of the nearly twenty-thousand-square-foot, single-story structure was done in maroon-and-gold carpeting that was thick as a mattress. Insulated walls meant that no voices or ringing phones or tapping on keyboards traveled outside of a given space. And there were as many portriats on the walls as most iPhones had selfies.

With private offices for senior management, a gourmet kitchen and a reception area that resembled the Oval Office of the White House, the facility represented everything the Bradford Bourbon Company stood for: the highest standards of excellence, the oldest of traditions and the very best of the best for everything.

Lane didn’t head for the higher-ups and their private offices, though. He went to the back, where the storage rooms and the kitchen were.

As well as the utilities.

Pushing through a double door, he entered a hot, window-less enclave full of mechanicals that included blowers for heat and air, and a hot-water heater … and the electrical panel.

Overhead lights were motion-activated, and he went directly across the concrete floor to the fuse box. Grabbing hold of a red handle at its side, he pulled the thing down, killing all current to the facility.

Everything went dark, and then low-lit security panels flared.