"I've always wanted to do this," Leif said, rolling the marker between his palms.
"Writing stuff? I keep telling you bro, you need a hobby," Woody remarked, his arm draped across the back of his chair.
"I have plenty of hobbies," Leif argued. "But I've never done this before. Have you? It's like an actual murder board." He gestured to the whiteboard that sat on a stand beside him. Right now, the surface was blank, wiped clean. Ready.
"Never needed to," Woody said with a shrug.
Forrest cleared his throat. "Let's start from the beginning. We know Gregor Quinn is ultimately the one behind everything."
He nodded to Leif, who wrote Gregor's name at the top of the whiteboard in his messy scrawl.
"What else do we know?"
"We know everyone was given small details," Noah said. "No one knew the entire picture. Urban and I sit down and compare notes regularly. Some of what we knew crossed over. Some of it didn't."
"Some of it wasn't even legit," Urban grumbled.
"What wasn't?" I asked, not even a little bit surprised.
"We were told one location," Urban said. “Then, last minute, we were told another. The first location was nothing. An empty lot."
Noah nodded while humming his agreement. "We looked at it later. Discreetly."
"If either of you told the cops and they turned up there, they'd know who betrayed them." Leif made a note of that on the board. "Similar thing with the auction. They didn't give us the final location until we were all at the Halloran."
"If people only know bits and pieces, it's harder for them to put the whole picture together. Harder for the cops too," Woody said. "So we know he fucks with people he's supposed to be able to trust. What else?" His gaze slid from nowhere to Urban and back again, as if accusing them of holding back.
"We know he's at the top, but someone else is pulling the strings too," Noah said.
"A man like him isn't going to get his hands dirty. Not directly." Urban raised his own hands, turning them this way and that.
"You sure it's not you, Forrest?" Noah teased. His wide mouth tipped up at the sides.
Forrest responded with a dry stare. "It's not me. Any idea who it is?"
"You sure it's not one of you two?" Woody said, his gaze still on the brothers.
"Yes, it's definitely us," Noah said sarcastically. "We're setting this up so you can kill Gregor Quinn and we can take over. Quite genius, wouldn't you say?" His smile turned into a smirk.
Urban's expression was a smirk the entire time his younger brother was retorting.
"If you think I'd put it past you, think again," Woody said. "Wouldn't be the first time someone with no moral compass has fucked over someone else who also didn't have one."
Forrest leaned forward and pressed his hands to the top of the table. "We're all on the same side here," he said firmly. "My brothers aren't behind this. If they were, I'd kill them right now."
He regarded all of them, even giving me a quick glance, as if I planned to join in the attack on the two other men.
He straightened back up and scrubbed a hand across his face. "There could be more than one person running this operation on behalf of Quinn. They may not know the others exist. He's playing checkers. We're playing chess."
"Thank fuck for that," Woody said. "For a minute there I thought we were playing Monopoly. I was about to tip the board." He pushed his chair back across the floor with a scrape of feet and stepped away to pour himself a glass of water from the faucet.
"Why don't we start by making a list of the usual suspects?" Leif suggested. "We have an idea of the people we suspect, or know, take part in shit like this. We can start there."
He turned and started to write names on the board underneath Gregor Quinn's.
"You should add Wolfgang to that list," I said. "It wouldn't surprise me if he was in it up to his eyeballs." Yes, he was dead, but it seemed relevant somehow, like looking into him would reveal the kinds of people he worked with.
Woody twitched, but didn't say anything.
