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Carlos frowned, very serious now. “I wondered the same thing. Seems like once they knew about X, they’d have come after him ASAP. Sorry, Mrs. M,” he added when Cicely recoiled.
“Not your fault, Carlos,” she assured him. “It’s just hard to think that someone was stalking my son. Antoine, do you know why they picked Monday to come after him?”
Antoine tilted his hand back and forth. “I can guess. The documents I put through AI were not only fragmented, but they were also encrypted. I had to find the key. That made it more difficult and took a while. And I know what I’m doing.”
“You said that whoever killed Rocky knew how to wipe his hard drive,” Molly said.
Antoine shrugged. “It’s a lot easier to destroy a drive than to put one back together. If Rocky’s killer didn’t have an IT guy as good as me, it could have taken them that long to sift through his hard drive and unencrypt everything. Six weeks seems like a long time, but it’s possible it could have taken that long.”
“What about how they knew my dad was searching for Benson?” Gabe insisted.
“I don’t know yet,” Antoine said.
“Paul Lott,” Molly said thoughtfully. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. He’s the puzzle piece that we haven’t known where to put, but now I think we do. I’m betting that somehow Lott knew Rocky’s personal business. He knew about Xavier because Rocky set up a trust. He didn’t know where Xavier lived, only that he had a UPS box in Baton Rouge. He was in contact with Mule the night that Rocky was killed. What if Paul Lott knew what Rocky was up to? What your dad was investigating?”
Gabe considered it. “I don’t think that Dad would have told him. He didn’t trust him completely. Not enough to give him Xavier’s home address, anyway, or his personal cell number. Just Xavier’s burner.”
Molly grabbed his hand and held it. “I didn’t say your father confided in him, Gabe.”
Gabe frowned. “You think Lott was spying on my father?”
“I think we need to follow the money where Lott is concerned,” Molly said. “If he knew that Rocky was giving Xavier an inheritance, he knew that Xavier was important. If nothing else, maybe he thought the same thing that you did initially—that your dad was Xavier’s biological father. Maybe he figured he could blackmail your father. We need to know more about Mr. Lott.”
Burke was nodding. “You’re right, Molly. It’s one of the loose ends that doesn’t seem to fit anywhere else. Antoine? Can you get into Lott’s bank records? See if there were any large deposits recently?”
Antoine was already tapping frenetically on his keyboard. “It might take a while, but I’m on it. That was all I had, by the way.”
Burke rubbed his hands down his face wearily. “Then are we done?”
“No,” Xavier said. “We were busy today, too. Nothing came of it—”
“So far,” Carlos interrupted.
“So far,” Xavier allowed. “We wanted to follow up on Madame Fluffy, Nadia’s dog.”
Molly sat up straighter. “You called vets?”
“We did,” Xavier said, wincing a little because Burke was glowering.
“Without clearing it with me?” Burke thundered, then snapped his mouth closed, throwing a glance toward the bedroom where Chelsea and Harper were watching a movie. He exhaled through his nose, visibly trying to rein in his temper. “What did you do? And who is ‘we’?”
“We included me,” Cicely said sharply. “So, please watch your tone, Mr. Broussard.”
Burke just shook his head, still angry. “What did you do, Xavier?” he asked more quietly.
“We got a list of veterinarians and called them,” Xavier said nervously.
“We used Manny’s phone,” Carlos added, his chin lifted defiantly. “It’s a burner, too, so no one can trace it to us.”
“And we spoofed the number we called from, so the cops couldn’t see a pattern,” Manny said. “We’d used my phone to text with the guy posing as Paul Lott, so I didn’t want that out there.”
“We said we owned an Afghan hound,” Xavier explained. “We said we’d gotten her as a puppy, but didn’t know the breeder’s name. Just the puppy’s mama’s name. Madame Fluffy.”
Cicely’s chin was also lifted. “We said that our Afghan had died recently of a hereditary condition and wanted to let the breeder know in case she’d bred that dog again—so that the other dog owners could be warned. We figured that if a vet recognized the dog’s name, they’d know that its owner wasn’t a breeder, but maybe they’d get back with us anyway. Breeders sell their older dogs sometimes. It was a decent story. Most of the vets said that they had no records of the dog or that they weren’t around back then. But a few said they’d get back to us.”
“We each made a few calls,” Manny finished. “So that if anyone tried to connect the dots, the vets wouldn’t have been able to agree on a single voice.”
“It’s what I would have done, Burke,” Molly said softly, then turned to Cicely and the others. “But what happens when someone calls you back? You spoofed the number. When they call back, it’ll go to someone else’s phone.”
