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“Why would Nina adopt his son?”
“Why do wealthy people do half the shit they do?” She snapped back. The stress was taking a toll on her as well and she had to take a few deep breaths to calm herself. “He was the product of an affair, and if I could just get through all the bullshit and find the women surrounding him at the time of that affair, we might be able to find Dominic’s mother.”
“I think I just did,” came the voice of one of the men on Jack’s team as he rushed over shoving a paper into my hands.
It was a list of employees and interns working for Parker’s law practice three decades before and one name shot out among the sea of strangers. “Scout, what was Caroline Harrington’s maiden name?”
She tapped a few more keys and shot the answer casually as she returned to her work. She had no way of knowing the bomb she’d just dropped saying “Williams”. Fitz and Cabot had been reading the list on either side of me and they both sucked in a gasp as I felt every puzzle piece we’d missed snap into place.
“He’s her half brother,” Fitz said in a low voice. But that voice had seemed to echo off the walls as everyone stopped their work to turn toward us in shock.
The eerie silence was broken by a nurse entering the room with a crazed looking blonde woman. She was barely 5’, thin frame, tears streaking down her face, and ice blue eyes raking over the group before they landed on me and she was rushing forward.
“Where is he? I want to see him!” She’d almost closed the distance between us before Fitz stepped in front of me and placed his hands on her shoulders to bend down to her eye level.
“He’s okay. He’s got one hell of a concussion, but he’s going to be fine. I’ll go find a doctor to fill you in and take you to his room. They’ve kept him sedated, but, if you keep him calm, they won't have to drug him anymore.” From the information he’d given the woman, I could tell she was here for Turner, but I honestly couldn’t have cared less in that moment as I turned my attention back to our mission as Fitz led her from the room.
“Scout, you said he was back in foster care at the age of five. Was it from losing his adoptive mother?”
“No,” she responded, clicking around her screen before she was back to typing. “Nina Parker gave up her parental rights when Andrew died. She obviously didn’t want to raise his kid from another woman.”
“Contact information for her?”
“Sorry, Decker, but she died 11 years ago. She was found murdered in her hotel room. Unsolved according to the police report on it.” She looked up to me and I saw tears threatening to fall. I needed her to hold it together. I couldn’t afford to lose it, and if she did, I would.
“We could really use Jack’s murder board right now,” Cabot murmured into my ear and I was surprised by the laugh that escaped me. Nothing was funny right now, and I didn’t want to investigate my own churning emotions.
“On it,” said a techie before hauling ass from the room and returning within minutes rolling a large white board into the room with him.
“Kasey would hate doing this old school,” the techie commented as a group of eager men began taping papers along the board and scribbling in notes faster than I could keep up. Jack Kasey had one well oiled machine in his team, and I made a mental note to praise him if or when he woke up.
In the blink of an eye, we were looking at a rundown on Dominic Parker complete with his smug fucking face, smirking at us from where it was taped up on the board. The team had organized a timeline of his life with key points thrown in.
“Okay, so Parker was eighteen when he started working on Harrington’s re-election. He rose pretty quickly and by the time his volunteer work ended, he was hired as Robert’s personal assistant.”
“He’s always been a manipulative asshole. My dad hates him.” Scout was mostly grumbling to herself, but her father’s connection to Robert had completely slipped my mind.
“Scout, can you get your father on a video call? He might have something on Parker since he was actually around those two together.”
“No,” she said simply.
“Why not?” I was fuming at her casual rejection of needed information.
She looked up at me with an exasperated expression. “His soon to be son-in-law was damn near gutted and used like a fucking inkwell. His best friend and woman he loves like another daughter were kidnapped a day ago. He’s already on his way, asshole. He’ll be here within the hour.”
“Oh.” was all I said as I focused back on the board that had only filled with more information as people worked like machines to acquire and add information. Fitz was back from dropping off the crying woman with Turner and was studying the board with an intensity I’d never seen before.
“He began working on the campaign two months before Caroline died in the car accident.” Fitz was talking to himself, but he had every ounce of my attention. His code cracking brain was exactly what I needed, and I wasn’t stupid enough to ignore the fact that my own worry was clouding my judgment. I needed them to find Dominic Parker. I needed them to point me at him and pull the fucking trigger.
“Convenient that the one person who could out his identity was out of the picture,” Cabot grumbled leaning against the wall and flipping through pages of what looked like call logs.
“I doubt it was a coincidence; look at this.” She turned her screen toward Fitz and all three of us were leaning close to a police report. “The lead detective on the case wrote in his report that it appeared another car had been involved, but with the amount of traffic on that area of road, crash investigators weren’t certain.”
“Are you saying Dominic killed his own mother when he was 18?” Cabot sounded doubtful. “Why would he kill her and spend 13 years working for her husband?”
“Well I couldn’t tell you since I don’t have the mind of a psychopathic serial killer!” Scout’s voice broke as we were forced to acknowledge how truly unhinged the man was. And he had my woman.
“Sir,” came a voice from behind me, causing me to spin on my heel, scaring the man with glasses holding up a paper. “Sorry, sir, but facial recognition out of Ronald Reagan gave multiple hits on Parker, but only a few correspond with his name on a flight manifest. I did some digging on flights that matched up with destinations where Lake Harrington was at the time and found a few names on manifests that pop up repeatedly.”
