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Zara maintained her lead on the interrogation. “If he wanted the couple out of the way so he could sell Game Time himself, why didn’t he?”
Kahlil sucked in an expressive breath. “Murder isn’t for everyone,” Kahlil said. “I saw him once after the accident—”
“It wasn’t an accident,” she said. Her defensive anger almost overwhelmed her, and she could only imagine how Brodie was feeling. “They were murdered.”
“I saw him once,” Kahlil said, not acknowledging her statement. “He was a mess. It could’ve been guilt about orphaning his best friend’s kids. But I don’t think anyone anticipated the reaction to the loss. McCormack had a lot of friends, there were tributes and an outcry to find out what happened. The heat was immense. It got to my boss too. Everyone agreed to lay low for a while.”
“Frank could’ve just sold the files with the schematic.”
Though there was heat from law enforcement, Frank wouldn’t want to make any deals that were too lucrative, especially for him personally because that would thrust him into the field of suspicion.
“For a fraction of what he’d get for the device,” Kahlil said. “This was twenty years ago, the technology sucked. CI would’ve had to put all their resources into it, and my boss didn’t have the kind of resources needed to do that. Frank had to get his people to develop it, but like I said, he couldn’t push too hard on that button because the world looked to the kid.”
Grant McCormack Junior. “Grant was in charge at CI,” she whispered.
He’d been hands-on from a young age, almost immediately after losing his parents. She guessed it helped him cope with his grief.
Kahlil’s brow lowered. “He was a dumb teenager, well, not so dumb… his father had taught him so much about running the company, more than even Frank realized. If Melinda hadn’t been on that boat, she would’ve let Frank run things at CI, and she’d have protected her boys from having to take on responsibility too young.”
But with her dead and ownership switching to the boys, Frank didn’t have the leeway he was counting on. The situation would have worsened for him when Brodie and Grant went their separate ways. Frank had to take guardianship of Grant to ensure he kept his position of power at the firm. Getting Brodie out of the way would’ve been a bonus, except the separation of the boys drove them to the extremes of their choices and entrenched Grant further into CI.
Frank didn’t have the influence he needed to divert all of CI’s resources to the development of Game Time. He couldn’t let on to Grant that it existed, or the kid might ask questions about his father’s choices and his father’s death. Grant also had the power to order all remaining information about Game Time destroyed, and Frank had been through that already with Grant Senior.
Killing off a kid was a different ballgame, and if Frank learned he didn’t have the stomach for murder after his complicity in the death of his best friend, he wouldn’t want to repeat that experience with a minor.
Kahlil continued. “Frank saw what my people were capable of when Future’s Hope went up in smoke. He worried for his own safety. If he handed over this device, there was no assurance that he wouldn’t be a victim of it.”
Brodie had explained to her how wireless technology sucked in the days of the original negotiations. A failsafe kill switch would be a pipe dream, as would GPS in the terms they knew it today. Frank was afraid of the people he’d jumped into bed with and racked with guilt over the loss of Brodie’s parents. Then he had a kid looking over his shoulder, breathing down his neck, questioning his every decision. It was no surprise that the deal had fallen apart at that stage, especially with society and the media scrutinizing their every move.
Brodie still hadn’t said anything. She wanted to go over there and hug him, to soothe and stroke him while he told her how this tale altered his mood and his perception of the people in his past. But it wasn’t the time to coddle him, they had to get their money and get out of here.
They had to express interest and give importance to the cash so as not to raise suspicions. What they wanted was for Kahlil to take Game Time to his nest. They would track it there and—a noise startled them all from their reverie.
“What is that?” she asked but knew what it sounded like: an engine.
“It’s the van,” Brodie said.
The sound of the engine made them all start moving, but they quickly came to a halt when Caine entered aiming a gun at them. “Everybody stay still,” Caine said.
His familiar arrogance grated, and his sinister smile spoke of his delight at outmaneuvering them. He didn’t even know that he was being played. It was sad that he thought he was a partner instead of being just a pawn.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“We’re just taking what belongs to us,” Caine said, choosing to move closer to her, although she backed off. “Mischa wants what’s hers.”
“None of this is hers,” Zara said.
Cuckoo was scorned and Game Time was her way of getting revenge. But the couple wasn’t stealing from just them, they were stealing from Kahlil, and it was him that lunged at Caine and tried to grab for the gun. “Get out of here,” Brodie called out to her and began to rush forward.
But Caine and Kahlil were locked together, both hands on the gun, right in front of the door. One shot went off and she leapt away. “His watch,” she cried. “There’s poison in the watch!”
Why she warned Caine of that, she didn’t know. It seemed unfair that Cuckoo would get the prize and Caine would receive all the pain. But she wasn’t being selfless, they had to find Game Time and Caine was the only person who could tell them where Cuckoo was and what she was planning.
The gun went off again, and she tried to run forward to get to the door, though she didn’t know where she was planning to go because the van was gone so she had no transportation.
Caine went down, and Kahlil leapt over him to snatch a handful of her hair. Yanking her back, the pain in her head made her scream and grasp for his clenched fist. But he hauled her in front of him, and the barrel of the gun he’d taken from Caine pushed into the back of her skull.
“Get it!” Kahlil hollered, his breathing labored. “You go and get that damned device, or your lady friend gets a bullet.”
