Page 22

Washington, DC

NANA MAMA WAS FEELING tired and went upstairs to lie down after breakfast. Bree was working on her laptop in the kitchen when Sampson came by after dropping Willow at school.

“How many more days off do you have?” she asked.

“Through New Year’s,” Sampson said. “I accrued a ton of comp time the past year. They told me to burn a bunch or lose it.”

“Give me a hand with something?”

“Ryan Malcomb?”

“Who else?” she said. She showed him how little was publicly known about Malcomb’s life before he founded Paladin. “Attended the University School in Hunting Valley, Ohio, graduating with high honors and winning the math prize. Then MIT. Shortly after graduating, again with high honors, he founded a private company, Algo Corporation.”

“It was also a data-mining thing?” Sampson asked.

“Yes. Malcomb brought on that CEO you and Alex met in Massachusetts.”

“Steven Vance.”

“Five years later, under Vance, they rebranded Algo as Paladin with very little fanfare. But that was always Malcomb’s modus operandi—publicity shy in the extreme, and yet his company explodes, lands some of the biggest government contracts within six years. Had all sorts of offers from people wanting to buy, but he kept it closely held.”

John thought about that. “Didn’t the aunt fund the first company?”

“Theresa May Alcott and her late husband did,” she said. “They were billionaires and his guardians.”

“The Alcott soap fortune.”

“That’s right.”

“Where were Malcomb’s real parents?”

“Dead,” she said. “Murdered, I believe, though I don’t know the details.”

“Believe?”

Bree shifted in her seat. “Remember when I went out to see Theresa May Alcott in Ohio after that fashion designer was murdered in New York?”

“Vaguely.”

“She mentioned her sister and husband had been murdered during a home invasion somewhere out west,” Bree said. “She adopted her sister’s twins, Ryan and Sean. But afterward, I remembered Alex saying that the first time you visited Paladin, you were told that his mother had just had a fall in her house in Palo Alto.”

“Maybe she was referring to Alcott,” Sampson said. “Do a search and see if you can find anything about the home invasion.”

She did, using the last name Malcomb, and got stories about Ryan’s recent death in Nevada.

“Some of these reference Theresa May Alcott, but there’s nothing about a murder three or four decades ago,” she said, scanning the results.

“Well, his mother was Alcott’s sister, right? Do we know their maiden surname?”

“May,” Bree said, and typed in couple murdered May .

“That’s only going to get you murders in the month of May,” Sampson said. “Add the name of a western state to limit it.”

Bree added Nevada and got a long list of stories about various homicides of couples over the years in May in Las Vegas and Reno. She tried Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, with similar results.

“Idaho?” Sampson said.

“Why not?” Bree said and ran another search.

The first story up had been filed three years before in the Boise Idaho Statesman . The headline read “Wheeler Murders Still Unsolved 35 Years Later.”

Bree clicked it, scanned the first few paragraphs, and said, “This has to be her.”

Sampson said, “It is her. Patricia May Wheeler.”