I can’t do this with you right now, Ivy.
“I thought Adam might be my father,” I said abruptly. As far as subject changes went, that one was effective.
“He’s not,” Ivy said immediately.
I met her eyes. “His brother was.”
Ivy froze for a moment. “Now I know what Bodie’s always talking about,” she said finally. “It is freaky.” I thought she’d stop there, but she didn’t. “Tommy was . . . exciting.” It took her a moment to decide on the word. “He was motion and emotion. He never stopped moving, never stopped feeling. He was stubborn and loyal and never once thought about the consequences of anything he did.”
“So I get that from him.” I meant that as a joke, but I couldn’t keep from thinking the words again. I get that from him.
Ivy reached for me. I let her squeeze my shoulder, then turned to the photos tacked to the wall. “What’s all this?” Another subject change—this one less successful than the first. Ivy’s lack of response pinged on my internal radar. “Ivy?”
I gestured to the photos on the wall. Judge Pierce. Major Bharani. Damien Kostas. The case was over. So why was Ivy down here, staring at pictures of these three men?
“It’s nothing,” Ivy said, standing up and moving to take the photographs from the wall.
“Right,” I said. Nothing wasn’t keeping Ivy up at night. “Tell me.”
Nothing good had ever come from Ivy keeping me in the dark. Maybe she was starting to see that, or maybe she was too worn down to fight me on this. She drew her hand back from the first photograph, leaving it pinned to the wall. A second later, she started to speak.
“After Kostas got word that his son had been pardoned, he let me go.” Ivy shuttered her eyes, and I knew she was thinking back to that moment. “He was coming out. He wasn’t a threat. He wasn’t armed. He was turning himself in, so why shoot?” Ivy looked down at her hands. “We’re talking trained hostage negotiators, Tess. There’s no way they should have taken that shot.”
She turned back to the wall. To the photographs. The judge. The doctor. The Secret Service agent. “Kostas killed Bharani when he became a liability,” Ivy said. “Kostas killed Pierce when he reneged on their deal.”
I heard what she wasn’t saying and gave life to the question myself. “So who killed Kostas?”
Who had fired that shot? A member of the SWAT team, presumably, but—
“Who killed Kostas?” Ivy repeated, interrupting my thoughts. “Or,” she added, “who gave the order?”
Ivy’s gaze went to the conference table. On it, there was a notebook, and on the notebook, there was a list.
Names.
I thought back to a conversation I’d had with Henry. There was another number on that disposable phone, he’d said. That means there is at least one other person involved.
At least.
I’d thought, multiple times, that we were either looking for someone who could have poisoned Henry’s grandfather or someone who had the power to usher Pierce’s nomination through. It had never occurred to me that we might be looking for both.
“You think there might be someone else,” I said. Ivy neither confirmed nor denied those words. “Kostas killed Vivvie’s dad because he was becoming a liability, but once Kostas’s son was pardoned . . .”
Kostas had told me that he didn’t expect to get out of this. He’d talked about being honorable.
Kostas was a liability, I thought, unable to keep the possibility from taking root in my mind. Maybe the Secret Service agent had been shot by an overzealous SWAT agent. Or maybe someone on the SWAT team had instructions to make sure Kostas didn’t leave that building alive.
The only way this plan makes any sense—the only way it could even potentially be worth the risk—is if Pierce had reason to believe he’d get the nomination.
Kostas didn’t have the kind of power. And when I’d asked him if Pierce was the one who’d arranged this whole thing, he hadn’t replied. He’d stilled, an unreadable expression on his face.
Not because he was thinking about Pierce. Because he was thinking of someone else.
“Pierce was made aware of my problem,” I told Ivy. “That’s what Kostas said to me. Not that Pierce figured it out, not that Pierce masterminded the whole thing. Pierce was made aware of my problem.”
By who? My mind went to the phone that Kostas had snapped in two. It was a flip phone, obviously a disposable. So who had the number? Who was calling?
My eyes traveled back to Ivy’s list. There were maybe a dozen names on it, but I only saw one.
My paternal grandfather’s.
“You said you cleared William Keyes,” I told Ivy, a feeling of dread taking up residence in my stomach. “You said Keyes was the last person who would have wanted Justice Marquette dead.”
Ivy flipped the notebook closed before I could get a look at the other names. “Nothing for you to worry about,” she told me, squeezing my arm again. “Let’s go back to bed.”
CHAPTER 65
A judge. The White House physician. A Secret Service agent.
Once Ivy put the thought in my head, I couldn’t keep from coming back to it. Were all the people responsible for Theodore Marquette’s death dead? And if not, who was still out there?
Judge Pierce had stood to gain a nomination.
Vivvie’s father had done it for money.
Kostas had done it for his son.
If there was someone else—someone whose role had been ushering the nomination through, someone whose calls Kostas had been avoiding—what had that person stood to gain?
I didn’t speak a word of those thoughts to Henry. Or to Vivvie. Our lives were slowly getting back to normal. That first Monday back at Hardwicke, the gossip mill ran full force. Ivy’s name had been released as the hostage. Everyone wanted the inside scoop—but I’d managed to do a pretty good job dissuading people from asking me questions.
I was, in general, pretty good at dissuading.
I knew things were dying down when a student approached me claiming that someone was sabotaging her grades. No one outside of Vivvie, Henry, and Asher knew about my role in getting Ivy released, but there was no escaping the persistent belief that if you had a problem at Hardwicke, Tess Kendrick was the person to see.
A week to the day after my last text from William Keyes, I received a second. He’d held up his end of our bargain. It was my turn to hold up mine.