The house was clean, at least from danger.
Ashton caught sight of what Harper called the “planning room” in the midst of his sweep, but couldn’t take time to study it then.Couldn’t even wrap his head around something that complicated.
Then forensics came in to see if they could find anything usable.It was an important part of crime fighting, but waiting for them to finish seemed to take an eternity.
“When Harper saidplanning room, he wasn’t kidding, Jon,” Ashton told the profiler as they stood at the car waiting for the go-ahead from forensics.“Elaborate is not a strong enough word.”
When they were finally allowed in a couple hours later and Jon saw the room, he immediately turned to Ashton.
“Call Brandon Han.Tell him he needs to get over here right away.”
Brandon was a genius.Like, certified genius.Two PhDs and a degree in law or something like that.If anyone could make sense of the wall full of newspaper clippings, photos, drawings, police reports, Google search printouts, fingerprints and whatever other unknown pieces of information were on the wall in that room—with different colored strings connecting them all in mind-boggling, crisscrossing patterns—Brandon Han could.
“This thing is giving me a nosebleed just looking at it,” Ashton rubbed his forehead.
“Yeah.”Jon continued to stare at the wall and its massive amount of information.“Whoever did this is...”
“A nutcase?”
Jon chuckled.“Probably.But also a genius.Harper never had a chance against this guy.He was just a small measure of this man’s much larger symphony.”
“I don’t think I like what you’re saying, Jon.A symphony implies that there’s a lot more music yet to come.”
Jon looked over at him and nodded, gesturing to the wall with his hand.“You’re right.Whoever this is, he’s just getting started.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Freihof watched all afternoon and evening from his true apartment—across the street from the one they were searching—as the Omega team carried out section after section of his wall of clues.
He was glad to see Brandon Han and Jon Hatton on site.He knew the other two men would appreciate the gift he’d left them.
It almost made up for the frustration he felt at the ruination of his original plan.Neither Summer nor Ashton had been killed in the explosion he’d set.Curtis Harper had one simple job to do: get Fitzgerald over to the sofa with Summer.The idiot hadn’t even been able to do that correctly.
Fawkes had warned Damien not to underestimate Omega Sector, and Damien could admit that maybe he had.Damien had known the SWAT team wouldn’t be far behind Ashton, but he hadn’t thought they’d figure out the plan so quickly and adjust accordingly.
The plan hadn’t been a total wash.From his visit to the hospital yesterday—and he’d been there right under a dozen agents’ noses—he’d discovered that one agent had died and one of the SWAT members was in a coma.
So not the win he wanted, but a win nonetheless.SWAT weren’t the only ones who could adjust accordingly as situations changed.And Damien planned to be in this for the long haul.His next play was already in motion.He’d had plans in motion long before he’d ever even spoken to Fawkes or Curtis Harper.
It involved a different state, different pawns, different victims.But it was still part of the bigger plan.What remained to be seen was if the Omega Sector agents could figure it out in time.
Damien was glad to see Omega was at least taking his clues seriously, moving sections of the wall piece by piece out to the truck with care.
Interestingly, Fawkes was on scene, too, helping load items from inside onto the truck to be taken back to Omega Sector.Damien wondered if that was the man’s job or if he’d volunteered when he’d found out what location was being searched.If he worried his own prints might show up.
Damien received a call on one of his burner phones.His business associate from Texas.
“Hello, Mr.Trumpold,” Damien answered.
“We’re ready to put the plan into action.They need to pay for what they’ve done.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
Convincing the Trumpolds that their brother had been wrongly accused of being a serial rapist, framed by two people in Corpus Christi, had required quite a bit more work than convincing Curtis Harper that he needed to go after Ashton Fitzgerald.
Damien had to doctor some evidence this time, make it look like it was all a setup.But ultimately the Trumpolds had been eager to believe their older brother—who they’d idolized—was innocent of all crimes.And since the man had died very early in prison, he wasn’t around to say one way or the other.
A little twisting of the truth, a sympathetic ear and he’d been able to convince them to take their revenge on the people who’d so wrongfully cost their beloved brother his life.
