Page 148 of Bonded in Death

“Well now.” He sipped some coffee. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Bet. Get me the names he used. I’ll dig into them, check them with what I’ve got on fancy theater. You said he’s good at forging IDs, backgrounds, but why keep generating them? Why not use one already established, like he did today? Nobody’s looking for Conrad Potter becauseConrad Potter’s dead. He’s got a new face, a new life. Maybe he’s using one of his previous IDs in New York.”

“Possible.”

“But he likes the complicated. Yeah, yeah. Still, worth looking there. This is good, Roarke. This is really damn good.”

“We do what we can.”

“Go do some more of it.” But she grabbed two fistfuls of his shirt first, yanked him to her, kissed him with enthusiasm. “I’ll pick it up here.”

The boy slept twice as long as Potter expected. Initially concerned—he didn’t want to spend time looking for an alternate—he checked the boy’s breathing, his pulse.

He’d wake soon enough, and the extra hours simply gave Potter more time to complete this stage of the mission.

He’d gone through the boy’s backpack and all the contents, including the tablet. With the bait’s name, he did some research on the family.

Father, Roland McReedy; mother, Kim Cho; younger brother, Silas. McReedy, human resources manager; Cho, paralegal.

Maybe if the mother had stayed home rather than taking a man’s job, her kid wouldn’t be drooling on the basement floor.

Two kids and she was probably giving her boss blow jobs under his desk instead of cleaning the house.

Made him sick.

He’d set up the camera, so he watched the boy on the monitor while he ate—salmon en croûte, roasted fingerling potatoes, and green beans with shallots. He enjoyed a single glass of Pouilly-Fuissé, perfectly chilled, and finished the meal with coffee.

And the boy began to stir.

Excellent timing, he thought, and left the dishes for the droid to deal with.

He didn’t bother with a disguise. Devin McReedy wouldn’t describe him. After all, dead boys tell no tales.

He unlocked the basement door, went down into the media room he rarely used but enjoyed having. He bypassed the door—also locked, and secured by his retinal scan—to his workshop, and unlocked the next door into the storage area.

He’d cleared that out some time ago, in preparation for the finale of his mission.

It stood empty now, but for the boy on the floor, the recorder, a bucket, a single chair, and the cameras he’d installed that covered the whole of the room.

No windows, no identifying features. Just walls painted bright white, and a floor of fake wood planks.

Potter walked over, sat in the chair as the boy moaned, shifted.

As he moaned again, and said: “Mom. Mom.”

“Mom’s not here. And if you want to see her again, you’ll do exactly what I tell you.”

Chapter Twenty

Devin felt sick, sort of like when he’d had The Bug. But now his head hurt really bad, and he was awful thirsty. He shivered with cold, then when he opened his eyes and saw the man, he screamed.

It was a bad dream, so his mom and dad would come. They’d come and hug him and tell him it was a bad dream.

In the dream, the man held a gun, like in the old vids his dad liked, and had eyes mean like a monster’s.

“Mom! Mom! Mom!”

“I said she’s not here! You shut up. You stop that yelling or I’ll shoot you in the leg.”

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