CHAPTER 30

DECEMBER SLIPPED AWAY AND January began bitter cold for the nation’s capital.

The Cross family Christmas tree came down on New Year’s Day. Damon left on January 2 to see his new girlfriend in Nashville before going back to Davidson. A few days later, Jannie returned to the dorms at Howard. And not long after that, Ali’s Christmas break was over.

At breakfast after dropping Ali off at school, Bree said, “I can’t believe how empty the place feels with just us.”

Alex nodded. “There was a whirlwind and now the calm afterward.”

“I’ll miss it until next Christmas,” Nana Mama said.

“Wish me luck getting in,” Alex said as he left.

“Getting in where?” Nana Mama asked Bree.

“The office of President-Elect Sue Winter,” Bree said. “He and Ned spoke to her transition team about something and got nowhere, but they realized that there were more parts to the incoming administration, like the inauguration team and the permanent team that will eventually surround the president in the White House. That’s who they’re trying to talk to.”

“Sounds complicated,” Nana Mama said.

“It’s not my cup of tea either.”

“Going to work over at Bluestone today?”

“Alex said I can use his attic office, so I’m going to stick around and get a few things done without distractions.”

After cleaning the kitchen for Alex’s grandmother, Bree got her laptop and climbed the stairs to Alex’s hideaway. He had a nicer office in the basement where he saw patients from time to time, but Bree liked the attic office more. Wood interior. Slanted roof that made you duck. A sturdy, wooden desk with neat stacks of files. Dozens of cardboard boxes crammed with the relics of his early investigations. And it smelled like Alex.

That made Bree smile. She turned on the light, shut the door, sat down at her computer, and spent some productive time answering emails from clients and finishing a report on her most recent assignment, a missing person who had sadly been identified as a plane crash victim.

She knew she should do some background reading on a case of possible corporate fraud her boss had asked her to look into, but instead, she sat there trying unsuccessfully to suppress a worm that kept invading her thoughts.

Okay, he’s dead. But that does not mean he wasn’t M.

Telling herself that it had been over a week since she’d obsessed about M and Maestro, she decided to give herself thirty minutes, an hour, tops, to review the case, looking for loose threads that might give her a different angle.

She scrolled through her files, saw a note she’d left for herself to find out why Ryan Wheeler had become Ryan Malcomb instead of Ryan Alcott. His aunt had tried to explain, but it still struck Bree as a little odd, the way the billionaire had pleaded ignorance and reacted dismissively when asked if her nephew had ever tried to track down his biological parents.

But was she being dismissive? Or was she trying to make me lose interest?

And what about Sean Wheeler? What had become of him?

Bree started to dig around in Idaho’s online court system. She found records—likely falsified—showing Ryan and Sean Wheeler had been born at home with the Wheelers listed as parents. Not long after, she found a filing in Boise in which eighteen-year-old Ryan Wheeler had petitioned to have his birth name, Ryan Felix Malcomb, reinstated. Bree muttered to herself, “That helps. But why do it in Idaho? Unless he was actually born in Idaho?”

She started digging into Ancestry.com, then stopped. She went back to the Idaho court records and searched for Ryan Felix Malcomb.

Almost immediately, up popped a reference to a filing in a Latah County, Idaho, court petitioning the judge to open the adoption records of Ryan Felix Malcomb. The petition was approved when Malcomb was twenty-one.

Bree tried to open the file but was halted by a digital seal that had been requested by Ryan Felix Malcomb shortly afterward. She felt thwarted. Why unseal and then almost immediately reseal?

Because he didn’t like what he found?

Bree felt that was a fair bet, but without access to the file, what good was it? She was about to move on when she noticed that the unsealing petition and the resealing petition had been filed by two different attorneys.

The unsealing petition had been filed by a Moscow, Idaho, lawyer. The resealing petition had been written and filed by a counselor from Salmon, Idaho.

She looked up the Salmon attorney and found an obituary from nearly ten years before. Why Salmon?

Bree went to the Ancestry.com birth records and typed in Ryan Felix Malcomb Idaho .

She got a hodgepodge of references to various Felixes and Malcombs but couldn’t find the one she was looking for until she added Salmon to the search.

Soon a birth certificate appeared on the screen, and Bree smiled. “There you are. And that birth date looks on the money. Your dad was William Malcomb, seventeen, and your mom was Lucille Wallace, sixteen.”

He had changed his last name to his biological father’s.

Why?

She checked her watch, saw it was almost noon. She’d spent close to three hours looking into Malcomb, and she told herself to stop. She had to start working on the corporate-fraud investigation.

Bree meant to save Malcomb’s birth certificate to her Ancestry.com folder but accidentally scrolled up to the next birth certificate in chronological order.

She stared at it and saw links to other documents. She clicked on several; the implications dawned on her slowly at first and then very, very fast.

Bree stood up and pumped her fist. Feeling vindicated, she whispered, “That, my friend, changes the story! That flips everything on its head!”