CHAPTER 73

I WAS ABOUT TO tell him to put his offer where the sun didn’t shine but Malcomb held up both palms and said, “Don’t make an impulse decision. In fact, don’t make any decision until you’ve slept on it. But please, tell me your doubts.”

“Okay,” I said. “As sophisticated as you are, I don’t believe in vigilantes taking the law into their hands and making a mess of things.”

“Name an instance where we did that.”

“Executing drug cartel members and law enforcement officers?”

“Law enforcement officers who were thoroughly corrupted,” Malcomb said, hardening. “And if you remember, the Alejandro cartel was winning the war for the southern border until Maestro got involved. Today, the cartel does not even exist, and the remaining narcos down there are terrified to take their place.”

I glanced at Bree and Sampson. We could not argue with him on that point. Every bit of intelligence we’d read indicated that drug trafficking along the southwest U.S. border had dropped significantly since the Alejandro cartel was destroyed.

Bree said, “And the fashion murders in New York?”

Malcomb said, “That designer and her top aides were running a human-trafficking operation in front of the whole world. Now it does not exist.”

Sampson said, “And the men you had murdered around DC? The Dead Hours killings?”

M shifted in his wheelchair. “You mean the child molesters? That was actually my late brother’s work. Even so, isn’t the world a better place without them creeping around, a better place for your daughter, Detective?”

John thought about that a moment. “I can’t dispute your goal, only your means.”

“Not our means in this case. Sean’s. Ian’s.”

Malcomb claimed that his brother figured out what Maestro was years ago and had created a digital back door to the organization’s files and Paladin’s supercomputers. He used that back door to target the child molesters.

“Why?” I asked.

“You’d have to ask him,” Malcomb said. “Which is impossible.” He tapped his lip again, his eyes slightly squinting.

“Was Sean molested as a child?” I asked, sensing my way toward the truth.

“We’re not going there.”

“Why not? You were his twin brother. Was he molested or not?”

The Maestro leader shifted in his wheelchair. “He was mistreated, not molested, beaten for things that he should not have been beaten for.”

“By your father? Wheeler?”

“And our dear mother,” Malcomb said.

“You were beaten too,” I said.

His head bobbed ever so slightly. “Though never as bad as Sean. They knew I was physically weak even before my diagnosis. But we were both ‘bad genes,’ as they called us. Bad genes. Bad adoptions.”

“They said that?” Bree said.

“Often,” Malcomb said.

Years of clinical psychology work backed up my instincts at that point. I said, “When were the worst beatings? What age?”

Malcomb adjusted his glasses. “They got worse as we got older.”

“And no one was coming to help. Your parents were wealthy. No one would have expected them to mistreat you.”

He said nothing.

“When did it become intolerable for you?”

“For me or Sean?”

I shook my head. “The both of you. You were twins.”

The corners of his mouth turned up ever so slightly. “You are very perceptive, Dr. Cross. I’ll grant you that.”

“Which one of you raised the idea of killing your parents first?”

Malcomb thought about that. “After our father whipped Sean with a leather belt so bad he bled, it was almost like he had no choice. He behaved and waited until his back healed completely to eliminate motive. And he and I figured out a way around the alarm system so it would look like Sean had never left the boathouse that night and climbed in naked through the basement window of the main house.”

I watched him, unsure whether I believed him. “What did Sean do with the knife?”

“We had a boat lift that was mounted on four steel pipes about eight feet long drilled into the bedrock. The pipes were capped and below the surface a good two feet. We’d figured out how to unscrew the caps earlier that summer. Sean dove in the lake after it was done to clean himself, then unscrewed the cap and dropped the knife in. I assume it’s still there.”

“So he was a vigilante at age nine,” Sampson said.

“Yes, yes,” Malcomb said wearily with a weak flip of his hand before turning to gaze at me. “I’m done talking about Sean. Dr. Cross, do you know what I decided in the early days of Maestro, before I began approaching vetted, angry, and incorruptible law enforcement and intelligence agents to join me?”

“I haven’t the faintest.”

“I decided that Maestro would be democratic—everyone involved would have a vote, and we would act based on evidence, then punish by any means necessary to restore order.”

Bree said, “Is that why you kidnapped Sean? Put him in your handicap van and saw him killed? To restore order? Or for you to disappear?”

M laughed softly, sadly. “Ian Duncanson was becoming highly erratic, and Ryan Malcomb needed to disappear. You, especially, were getting too close, Chief Stone. But more important than disappearing, I will miraculously appear next spring as my brother, bad spine and all, having survived an entire winter alone in the wilderness. I will have a story to tell, and it will all be backed up by evidence on the ground. How I fell hunting and injured my back. How I survived until I could literally drag myself to a remote cabin just as the snow started falling. How I shot a cow elk that fed by the cabin. How I—”

I could tell he was winding up and I wanted to bring him down a notch or two. “Killed your twin brother.”

He was getting increasingly agitated the more we pressed him about his dead brother and seemed to struggle with his words. “As I told you, he was becoming erratic, dangerous. His skills were … the distance between genius and madness is always a hair’s…”

He lost all color. His eyes left us and he gazed at the floor. And his jaw sagged.

Edith came fast to his side. “M? Are you okay?”

I thought for a second there that Malcomb was having a stroke. But then he shook his head slowly. “Late for my meds.”

Bean said, “I’ll take you up straightaway.”

He nodded weakly, then gazed up at us. “You have twelve hours to decide.”

“But how would it work?” Bree said. “Are you asking us to leave our lives behind? Our families?”

I was kind of shocked that my wife was entertaining the offer at all.

Sampson said, “The details. Otherwise, we can’t make a rational decision.”

He gestured at Edith. “She’ll explain.”