Nickel City Crossfire, Gary Ross [ebook reader for pc and android txt] 📗

everyone to family out of state. Back by tomorrow night. Keisha will call early Saturday.

In the morning I joined Bobby for breakfast.

As he stirred sausage, eggs, tomatoes, mushrooms, and peppers in his favorite cast iron skillet and sprinkled in shredded cheddar, I set plates, utensils, and coffee mugs on the counter. While we ate the frittata, I summarized my investigation. Having sat with Mona, he already knew several names of those involved, so I saw no need to withhold new names and new developments. It was as if I were rehearsing what I would say to Chalmers and Piñero.

I told him about the attempted break-in at the Simpkins home, the Navigator that followed me, my interviews with Reverend and Mrs. Markham, Ileana and her co-workers, Keisha’s oldest friends and her ex-boyfriend, Carl Williamson, even Glendora Chancellor-Pratt, though I kept her proposition to myself. I described the trip to Sanctuary Nimbus, the hospital fight with Felicity Sillers, her rescue from Interview One by Harlow Graves, and Veronica Surowiec before her autopsy. Finally, I showed him Keisha’s documents from Flame Bright Fame.

“Do you think it’s some kind of hostile take-over?” he asked after skimming several pages. “Hostile enough to kill for?”

“Maybe,” I said. After a swallow of coffee, I continued. Dante Cuthbert and QC Griffin were also names Bobby had not heard before. Now he listened attentively as I recounted what I had learned of them and even held off interrupting me until I finished my recitation.

Both had been born in Detroit, forty-six years ago, five months apart. Dante was the oldest of four children and the only boy born to Rod and Lizzy Cuthbert, both auto workers. Dante’s cousin Quentin Cuthbert Griffin was an only child born to Rod’s sister Paula, who died in childbirth, and her husband Archie, who signed over care of his newborn son to his brother-in-law and sank into an alcoholism so intense cirrhosis claimed his life less than a decade later. Dante and Quentin were raised as brothers. When they were thirteen, Quentin was hit and killed by a car as the two crossed a street. For a time Dante was in and out of trouble but he straightened up by tenth grade and attended Eastern Michigan on a scholarship. After graduation, he took a job in a finance company. Ten years later, he established FBF to buy, rehabilitate, and sell abandoned houses in the inner city, many of which had sat empty for decades. Unlike other developers, FBF prospered during the subprime mortgage crisis, because their homes were affordable even as the market collapsed. Dante began a slow expansion during the economic recovery. The company was still small enough to avoid the scrutiny invited by larger organizations but apparently successful enough to establish a presence in mid-sized cities eager to attract young professionals with new developments.

“The question,” Bobby said, “is how a dead boy got to be chairman of the board.”

“Probably the same way he worked part-time jobs in his teens and twenties and even earned a GED,” I said. “I have a theory.”

“But I thought you said he finished high school and went to EMU.”

“Dante did,” I said. “Quentin got the GED. Dante had access to his dead cousin’s birth certificate and social security card. Both have driver’s licenses, employment histories, tax returns. Quentin wears glasses while Dante doesn’t, but their faces in DMV photos look the same. For years they shared an address, but now they live in different places, twenty miles apart, Dante in a Brush Park condo with a wife and Quentin in a studio apartment on Woodward Avenue near Pontiac. Neither one, by the way, has ever been arrested.”

“Of course not,” Bobby said. “Dante probably had to be fingerprinted and bonded to work in finance. Quentin’s getting arrested would ruin that.” He ate another forkful of the frittata. “What about the parents? Do they know all this?”

“Can’t say. Rod died when Dante was still in high school, Lizzy three years ago.”

“So he established a separate identity because he anticipated it would be useful—lower taxes if total income isn’t lumped together, a wife in a condo and maybe a girlfriend in the studio. There are probably other angles we don’t know yet. That’s pretty calculating.” Bobby thought for a moment. “But why bring them together? Why make your dead cousin board chair? Won’t other board members notice a resemblance?”

“If there are other board members. It could all be a front for something else.”

Bobby excused himself and went into his living room, which had floor-to-ceiling bookcases and even a rolling library ladder. Several minutes later he returned with a thick paperback and took his stool again.

“I remembered something,” he said. “One of my hobbies is etymology.”

“Everything is one of your hobbies if it involves reading,” I said. “Word origins?”

He smiled. “Yes. Take window. It’s from the Old Norse vind, for wind, and auga, for eye. Thus window means wind eye. Sometimes in a child’s drawing of a house—”

“The windows look like eyes,” I said. “You just can’t stop teaching, can you?”

“True, but I think you’ll find this one interesting.” He opened the book and turned it around so I could see the page. “Given names and surnames have meanings too.” He pointed to my name on the page. “Gideon, for example, means destroyer or warrior.”

“From the Old Testament.”

“My name, Robert, means bright glory. The -bert names are all related because the -bert root means bright. Robert. Herbert. Norbert. Albert.” He flipped to another page and tapped. “Cuthbert. It means bright fame.”

“Cuthbert gave a form of his surname to his company?”

“What does that tell you about him?”

I thought for a moment. “He’s a narcissist who plasters his name on things, in code. Add to that a second identity and you’ve got a secretive narcissist.” I shrugged. “Educated enough to know the etymology. Clever enough to have a back-up identity if something goes wrong. That means he’s formidable. He’s—” I whispered the name Dante Cuthbert and the company name once more. Then it hit