“Got it,” Madeline said. “You’ve decided that I’m the reason your big plan fell apart. You want revenge. Tell me, how long did you and Ramona Owens, or whatever her name was, work on the con?”
“Two years, damn you. And it wasn’t a con. It was my dream—everything I ever wanted. It was supposed to be my life. Simply seducing Travis Webster would have been easy enough. He’s just like his old man when it comes to women. He’ll screw any pretty face that comes along.”
“But you wanted to be more than just another lay. You wanted to marry him.”
“He had everything he needed to go far—the looks, the charisma, the family money—everything. But he wasn’t interested at first. When I met him his only goal was to rob his father’s hedge fund blind before the Webster pyramid scheme fell apart. I’m the one who made Travis dream big.”
“You dazzled him with visions of real power—the kind that comes with high office—and he fell for the promise.”
“Convincing a man that he has what it takes to be rich or powerful isn’t really all that difficult,” Patricia said. “Men always want to believe what you’re selling, you see. Ramona and I had considerable success running cons on the hedge fund boys. But Travis Webster was going to be our ticket to a new future. He was the one who had what it took to break into politics. That’s where the real power is.”
“You convinced him that he needed you to make it to the top,” Madeline said. “You got him to marry you. When did you realize that there were a few bits and pieces of the Webster family history that had to be erased?”
Patricia’s expression tightened with fury. “The bastard didn’t even hint that there was something off about the founding of his father’s hedge fund until after the wedding. Then he admitted that he was afraid Egan had a couple of real skeletons in the closet. He found them when he went digging into his own family history.”
Daphne stirred. “You knew that as soon as Travis became a serious candidate, the media would start excavating his past.”
“We didn’t think the deaths of Carl Seavers and Sharon Richards would be a problem. There was no there there, as they say. Absolutely zero evidence that Webster had anything to do with the deaths. Travis was more concerned that his crazy brother and his father’s financial manipulations might be the real problems for the campaign. It was Travis who first suggested that something permanent would have to be done about Xavier.”#p#分页标题#e#
“What made you realize there might be a more serious problem with the murders of Seavers and Richards?” Madeline asked.
“Travis talked to his mother about his plans to run for office. Louisa was thrilled. But when he mentioned that he was concerned about the unsolved killings in the past because they coincided with the founding of Egan Webster’s hedge fund, Louisa got very nervous. She finally broke down and told Travis that she had hired a private investigator to follow Egan to see who he was sleeping with. The PI disappeared. The next thing she knew, Egan told her he had received a blackmail threat, supposedly about some insider trading thing. Louisa was horrified. She suspected the extortionist might have been the PI she hired, but she could hardly admit that to Egan. So she kept quiet.”
“And then the blackmailer just disappeared. The demands stopped.”
“Louisa told Travis she hadn’t known what to think so she just kept silent. But Travis was worried. So he and I set out to discover what had happened to the PI Louisa had hired. Ramona assisted us. I trusted her, you see.”
“Because the two of you had worked together on other scams.”
“Yes. Eventually Ramona found Purvis’s sister. She was a junkie who’d been living from fix to fix for years. Ramona gave her a free fix and the woman told her that her brother had borrowed her car and taken off for some island in the Pacific Northwest. Purvis had told her that he was onto something really big, a business venture that was going to make him rich. He promised to share some of the cash with her.”
“But she never heard from him again.”
“And being a confirmed addict, she didn’t waste any money looking for her missing brother,” Patricia said. “But after Purvis disappeared, the landlord of his office building cleared out the office. He dumped everything into a cardboard box and gave it to Purvis’s next of kin—his sister. She stuck the box in a closet and never thought about it again. Ramona bought the whole box of files for the promise of another fix.”