Nevada waved and the laptop screen went dark.
I walked over to Bern and handed him the USB. “I need to know what’s on it.”
“Will do.”
He got up, and Runa and he left. Leon sauntered out the door. Mom nodded to Arabella. My sister jumped off her chair and the two of them went out of the room.
Cornelius also rose to his feet. He’d stayed so quiet throughout the meeting, it was easy to forget he was there.
“Just a moment.” I got up, went back to my office, took the Ziploc bag with Luciana’s brush out of my desk drawer, and brought it back to the conference room. “I’d like you to check something for me.”
“I’m all ears,” he told me.
Chapter 5
The sound of my phone pulled me away from the computer screen. I glanced at it. Linus.
Linus?!
“Yes?”
“I broke into Linus’ phone,” Bern said.
Damn it. “You almost gave me a heart attack.”
Bern made a deep rumble that was probably a chuckle.
“Did you find anything good?”
“The last call he took was at 6:43 p.m. Sunday night. All others went to voice mail. The first of these was at 10:51 p.m. That’s likely your window.”
“The first call that went to voice mail, who was it from?”
“Zahra Kabani.”
Zahra Kabani was the Warden of Michigan. Linus and she were working together on tracking a fugitive. He would’ve taken her call.
“Any progress on the security system?”
“Working on it. How’s Linus?”
“Still unconscious.”
“No change is better than a change for the worse.”
“True. What about my USB?”
“Working on it.”
He said goodbye and hung up.
I rubbed my face. Whatever happened to Linus likely happened between 6:43 p.m. and 10:51 p.m. on Sunday night. We would narrow it down even further once the coroner was done with Pete.
Pete’s face crisscrossed by the dark starburst of lines surfaced from my memory. I pushed the thought aside and stared back at the screen.
Alessandro and I decided to divide and conquer. He reached out to his international contacts trying to figure out why the Russian Imperium was suddenly interested in Texas or its Warden, and I decided to work on House Cabera.
My head hummed. I should probably eat something and soon. I rummaged in my desk drawers, found a packet of jerky, tore it open with my teeth, and surveyed the fruits of my labor. For a two-hour deep dive into all things Cabera, I hadn’t come up with much.
Luciana Cabera, halcyon Prime, Head of the House, fifty-six years old, widowed. For some reason I thought she was in her early sixties.
Husband, Fredrick Cabera, halcyon Prime, ten years her senior, died of cancer six years ago. Fredrick had joined House Cabera and taken his wife’s last name. From what I could gather, he had been born in South Africa and had wanted to immigrate to the US. At the time the US had prohibited immigration from SA due to an Ebola outbreak. Marrying Luciana allowed him to sidestep the ban.
Daughter, Kaylee Cabera, twenty-two years old. Full-time student at Rice University, right here in Houston. Her driver’s license and her IP address confirmed that she still lived at home. Kaylee either hadn’t wanted to leave the nest or wasn’t allowed to.
Luciana had two brothers, one uncle, three aunts, and her parents were still alive, although neither was in good health. Besides Luciana, House Cabera officially listed one other certified Prime, Luciana’s elderly mother. However, Luciana’s twelve-year-old niece and her seventeen-year-old nephew had both undergone preliminary trials and tested in the Prime range. Their official certification would wait until they turned eighteen. The rest of the family fell into the Significant range.
Unlike a lot of other Houses, the Caberas did not diversify their business interests. The Serenity Clinic was their primary source of income, aside from some privately held stocks. All of the adult Caberas worked for the clinic, all of them held relevant degrees or were in the process of obtaining them, and none of them had attempted to break away from the family business.
None of them had been involved in any scandals, nobody had a criminal record, and their credit reports were blissfully free of bankruptcies and large debts. They were respectably boring.
Luciana’s political career was equally as boring. I couldn’t find a single matter she had brought before the Assembly in the last three years that could’ve put her into Arkan’s crosshairs. I seriously doubted he cared about House inheritance minutiae or the exact procedure for the certification of Primes in the state of Texas. All of it was local and region specific.