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overly paranoid. Even if Luka’s killers—and logic suggested there was more than one, considering how much effort it required to sneak a steamer trunk with a corpse inside it onto a train platform without anyone noticing—had found out where Jada had been hiding, they could not have predicted which route Drake and Sully and Jada would take when leaving the apartment.
    Still, he was worried. As they walked, he turned the whole thing over in his mind. Luka’s wife had made the introductions between her husband and her employer. Drake wasn’t sure what her position was at Phoenix Innovations, but it stood to reason that she knew at least some of the details of the secret project Henriksen wanted Luka to work on. When Luka turned him down and started working on it himself, that would have put Olivia in a difficult position. Would she have told Henriksen what her husband was up to?
    Jada referred to Olivia as her “wicked stepmother.” It might be a family joke, but Drake doubted it. The question was whether Olivia Hzujak valued her job more than she did her marriage. And if she had told Henriksen what Luka had been up to, would this billionaire CEO have gone so far as to have the man murdered?
    Drake didn’t know. But someone had killed Luka, and to do it in such an odd and gruesome fashion—well, the killers hadn’t tried to hide their work. On the contrary, they had virtually assured that the whole world would know of it. By now, details of the discovery of Luka’s body would be on every news channel and all over the Internet.
    Something didn’t click there. If Henriksen had wanted Luka dead, would he have made such a spectacle of the crime? It seemed far too great a risk for a man with so much to lose.

    Ruminating on it, he picked up his pace as Sully and Jada passed the museum on the right and reached the corner of Central Park West. They looked comfortable together, like father and daughter. Sully spent most of his time focusing on his own fortunes, so it was fascinating to watch him become so wrapped up in someone else’s. He had no children of his own, but Jada was his goddaughter, and it was pretty clear he would do anything to protect her. Even if Drake hadn’t wanted to help Jada—which he did both for her own sake and because the puzzle intrigued him—he would have been on board just because Sully had asked.
    It was the one thing that Drake and Jada had in common. As of this morning, Sully was the closest thing either one of them had to family. Drake hustled up the museum steps and through the door, finding Sully and Jada waiting for him just inside.
    “Anything?” Sully asked.
    “Not that I saw,” Drake replied, “but I’m no detective, so what do I know?”
    Sully frowned. “Nah. If they knew where Jada was, they’d have tailed us from the apartment.”
    Jada looked relieved as Sully headed off toward the information desk. For a person who had learned of her father’s murder only half a day before, she was holding together well.
    By the time they caught up to Sully, he already had spoken to the neatly attired man behind the desk, who had picked up a phone and was having a conversation while half turned away from them. A moment later he hung up the phone and informed them that someone from Dr. Cheney’s team would be down to fetch them momentarily. Drake fought the temptation to make a crack about anyone “fetching” them and joined Sully and Jada in standing around an enormous plant, trying not to look awkward.

    An attractive young woman arrived to fetch them, introducing herself as a graduate student working with Dr. Cheney. She wore her hair up in a loose bun, artfully disarrayed, and though her dark red sweater and gray skirt were fashionable and neat, Drake thought she looked more like a movie superspy masquerading as a museum employee than an actual graduate student. She made him want to enroll in classes or become a museum curator, and though Jada and Sully asked her questions