Murphy's Wrath (Murphy's Law Book 2) Read online

  Murphy’s Wrath

  Murphy’s Law Book Two

  Michelle St. James

  Blackthorn Press

  Contents

  Murphy’s Wrath

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Links

  Also by Michelle St. James

  Murphy’s Wrath

  Murphy’s Law Book Two

  Michelle St. James

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 2019 by Michelle St. James aka Michelle Zink

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Isabel Robalo

  1

  Ronan Murphy watched his brother’s face through the shadows inside the car. “See anything?”

  Nick lowered the binoculars. “Tell you what: I’ll let you know if I see anything so you can stop asking me every ten minutes. Or better yet,” he held out the binoculars to Ronan, “you can look for yourself.”

  Ronan took the binoculars, even though he’d handed them to Nick two hours earlier precisely because he’d gotten sick of peering through them and seeing nothing unusual.

  They’d been casing Connor Moran’s office for almost a week. Like all of Ronan’s recent targets in his effort to find Elise Berenger, Congressman Moran had appeared on the list of the Whitmore Club’s membership, but he also occupied a place on their board. Ronan had no idea how the shadowy group called Manifest was linked to the Whitmore Club, but it undoubtedly was, and as far as Ronan was concerned a board member was more likely to be involved.

  That’s what he’d told himself when they’d started staking out the Whitmore’s board members, anyway. So far it had amounted to almost nothing.

  He’d never been as frustrated with a case as he’d been in the three months since he and Julia came home from Dubai without Julia’s sister, Elise.

  He’d been sure Elise was at Gold, the club in Dubai linked to Manifest. He was still sure she’d been there, although it wasn’t something he said aloud to Julia. Everything about the place had screamed wealth and secrecy, and he’d been haunted by the well-heeled couple who’d been sitting outside the private offices on the top floor of the club, a steel briefcase on the table in front of them.

  Had the couple been there to buy a girl? To buy Elise?

  Rumors were rampant online about the secret society called Manifest: that they engaged in trafficking, that they were backed by a consortium of rich, powerful men, that they influenced politics with money and blackmail and a host of other unsavory methods.

  It was something he didn’t let himself consider too often. The curtain of rage that spilled over his vision made it hard to think straight, rivaled only by the helplessness he felt when he caught Julia’s expression in an unguarded moment. It was fear and pain so raw he sometimes had to stifle a primal scream, her pain fostering his fury until his need to make Manifest pay eclipsed the reason he’d spent a lifetime cultivating.

  He tried not to think about the way she’d fought as he’d carried her out of Gold, gunfire erupting around them as she yelled for Elise and called Ronan names. He’d hated it, but every instinct in his body had told him his only job was to get Julia out of there alive.

  The owners of Gold had proven difficult to crack, even for the world-class hackers kept on retainer by Murphy Intelligence and Security. Whoever Gold’s owners were, they were tied to Manifest, hidden behind a network of shell companies and fake identities that MIS was still trying to unravel.

  They’d diversified their strategy six weeks earlier by refocusing on the members of the Whitmore Club. They proved easier to target — technically the place was an aboveboard private club for Boston’s wealthy movers and shakers — but the ease of getting the information was offset by the sheer number of leads it opened up. Every member had multiple businesses and places of residences, associations that fanned out into overlapping patterns that took up a whole wall in the MIS conference room.

  Their hackers were still working the Dubai angle, but in the meantime, Ronan had been doing recon on every long-standing member of the Whitmore Club, staking out their houses and places of businesses, running background on every known associate.

  He tried to ignore the feeling that he was spinning his wheels, that the activity was doing little more than keeping him moving, allowing him to convince Julia they were making progress when any fool could see they were at a standstill.

  And Julia Berenger was no fool.

  “We can’t do this forever.”

  Ronan turned toward his brother’s voice. Nick was staring out the windshield, his eyes focused on the brick facade of the Congressman’s downtown office.

  “We fucking can and will,” Ronan said.

  Nick looked at Ronan, his green eyes flashing in the dim light of the street lamps around the car. “No, we can’t. The Berenger job never fell within our core service offerings, and we’ve been at it for more than three months. We have other clients waiting.”

  “Core service offerings? You sound like such an asshole.”

  Nick shrugged. “Somebody’s got to do it. It used to be you.”

  Ronan heard the meaning flowing under Nick’s words like a current: that Ronan had gotten soft, that he wasn’t being professional, that his feelings for Julia were clouding his judgement. “Careful, Nick.”

  He hoped Nick heard the warning in his words, hoped it was a warning Nick heeded. It had been a long time since they’d fought it out, but Ronan wasn’t too old to kick Nick’s ass.

  Nick moved his shoulders like he was loosening the kinks. “I’m not saying anything you don’t know — and for the record, I’m not saying anything Dec doesn’t agree with.”

  Ronan’s laugh was short. “Criticism from Declan doesn’t exactly hit me where it hurts.”

  Knowing each other too well was just one of many perils of working with one’s siblings. As a former cop with Boston PD — following in their father’s footsteps — Nick was perfectly capable of stepping in when things got hot in the field, but Ronan did most of the dirty work, along with the high-level strategizing, both areas of expertise a product of his time as a Navy SEAL.

  Nick had seemed to surprise even himself when he’d realized he was good at managing the business side of things. He had a knack for dealing with the financials, crossing every T and dotting every I with the IRS while stashing money in lucrative investments and offshore accounts that had made them all millionaires many times over.

  Sometimes Ronan thought it was a shame. Nick had been a great beat cop and an even better detective, thriving on the excitement and danger of criminal work in a city as complex as Boston. More than once Ronan had wondered if it was because of Erin, their sister who’d overdosed when he and Nick had been in their
early twenties. Maybe seeing all that crime up close and personal had been too much. Ronan wouldn’t know: as brothers went, he and Nick were close, but none of the Murphy brothers were eager to pick the scab off the wound of their dead sister, and that included Declan, an aimless douchebag either by birth or through the circumstances of their mother’s death from cancer followed by Erin’s overdose.

  Dec was an equal partner in the business, but while he showed an annoying level of competence at pretty much anything when pressed into duty, he couldn’t be pressed into duty often between the bevy of women who frequented his bed at their shared residence.

  “Dec’s not stupid,” Nick said, pulling Ronan from his thoughts.

  “I didn’t say he was,” Ronan said. “But we both know he’s not in a position to criticize.”

  Nick met his eyes. “We’re all in a position to criticize, Ro. That’s what it means to have partners. And brothers.”

  Ronan looked away, not wanting to admit Nick was right. What would Ronan do if the roles were reversed? If Nick deployed the company on what was, for all intents and purposes, a wild goose chase, tying up their resources in a pro bono client while paying clients waited in the wings?

  He didn’t have to think long about the question. Ronan would shut it down. He’d tell Nick exactly what Nick was telling him, albeit a lot less diplomatically. Their business, borne out of their grief and rage over Erin’s death, was about more than money, but they couldn’t take pro bono jobs without paid clients.

  “Clay and his guys are getting close to something on Gold,” Ronan said. Clay was the unofficial leader of their freelance digital team and the hacker who’d gotten them deeper into the Manifest website when Ronan had first met Julia.

  “That’s what you said last month.”

  “It was true last month.” Ronan looked at Nick. “This isn’t some hit job. We knew it would be more complicated going in.”

  The Berenger job had always been outside of MIS’s true purview. For lack of a more eloquent word, they were vigilantes, men who stepped in to take out the trash when the system had failed, as it had when it set loose the drug dealer who’d gotten Erin hooked on heroin when she was still in high school.

  They weren’t private investigators. Clients came to them when they already knew who to punish.

  But Ronan had been moved by John Taylor’s predicament even before he’d crashed into Julia in an alley, both of them surveilling Seth Campbell, the tech giant who’d been dating Elise before her disappearance. At the time Ronan hadn’t known Julia was his new client’s granddaughter any more than Julia had known her grandfather, John Taylor, had hired MIS to find Elise and punish her kidnappers.

  Usually MIS was called in when it was too late to save anyone. By the time their clients walked through the doors of their office, the damage had been done.

  All that was left was retribution.

  John Taylor was everything Ronan admired: a quiet but commanding man of few words, a former Army drill sergeant, a man who took seriously his duty to protect the people he loved, even if it meant subverting the law.

  In Taylor’s plea, Ronan had seen an opportunity to actually save someone, to save Elise Berenger before punishing the men who’d taken her.

  Had he been compromised by his history, by the loss of Erin all those years ago, by his inability to save her? Fuck yes. That’s all MIS was: a series of attempts at rewriting a history that could never be rewritten.

  It hadn’t stopped them from taking jobs before.

  “I’m concerned about the personal angle,” Nick said. “And before you get your panties in a twist, you know you’d say the same thing to me if the roles were reversed.”

  Ronan bit back his anger, forced himself to breathe. The personal angle. It was too antiseptic a word for the feelings he had for Julia Berenger.

  She flashed behind his eyelids: her tawny hair spread like silk across his bare chest, body supple and soft in his arms, brown eyes lit with amber fire and pain she didn’t want him to see.

  “We made a commitment to John Taylor.” Ronan wouldn’t pretend Julia had nothing to do with his desire to find Elise, but their contract — illegal and unspoken as it was — wasn’t nothing. In their business, a business not found on Yelp and not reviewed on social media, trust was everything. If they started backing out of every job when it got tough, their paying clients wouldn’t be so eager to pay, and that would mean no more pro bono work either, and no more MIS, something that was more than just business for the Murphy brothers.

  Nick sighed. “I know. I’m just saying. There has to be an end point. We don’t have to figure out what it is tonight, but you should start thinking about it.”

  An end point: a polite way of saying the point at which they gave up on Elise Berenger, the point at which Ronan would have to tell Julia her sister was lost forever, just like Erin.

  Over his dead fucking body.

  2

  Julia turned off the engine and looked at the cottage in the middle of the clearing bordered by trees. It was August and at least ten degrees cooler here than in the city, but she couldn’t seem to make herself move.

  The living room light was on in her gramps’ house, the glow warm and welcoming, and yet she could only sit, the cold air seeping from the car’s interior, the engine ticking as it cooled. It had been like that in the months since she’d gotten back from Dubai, her usual anticipation at seeing her grandfather dampened by the fact that week after week, there was no news about Elise.

  Her frustration was only inflamed by her gramps’ calmness. It wasn’t that he wasn’t worried about Elise — he still called hospitals every two days to see if anyone matching Elise’s description had been brought in without ID.

  But where Julia’s panic seemed to rise with each passing day, an invisible clock ticking down the time that had passed since Elise’s disappearance (four months, five days, twenty hours) while her runaway mind calculated the decreasing probability that she was still alive, her gramps was unflappable in his belief that Ronan and his brothers would bring Elise home safe and sound.

  It should have brought Julia comfort. Her gramps was no fool. If he believed Elise was coming home alive, why couldn’t she put her faith in the same belief? Or why couldn’t she pretend, at least, during their weekly dinners?

  It was easier at the Murphy house. There she didn’t dare express even the slightest worry that Elise wasn’t alive. She needed MIS to stay invested in Elise’s case, and while she knew Ronan wouldn’t stop looking, she was less sure about Nick and Declan. As much as she’d come to care about the two younger Murphy brothers — she’d never met the youngest, Finn, who apparently hadn’t been home in years — she didn’t know them well enough to assume they wouldn’t throw in the towel on a case that was going nowhere, for which they weren’t being paid a dime.

  In their company, she was careful to refer to Elise in the present tense, to speak about her sister as if there was no doubt she was alive and waiting to be rescued.

  But her gramps’ house had been the one place she could tell the truth when she was scared without worrying it would be used against her later, a favorite tactic of her mother, who’d always been more invested in her latest boyfriend than in Julia and Elise.

  Their gramps had taken care of them when their mother couldn’t, had protected them from life’s uglier realities while never lying to them.

  Now Julia couldn’t help wondering if he really believed Elise was alive or if, for the first time ever, he was lying to Julia — and maybe even to himself.

  The porch light came on and the front door opened, her gramps silhouetted in the doorway. From a distance, he might have been thirty, tall and proud in his Army uniform like in the photographs she’d seen of him when he was younger.

  He’d known she was out front of course, had obviously just been giving her time to collect her thoughts before he decided enough was enough.

  She stepped out of the car and breathed in the air laced with pine
and cooling earth as she made her way up the porch steps. “Hey, gramps.”

  He wore his uniform of pressed slacks, button-down shirt, and the cardigan she rarely saw him without. His brown eyes shone with affection as he leaned in to kiss her cheek.

  “I thought we’d eat on the deck.”

  “Sounds good,” she said, stepping into the house.

  “I have lemonade and iced tea,” he said. “Unless you’d prefer something stronger.”

  She laughed. “I’ll take lemonade.”

  Her grandfather disapproved of ready-made food and beverages, lemonade included. His lemonade was fresh-squeezed and mixed with simple syrup that dissolved seamlessly into the liquid.

  He went to the cupboard and pulled out two glasses, put an ice cube in each, and poured lemonade from a glass pitcher on the counter.

  He slid one of the glasses toward her and raised his own. “To summer, steaks, and fresh lemonade.”

  She touched her glass to his. “I’ll drink to all those things.”

  “Let me get the salad and we’ll head outside.”

  He set down his glass and removed a bowl from the fridge. Julia leaned in to get a look and saw that it was her favorite pasta salad, chock full of mozzarella and asparagus and olives in a tangy dressing of blended capers, sun-dried tomatoes, balsamic vinegar, and olive oil.