A Deadly Twist by Jeffrey Siger (free novel reading sites .txt) 📕

“Will do. Kisses. Bye.”

Andreas lay in bed staring up at the ceiling. He missed his wife. She somehow always knew when something was bothering him. Even when he didn’t know it himself. That’s a rare quality to have in a partner.

He listened for the sounds of children. Not a stir, not a murmur. Or a scream. Yes, he missed even that. But not as much as he did his wife.

I’m one lucky guy.

His mind was waking up. He didn’t want it to, quite yet. He’d have preferred sleeping but knew his preference was losing the battle to duty. He rarely slept this late, and even though he had no idea what to do next, he was awake. He picked up his phone and skimmed through a string of utterly useless email offerings, until he came to the one from Lila. He opened it and clicked on the attachment.

Andreas looked at the letter without bothering to read it. He didn’t want to read it, for it would only remind him of how his father had been blackballed from the police force by another powerful man. One who’d set Andreas’s father up to suffer a public shaming for something he had not done, ending with eight-year-old Andreas losing his father to suicide.

The letter was typed single spaced on the publisher’s personal stationery, with a blue-and-gold coat of arms emblazoned across the top of the page. Andreas rolled his eyes at the crest. Of course he has one. He looked at the coat of arms more closely, trying to discern what the publisher’s family had chosen to portray about its history to the world. On one side stood a ship honoring the fortune his family had made at sea. On the other side, a printing press paid homage to the family’s current financial engine. And in the central place of honor, the goddess Athena stood upon the pedestal of an open book. He wondered what the book represented and tried to make out what was written on its pages.

He casually tinkered with enlarging the words the family had thought important enough for Athena to stand upon.

One page of the book read,

JSS

GTS

AKS

Its facing page read,

KSM

RIM

BZ

Andreas bolted out of bed, yelling, “Yianni, Tassos, wake up. The world as we know it is over.”

* * *

“I can’t believe this,” said Yianni, staring at the coat of arms on Andreas’s phone.

Tassos sighed. “We’ve either hit upon a one-in-a-zillion coincidence or an explanation that ties everything together.”

“Not quite everything, but a hell of a lot,” said Andreas. “I asked Lila if she knew whose initials they might be. She said she’d ask her mother, the source of all knowledge about old-line Greek society.”

“If the publisher’s tied into this, he’s involved in at least three murders.”

“Plus two attempted murders,” added Yianni. “Make that three, if you count Zagori’s terminally unsuccessful plans for Nikoletta.”

“It also explains how Nikoletta and you became targets. The day after her editor forwarded Nikoletta’s sixth notebook to the publisher, Zagori showed up on Naxos to kill her. When that failed and you began retracing her steps, someone panicked, likely over your potentially discovering what she’d learned, and put out a casting call for local bad guys to take you down immediately.”

“In the notebook covering her meeting with the hacker, Nikoletta wrote down the names of some persons who’d used his services,” said Yianni. “But I don’t recall any name fitting those initials, and certainly not the publisher’s name.”

“So that notebook isn’t likely what set this off.”

“Something in the sixth notebook is what did it,” said Tassos. “And if those initials represent the members of some sort of cabal, there are at least six involved in this.”

“But none of those initials is the publisher’s,” said Yianni.

“Which means it could be more than six. I know it looks like a perfect match to us, but with all the powerful players potentially implicated, we can’t afford the slightest misstep. That’s another reason I asked Lila for help.”

“I don’t mean to rain on anyone’s parade,” said Tassos, “but as the resident cynic in this trio of cops, do you think it even matters what we prove? Whoever’s behind this undoubtedly has both the money and the power to literally get away with murder.”

“As I see it,” said Andreas, looking at Tassos while motioning for Yianni to give him back his phone, “my job is to chase down bad guys. After that, it’s up to prosecutors and courts to seek whatever justice is called for. If I started thinking about what actually happens to so many of the bad guys I bust my ass to catch, I’d go crazy.”

“Thanks for the pep talk, Chief,” said Yianni, handing Andreas the phone.

“Hmm,” said Tassos. “It makes you wonder whether the corruption among our brethren on the force is the cause of this sort of thing or the consequence.”

“A bit of both, I suspect,” said Andreas. He felt the phone vibrate in his hand and put the incoming call on speakerphone. “Hi, darling. We’re all gathered around the phone to hear the results of your research.”

“You mean my socialite efforts?”

“I knew you didn’t like it when Nikoletta called you that, but I very much admired your self-control.”

“I’ve since explained my feelings on that subject to her, and all is now fine in the fortress. She’s even offered to do a feature on our Fresh Start initiative.”

“That’s great.” He paused. “But could you please explain to us what those initials represent?”

“My mother’s a better search engine than Google.”

“No argument here.”

“Okay. Let’s start with the matriarch of the family. Her name was Athena.”

“Well, that explains her namesake’s presence on the coat of arms,” said Yianni.

“Her father was a very rich and powerful foreign shipowner with vast investments in land across Greece, and one of the first twentieth-century off-islanders to invest in Naxos. He married a Greek who passed away when Athena was born, and he never remarried. He raised Athena to share his penchant for acquiring land—and his passion