“To make them desperate?” Dion asked.

“To crash the company,” I said, walking back to Zen, passing a flummoxed Audrey. “So I could afford to buy it. Yol was supposed to do that part, but only got halfway done. I had to have Wilson do the rest, calling the various Exeltec investors and buying them out.” I proffered my hand to Zen. She gave me my phone.

“So . . .” Dion said.

“So I now own a sixty percent stake in the company,” I said, checking the text from Wilson. “And have voted myself president. That makes me Zen’s boss.”

“Sir,” she said. She was doing a good job of regaining her composure, but I could see a wildness in the way her hands still trembled, the way she stood with her expression too stiff.

“Wait,” Dion said. “You just defeated an assassin with a hostile takeover?”

“I use the cards dealt to me. Probably wasn’t particularly hostile, though—I suspect that everyone involved was all too eager to jump ship.”

“You realize, of course,” Zen said smoothly, “that I was never actually going to shoot you. I was just supposed to make you worried so you’d share information.”

“Of course.” That would be the official line, to protect her and Exeltec from attempted murder charges. My buyout agreement would include provisions to prevent me from taking action against them.

I pocketed my phone, took my gun back from Zen, and nodded to Audrey. “Let’s go collect that body.”

21

We found Mrs. Maheras in the garden still. She knelt there, planting, nurturing, tending.

I walked up, and from the way she glanced at me, I suspected she realized that her secret was out. Still, I knelt down beside her, then handed over a carton of half-grown flowers when she motioned toward them.

Sirens sounded in the distance.

“Was that necessary?” she asked, not looking up.

“Sorry,” I said. “But yes.” I’d sent a text to Yol, knowing the feds would get it first. Behind me, Audrey, Tobias, Ivy, and a downcast J.C. stepped up to us. They cast shadows, to my eyes, in the fading light, and blocked my view of Dion standing just behind. We’d found them all walking along the road, miles from Zen’s holding place, trying to reach me.

I was tired. Man, was I tired. Sometimes, in the heat of it all, you can forget. But when the tension ends, it comes crashing down.

“I should have seen it,” Ivy said again, arms folded. “I should have. Most Orthodox branches are pointedly against cremation. They see it as desecration of the body, which is to await resurrection.”

We had been so focused on the information in Panos’s cells that we didn’t stop to think there might be other reasons entirely that someone would want to take the corpse. Reasons so powerful that it would convince an otherwise law-abiding woman and her priest to pull a heist.

In a way, I was very impressed. “You were a cleaning lady when you were younger,” I said. “I should have asked Dion more about your life, your job. He mentioned hard labor, a life spent supporting him and his brother. I didn’t ask what you’d done.”

She continued planting flowers upon her son’s grave, hidden in the garden.

“You imitated the cleaning lady who worked at the morgue,” I said. “You paid her off, I assume, and went in her place—after having the priest place tape on the door. It really was him, not an impostor. Together, you went to extremes to protect your son’s corpse from cremation.”

“What gave me away?” Mrs. Maheras asked as the sirens drew closer.

“You followed the real cleaning lady’s patterns exactly,” I said. “Too exactly. You cleaned the bathroom, then signed your name on the sheet hanging on the door, to prove it had been done.”

“I practiced Lilia’s signature exactly!” Mrs. Maheras said, looking at me for the first time.

“Yes,” I said, holding up one of the slips of paper with scriptures on them that she put in her son’s pockets. “But you wrote the cleaning time on that sheet as well, and you didn’t practice imitating Lilia’s numbers.”

“You have a very distinctive zero,” Audrey explained, looking supremely smug. Cryptography hadn’t cracked this case after all. It had just required some good, old-fashioned handwriting analysis.

Mrs. Maheras sighed, then placed her spade into the dirt and bowed her head, offering a silent prayer. I bowed my head as well, as did Ivy and J.C. Tobias refrained.

“So you’ll take him again,” Mrs. Maheras whispered, once she had finished. She looked at the ground before her, now planted with flowers and tomatoes.

“Yes,” I said, climbing to my feet and dusting off my knees. “But at the very least, you’re unlikely to be in too much trouble for what you did. The government doesn’t recognize a body as property, so what you did wasn’t actually theft.”

“A cold comfort,” she muttered. “They’ll still take him, and they’ll burn him.”

“True,” I said idly. “Of course, who knows what secrets your son had hidden in his body? He’d been splicing secret information into his very DNA, and he might have hidden all kinds of things in there. The right implication at the right time might prod the government into a very, very long search.”

She looked up at me.

“Scientists disagree on how many cells there are in the human body,” I explained. “Somewhere in the trillions, easily. Perhaps many more than that. Could take decades upon decades to search them all, something I doubt the government will want to do. However, if they think there might be something important, they could likely set the body into storage just in case they need to do a thorough search at some point.

“It wouldn’t be a proper burial, as you want—but it also wouldn’t be cremation. I believe the church does make provisions for people donating organs to help others? Perhaps it’s best to just consider it in that light.”

Mrs. Maheras seemed thoughtful. I left her then, and Dion stepped forward to comfort her. My suggestions did seem to have made a difference, which baffled me. I’d have rather seen a family member cremated than spend forever being frozen. However, as I reached the building and looked back, I found that Mrs. Maheras seemed to have perked up visibly.

“You were right,” I told Ivy.

“Have I ever not been right?”