Total pages in book: 137
Estimated words: 126060 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 630(@200wpm)___ 504(@250wpm)___ 420(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126060 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 630(@200wpm)___ 504(@250wpm)___ 420(@300wpm)
Rogan Boutler was the man who had murdered the Australian girl. He was sixty-six years old and had been a shadow rider in inland Queensland for a number of years. He’d been married and had three sons, Parker, Owen and Neil. His wife, Irene, died in a hunting accident. She had fallen from a cliff into a ravine. Rogan left Queensland with his three boys within weeks after her death. The boys had been in their early teens.
It seemed to Geno that the wives of the Boutler men ended up dying in tragic accidents that no one could quite believe of a shadow rider. Brielle questioned the accidents as well. In any case, Rogan was dead. Vivian Brown, the Australian woman Rogan had murdered, was twenty-six years old and distantly related. Rogan had started up a family genealogy site online, and she was one of the interested parties who had joined. She’d begun corresponding with him and asking all kinds of questions about the family.
Brielle said both Rogan and his brother, Lewis, seemed to be very charismatic and would post videos talking to their followers. Those videos were viewed over and over, hundreds of times, by the same younger relatives as if they were mesmerized. Geno believed in psychic gifts. Rogan and Lewis seemed to possess the ability to bind followers to them. Not all joining the genealogy site became fanatical followers; in fact, many seemed to be refusing to have anything to do with the two men once they left the site.
Brielle had added a few names she was keeping track of—men and women she believed might aid Rogan and Lewis in their plan for revenge against the shadow riders, but Rogan’s sons, Neil, Owen and Parker, were in New York. Not only were they in New York, but they were close to the theater. Not in it, but close. It wouldn’t take much for them to catch a shadow, slip inside and murder their assigned targets and leave.
Lincoln, Lewis’s son, was also in New York. He’d lived there for seventeen years. Like his cousins, he wasn’t married. He was part owner of a thriving art gallery and illustrated graphic novels. From what Brielle could tell, he lived quietly, dated Fiona Alley, an artist whose work sold very well. They kept their relationship out of the spotlight and attended few public events together. At her showings, they were never seen together.
Geno considered why Lincoln would put an ocean between his father and himself. Why he would live so quietly, almost as if he were living in the shadows. He had dated the same woman for years but didn’t live with her and didn’t appear in public with her, as if hiding that relationship. Late at night, Geno had discussed his conclusions with Amaranthe, and she agreed with him. Lincoln wanted his family to forget all about him, just as Rowina Boutler had hoped would happen when she married in Greece. Still, Brielle kept a close watch on Lincoln and Fiona.
Cooper and Calen Boutler, sons of Eric, had arrived in New York a good six months earlier. They frequented one of the internet cafés the hackers used. Now that Amaranthe was able to see photographs of them, she realized she had seen each of them separately on more than one occasion in the business district near a coffee shop she sometimes stopped at before going to work.
It was a sign that the Boutlers were entrenched in the Ferraro territory as well as in Little Italy. The times she saw the two men, they had teenagers with them, and the boys or girls were following their every word with rapt attention. It seemed one of the gifts some of the Boutler members inherited was charisma.
Finding a way to track Cooper and Calen hadn’t been easy. Amaranthe and Salvatore had slipped into the shadows and waited for them to go to the internet café, knowing they were using it to direct the others in the conspiracy and to get their orders from Lewis Boutler.
Several years earlier, Giovanni and Taviano had made a tiny tracker that could be inserted under the skin of a rider. They’d turned it over to their cousin Damian to find the right element so the device could be in a rider and could also travel through the shadows. At the time, they thought to put it in the young trainees so they wouldn’t lose any of them. Now, they were able to use it on Cooper and Calen, inserting the tiny device into their skin as they brushed past them entering the shadows. Both men had to feel the slight sting as if an insect had bitten them. The needles were thin enough that no evidence was left by the time the two men were once again out of the shadows.