Unthinkable by Brad Parks

Author:Brad Parks [Parks, Brad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2021-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 28

NATE

Barry continued to share what the state police knew—or didn’t know, since the gun had no serial number, and the body yielded no clues about what Candy Bresnahan had been up to for the last quarter century.

I knew.

Or at least I could assemble a pretty good guess.

Sometime in 1993 she had been approached by Lorton Rogers, or some other member of the Praesidium, and jolted out of her otherwise ordinary mother-of-three-in-small-town-Indiana life. She was told she needed to kill her husband because . . .

Well, because Jerome Bresnahan was a man with a drinking problem who chauffeured toxic waste for a living. You didn’t need to be one with the currents to know it was destined to end poorly.

Maybe Jerome was going to drive a truckload of nasty goo into a school bus, or spill a deadly mess across a busy interstate, or inadvertently taint an entire city’s water supply with his boozy recklessness.

Whatever it was, it was bad enough that Jerome had to go. And the Praesidium decided he needed to die in its preferred manner: at the hand of his own spouse.

Everyone knows Jerome is a drunk, Candy was told. We’ll just say he guzzled some Prestone thinking it was a mojito. The jury will deliberate for five days and then you’ll be free.

Had Candy fought the inevitable, like me? Did she need to be convinced by a demonstration of DeGange’s power? Or had she accepted her fated future at face value, eager to be rid of her drunken, abusive husband?

Whatever it was, she had gone through with it. And then she decided she wanted no part of the reception she’d get if she returned to Warren. She couldn’t face the withering stares at church or the under-the-breath mutterings at the grocery store.

Or perhaps it was that working for Vanslow DeGange, a billionaire who helped the world dodge punches before they were ever thrown, was more interesting than selling auto parts in Indiana.

Whatever the case was, she got her brand and she joined the Praesidium, at which point she did . . . what exactly? Procured replacement mufflers for the Praesidium’s fleet of cars?

Or was she more like Rogers, jumping from crisis to crisis, never knowing who she’d have to conspire to kill next?

And then, one day, that someone became my wife.

Except it made no sense Praesidium would dispatch her on that errand. Why send her to do on a Thursday afternoon what I was going to do on a Friday evening? Rogers said the Praesidium had a rule about not doing its own dirty work.

And why, for that matter, was she so bad at it? The Praesidium surely had more capable people. Why send a woman in a bright-red shirt to fumble around the plaza in front of Jenny’s workplace for an hour, slipping her hand in and out of her bag, being so obvious with her ill intentions? Why not plant a sharpshooter on the top of the parking garage, much like the state police had done? Or simply kill her as she walked out to her car in the morning?

None of it made sense.

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