Prodigal Son

Chapter 27

Oliver showed Thea the video, a move that surprised Felicity. There had been so much to take in lately, but Oliver had been adamant. He said as much as he wished he could spare his sister, there'd been too many secrets rotting the core of their family.

It was hard to say how Thea took it. Oliver played the video and she'd been in denial at first, just as he'd been. Once they had convinced her it was real, before they could get a gauge on what she was thinking, she asked for space to process it.

Sharing with Tommy his father's blackmail list had been the next bomb they'd dropped.

"But why? My dad was a control freak but an encyclopedia of blackmail is over the top even for him. And what does any of this have to do with the things sitting in my basement?"

"We don't know yet," Felicity told him. "I'm still going through the data."

"Do we know anything?

Oliver gestured at her to take the lead in explaining.

"Well, we know the List folder hasn't been accessed since before Malcolm died but that doesn't rule anyone else helping him at MG. Like I've explained before, the servers there are weirdly compartmentalized. If someone hadn't been given access to the specific server he'd put them on, they could have searched the company database and not found any record of his files."

"But you managed to search the whole database. Why couldn't anyone else?"

"Felicity isn't just anyone."

She warmed under Oliver's matter of fact praise. "I knew about the compartmentalizing, so I built the search to look places that normally one would have to know about to find. The known unknown, if you will. Only someone else given direct access or another computer expert like me would find it." She left unsaid how few computer experts were anything like her.

"Is that it? Proof by the absence of proof?" Tommy sounded frustrated and she understood his impatience.

"There is more. Even three years ago, a majority of the industrial buildings in the Glades were sitting abandoned. And probably about a quarter of homes, apartments, and other business sites were derelict as well. Guess who was quietly buying them up? The activity dates back almost a decade."

"My dad? That doesn't make sense." Tommy paced, shaking his head. "He hated the Glades. He even tried to shut down Mom's clinic. Why would he want property there? What did he do with them?"

"He only got so far as acquiring properties."

"My father didn't buy buildings for ten years in a part of the city he hated without big plans. What was he waiting for?"

"I think waiting was the key," Felicity explained. "I found detailed, complicated, rebuilding from the ground up, plans that proposed a new Glades, but the plans hinged on him having control of close to 70 percent of that part of the city.

"The only way the financials worked was if he stuck to his pattern of buying the condemned or abandoned buildings on the cheap, and for that, he'd have to keep waiting. I mean, the Glades have been dying, but not so fast Malcolm wouldn't have had to wait at least another twenty years for enough properties to fit his criteria and that was if things like our current rehab initiative never happened."

Tommy tilted his head looking skeptical. "My dad could be patient; he once served the same Brussel sprouts for dinner for a week until I ate them, but yeah, no, he wasn't the kind of patient that waits thirty years."

"That's it, isn't it?" Oliver frowned, lines forming on his forehead and pulling the corners of his mouth down. He began to shake his head as if he couldn't believe whatever he was thinking.