Curious Minds Read Online Free PDF Page B

She didn’t like being called Moonbeam. And she didn’t especially like her new assignment.
    —
    W erner watched Riley leave his office. He hoped he’d chosen wisely. She had two advanced degrees from Harvard but no street cred. She needed Blane-Grunwald to pay off her loans and push her up the corporate ladder. He had her pegged as psychotically ambitious, and he was counting on her to sell her soul for a shot at the corner office. If it turned out otherwise, he might have to kill her.
    —
    R iley caught up with Emerson at the car. He was leaning against the right front quarter panel, eyes closed, lost in thought. Probably having an out-of-body experience, Riley thought. Or maybe he was convening with aliens from another solar system.
    “Hey,” she said. “What’s up?”
    “I’m waiting,” Emerson said.
    “For?”
    “For you.”
    “Of course.”
    She unlocked his door and ran around to the driver’s side. She plugged the key into the ignition and backed out of Günter’s space. “Just exactly what is it you expect me to do?” she asked.
    “Drive my car.”
    “Anything else?”
    “I tend to forget details that aren’t important to me. I would expect you to remember them. You might even record them, amanuensis style.”
    Crap, Riley thought. There was that word again.
    She drove through the bustling streets of Washington, through the pastoral woods of Rock Creek, and up the long driveway to Mysterioso Manor.
    “Would you like to take the Bentley home with you?” Emerson asked.
    “Nice of you to offer, but no. The Bentley is lovely, but the Mini gets better gas mileage. It’s more environmentally responsible. It’s the car I picked out as the wisest for my new life in Washington.”
    “I thought you bought the Mini because it was the only car that would fit in your assigned parking space.”
    “That too.”
    —
    R iley’s apartment was on Monroe Street in the Mount Pleasant section of Northwest D.C. It was a tiny one-bedroom flat that occupied the entire third floor of a converted Victorian built in 1907. The plumbing sounded considerably older. The radiator clanged, the water pipes gurgled, and she lived in fear of the toilet exploding.
    She stripped off her executive uniform and got into her sweatpants and big, roomy Batman T-shirt. She’d wanted to grow up to be a superhero, and in a left-turn kind of way she felt like she was on track. She was going to be a financial superhero, helping people invest in their future, safeguarding the country’s monetary system. At least she had been on track last week. This week she wasn’t so sure. This week she was chauffeuring a goofball around town.
    She sat at her small kitchen table and unwrapped the turkey breast and Swiss cheese sandwich she’d picked up at Potbelly on her way home. She switched on her laptop and Facebooked her mother and brothers while she ate. When she’d caught up on her family she went into Oracle mode. Oracle had been her favorite comic book character when she was a kid. And truth is, Riley still loved comic books, and especially Oracle.
    Oracle was Barbara Gordon, Commissioner Gordon’s daughter. She was Batgirl first, but after the Joker put her in a wheelchair she became a computer whiz who could find any information about anyone with just a few clicks of her keyboard.
    Riley could do almost the same thing. She typed in “Emerson Cranston Knight,” and sources of information flooded her screen. The Knights had been newsworthy for several generations, not just for their wealth but also for their eccentricities.
    Emerson was described as an American business magnate, investor, inventor, and philanthropist, the only child of communications and aerospace mogul Mitchell Brown Knight. If Riley read every article on the Net about Emerson’s father she’d be up until dawn, so she skimmed Wikipedia and kept her research to articles that addressed Emerson particularly.
    The Knight fortune stretched back to Emerson’s