The Housewife Assassin's Garden of Deadly Delights by Josie Brown Page A

modified,” I mutter.
    “The one bit of good news is that this driver also rounded up the other three, so I presume it may have been the first time the Exodus strain made it out of the silo,” Ryan says.
    “Let’s hope so,” Jack mutters.  
    “Unfortunately, two months is just long enough to grow a field of corn, depending on the strain and the temperature conditions,” I explain.   “A few years back, we grew a few stalks in the back yard. It was one of Mary’s fifth grade Geography projects.”
    “Then that crop should be ready for harvest right about now,” Jack reasons, “if it hasn’t been, already.”
    There’s a knock on the door. Hearing Ryan’s bark, Emma enters, pushing a stroller where her infant son, Nicky, sleeps peacefully. Rocking it side to side, she murmurs, “I combed through Jilly McIntosh’s personnel file, and did a background check as well. She’s clean as a whistle: raised in Lodi, basketball star for her high school team, and earned her degree in Genetics from UC-Davis. Unfortunately, she graduated during the Great Recession. She was surviving on minimum wage jobs before she got hired at SeedPlenish. She was certainly overqualified to be a file clerk, but it paid better than anything she had before it, and at least it put her in a field where she could use her training.”
    “She must have thought working under Wellborne would be a dream come true. But from the correspondence I saw, it was more like a nightmare.” I shudder. “So, where is she now?”
    “Nowhere, from what I can tell. It’s almost as if she’s dropped off the grid.”
    “If I’d learned what she had about the Exodus seeds, I would too,” I declare. “Still, she’s going to surface for some reason. And it may be close by, since she’s only been gone a couple of days.”
    Emma frowns. “Um…no. She left over a month ago.”
    “Are you saying Jilly wasn’t his last file clerk?” I ask. “Odd. But Wellborne did mention two clerks before me. He said one had been there six months, and another just a little under a month.”
    “Then Jilly would have been the former,” Emma assures me. “She quit over a month ago. From what the SeedPlenish employee roster shows, another woman—Serena Lee—was hired to replace her.”
    Jack shakes his head. “Jeez, I wonder what happened to her?”  
    “Emma, what can you pull up on this Serena person?” I ask.
    “Let me see.” She pulls an iPad from the stroller bag.
    A moment later, she exclaims, “Bingo! I started with her SeedPlenish personnel file. Take a look at this!”
    Her screen is open to Serena Lee’s employee badge picture: Only it’s Liang Xia.
    “Well, I’ll be damned,” Jack declares.  
    “If she showed up the same time Jilly disappeared, maybe she had something to do with it,” I declare.
    “Obviously, Jilly was on to Wellborne’s shenanigans,” Jack reasons. “If Xia was his MSS contact, he may have called her in to clean up his mess.”
    “Sadly, you’re right,” Abu says. “And here’s the proof.”
    We turn to find him standing in the doorway. He holds a picture in his hand. In it, a woman’s head can be seen in a SeedPlenish seed bag. Her eyes are wide open. There is a bullet wound through her forehead. The bag is large enough to hold the rest of her.
    “What a shame,” I murmur. “Who is it?”
    “She’s the woman you replaced in Wellborne’s office: Jilly McIntosh.” There’s an edge to Jack’s voice.
    I know what he’s thinking: I might have met the same fate, if he hadn’t gotten to Wellborne and me.
    There’s a good chance that he’s right about that.
    But who killed her: Wellborne or Xia? I guess we’ll never know.
    “The one link that will uncategorically tie Wellborne to MSS is the money that came into the Caymans bank account,” Jack reminds us. “We should retrieve it.”
    “I’ve got operatives pulling Wellborne from the silo as we speak. We’ll copy his prints. Once we get them, I’m