Free A Billionaire's Redemption by Cindy Dees Page A

through his files on the computer there.
    It hurt to go through his private correspondence like this. She could almost hear him saying the things written in his emails and memos. She’d mostly gotten over her disbelief that her father was dead, but the sharp ache of loss still stabbed at her. No matter how big a bastard he might have been, he was still her father. She’d spent the better part of her life trying to please him and had basked in his approval whenever he’d doled out a smidgen of it to her.
    Larry Shore had grudgingly handed over the passwords to get into the encrypted portions of her father’s machine, and had then departed hastily, leaving her to sort out the jumbled mess for herself. If her father had a system for filing anything, it was certainly eluding her.
    A few things about her father’s life as a senator were becoming clear, however. He was firmly hooked into the good ol’ boy network. Most of what he accomplished was done through under-the-table trades and mutual back-scratching arrangements. Her father didn’t appear to have even the slightest sense of ethics or fairness in how he chose to support or oppose various pieces of legislation. It was all about what he could get from someone else.
    Although she’d been aware of his horse-trading style, a tiny part of her had hoped he’d had at least some small shred of conscience. That once in a while, he voted on a bill because it was the right thing to do. Instead, she even found an email from him to a junior senator berating the young man for voting with his conscience. Her father’s letter closed with a line declaring that conscience had no place in politics.
    Was that why her father had been killed? If only the police could make some headway in identifying her father’s murderer. Maybe she’d be less jumpy at night and sleep better. Even if all they discovered was why he’d been killed, that would be better than this giant black hole hanging over her family.
    She clicked on yet another file and scanned through a mind-numbingly dull list of people to pressure into delaying a vote on something or other having to do with oil companies’ right to privacy. It had to do with proposed legislation that would force oil companies to turn over complete lists of the chemical formulas of the liquids they injected into the ground as part of extracting oil and gas from shale rock.
    The technique, hydraulic fracturing, commonly called fracking, involved pumping water and a propriety blend of chemicals underground to break up oil and release it from the rock it permeated.
    She clicked on the next email, and started as a bright red screen popped up, warning her that the contents were classified. What had Larry said about that? It had been hours ago and her brain was fried. She pulled out the piece of paper she’d scribbled all her father’s passwords on and tried the main one that he supposedly used for just about everything. It didn’t work. She tried the others, and of course, it was the very last one that caused a new folder to pop up on her screen. It was labeled only Senate CMA.
    She clicked on the first file. The letterhead made her frown. Senate Committee on Miscellaneous Affairs? She’d never heard of it. But apparently, her father was a member. She paused in her reading to do an internet search of the term and frowned as a message blinked, “No result matches your search.” It must be some sort of secret committee. She wasn’t so naive as to think that everything Congress did was known to the public.
    She went back to reading. The letter outlined a schedule of meetings for the past year. She noted that more than a few of the closed sessions were actually scheduled for late in the evening. What senate committee started meetings at ten o’clock at night, for goodness’ sake?
    Alarmed, she opened the next file. This one outlined an operation by...somebody...a group called Excelsior...to infiltrate Mexico and kill the governor of a Mexican