By the time Jericho had finally shut the bay doors and turned off the sign for the night, the usual suspects had already gathered. Levi and Arsen sat perched on the back of the large ratty couch, while Felix and Nico sat on the cushions. Cree, Lake, and Seven had also managed to make it. They sat on the pool table, perched like gargoyles.
Jericho looked at each of them. “I need your help.”
“Anything, man,” Nico said as the others nodded along. “What’s up?”
Jericho cleared his throat, swallowing down the wave of sadness that hit him. “I got a lead on Mercy’s killer or, at least, somebody who might have answers about what happened to her.”
“Who is it?” Felix asked, raising slightly to tuck his feet beneath him.
Jericho shook his head. “I don’t know. That’s why I need your help.”
“What’s the lead?” Lake asked.
Lake was appropriately named. He was long and lean with wavy brown hair and eyes the color of a lake and he was…very still. There was no other way to describe him. He never raised his voice, never lost his temper. He was almost the antithesis of Felix, except they were both eerily soft-looking considering how deadly they were. They just attacked their tasks in very different manners.
“Someone said they saw her being…dragged off by a guy I’d never heard of. I don’t have a name yet, but I have a description. Over six feet tall. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Sharp chin. Bad skin. Has a word tattooed on his chest. Has a rose and thorns tattooed on his neck. Some kind of jailhouse tattoo on his hand, but it’s too muddy to make out. Ring any bells?”
“Man, that could be half the town,” Seven said.
Jericho nodded. “I know. That’s why I need you guys to ask around… Discreetly.”
Seven’s real name was Stanley, after his father—Stan Symanski—a notorious bookie, who ran a gang of thugs who helped him with his collections business. Seven was one of ten sons born to Symanski, all named Stanley—thanks to the man’s over-inflated opinion of himself—all with different mothers. To keep track of them, he called each of them by order of their birth, which was how Seven got his moniker.
Stan was a piece of shit, definitely not worthy of burdening his sons with his name or reputation. Luckily, Seven looked like his Egyptian mother with her rich copper skin, sea glass eyes, and dark brown hair he often hid under a backwards ball cap. While Seven’s mother was accepting of his same sex preferences, his father was not, which was how Seven came to be one of Jericho’s boys. There was safety in numbers.
“You want all of us to start asking around about the same dude but keep it quiet?” Arsen asked, his tone implying that was impossible.
“Who was this person who tipped you off?” Felix asked, tone suspicious.
Felix was already threatened by Atticus and he and Jericho barely knew each other. He didn’t think telling them that Atticus had brought his family—a psychic, no less—into this would help smooth out any future encounters.
“A friend of a friend,” Jericho finally said, vaguely.
“A friend of the friend you’re sleeping with?” Felix persisted, eyes narrowed.
“I didn’t say that,” Jericho hedged.
“You didn’t not say it,” Nico pointed out.
Felix’s shrewd gaze burned a hole through Jericho as he pressed on.“It was him, wasn’t it? The rich ginger? He has friends in this neighborhood? Friends we, somehow, don’t know?”
Levi raised a brow. “That sounds sus, man. Who is this dude? Is he a cop? How does he know this guy? Does he know Gabe?”
Jericho’s mood soured at his ex-boyfriend’s name. They hadn’t parted on good terms, and seeing him at the morgue hovering over his dead sister, his face screwed into a mask of fake sympathy—a mask he put on a hundred times a year in his job as an investigator—had been too much. Jericho hadn’t wanted him to touch her and hadn’t even wanted to speak to him.
It wasn’t lost on him that he hadn’t had the same response to Atticus. But Atticus hadn’t tried to fake a sympathy he didn’t feel, hadn’t tried to make himself feel better by hurling platitudes he didn’t mean about better places and God’s plan. When Jericho had tried to hide and isolate himself from his grief, Atticus had followed, had persisted, offering physical comfort when he couldn’t offer an emotional response.
He shook the memory away. “This has nothing to do with Gabe.”
“So, there’s another cop on the case?”
Jericho was starting to regret teaching them to question everything. “Sort of.”
“Sort of?” Lake questioned.
Jericho sighed. “Look, just trust me. His info is legit. He’s a retired Fed.”
Lake questioned. “Fed? Like the FBI?”
