“The key to his crypto.”
“Crypto? Like… currency?” He nodded. “How much?”
“Fourteen million.”
I put a hand to my head. “Jesus, Cameron!”
“And a file.”
“What file?”
“A spreadsheet of everyone who’s ever done a job for him, including how much they were paid. Cops included.”
This was so much worse than a body in a trunk. “Why on earth would you do something like that? You might as well have painted a target on your back!”
“That’s exactly why I did it, Mrs. D! The Russian mob doesn’t fuck around! One wrong move and Feliks doesn’t just fire you, he makes you disappear! He was pissed when he found out Joey was still alive, and he knows I had something to do with it. I needed insurance that Feliks wouldn’t kill me, so as soon as he boarded that plane to Brazil, I found what I needed on his server and I took it. I wiped every last trace of those files from his system and walked away with the only copy. If his people shoot me, he’ll lose the key to his crypto. Only two other people in Feliks’s circle have access to his wallet—Kat, because she manages his entire fucking estate, and Charlie.”
Ekatarina “Kat” Rybakov was Feliks’s star attorney, but more than that, she was his secret right hand, the “Boss Bitch,” as Vero liked to call her. It made sense to me that Kat would have access to such sensitive information. But as far as I could tell, Charlie was little more than a glorified lapdog to Feliks. And since Charlie was also a retired cop, it seemed a stretch that Feliks would trust Charlie so completely. “Why would Charlie have access to Feliks’s money?”
“Because Charlie was the one who made me hack Feliks’s privateserver in the first place. He made me give him a back door in so he could snoop around. That’s how I found the spreadsheet and the crypto wallet in the first place—but no one can open that wallet without the key.”
“And you thought you could use it as leverage against the Russian mob? Do you have any idea how crazy that sounds?”
“Not just the mob. If your boyfriend decides to arrest me for starting that fire at the academy, the list of dirty cops on that flash drive is the only thing that might get me off the hook. I needed a safe place to hide it, and you were the only person I thought I could trust, so I put the files on a thumb drive and I stashed it in your car.” He swatted his eyes and his voice cracked. “I need that drive back, Mrs. D.”
I wasn’t sure what was worse, that Cam had no other adults in his life he trusted to protect him, or that he believed I was the only one who could.
Or did he?
“Wait,” I said as another thought occurred to me. “You knew Nick was here?” Cam hadn’t seemed surprised at all when I’d told him the Fairfax police were at my hotel. “Youwere the one who reported the anonymous tip to the police?”
“I needed a way to slow down Feliks’s people. I knew they’d come looking for the key to his crypto. I’ve got spyware on Kat’s phone. She called Charlie yesterday morning and told him to get his ass up here and find those files, and your boyfriend was the biggest roadblock I could throw in Charlie’s way. So I picked some random charter jet with a flight plan from Brazil into New Jersey, added one of Feliks’s aliases to the manifest, and fed it to the cops.”
That would explain why Charlie had been so quick to offer to drive Nick and the others here—he was already planning to come.
I stared down the boardwalk, watching two seagulls fighting over scraps of a pretzel as I struggled to make sense of it all. “I don’t understand. How did Kat know the key to Feliks’s crypto was in Atlantic City?”
Cam shrugged, his back hunched against the biting wind. “I don’tknow. She must have seen me sneak into the Aston that night at the salvage yard. She probably went back looking for it as soon as she realized those files were missing. By then, I was gone and so was the car. And she would have already known you were here. She must have put it all together and figured it out.”
“How would she knowIwas here?” Cam rolled his eyes, clearly annoyed that he should have to explain. I made a mental note to check my phone for spyware, too. “Aren’t you in enough trouble? Wiretapping is a felony charge!”
“For the love of fake tits, Mrs. D, just tell me you know where the goddamn car is!”
“I don’t.”
Cam swore. He turned a slow circle, hands on his hips, staring at the sky as if he were praying for a miracle.
“We’ll find it. Vero and I have a few leads,” I assured him, hoping Vero had managed to figure out whoS.H.orG.G.were since we’d last spoken. “But you should probably stay out of sight until we figure out where the Aston is. Do you have anywhere safe you can go?”
Frost clung to his wet lashes as he shook his head.
“You’ll freeze to death out here. You can’t sleep in your car.”
“I don’t have one,” he reminded me.
“How’d you get here?”
“Hitched a ride with a trucker.” He jutted his chin toward my purse. “You got anything to eat in there?”
