“Happy. Excited.” She pressed her fingers to her temples. “He said he had something big happening this weekend. Something that was going to change everything. I thought—” Her voice broke. “I thought he was going to propose. He’d been acting different lately. Secretive, but in a good way. And he asked me to dinner Friday at this nice place downtown. Nicer than anywhere we’d ever been.”
“But he didn’t show up.”
“No.” The word came out in a ragged breath. “I sat there for two hours. Kept checking my phone, kept telling myself he was just running late. Finally went home and cried myself to sleep.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand. “And the whole time, he was already…”
I reached across and covered her hand with mine while she cried. Her skin was cold.
After a moment, Jack asked, “Did Dre ever seem scared? Like someone might be watching him, or following him?”
Tiana considered the question. “Not scared exactly. But careful. He was always aware of what was around him—checking mirrors when we drove, looking over his shoulder. I figured it was a military thing.”
“Was there ever a time he seemed more than just careful?”
She was quiet for a moment. “A few weeks ago. I was staying over at his place, and he came in really late—two, three in the morning. I woke up when he got in bed.” She paused. “He was shaking. Not like he was cold. Like he was scared.”
“Did he say what happened?”
“No. I asked, but he just pulled me close and held on like he was afraid I’d disappear.” Her voice cracked. “Said everything was fine, just a rough night. But I could feel his heart pounding. He didn’t sleep the rest of the night.”
A few weeks ago. Right around the time the crew said he’d come to work beaten worse than training could explain.
“One more thing,” Jack said. “His trainer—Vic Caruso. What did you think of him?”
Something hardened in her expression. “I only met him once when he came to the apartment one morning to pick up Dre.” Her nose wrinkled slightly. “Vic was polite enough. But there was something about him I didn’t like. The way he looked at Dre.”
“How do you mean?”
“Like he owned him.” She shrugged. “Dre said I was imagining things. Said Vic had his best interests at heart. But I know what I saw.”
Jack handed her his card and told her to call if she thought of anything else. She nodded but didn’t take her eyes off the table, tears falling silently onto the laminate surface.
We let ourselves out and closed the door behind us. Rita was waiting in the hallway, a box of tissues in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. She didn’t ask questions. Just gave us a look that said she’d take it from here, and slipped inside.
The heat hit us like a fist when we stepped outside.
“King George Trust,” I said as we crossed the parking lot. “And Fit24.”
“Two places Dre kept separate from everything else.” Jack unlocked the Tahoe. “If he was hiding something, that’s where we’ll find it.”
He cranked the AC and pulled out of the lot. I angled the vent toward my face and let the cold air bring me back to life.
“What’s the chance T-Bone is his given name?” I said.
Jack’s lips twitched. “I don’t know. I was thinking we should put it on the list of baby names.”
“I was thinking it’s more of a middle name.”
“Good to know,” he said. “As far as T-Bone is concerned, we’ll get a warrant for Dre’s phone records and cross-reference his contacts. Someone saved as T-Bone shouldn’t be hard to find.”
“Tiana knows more than she’s saying,” I said.
“She’s young and in love. Dre could do no wrong in her eyes, so she didn’t ask questions. Questions lead to answers you don’t always want to hear.” Jack glanced at me. “Women have been pretending they don’t know what their men are up to since the beginning of time.”
Jack called Cole on the drive over and asked him to get a digital warrant for Dre’s gym locker at Fit24, and also for his phone records and financials so he could irritate the judge all at once.
By the time we pulled into the shopping center, the warrant was sitting in Jack’s email. What used to take hours of tracking down a judge and hand-delivering paperwork now took a phone call and a few keystrokes. I loved technology. Even if the robots were eventually going to kill us all.
Fit24 sat at the far end of the shopping center, sandwiched between a nail salon and a sandwich shop. The sign out front promised 24-HOUR ACCESS and NO COMMITMENT, which pretty much summed up what you got for twenty bucks a month. Through the plate-glass windows I could see rows of treadmills facing a wall of televisions, and a handful of people going through the motions of their afternoon workout. This was a gym where people went to feel good about themselves for showing up, not the kind where anyone was getting punched in the face.
