“A man like Stavros doesn’t get rattled by a local sheriff asking questions. He’s got lawyers, connections, layers between him and anything dirty. We’re going to need more than property records and shell companies.”
“We’ll get it,” I said. “The notebook is a start. The financials will tell us more. And when those phone records finally come in?—”
“If the phone company ever gets around to it.”
“—we’ll have the communications to tie it together.”
He was quiet for a moment. His arms tightened around me, and he pressed a kiss to my temple. “Come on. Let’s go to bed. Tomorrow we start pulling threads.”
“I’m not sure I can have sex here anymore,” I said. “Not with Margot cataloguing everything.”
He grinned and led me upstairs. “I don’t know. I see it as a challenge. Maybe if we do it enough she’ll realize how madly in love we are.”
He kissed the back of my neck and I shivered. “I don’t know. You’re probably going to have to talk me into it.”
“That’s my specialty,” he said, and pushed me back on the bed.
CHAPTER TEN
I slept like the dead, which was ironic given my line of work.
No nightmares. No hospital corridors stretching ahead of me, no locked doors, no silence where crying used to be. Just deep, dreamless black. Sleep that only came when my body was too exhausted to torment me and Jack had worn me out thoroughly enough that my brain couldn’t find the energy to spiral.
I woke to sunlight slicing through the large picture window and the smell of coffee drifting up from downstairs. Jack was a man who believed life was too short for bad coffee and bad women, and he’d told me more than once that he’d gotten lucky on both counts.
The clock read seven fifteen. Late for us. Almost decadent. My phone was on the nightstand, and I checked it while the rest of me worked up the ambition to move. Two texts from Daniels—lab results from the foot residue samples were being expedited, preliminary report expected by end of day. One from Derby—he’d pulled fifty-three building permits in the dock district so far and was finding interesting patterns in the ownership records.
From somewhere on the second floor, bass thumped through the ceiling in a muffled, rhythmic pulse that vibrated faintly through the headboard—Doug’s music, an electronic noise that sounded like robots having a nervous breakdown in a warehouse. That kid ran on energy drinks and obsession the way normal humans ran on sleep and good intentions. He’d probably been at it all night, mining the phone records and financial data Jack had forwarded, building webs of connection that only he and his digital girlfriend could see.
The shower was hot and quick, and I dressed for a day I expected to spend split between the office and fieldwork—dark jeans, a fitted black V-neck, my black blazer. Functional. Professional enough for interviews, practical enough to squat beside a body if I had to.
Jack was at the kitchen table when I came down, his laptop open in front of him and a cup of coffee at his elbow that he’d barely touched, which meant whatever was on the screen had his full attention. He was already in uniform—black BDUs, black polo with the sheriff’s office logo, his duty belt and badge laid out on the counter beside his windbreaker. Morning light came through the kitchen windows at a low angle that caught the planes of his face, the set of his jaw that told me he’d been thinking hard about something and hadn’t liked where the thinking took him.
“Phone company finally came through,” he said without looking up. “Daniels’s contact lit the fire. Dre’s phone records hit my email twenty minutes ago.”
That woke me up faster than caffeine. “Anything jump out?”
“Haven’t had time to go through all of it yet. I forwarded everything to Doug—he’s been up all night anyway, so Margot’s already chewing through it. But at a glance—there’s a burner number that shows up constantly in the last two months. Multiple calls a day, sometimes at two and three in the morning. And the last call Dre received was from that burner, Friday at 7:14 p.m.”
Friday at seven fourteen. Less than an hour before he was supposed to meet Tiana for dinner. The dinner he never showed up to.
“That’s the abduction window,” I said.
“That’s what I’m thinking.” Jack took a sip of his coffee. “Whoever called him from that burner lured him somewhere. Maybe told him to meet, changed the dinner plans, whatever. And by the time he realized something was wrong?—”
“He was already outnumbered.”
Jack nodded. “Doug’s going to trace that burner. Even prepaid phones leave a trail—where they were purchased, what towers they ping off. If we can place that burner in the dock district on Friday night, we can start building a timeline of where Dre was taken and when.”
I poured my coffee and leaned against the counter, wrapping both hands around the mug and letting the warmth seep into my fingers. The kitchen was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator, the tick of the old clock above the stove that had survived the rebuild, and the faint percussion of Doug’s music filtering down through two floors of hardwood and plaster like a heartbeat the house had developed on its own.
“Are we any closer on the shell companies?”
“Margot’s still working it. The domestic accounts are straightforward—Iron House LLC is Vic’s, and the money flowing through it matches the notebook ledger. But the offshore and crypto wallets are going to take time. We’ll need formal international requests, and those move at the speed of diplomacy.”
“So slowly.”
“Glacially.” He closed his laptop and reached for his duty belt, threading it through the loops of his BDUs. The weapon went into the holster, the badge clipped on to his belt, and the windbreaker went over everything—the thin layer of civilian camouflage that was supposed to make the public feel less nervous about their sheriff carrying a forty-caliber sidearm into the local breakfast spot.
