When the meeting wrapped, I left the lounge and headed for Ava’s place.
Ava had texted me earlier that she had a stack of orders packed and ready to go, and I told her I’d swing by and take them to the post office for her. I loved that she had her own business and was really making a bag from it too. Ava wasn’t just sitting pretty waiting on some man to take care of her. She was building something, moving product, growing her name, and looking fine while doing it.
I had just stepped out and started toward my truck when two unmarked cars rolled up too smooth and fast. That made me stop in my tracks. The doors opened almost at once. Mallory got out the back seat of one. Two Chicago detectives got out the other.
I already knew from the way they spread that this wasn’t some casual little run-in.
Mallory came right at me. “Tariq Horton.”
I looked between her and the detectives. “The fuck is this?”
“We need you downtown.”
“For what?”
She stopped a few feet in front of me. “Questioning.”
I laughed once. “And if I’m busy?”
One of the detectives answered that. “Then we all stand out here making this look worse than it has to.”
I looked at him, then back at Mallory.
She stepped closer. “There’s an active missing-person investigation. You’re connected. Don’t make this harder than it needs to be.”
I should’ve told them all to eat a dick and call my lawyer. Instead, I looked around the street once, clocked the attention already starting to turn our way, and understood exactly what this was. They weren’t cuffing me. They weren’t reading me rights. But they were boxing me in just enough that fighting them in public would create more heat than going with them.
So I said, “A’ight.”
Mallory nodded toward the car.
The ride downtown was quiet and uncomfortable.
Nobody said shit to me, which was probably the point. Let a man sit. Let him think. Let him wonder what they really had and what they were just hoping he’d react to.
By the time they walked me into one of those plain interrogation rooms with gray walls, bad lighting, and a table bolted to the floor, I was already irritated enough to want to put my fist through something.
Mallory came in a minute later with a folder and sat down across from me and opened the folder.
“Sienna Langford is not just missing.”
I leaned back in the chair and looked at her. “Okay.”
“She was compromised.” I kept my expression blank, as Mallory folded her hands on top of the folder and watched metoo close. “And you’re the last man who would’ve known enough to silence her.”
I looked at her like she was boring me. “That’s what you brought me down here for? Theory hour?”
Her lips pressed into a thin line. “This is not theory. We know she was under pressure before she disappeared. We know she was involved with you. We know you were one of the last people in her orbit with any real access.” She leaned in a little. “And we know you’re exactly the kind of man who would react violently when a woman became a liability.”
I gave her the same thing I had been giving since the beginning.
“I told y’all already. The last time I saw Sienna, we hung out. We fucked. I left. Ain’t heard from her since.”
Mallory didn’t blink. “Do you really expect me to believe that?”
I shrugged. “I don’t care what you believe.”
She opened the folder and slid a few photos across the table.
