Page 10 of Velvet Vaughn

Leo studied the phone, and a lawyerly voice in the back of his head told him very clearly not to touch the call button under any circumstance until he had someone next to him who understood what answering it might mean. He laid the phone down on the desk next to the note.

Outside the window, the lights of Forest Park were starting to come up in scattered dots beyond the treetops. Forty-two stories below, a Friday night was beginning in restaurants and bars Leo couldn’t see from this height.

Inside the building, the hush had thickened. The HVAC ticked through its cycle in the ceiling above him. An elevator chimed faintly, and the doors opened on a level Leo couldn’t identify. He waited for the chime to come again and tell him the doors had closed. A second later, it did.

Leo had worked late in this office a hundred times, had stayed past midnight closing contracts. He’d slept on the leather sofa against the wall during the worst week of the Andy Bane trade. None of those nights had ever felt how this one did, with the sensation of being completely alone in a space that was much larger than one person and much easier to enter than he had ever bothered to notice.

Leo started moving.

Gathering the items Vic sent him, he shoved them back into the padded mailer. He folded the top over twice and tucked it under his arm. After powering down the Lenovo, he closed the lid and slid it into his briefcase along with its charger. He walked to the door, killed the lights, and stood at the threshold for a single breath, looking back at his office.

Then he pulled the door shut behind him and heard the lock catch.

#

The Range Rover handled Friday night traffic on Forest Park Parkway easily, justifying the indulgence of paying extra for the suspension package. Leo drove with both hands on the wheel, the radio off, and the briefcase on the passenger seat where he could see it. He let his brain do what it did when a problem was too big to attack head-on.

He started making lists.

First were colleagues at Pinnacle he would call in any normal crisis, ranked by proximity. Curtis Lennox, the managing partner, had recruited Leo out of his injury rehab six years ago and given him a new life direction. He’d sent flowers when Leo’s grandmother died. Jasmine Ortega, the firm’s general counsel, was sharp as a paring knife and Leo’s closest work friend. She’d once spent a weekend at Leo’s kitchen table helping him prep a contract without charging the firm for the hours. Brad Hatton, another senior agent, had repped a couple of Leo’s teammates back when Leo was still playing. Marcy Bell, his loyal assistant.

Leo didn’t believe any of those four were compromised.

He also could not prove that any of them weren’t.

That was the part that sat in his stomach like a lead weight. Leo had built a career on reading people, and he was good at it. His gut told him everyone on that list was clean. But Vic was presumably also good at reading people, and he was dead in a hotel room in Kansas City. I thought I had been careful. Look at me now. The whole point of Vic’s warning was that the machinery Vic had stumbled into could reach inside rooms Vic had thought were sealed. Believing his coworkers were uncompromised didn’t mean as much as it had this morning, because he hadn’t accounted for the possibility that they’d spent years showing him the version of themselves they wanted him to see.

He moved to the next list.

The cops. Leo had a contact at the St. Louis Police Department from a domestic violence case involving a client’s brother two years back. He had a friend-of-a-friend at the FBI’s St. Louis field office, a special agent who’d come up through college baseball and remembered Leo from his playing days. Both were almost certainly clean, but there was no way to verify it. The instant he walked into either building with a thumb drive and a dead man’s note, he would create a paper trail that others in the same building would see. Vic had insinuated that they have people inside places you would never guess, and Leo understood that Vic had not chosen those words by accident. Vic used places in the plural. He’d said would never guess in the indicative. Vic had told Leo, in the gentlest possible language a dying man could manage, that the cops were not safe.

A clean job meant a pro. Pro meant money. Money meant organization. Organization meant reach. Leo had no idea how far it went. He had no idea where the safe people lived.

He needed somebody outside of the sports world and any institution Vic’s enemies could touch. Someone whose loyalty Leo had not bought with a paycheck or earned through a favor, because both of those forms of currency could be counterfeited if you had enough leverage. They had to owe Leo nothing, and vice versa. This had to be somebody whose competence Leo trusted with his own life.

The list of contacts who matched all those criteria was literally one name long.

She lived four hours away, in a town on a lake in southern Indiana, on a compound owned by the only private security firm Leo would entrust his cousin to. His mind drifted back to the only night that mattered when he thought about her now.

Five months ago. Chloe and Kayne’s wedding at Duquesne Park.

He could still picture Anja standing at the edge of the gathering during the ceremony, reading the space out of habit, even surrounded by friends. He’d watched her watch everything. Then she’d caught him at it, and neither of them had looked away.

Leo recalled her apartment afterward. How she’d stepped into him without asking permission or offering any. How she’d kissed him.

He thought about the morning after, with the light coming in through her blinds in flat silver bands. Her voice, low against his shoulder, telling him to get some rest when they hadn’t slept all night. He’d left at six because he had to. She hadn’t walked him to the door.

Five months. He’d respected the closed door for every one of them, and it had cost him a piece of his sanity he hadn’t realized was on loan. He’d drafted, by his count, in the neighborhood of a hundred text messages he’d never sent. Some had been jokes. Others had been honest. Those had been worse, so he’d deleted them first.

Now he had a reason to call her that didn’t involve any of the things he wanted to call her about, and the relief he felt about that was its own special category of pathetic.

#

The Range Rover crested the rise on his street, and the lights of the Central West End opened up in front of him. Leo’s condo occupied the top floor of a modern glass-and-stone residential tower sitting just east of Forest Park, in a tree-lined neighborhood where most of his neighbors were doctors or lawyers. He’d chosen it for the floor-to-ceiling, east-facing windows offering a sweeping view of downtown St. Louis.

The furniture had been selected by a designer Chloe recommended. The kitchen included a six-burner Wolf range, a massive marble island, and a wine fridge. Leo cooked in it maybe twice a month. He ate at the island when he ate at home at all, which was less often than his cardiologist would have preferred, not that he actually had a cardiologist. Yet.

He let himself in, threw the deadbolt behind him, and walked straight to the kitchen without turning on the overhead lights. The reading lamp in the corner of the living room was enough. He dropped the mailer on the marble, placed his briefcase on a bar stool, shrugged out of his coat, and draped it over the next stool down.