by Elise Noble
“I’ve been through worse.”
Alaric squeezed my hand under the table. “That doesn’t make it okay.”
“I can talk. I just wanted to thank you. That’s why I came. And also to tell you that I’m not living in my flat at the moment. The food…”
Judd’s brow furrowed. Guess Alaric had forgotten to mention the part about the care package to him.
“What happened to your flat?”
“The police are in it.”
“Why?”
“There was a bad smell, so the council came. They took apart the plumbing and found… Eunice said it was pieces of leg. A person’s leg. Then all the stuff we normally flush down the toilet got stuck behind it, and the blockage got worse, and the bathrooms near the bottom of the tower flooded. Some of the pipes run behind the walls in my flat, so now the police are pulling them down.”
Oh. My. Gosh. I regretted the chicken I’d eaten for lunch because it nearly came straight back up again.
“They found body parts?” Alaric asked, and he sounded incredulous too.
“That’s what Eunice said. They didn’t tell me much, just said I had to go.”
“Go where?”
“To a bed and breakfast. In Ealing.” She cracked the tiniest smile. “The hospital is actually nicer.”
A door opened, not in the farmhouse but in the hospital. Judd’s head turned to the side, and I heard a female voice.
“Mrs. Millais-Scott, you’re awake. Good. How are you feeling?”
Hevrin looked puzzled, but only for a second.
“Much better, thank you.”
The screen went blank. Wow. Working for Sirius was like living in a soap opera.
Alaric didn’t say anything straight away, just poured himself a glass of water from the pitcher on the table. Me? I couldn’t stop thinking about the body parts. If we hadn’t found Gemma when we did, would that have been her remains in the drain? Despite the warmth, I shuddered.
“Don’t think about it,” Alaric said. “We did what we could. Gemma’s safe, and that sick freak’s dead.”
“But somebody else didn’t make it.”
“Don’t dwell on the past. It only ruins your future.” He sighed. “I know, I know. Do as I say, not as I do.”
Don’t dwell on the past. Those were words to live by. Logically, I knew that, but still…
“At least Hevrin seems to be keeping the secret about that night.” I tried to think positive.
“Seems to be.”
Alaric’s tone sent another chill through me.
“You don’t think she will?”
“Right now? I don’t know. I keep coming back to the logistics—how did she find us? She only lived on the estate for a month, and she’s a refugee. She’s got no network. No contacts. We gave her almost nothing to go on, and yet somehow, there she was.”
“You’re worried.” He had lines on his forehead, and I ran a fingertip along one furrow. “Is there anything I can do?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I’ll speak to Judd later, but I think Hevrin Moradi’s got her own secrets. And I doubt she’ll share them before she’s ready.”
CHAPTER 19 - EMMY
“SO, WHERE ARE we?” I asked.
Black wanted to have a recap before we left for Norfolk because this case had more tentacles than a genetically modified octopus. Nothing was bloody simple at the moment—apparently, there’d been a training accident at Riverley and Alex had broken ribs, but Rafael sent a message to Black saying he was handling it. Thank fuck. I didn’t have time to fix any more problems today, not with Dan, Alaric, and Bethany sitting at the kitchen table in the rental house, waiting to start. At least there were Danishes. Bethany had picked them up from somewhere.
“Damn dog,” Black muttered as he uncapped his fountain pen. I looked under the table. Barkley was sitting on his feet, her chin resting on his knees as she waited hopefully for any stray flakes of pastry to drop. Black might have complained, but he still put down his pen to scratch her head as Dan started speaking.
“Let’s start with the problem that brought us here—the painting. We’ve got two possible leads—the two men who visited Irvine here at the house. Stephané and the nurse have both worked with us to produce sketches. The man Stephané saw bears a vague resemblance to Dyson. See?”
Dan turned her laptop, where the screen showed the newest sketch lined up beside the drawing produced eight years ago when Alaric and I worked with an artist after our Atlantic gun-fest. Irvine’s visitor had been wearing glasses, and his hair was thinner, and his jaw was different. The same man? Possibly.
“It looks more like Nicolas Cage,” Black said.
“Stephané admits he’s terrible with faces. If this is Dyson, we’re chasing a shadow. Which leaves the second guy.” Dan clicked to another sketch, a much younger guy with a goatee. “Neither Harriet nor Stephané recognises him. Working on the assumption that he recorded the endorsement video, we called every professional videographer in a hundred-mile radius to see if they were involved, but so far, nobody’s admitting to it.”
“So far?” Black asked.
“Six of them didn’t answer the phone, and one man I spoke to sounded evasive. We’re following up, and I’ve got two interns from the Lexington office expanding the search radius to two hundred miles and also checking websites to see if anyone in the industry matches the sketch.”
“Leave that ticking along. Priority goes to Devane right now, and by extension, Eric Ridley.”
“Guilt by association?” Alaric asked.
“You could say that. Nobody hires a man like Ridley unless they’re strapped for cash or shady, and Devane claims to be worth two hundred million bucks. My sources say it’s more like fifty million, but that’s still not an insignificant amount.”
Her wealth came from family money—her father had been big in the aviation industry before his death nine years ago, ironically in a plane crash. By all accounts, Kyla had never done a proper day’s work in her life, although she did have a thriving Instagram account and got paid big bucks to flog make-up and turn up to parties. Oh, and she’d presented a short-lived reality show where rich people and poor people swapped houses for a week. Rumour said she’d disinfected her shoes every time she set foot in the projects and once squirted a Black man with Purell before she allowed him to shake her hand.
Alaric tilted his head from one side to the other. “Plenty to hire decent security.”
He ought to know—his parents were worth as much as Kyla, and they often had a bodyguard or two around.
“Precisely my point. Anyhow, I’ve had a word in the ear of a friendly reporter, and the American public will shortly be getting a reminder that Ridley was suspected of involvement in the murder of three little girls and their parents in Kandahar. Logan’s on his way there to see if he can dig up any further information.”
Alaric raised an eyebrow. “He’s going to Afghanistan?”
“I don’t believe Kyla Devane has an appropriate temperament to represent Kentucky in the senate, so it seemed worth the airfare.”
Black might have framed his motives as altruistic, but I suspected there was a teeny bit of self-interest involved. His genuine dislike of Ridley had come through loud and clear in our conversations over the last two days. But Alaric seemed to swallow the explanation.
“I find myself in unexpected agreement.”
Black ignored the jab. “I’ve also got our people in Syria taking another look at the incident off the coast of Latakia, but since Ridley was officially exonerated, I’m not sure it’ll help our cause to draw attention to it at this time.”
“Which brings us back to Kyla herself.”
“Yes. Assuming she is shady, it appears she’s also careful. We can’t find concrete evidence of any recent wrongdoing, just a whole lot of suspicious smears and rumours. It appears her ex-staff all signed NDAs, and she has a hair trigger when it comes to sending her lawyer after them. You mentioned you’d found somet
hing interesting, though?”
“It was Beth and Harriet rather than me, but yes. Kyla might not have been quite so discreet as a teenager.”
Alaric told us about two incidents—one where Kyla’s sense of entitlement was compounded by a boyfriend dumb enough to take the rap for her, fairly cut and dried, and another that sounded far more interesting. Black leaned forward an inch. He thought so too.
“Doesn’t sound hopeful for Piper.”
“No, it doesn’t. Although nobody found her car either, and that’s harder to hide than a body.”
“You’ve reviewed details of the case?”
“Harriet ‘borrowed’ the files from the sheriff’s archive. I’ve got digital copies of everything, although ‘everything’ isn’t as much as you’d expect. Apparently, the sheriff at the time of Piper’s disappearance was one of Daddy Devane’s cronies. The current sheriff’s more conscientious by all accounts, but he’s got limited resources and sees no need to reopen a case colder than the dark side of an iceberg. Piper’s grandmother still lives in town, according to Stéphane, but she’s got a reputation for being a bit out there so nobody listens to her.”
“Out there?” I asked. “In what way?”
“She believes Piper was abducted by aliens. Her buddies at the Saucer Syndicate stage a picket outside the Woodford County Sheriff’s Office every year on the anniversary of her disappearance, although in recent years, it’s turned into more of a general conspiracy theory-based rant.”
“I see how that could be controversial. What about her parents?”
“Never in the picture, so Harriet says. When Kyla and Piper started hanging out in ninth grade, Piper was the ugly duckling, but smart, and Kyla just wanted someone to do her homework. Piper managed to stay in the clique as she blossomed into a swan, but there was evidently tension between the two of them, which culminated in the homecoming queen face-off.”
“Wannabe royalty, tinfoil hats, and a body lying in a shallow grave. Maybe,” Dan murmured. “All the makings of a good novel.”
“Except this is real life,” I pointed out. “But you know how you love a good cold case…”
“I also love sleep.”
“You can sleep after the election. I’ll make you hot chocolate and sing you a lullaby.”
“Sing? You? I just said I liked sleep.”
“How about I promise to keep my mouth shut instead?”
Dan sighed and drained the last dregs of her coffee. “Fine, send me the file.”
Bradley had left me an outfit on the jet—a cocktail dress in deep purple, plain enough that I didn’t look like a tart but short enough for me to play the part of a trophy wife. Yes, some outsiders knew I was involved with Blackwood, but I never liked to disclose quite how hands-on my job was. Far better to play dumb and let people underestimate me.
Black was wearing his old dress uniform, which, let’s face it, was the only reason I usually went to these things with him. Not only did I get to stare at him in it all evening, but since our marriage had turned from a convenient sham into at-it-like-rabbits, I also got to peel him out of it at the end of the night. Bradley had booked us a hotel room nearby, thank goodness. Otherwise the cab driver might have got an eyeful.
“What’s the plan, boss?” I asked. “Do you want me in full vapid-blonde mode tonight?”
“I think so, yes.” Black cracked a rare smile. “You certainly look the part.”
I threw a tube of mascara at him, but the asshole caught it.
“Ah, you want me to go as a drag queen?”
“Shut up, Chuck.”
The O Club could have been any mid-budget hotel the world over—slightly tired decor, harried waitstaff rushing around, and an unimaginative menu created with a nod to profit margins rather than gourmet dining. The white tablecloth had a tiny hole in front of my place card, and my wine glass had a chipped rim.
But we were seated just one table away from Eric Ridley.
He was angled side-on to me, his uniform now a little tight across the stomach, and since he kept turning away to talk to the brunette on his right—he hadn’t brought a date of his own, she was somebody else’s—that gave me plenty of time to check him out unobserved. He’d changed his hairstyle since I saw him last. Tonight, the top was slicked back, the sides shaved. But paying a visit to the barber didn’t make up for his tendency to slouch. Every so often, he’d catch himself and straighten. Puff his chest out. He also liked the sound of his own voice. The others at his table struggled to get a word in edgeways, and I caught a couple of eye-rolls during a particularly long anecdote. Which fitted with Black’s assessment that Ridley lacked self-awareness and thought the lieutenant’s stripes he wore on his shoulders elevated him to demigod status.
I’d had a fair bit of practice at this shite, so I still managed to make small talk and eat as well as conducting surveillance. Also at our table of ten was another Blackwood guy, a former enlisted man who Black had recruited into our Boston office a few years after he and Nate started the company. Black did that a lot—snaffled up the good guys he met along the way—which meant our team was built on a solid foundation.
I went easy on the wine, watching, waiting for my chance. It finally came between dessert and the start of the charity auction when Ridley pushed his chair back and strode off in the direction of the bathrooms. The relief from his dining companions was palpable.
“Be right back,” I whispered to Black, picking up the oversized handbag Bradley had sent for the occasion. Black caught my hand and kissed my knuckles, and the lady opposite swooned a bit. I couldn’t blame her.
A moment later, I slid into Ridley’s vacant seat and smiled at the brunette.
“Hi, I was just wondering where you got your necklace? It’s really eye-catching.” In a gaudy, plasticky sort of way. I lowered my voice a touch. “Plus I wanted to escape yet another conversation about ships’ innards.”
“You like it?” She sounded faintly surprised. “It was a gift from my husband.” Ah, so she was wearing it under duress. “Honey, where did you buy my necklace?”
A faint look of panic crossed the man’s face, which was made all the more amusing by the captain’s stripes he wore.
“Uh, from the internet.”
“Which site?” she asked. “This lady wants to buy one.”
“I don’t remember. There was an ad.”
The brunette rolled her eyes. Men.
“Sorry,” she told me.
“No problem.” I picked up Ridley’s three-quarters-full wine glass as if it were my own, careful to hold it by the very bottom of the stem as I took a sip. Ridley had wrapped his fingers around the bowl each time he drank. I’d been watching him. And at one point, he’d swapped the glass into his other hand while he accepted a business card from the guy opposite. “Nice to meet you, anyway. Do you happen to know where the bathrooms are?”
She pointed me in the right direction, which I already knew. Ridley passed me on the way, and I couldn’t resist holding up his glass in an imaginary toast.
“Great evening, huh?”
“Sure is,” he said automatically, then his gaze rose from my cleavage to my face, and he scowled when he recognised me.
I held my smile, sweetened it to saccharine as I carried on walking. Ridley and Kyla deserved each other.
Locked safely in a bathroom stall, I tossed the remains of the wine down the toilet, then set the glass on the closed lid. Forensics had never really been my thing, but I’d spent enough time in the lab to know how to collect a set of fingerprints. Sure, I could have sealed the glass in an evidence bag and left it to the techs, but if this set of prints was smeared too… We’d be back to square one. At least if I did the work now, I could have another crack at Ridley right away if it didn’t pan out.
Carefully, carefully, I sprinkled graphite powder onto the glass, then gently brushed away the excess. Jackpot. Four fingers and a thumb near the bottom where he’d held the glass to drink, plus the same on the sides, and
they looked pretty clear to me. Phew. I’d got both hands. Once I’d transferred the detail onto sticky tape and stuck the prints onto a piece of white card, I photographed them and sent the pictures to the Cincinnati lab. Black had put them on standby. We’d have an answer as to whether they matched the prints on the laptop bag by the time the charity auction started.
My job done, I wiped up the mess, stashed the evidence in my handbag, and strolled back to my husband. How long until we could leave? I’d rather walk a tightrope over a lava field than listen to another round of speeches, and my fingers were itching to get Black out of that uniform.
“Home time?” I whispered.
“Prints okay?”
“Yup.”
He stood, a man of few words, towering above me despite my four-inch pumps. And we almost got away with it. A few nods, a couple of goodbyes, and we were almost at the exit when a bottle blonde in her late fifties stopped us, clipboard in hand.
“You’re not leaving, are you?”
There were some moments when being a billionaire had definite drawbacks, and trying to sneak out of a function right before a charity auction began was most certainly one of them. Black never broadcast his wealth, but they knew he had money.
“We’re just about to start our fundraiser,” she continued. “Everyone was so excited when they saw your name on the guest list because we all know how much you love to support injured veterans.”
“How about I just write you a cheque?” he offered.
“Where’s the fun in that?” She looped her arms through ours, oblivious to the fact that I wanted to sew her lips shut. “You can come sit at our table. Linus, could you get extra chairs?”
“Someone kill me now,” Black mouthed, but she didn’t notice.
“Next time, you can bring Dan as your date,” I muttered back.
Although I did change my mind half an hour later. Right after lot seventeen went up for auction, a signed football jersey from a player I’d never heard of. But it seemed Ridley had because he was locked into a bidding war with an admiral, and the price was up to sixteen hundred dollars and he was winning. Black waited until the last possible second, right before the hammer came down, before he raised his hand.
