Zian nodded and as I watched his eyes started to return to their normal, lighter hue.
“I thought heterochromia was a permanent difference between both eyes,” Kennedy objected. “I looked it up earlier.”
“It’s a rare condition,” Zian said as he got up. “Runs in the family.”
He propped himself up against the Prius next to me, affording me a good look at his injuries. He had a cut to the side of his head, but it had stopped bleeding. His PacMan shirt was torn in two places, but the wounds beneath seemed superficial.
I locked gazes with him. “You okay?” I asked.
He waved my concern aside and glanced at his totaled Prius. “I loved that car.”
“Yeah, I kinda liked mine too,” I said with a mirthless chuckle. “Now, about how you found us …?”
“I was heading to your place,” he explained as he started patting his pockets. “I thought we could figure out what happened to Luc together. Then I saw that … thing and I just improvised.”
“The fire department’s going to be here pretty soon,” Kennedy interrupted, indicating the blazing dumpster. “I’ll get us a cab out of here.”
Zian had picked up my knife while I wasn’t looking. After he had handed it back to me he pulled out his own phone, the screen intact despite the crash.
“I’ll send an SOS to my favorite towing company to get the cars out of here,” he said, his fingers working the phone’s screen. “I know some mechanics who can work miracles.”
“I’ll pay you back,” I offered while sheathing the knife.
“The Tartarus you will,” Zian retorted. “Everything from the tow to the repairs is going to be on the house. Just got to find some mundane office-related supplies my father won’t look at twice to file it under.” He winced. “If he saw how bashed up I was, he’d finish the job the Prius started.”
I remembered his father’s last text message to me and shivered.
Chapter twenty
Good run of bad luck
I groaned in pain when the smartphone woke me up with the upbeat “Do You Want to Date My Avatar.” A quick glance at my watch told me it was close to ten-thirty.
It took a couple of seconds for me to remember what had happened before I went to sleep. After our near-fatal encounter with the Berserker, we’d caught the cab Kennedy ordered a couple of blocks away from the dumpster fire. I was barely holding on by then. I hadn’t even taken off my jacket before I collapsed on my bed and was out in seconds. Now every inch of me felt heavy, bruised, and every bit as filthy as the trash I’d burned last night.
But one thing at a time … I picked up the phone.
“Yeah,” I grunted.
“Hey, Bell, it’s Zian,” my savior of the previous night said at the other end. “Just checking in to see how you’re feeling.”
“Like I was the one who got hit by two cars instead of that Berserker,” I admitted. “But I’ll live. You?”
“A little sore and a few bruises,” Zian admitted. “I need to see you right away. Some of the work I was doing at the offsite may have just paid off for us.”
“How?” I asked, straightening up a little more and doing my best to ignore the soreness.
“Better if I tell you in person,” Zian assured me.
“Umm, I don’t mean to be critical but wouldn’t me seeing you in person require one of us to have a functioning car?” I asked, moving myself into a sitting position.
“Just heard from my guys—both of our cars are ready for pickup.”
“That was amazingly fast, considering what kind of shape both of them wound up in. They must have worked all night!”
“Family connections go a long way.”
I rose to my feet. “So … any chance you might bring my Stingray over?”
“Absolutely,” Zian assured me. “Give me half an hour.”
“The way I’m feeling, I’ll be glad to give you two,” I assured him.
We rang off and I headed to the shower to clean up the filth and dried blood off my skin. I had just finished putting on fresh clothes when I heard a knock at my newly refurbished front door. I suspected that the people who’d been trying to kill me for the last couple of days wouldn’t be that polite, but it didn’t stop me from retrieving my Sig before I went to the peephole. The fisheye showed me it was Kennedy.
The look on her face when I opened the door was … well, overwhelmed might be the best way to describe it. She came in without a greeting and I shut the door behind her. She saw me peek back through the peephole to check she was alone.
“Nobody’s after me, Vale. At least, I don’t think so.”
“Morning to you too, sunshine,” I said, turning to her. “What’s going on?”
She licked her lips before taking a seat on my couch. “I can’t get last night out of my head,” she admitted. “That … thing … looked like a man but what kind of man shrugs off bullets like they’re raindrops and survives not one but two cars plowing into him?”
I was glad that she hadn’t realized that it was the Berserker who had plowed into my Stingray, not the reverse. “C’mon, Kennedy,” I remonstrated with her, “you’ve been a reporter long enough to know that there’s plenty of reasonable explanations for why he was able to take and dish out that kind of damage … steroids, PCP, body armor—”
The shocked expression on her face was replaced by an angry stare in my direction. “Sarah Connor didn’t buy that speech in Terminator and I’m not buying it now. I know you know more than you’re telling.”
I took a deep breath. “All I can say is that there’s a very good reason I’ve not been letting you know more.”
“Well, how about confirming the very solid suspicion I have that whoever or whatever we were tangling with is behind those wolf killings?” Kennedy asked, not letting me off the hook.
After the previous night, the truth on this one was the least I could give her. “Yeah … and I doubt you would have believed me before last night if I’d told you what that SOB could do.”
Kennedy’s face softened a little. “Well, it’s not like you didn’t tell me that this could be dangerous ...” Then she sighed a little huff of frustration. “But that’s not all what’s bothering me this morning.”
I sat down next to her. “What is it?”
“Ever since I woke up this morning nothing’s been going right,” she explained. She held up her right hand. Her otherwise flawless manicure had a couple of chipped nails. “That happened first thing this morning,” she said, putting her hand down. “On the way to work—”
“Wait, don’t you work the late shift?” I queried.
“Sure, but the head of the station doesn’t,” she answered. “I was going to see him about putting our little story on an exclusive basis.”
I nodded.
“Anyway, on the way over to the station, my car got an ugly scrape from a passing bike,” she went on. “It left a scar that’s going to take more money than I’ve got to buff out. Then I get an offer of coffee while I’m waiting for the big cheese and things get even worse—not only was it the vilest version of bean juice ever brewed, I wound up spilling it on my hand while my taste buds were kicking me for doing that to them.”
“Maybe you’re just having a bad morning,” I said with a shrug. “After the night you’ve had, and lack of sleep.”
“And I want to believe that, hoss,” Kennedy replied, looking at me with an eagerness that was two steps short of desperation. “I really, really do, more than I want to believe what you just tried to sell me about that man-mountain we ran into last night. But my guts keep screaming at me that this is something else … something bad.”
I was starting to get a little uneasy. I didn’t want to think that what was happening to her was what I suspected it was. But, like I said, I don’t believe in coincidence as a rule.
“Got any coffee that might taste better than that swill at work?” she asked, changing the subject.
“Can’t stand the stuff myself,” I admitted. “How about some green tea?”
“Sure. Just my luck today to come to the only guy in this city who doesn’t have any coffee in his kitchen.”
She eyed me as I got up. “You’re sure you’re okay? You look like crap and you’re taking beating after beating this week.”
“I’ll be fine, just need some sleep and rest,” I said, grabbing the box of tea bags from the cupboard.
That made me take my first real look at Kennedy. Despite the obvious short night, she looked fresh as a rose. She was wearing a peach blouse and a black pencil skirt over ankle-high black boots.
She looked suddenly apologetic. “Ahh, hell, I didn’t wake you up, did—”
“Nah, nah,” I told her as I poured water into my electric kettle up to the two-cup mark. “Zian already did that by calling me up just before you got here. Wanted to see if I was okay.”
“How ’bout him?” Kennedy asked as I fetched a pair of cups from the cupboard.
“Sore, but he’s good,” I assured her. “He’s coming by in a bit. Got time to stay and compare notes?”
Kennedy cast an appreciative glance around my place. “Right now, I’m thinking this is the safest place in Cold City for me.”
The water reached full boil. As soon as it clicked off, I set about making the tea. “So how’d the meeting go with Mr. Station Chief?”
“About as bad as everything else today,” Kennedy said with a shake of her head. “Somehow, my dipshit cameraman managed to lose the recording we made of that murder last night. I got blamed for that.”
“Why?” I asked, making a face.
“Hell if I know, Vale,” she scoffed. “Not the first time that I got shot down. But this one hurt. Not only was I not given the exclusive on this story but I—and I quote—‘needed to stop pretending that I was Lois Lane.’”
“Damn prick,” I muttered. More than one CO I’d served under in the Navy came to mind … ticket-punchers who took a sadistic delight in making their subordinates miserable. God help you if you happened to be a woman under their command.
“Hope this doesn’t make you think that I’m bad luck to you,” I quipped, only half-jokingly.
“Ahh, it’s nothing,” Kennedy said, pulling a notepad and pen from her purse. “Just jitters from last night mixed with a lot of disappointments this morning. I mean, c’mon, I’m shooting at a human tank last night and this morning I’m freaked out about a cup of coffee?”
The tea had steeped by then. I pulled out the bags and tossed them in the trash. “How much sugar do you want?”
“Just one scoop, thanks. Damn it, I swear this pen was full the last time I used it.”
I felt my gut clench a little at that last sentence. This many small things going wrong in succession was beginning to look like more than coincidence. So many coincidences in a row, in the circles I swim in, are usually anything but … Still, I did my best to keep the unease off my face as I handed Kennedy her tea.
No sooner had I handed the cup to her than the handle broke off and the mug fell to the table, shattering. Tea spilled everywhere, including on Kennedy’s bare legs. Thank God I’d let it cool down some before I brought it over.
We gave each other a look. It was a look based on a mutual acknowledgment of what was happening—coupled with absolute fear over what could be causing it.
***
I’d just finished cleaning up the mess when I got another knock at the door. Zian was waiting on the other side this time. He looked a little surprised to see Kennedy when he came in.
“Umm, I didn’t come at a bad time, did I?” he asked.
“Now why would you say something as foolish as that?” Kennedy challenged him. She had taken her shoes off and was half sitting and half lying on the couch as she finished drying her legs with a towel.
“Well, I mean, if you and Vale need a little more private time, I can always—”
“Stop digging, Z,” I warned, putting an arm around his shoulders. “You’re already in a deep enough hole.”
“Oh … oh,” Zian stammered. “I-I’m so sorry I ever thought—”
Kennedy shot me a look of gratitude then cleared her throat. “Let’s talk about something else, what do you say?”
Zian nodded and I let him go. He sat down next to her on the couch while I remained standing.
“You all right?” Kennedy asked Zian with honest concern as she slipped her shoes back on. “You took a hell of a hit last night.”
“Just a little sore,” he answered. “And glad everybody got out of that one alive.”
“So what do you have for us, Zian?” I asked, getting the conversation back on track.
“Everybody’s smartphone still work?” he asked, pulling out a trio of flash drives.
After handing us each one of them, he plugged the remaining one into his phone. Once he was sure we’d done the same with ours, he said, “Scroll down to page three.”
Kennedy nodded when she saw what was coming up on her screen. “I’ve been digging into these murder victims you told Vale about,” she told him. “All of them had rap sheets with gang and drug-related crimes plastered all over them. I couldn’t find any connection between them, but if they got in Ramon De Soto’s way, there wouldn’t be anything to find.”
“I don’t buy that for a second,” I countered. “Everything I heard, De Soto’s only that kind of brutal when all the better options are off the table.”
“What if he wants to send a message?” Kennedy argued.
“Then he does it with one guy, not four in a row,” I told her, knowing I was sounding more defensive than I needed to.
As we continued scrolling, I spotted a pattern emerging. “Looks like every one of them had some kind of ultra-violence charge on their record.”
“I’d peg them for local muscle,” said Kennedy.
“My money’s on Arete being behind these killings,” I said at last. “Blood is a very big expense but if they’ve got deep enough pockets to take on the city …”
“That matches up with the work logs of the late Mr. Kurtzenberg,” Zian remarked. “Check page nine. He had a lot of contact with Arete in the course of his work, helping them coordinate the Orion project.”
“That wasn’t all he was doing,” Kennedy added. “Like I told Vale last night, he was also doing some solo work on a couple of buildings.”
“In each one, he concentrated on one particular point,” I put in. “Anything unusual happen around the time of Kurtzenberg’s death that might tell us something?”
Zian thought for a moment. “Page fifteen.”
A look at the page in question showed how the legal wrangling between Fairwinds and Arete had heated up considerably around that time.
“When they weren’t taking on Arete, it looks like Fairwinds was going toe-to-toe with the city,” Kennedy noted. “That leaves us with the two more recent murders and the one that Vale here prevented. Also, the first signs of Arete popped up around the time that the first batch of killings got started.”
“Yeah, it’s in the file,” said Zian. “If you look at page twenty-three—”
“Do any of these records show that Arete was incorporated about a year and a half ago?” Kennedy demanded.
Zian did some quick flicking through his reams of data and then shook his head.
“All hard copy,” I surmised. “The incorporation paperwork was never put on a computer system. But it’s there for anybody else who wants proof that the outfit is for real.”
“It’s a classic shelf corporation,” Kennedy concluded.
“Umm, shouldn’t that be ‘shell corporation’?” Zian asked.
“No, no,” Kennedy replied, shaking her head. “I mean
t what I said. How it works is that the corporation is formed on paper, all the i’s dotted, all the t’s crossed. After that, nothing happens for a while except regular maintenance of the taxes and whatnot needed to keep it operating. Then, when it’s time to use it for what you needed it for, you take it off the shelf and get to work.”
“Like, say, when it’s time for a big gentrification project like Orion that you couldn’t justify in a city council meeting,” I speculated, tapping my chin. “Which means this ties in with somebody at City Hall.”
“I haven’t seen that hard copy you mentioned yet,” Kennedy admitted, “but I got a source I’m trying to develop … might hand it over to me in the next day or two.”
“So when did Fairwinds come into the picture?” I asked both of them.
“Page thirty-two,” Zian told us.
One quick scroll later, I saw that the official incorporation had taken place a full year before the first killing spree.
“Don’t bother looking up the corporate officers on those papers,” Kennedy advised us. “I checked them out and—”
“They were all bogus cut-out IDs, untraceable,” Zian finished, sounding embarrassed. “I sort of found that out the hard way.”
Scrolling down a little further, I came upon the various property purchases Fairwinds had made. “These addresses are all in the same area as the Cinema Leone, right?”
“Yeah,” Zian confirmed. “Almost everything that Arete and/or the city didn’t gobble up first.”
Further down, I found a long trail of correspondence between Fairwinds and Mr. Nicholls. The amounts being offered would have enabled him to buy a multiplex and self-finance it for a full year. But Nicholls kept sending back the same letter over and over. If you had to boil the verbiage into a single sentence, it’d be “no thanks.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s buried on this drive somewhere, Z,” I pondered aloud, “but just out of curiosity, how much—”
“—is Cinema Leone worth?” Zian finished with a smirk as he leaned back on the couch. “The figure I saw on the property value was something like half of what the city offered to take it off Mr. Nicholls’ hands.”
Hostile Takeover (Vale Investigation Book 1) Page 18
