I try to work the rest of the day and get nowhere. I can’t think about anything but Gavin and the mess I’ve made. At lunchtime, I trudge to the kitchen to scavenge for food, and I find a box wrapped in brown paper on the kitchen island. There’s an envelope labeled “Lily” taped to the top of the box. Hoping it’s from Gavin, I tear into the envelope.
Lily,
Your adversaries are growing impatient, and thus you are in imminent danger. Bring this file to the FBI immediately. While they’ve already boggled the tip I spoon fed them, hopefully this information will help them keep you safe.
Keep up with the martial arts training. You’ll need all the protection you can get.
You’ve surrounded yourself with good men. Your choice in roommates has kept you safer than you realize.
Trust no one. Even if they have a badge.
Keep your head down and stay safe. And for the love of Christ, stay out of the papers. Cost me a pretty penny to call the dogs off you last time.
LG
Well, fuck me.
Twenty-Four
I stare at the box for over an hour, too scared to open it. What the hell’s actually in there? Money? Drugs? My mind flashes to a movie scene—a young Brad Pitt staring at an open box with his wife’s head inside. Lorenzo wouldn’t send me a head. Would he?
I try calling Gavin but an automated voice answers, saying, “The party you are trying to reach is out of the service area.” Seriously? An international man of mystery like him isn’t on a global plan? I send an email, but it bounces back as undeliverable . I know he said that he’d be out of reach a lot, but it seems like he’s simply checked out.
My mind races. How am I going to explain to Max how I got this box? Everything I come up with I’m sure Gavin’s new security system will be able to disprove. Then again, Lorenzo did manage to slip the box in here undetected. I don’t have much time to mull over my story before Max comes home from work. I opt to go with a version of the truth.
When he walks in, he drops his keys in the dish by the door, then walks to the fridge to get a beer. He looks at the box. “What’s this, Lil?”
I shrug. “Not sure. It was by the front door when I went to get the mail.”
A look of horror crosses his face. “And you picked it up? What if it was an explosive? Fuck, Lily. I’ve got to call this in.”
An army of FBI techs shows up to determine if there’s a risk of a bomb or any kind of biological agent. Even though I know there isn’t, I play the part of the clueless recipient as best I can. When they declare the coast clear, all but two techs depart.
As soon as they walk in the door, Greene and Sully are yelling at me for picking up a strange, unmarked package.
“Yeah, yeah. I’m the worst, and I’m lucky to be alive. I’ve got it, Dads. Can we please just open the damn thing?”
The box contains several file folders. The first folder contains a series of photos and a note written in block lettering: “HE SAW YOU, BUT YOU DIDN’T SEE HIM.” The photos have captured a man in a hat with a camera clearly taking pictures of me. Based on what I’m wearing in the photos, I’m certain it’s from the days during our surveillance mission. The guy with the camera is right there, in the middle of everything, but we never saw him. There are dozens more from the past few months. He was there when I went to painting class, yoga, Meredith’s. There are even photos of me in Boston, at the conference and when I went to meet Gavin at the Top of the Hub. This guy has been following me for a long time.
The guy could be anyone. He does a masterful job of just blending in. Instead of Where’s Waldo?, it’s Can You Spot the Sociopath Sent to Kill Me?. I stare at his ever-present figure, trying to place him, but the shots are too grainy for any such luck.
The second envelope holds more information on places Ash may have stashed his money. There’s an address for an apartment we hadn’t known about, a storage locker, and two banks where he may have had safety deposit boxes.
The third envelope has more details on the cartel and how Ash became connected with it. There are pictures of Ash with a group of men that Lorenzo has identified as members of the cartel. Pictures of Ash with stacks of cash. Transcripts of conversations between Ash and the cartel members talking about him cleaning their money. How the hell these men—who are supposed to be cynical, hardened criminals that don’t trust anyone—couldn’t see through his bullshit is beyond me. I can’t even read Ash’s lines with a straight face he’s so clearly full of it.
“Well, Lil. Looks like your fairy godmother delivers again. Something you want to tell me?” Greene asks.
“No. I’m as shocked about this as you are,” I respond, hoping I sound convincing. I’m genuinely and visibly shaken up by the new information.
He cuts me some slack and backs off, not asking again.
Needing to catch my breath, I step onto the balcony.
Max appears beside me moments later. “It’s going to be—”
“Stop right there, Max. Don’t you dare say that it’s going to be okay. You don’t know that. This guy has been five feet away from me for months. Right under your noses. I’m not safe. Not by a longshot. At any given moment, he could jump out of the shadows. What did your guy say? They’d torture me until I give up Ash’s money. Well, that’s a great fate for me because I know jack shit about the money!” I yell into the night. “Hear that asshole? I’ve got no fucking clue where the money is!” As if he could hear me or would believe me. Angry sobs overtake me.
Max pulls me to his chest and strokes my hair, whispering reassuring words in my ear.
“I hate him so much it hurts, Max. If I could kill him all over again, I would and wouldn’t think twice.” Tired of wasting tears on Ash, I pull away and wipe my eyes. “Let’s go to the gym. I want to hit something.”
We head down to the gym in the FBI building. It’s much nicer than my living room. Max and I spar, and he gallantly allows me to kick the crap out of him. He doesn’t get on me about technique. Today is all about anger management. I fight till I can barely stand, and at that point, he forces me to call it a night.
“Let’s go get drunk,” he says. “Home or bar?”
“Home. With my luck, my sociopath stalker would buy me a drink, and I wouldn’t even know it. I think I’ll to try to catch Gavin quick first though.”
When I get home, I try Gavin’s cell again and get the same automated response as before. Right now, I want nothing more in the world than to talk to him. He always seems to say just the right thing to calm me down. Maybe it’s just the accent, but either way, I’m missing him deeply, which makes me feel even worse for not going with him. He did everything short of begging me to go, and I’d shot him down because I’m a coward. Now I need him, and I can’t reach him. This situation completely sucks, and it’s entirely my fault.
Max tries him on his cell as well and gets the same result. We even ask Greene and Sully to try calling, but no one gets through. Max promises to do some digging, but it won’t help me just now. Feeling defeated, I pull on Oxford’s sweatshirt and get into bed. At around ten, Max bounds into my room.
“Get your ass up.”
“No. My whole life is totally fucked up. I’ve pushed away the one good thing in it. I just want to lie here and wallow.”
“That’s all well and good, but I live here too. I’ve listened to you crying for two hours now, and I’ve had all I can take. I’m doing my job as a good roommate, and I’m going to get you stinking drunk. Let’s go.”
He drags me to his room and puts Mad Men on his mammoth TV—my favorite show on television and the best show to play drinking games to. Whenever someone drinks on the show, you drink. Whenever Don makes a girl swoon, you drink. Whenever someone does something morally questionable, you drink, etc. By the end of two episodes, we’re both three sheets to the wind, and I’m finally numb enough to drift off to sleep.
******
The sun wakes me up earlier than I would have liked, but I can’t go back to sleep.
I try Gavin again, but his phone tells me yet again that he’s still out of his service area. Desperate to speak to him, I call his office.
“Mr. Edwards’ office,” Snooty Smythe answers.
“Good morning, Mrs. Smythe. I know Gavin isn’t in, but I’ve been trying to reach him, and his cell phone is out of service. Do you have another way of reaching him?”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Clark. I cannot give out that information.” She doesn’t even try to mask her arrogant condescension.
Seriously? “O-kay... Can you please let him know that I’m trying to reach him? It’s kind of an emergency.”
“I will pass your message along to his staff abroad, and they will prioritize your message appropriately. Good day.” With that, the line goes dead.
What the hell does that mean? Did he instruct her to give me the brush off, or is she just naturally that much of a bitch? Are we over?
Needing to get a handle on what has just happened, I go for a run to sweat out all the tequila. Each time my foot strikes the pavement, my anger grows. By the time I make it back to the condo, I’m fit to be tied.
“Max!” I scream as I lock the door behind me. “Get your ass up. I’m done being a sitting duck. If they want his money, I’m damn well going to try to find it. I can’t spend another day hoping this is just going to go away. And I will not sit here in fear.”
He stumbles out of his room looking disheveled. He’s in boxers that hang indecently low, and his curly hair looks like a ‘fro. “Okay, Slugger,” he answers. “Let’s go to my office and look through the files.” He kisses the top of my head before ambling back to his room. “Just stop yelling. I still have tequila brain.”
We get dressed and meet Sully and Greene at the office. They’ve already been at work on Grimaldi’s file and tracked down the apartment Ash had been paying for. The name on the lease is a Crystal Steiner.
Huh. So Crystal finally makes an appearance. “We need to check this out,” I tell Max.
“When we were at that club with Em, a dancer came up to me asking about Ash. She wanted to know if I was looking for Crystal.”
He puts down the file he’d been looking at. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”
I shrug. “I didn’t want to get into it. Em would have tracked her down and strangled her with her stockings.”
He gets a dreamy look on his face. “Have I mentioned that I’m in love with that woman?”
“Yeah, yeah.” No matter how much I try to deter him from his little infatuation with Em, he’s still stuck on her. “Have you told Sabrina you’ve found your soulmate?
He throws a wadded up post-it at me. “Very funny. Speaking of that, I think S and I are done for good this time.”
“I’m sorry. You and I can be single and miserable together.”
“Hell, no. I’m a playa, baby. I’ll never be miserable.” Freckled white guys with crater-sized dimples should never use the word “playa”. They just can’t pull it off.
I groan and roll my eyes as he collects the files on his desk and shoves them into his messenger bag. “Come on. Let’s go track this chick down.”
I slide my jacket on just as Greene runs up to us. “We’ve found her,” Greene says. “She died about a month ago. Cause of death was an OD, but someone beat the hell out of her first. Raped her every which way. She was a longtime user and had been known to turn tricks now and again. Her file says she went clean after she had her kid. DC homicide didn’t think it passed the sniff test and have been holding on to it. Now that we have this connection, it’s pretty obvious what really happened to her.”
I feel like I’ve been slapped in the face. Grimaldi told me that living with Max had kept me safer than I knew. I haven’t really understood just how much until right now. The cartel’s only being careful with me because I’m under the watchful eye of the FBI. Crystal didn’t have that luxury.
She was only twenty and probably had no idea what she was getting into. I’m sure Ash must have come around with his big wad of cash and made her all sorts of promises. It worked on me when I was twenty. Why wouldn’t it work on her? Whoever she was, she didn’t deserve this. More importantly, her kid didn’t deserve this, didn’t ask for this bomb to be dropped on his life. The poor kid’s life is permanently screwed up because Ash couldn’t figure out that stealing from Mexican drug lords was a bad career move.
Max pulls out his keys. “They’re going to keep working at the Crystal angle here. Let’s you and me start with the banks,” he says, turning to me.
I nod and follow him to the parking garage. We drive out to Eagle Bank in Old Towne Alexandria. We arrive armed with a key ring full of random keys the FBI collected during their seizure of Ash’s things. One of them has to be the right key.
When the banker pulls out the box, I know the money isn’t in there. You can’t fit five million dollars into something barely bigger than a lunchbox. The banker leaves Max and I alone to look at the contents. The box is stuffed full of file folders filled with photos of influential men in compromising situations.
“Looks like Ash was in the blackmail business as well,” Max says. As he flips through the folders, his eyes grow wide. “Holy shit, he has the director of the DEA in here. A couple of Congressmen, some federal judges. This is some powerful material.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised. I knew that Franklin couldn’t have gotten all of his government contracts simply because he was good at what he did.”
“That’s Washington for you. You can only stay in the game if you’re paying them off or keeping their secrets.”
Glancing at the files, I say, “I wouldn’t be surprised if there aren’t more files somewhere.”
“Maybe,” he replies. “Maybe Ash set these aside for some reason. His death must have made some people very happy. They may not be too happy if they find out their secrets have been uncovered by someone else,” Max offers.
“Oh, fabulous. Just what I need—more people out to get me. This just gets better and better.”
He puts his arm around me and kisses me on the temple.
“I’ll be okay. I promise. Let’s bounce and head to the other bank.”
We put the box back and head to Nations Capital Bank on Pennsylvania Ave. This one is a ten-by-ten box, but it’s empty. If he’d had money here, it’s long gone.
“I watched Breaking Bad,” I say. “I know how big a stash of five million should be. The storage locker makes the most sense. We should’ve started there.” I pull out the key ring and rifle through the keys. “The file said the unit’s on H Street, right? And look! I’m guessing this little key here that says ‘H Street Storage’ is probably the right one.”
Max opens the door for me as we exit the bank. “You’re such a smartass. Fine, we’ll go. But then, I’m taking you home. It’s been fun playing detective, and you’ve saved me all sorts of warrant paper work. But, I don’t want you getting sucked too far into this,” he states.
“The Mexicans are looking for money I don’t have, and if Crystal is a cautionary tale, they’ll use me as a heavy bag until I either die or give them what they want. Sticking my head in the sand is no longer an option.”
He unlocks the car with his remote. Unlike Gavin, he doesn’t open my door for me. “I hear you, Nancy Drew. But you need some space from it so it doesn’t eat you alive. This is heavy shit. Spend too much time in it, and it’ll turn you black.”
His words stick with me the whole ride, and my stomach is in knots by the time we reach the storage locker. I pray the answer to my problems lies behind the unit’s door. But as always with things concerning Ash, I’m abundantly disappointed. The unit is full to overflowing with knock-offs: purses, shoes, jeans, wallets, luggage. No money.
I pick up a cute clutch. “Do you think they’ll take some fake Prada in lieu of their five mil?” I ask.
“Don’t let this get you down. You’d be amazed where people hide money. It could be stuffed inside the linings of that Louis Vuitton crap over there. I�
��ll get the crime scene guys down here.”
I scoff. “You’re giving Ash way too much credit. Hiding money in the lining of a suitcase is beyond his creativity level.”
Deflated, I walk back to the car while Max locks up. Halfway there, Greene calls to say that they’re still waiting on the warrant for Crystal’s place.
“Do we need a warrant?” I ask as Max reappears beside me. “Ash’s name was on it, right? So then, technically, it’s my place, right? I’m sure the key is on this ring.”
Max shrugs as we hop into the car. “It’s a bit of a grey area, but if you were to go and open it up and I just happened to be there, I think we’d be in the less-illegal section of the grey area.”
“I need to find this money, Max. I couldn’t care less if you can use whatever we find in court. I just need to get in there.”
“Let’s roll, then.”
It’s a short drive to the address in Falls Church, but far enough for panic to set in. I need to find a mountain of cash in this apartment. If not, I’m out of options. Game over. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars.
We pull up to a lovely little complex tucked away on a tree-lined street. I have to hand it to him—Ash found a cute place for his mistress. A nice place for a kid.
I try six different keys before I get to the right one. When we enter the three-bedroom apartment, it’s evident we aren’t the first ones to check here. The place is trashed. The couch has been torn to shreds, all of the tables and chairs are overturned, the walls have huge holes in them, and a bunch of floorboards have been pulled up. The bedrooms look as though a tornado has gone through. Every mattress has been gutted, and there’s stuffing everywhere. Someone was definitely looking for a hiding spot.
There’s no money here. Short of a miracle, I’m walking dead. Noticing a sledgehammer leaning against the wall, I see an outlet for the rage boiling inside and grab the heavy instrument. With each swing that smashes into the dry wall, I release a primal scream along with a rush of long-suppressed emotion. Fury that he left me holding a five-million-dollar bag that’s conveniently missing the money. Utter sadness from the hopelessness of my position. I don’t even hate the cartel as much as I hate Ash. In a warped way, they’re just carrying out their jobs according to their own rules. Ash knew what he was signing up for. The part that breaks my heart is that my life clearly had no value to him. I knew our relationship had diminished, but for him to act with no regard for me or my safety whatsoever just shows he didn’t care about me at all. I was nothing to him.
When Fates Collide Page 26