Most troubling, as far as Dominic was concerned, was the absence of any social media presence whatsoever. He knew from the few times he’d met her, as well as the charges on her credit cards, that she was a sociable, extroverted young woman—social media’s prime demographic. But she didn’t have so much as a disused Facebook or neglected Instagram feed.
Dominic trusted his gut, and right now his gut was telling him Juliette had something to hide. Sketchy as she was, however, there was no proof of a connection to the kidnappings.
An email notification flashed in the lower left corner of his screen. Grateful for the distraction, he clicked over to it.
McBride’s in-house forensic accountant had forwarded the report on her investigation into the four surviving kidnapping victims’ ransom payments. Dominic did his best to read it, but the dense financial jargon would have gone over his head even fully rested, so he skipped to the summary.
The payments had bounced around various offshore accounts before coming to rest in one owned by a shell company with one named proxy, Nicholas Fox, a phony identity as flimsy as a paper doll. The accountant intended to continue investigating, but her tone wasn’t optimistic.
Dominic reached for his phone.
“Detective Abrams,” Levi said a few rings later. He must not have recognized Dominic’s office number.
“It’s me; I’m calling from work.”
“Did you find anything?” Levi sounded as tired as Dominic felt.
Dominic told him about the email, and Levi made a frustrated noise when he finished.
“We got a similar report from our own accountant this morning,” Levi said. “All the names connected to the account are garbage shell companies and equally fake aliases. It’s a dead end.”
“How about the kidnapper Perrot shot? Any luck there?”
“Yes, actually, though I wouldn’t celebrate yet. I just got back from escorting him to the hospital. His wound got infected and they had to take him back into surgery. I’ll see what he has to say for himself when he wakes up.”
Dominic swiveled his chair around to gaze out the window at the busy street below, one block over from the Strip. “The named proxy for the account where the ransom payments ended up was a man.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” said Levi. Dominic could hear him typing in the background. “A woman could easily set that up. The identity is fake, anyway.”
“True, but I don’t think Juliette could pull this off.”
“Why not? Was her background check clean?”
“Not exactly. It’s just . . . I’ve seen histories like hers before. Either she’s running from something or she’s a small-time, low-level grifter. Either way, I doubt she has the skill set to arrange a complicated series of account transfers. And how could she possibly afford to hire mercenaries of this caliber?”
Levi hummed thoughtfully. “So you think that if Juliette were involved, she’d need a partner?”
“Maybe . . .”
“Like Nathan Royce?”
“For God’s sake, Levi—”
“Look, it’s not my fault your client is shady as hell. It’s long past time for you to confront him about this.”
“I can’t do that,” Dominic said through gritted teeth.
“Why not?” When Dominic didn’t answer, Levi said, “Because you’re afraid he’ll fire you? It’s not like you to avoid taking necessary risks.”
“I lost McBride’s trust because I took what I thought were necessary risks with a case.”
“That was a completely different situation; you know it’s not the same. If you’re so worried, why don’t you talk to McBride first and ask her advice?” Levi hesitated, and his voice was gentler when he said, “There’s nothing wrong with admitting you need help—”
Dominic spun his chair back around to face his desk. “Oh hey, someone just walked in. I’ll update you later, okay? Bye.” He hung up to the sound of Levi’s exasperated groan.
He propped his elbows on the desk and raked his hands through his hair. As much as he hated to admit it, Levi had a point. If he was apprehensive to take the next logical step in his investigation because he was concerned about McBride’s reaction, then the best thing to do was talk it out with her.
Swallowing his pride, he dashed off a quick email to McBride, asking if she had room in her schedule to meet today. Half an hour later, he was entering her office with the Royce file under one arm.
McBride waved Dominic into the chair in front of her desk with the hand holding her ever-present e-cigarette. “So what’s going on?” she asked in a deep, throaty voice roughened by decades of chain-smoking before she’d switched. “Problems with the Royce case?”
“I don’t know how to best handle the information my investigation is turning up.”
She paused with the cigarette an inch from her lips. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say anything like that before.”
“Yeah, well, there’s a first time for everything.” He handed her the file. “Here’s the problem . . .”
She paged through the file while she listened to him outline the details, her frown deepening by the minute. “You think it’s an inside job?”
“Maybe, but I genuinely don’t think Royce is involved. He doesn’t have the spine to hire a PI to investigate his own crime, or to kidnap someone he’d know couldn’t pay the ransom just to cast suspicion off himself.”
“That same lack of spine could make him an easy mark for a grifter, though.” She tapped Juliette’s photograph.
“That’s my main concern. The cops think Royce is behind the kidnappings, possibly with Juliette as his accomplice. From what I’ve seen, it’s more likely that if she is involved, she’s manipulating him without his knowledge. Though in that case, either she must have a partner, or she’s such a gifted con artist that even the things I turned up in her background check are fake.”
McBride continued studying the file, puffing on her e-cigarette and exhaling a stream of piña colada–flavored vapor. “If Royce wasn’t your client, what would be your next step?”
“I’d put Juliette under a microscope,” said Dominic. “Dig as deep as I could, get surveillance going on her, find out everything she’s doing and everyone she’s talking to. The problem is . . .”
“You have to report what you’re doing to Royce, and if he finds out you’re investigating his girlfriend, he may terminate his contract with the agency.”
“Exactly.”
McBride tilted her head back and aimed her next exhalation at the ceiling. “You’ve found no evidence of fraud or sabotage?”
“None. And there’s no proof that anyone outside the company ever accessed the list from which the victims were chosen.”
“All right.” She met his eyes. “Mr. Royce hired us to answer a particular question. Our duty as private investigators is to collect whatever information is necessary to answer that question by every legal means available to us. We can’t guarantee what the answer will be, or that the client will like it—we tell them that from the start.”
She inhaled deeply, then pointed her cigarette at him.
“If your investigation is leading you in a direction that’s supported by evidence and free of personal bias, what are you gonna do, ignore it? That would be a breach of your responsibility to your client. Now, I’m not saying you should sneak around behind his back. You need to be straight with him about where the investigation is going. If he decides he’d rather protect himself and his girlfriend than discover the information he was desperate enough to hire a PI to find, that’s on him. When a client fires you for doing your job right . . .” She shrugged. “You can’t control that.”
A knot loosened in Dominic’s shoulders, and he breathed a little easier. “This case pulls in a lot of money. I thought if I lost Royce as a client . . .”
“I’d kick you to the curb?” Belting out a raspy smoker’s laugh, McBride shoved the file back toward him. “The last time you fucked up, it was beca
use you were doing your job wrong. Every PI has times when a client would rather bury their head in the sand than face the ugly truth. Nothing you can do to change that. Just make sure you’re documenting every move you make.”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you.” Dominic grabbed the file and left the office with renewed resolve. He’d call Royce now, and let the chips fall where they may.
Friday afternoon, the tension in the substation was suffocating. The Seven of Spades still had two captives, and though nobody had shared information with Levi directly, he wasn’t blind to their agitated running around and frantic whispers and harrowed expressions. The pressure was on both the LVMPD and the FBI to find the victims before they died, but the Seven of Spades remained elusive. Ominously, they hadn’t contacted Levi or anyone else in the LVMPD, not even in reaction to Levi being removed from the investigation.
Levi remained at his desk, keeping his head down, ignoring everyone else even as they shot him suspicious sideways glances and went out of their way to avoid talking near him. Let people think whatever they wanted. His responsibility now was to the victims of much different kidnappers.
Unfortunately, that case was shaping up to be just as frustrating. Charles Graham, the man Perrot had shot, had gotten through surgery fine—only to immediately hire an attorney from the powerhouse defense firm Hatfield, Park, and McKenzie, essentially making it impossible for the police to communicate with him even as he continued recovering in the hospital under custody.
Levi’s search for the kidnappers’ safe house had been similarly unproductive. There shouldn’t be any jurisdictional issues to contend with, because the Clark County line extended beyond the range Perrot could have traveled in the time she’d been missing, and the Paiute-owned lands weren’t anywhere near the foothills. But it was still an enormous area encompassing a mix of public and private land—plus, there was no guarantee that any legal record of the property existed. Plenty of survivalists lived out here, and it wouldn’t be hard to build a secret cabin in the middle of nowhere and keep it off the grid of every utility company and government agency.
Even Dominic wasn’t immune to the strain. He’d called earlier to touch base, at the end of his rope because Royce had been dodging his calls since yesterday. When Levi had pointed out that this only made Royce look more guilty, Dominic had hung up on him.
The one bright spot had come from the Tribal Police. When Levi had reached out to them and explained the situation, their office had sent over months’ worth of security camera footage from the Snow Mountain Smoke Shop and its attached gas station. By comparing those recordings to the ones from the traffic cameras he had used to identify the kidnappers’ vehicles earlier that week, he might be able to make a match, even get a look at the kidnappers themselves. It was slow, tedious work, but it was the best lead they had, so he didn’t care if it took all weekend. His ass was glued to this chair until he found what he was looking for.
No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than his cell buzzed with a text from Leila.
Don’t forget, court prep @ 3 today. If you try to weasel out of it again I WILL hunt you down.
Levi rolled his eyes. I’ll be there, he texted back before returning his attention to his computer.
Hours of mind-numbing tedium, three cups of coffee, and a throbbing headache later, he hit pay dirt. He’d been pausing the gas station footage every time a large black SUV pulled in, comparing the make, model, and license plate to the stills he had of the kidnappers’ cars. It was a common vehicle type, so that had resulted in a lot of false starts.
But this time, in a recording dated February 19, the Chevrolet Suburban that stopped at the gas station had the same stolen license plate the kidnappers had used when they’d taken Rose Nguyen the next day.
As Levi watched, one man got out of the car to start pumping gas while another two headed into the smoke shop—all with their faces uncovered. His heart beating faster, Levi advanced slowly through the footage, taking a series of still shots until he had clear photographs of all three men’s faces. Then he added the images to the queue to be run through their facial-recognition program, along with a filter to search military records first.
That would take a while to go through, so he continued scanning the recordings, looking for any other occasions the kidnappers had stopped by the gas station. He was so absorbed in his work that he didn’t notice the time until it was 2:45.
He hated to stop while he was on a roll, so he called Leila and asked to reschedule. She would only agree to push their meeting back a couple of hours and have it over dinner in her office, and even that concession was made with poor grace, so he didn’t push his luck.
By the time he left the substation, he’d discovered two more incidences of the kidnappers using the gas station, and had gotten clear shots of six different men, including Graham. Now it was only a matter of time before those men were identified, and no power on this earth would stop Levi from bringing them to justice.
“This is ridiculous,” Levi said over the remains of his and Leila’s take-out Thai. “Juries don’t like me; they never have. What does it even matter?”
Leila looked bored, but since that was her default emotional state, it was hard to tell how much the past hour of fruitless coaching had added to her ennui. “I don’t need them to like you. I need them to respect you. People don’t respect cops who lose their temper on the witness stand.”
“I won’t—”
“Frankie Papadopoulos is the scum of the earth. He will use every slimy, underhanded tactic he can think of to discredit your testimony on the cross-examination. After Drew Barton’s trial, all the defense attorneys in the city know the best way to provoke you is through your connection to the Seven of Spades. And after everything that’s happened this week, that’s a more volatile powder keg than ever.”
Levi dropped his plastic fork into his dish and pushed his half-eaten food away. “I can handle it. I’m getting better.”
“I believe you. But we still need to practice.” She folded her hands on the table, her eyes intent on his face. “Levi, people respect you even when they don’t personally like you. You have an air of gravitas that people find reassuring in an authority figure. That’s always worked to the prosecution’s advantage in the past. I’ve read transcripts of your testimony in previous trials, and you never had an angry outburst in the courtroom before the Seven of Spades’s debut.”
“I’m doing the best I can,” he said wearily. “Do you think I want to be the kind of guy people think they have to tiptoe around in fear that he might fly off the handle at any second? I mean, God, I used to look down on Jonah Gibbs for his hair trigger, and now I’m even worse than he is.”
“You’re under a form of stress that’s almost unimaginable. The people who know you are willing to cut you some slack.” With a shrug, she kicked back in her chair. “Strangers, not so much.”
“Is it even that big a deal in this case? The physical evidence is overwhelming. Wilson was injured during the assault on the casino and picked up with his AR-15 still in his hands. There’s no room for doubt.”
She grimaced. “You’ve been a cop for too long to be that naïve. People are stupid. They make decisions with their guts, not their heads. So if Papadopoulos makes you look like a loose cannon, all the evidence you’re connected to will be tainted by association. I am not watching a Nazi skate on multiple homicides because twelve morons decided they don’t trust the angry detective involved in the case.”
She was right. A cop’s job didn’t end when the perp was in jail; providing helpful testimony for the prosecution was just as important as the investigation itself. He was letting his anxiety about the cross-examination get the better of him.
“I get it.” He blew out a forceful breath. “Okay, let’s go again.”
“Use smaller words this time,” she said as she swept the take-out containers aside and rifled through her papers. “Juries have to be spoon-fed tiny bits of information like dumbas
s toddlers.”
He couldn’t help laughing. “You’re such a humanitarian.”
They spent another hour first rehearsing the testimony Levi would provide as Leila’s witness—which was the easy part—and then practicing the cross, for which Leila took on the role of Papadopoulos. She didn’t pull her punches, either, which Levi appreciated. The only way for him to practice controlling his anger was to experience as close to the genuine provocation as possible. In fact, the whole thing reminded him of the role-playing he sometimes did in his sessions with Alana.
It wasn’t too late when they called it quits, and there were still plenty of cars in the parking garage next to Leila’s office building. Levi had parked closer to the surface, but he walked with her to her car anyway, telling her about his progress with the kidnapping ring. With any luck, he’d have gotten some hits on the mercenaries’ identities by the time he returned to the substation.
Even as he said that, she frowned and glanced at her watch. “You’re going back to work?”
“Where else would I go?”
“Levi—”
Her mouth snapped shut, and they both abruptly stopped walking. They were on one of the lower levels of the garage, between two rows of parked cars. Though nothing appeared out of the ordinary, the back of Levi’s neck prickled with unease as alarm bells went off in his head. Looking at Leila, he knew she felt it too.
“Something’s not right,” she said.
Before he could respond, multiple slamming doors echoed off the concrete as men emerged from cars in every direction. Levi automatically turned so his back was to one row, making it difficult for anyone to get behind him. To his right, Leila did the same.
The men approached them in a loose semicircle—eight total, all white, some heavily tattooed. Most were empty-handed, but one was swinging an aluminum baseball bat idly from one hand, while another was twirling a tire iron in lazy circles.
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