WHISPERS AMONG WOLVES

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REAGAN KEETER

Summithill Press

Atlanta, Georgia

Copyright © 2024 by Reagan Keeter

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are use fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

FIRST EDITION

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN  979-8-9874103-6-3 (ebook)

CHAPTER 1

Nick Chase stepped out of his office and headed for the elevator. Ten years ago, he could not have imagined his life would turn out like this. Back then, he was on the fast track to everything he’d ever wanted. He and his best friend, Theo Lockwood, both were. They had graduated from Princeton at the top of their class and pitched their idea for their company, Viberly, to a small group of investors who were eager to cash in on the social media craze.

The company had taken off like a rocket. Soon he and Theo were living the kinds of lives most people could only dream about. And when he married Samantha, his high school sweetheart, he felt like his dream had indeed become a reality. The company’s value seemed to double almost monthly. They moved from small offices to bigger ones, increased their staff. Theo even bought himself a private jet.

Sometimes Nick had trouble believing it was all real. He had grown up poor. His mother had managed to put food on the table working multiple jobs, but you could only stretch a dollar so far. She did not have a savings account or an investment portfolio and, needless to say, there was no college fund. And since Nick’s father had never been in the picture, he sure as hell wasn’t going to be providing any money for Nick’s education.

That meant, if Nick wanted to go to college, he was going to have to do it on his own. Loans were always an option, but after watching his mother struggle to make the most of every dollar she earned, he did not want to blow his future salary on wasted expenses like interest. Not when there were better options available to him. Ones he might be able to access with hard work alone.

Like scholarships, for example.

So that was what he did. Studying late into the night. Always aiming for straight As. Forgoing friends and parties. The only hours he spent without his nose in a book were those he spent with Samantha.

It paid off. He graduated valedictorian and was offered a full ride to some of the most prestigious universities in the country. He selected Princeton because they also offered to pay for his housing.

His mom could not have been more proud. She told all her friends about it. He would have told his if he had any. But he didn’t mind that he had only Samantha to tell. His decision to pass on any meaningful friendships, like so many other sacrifices he had made while in high school, had future-proofed his life. With a school like Princeton under his belt, he knew his resume would be as good as gold. Any door he wanted would open for him. Odds were he would leverage that to become a power player on Wall Street.

But that was before he met his roommate Theo.

When Theo told Nick about his idea for a social media platform called Viberly, the many possibilities Nick saw for his future immediately sharpened into a single option. The idea was good. No, it was better than that. It was great. Nick knew that right away. There would be no Wall Street hustle for him. Viberly, he thought, could set him up for life.

And until recently, it seemed to have done just that.

He graduated with a degree in finance and had immediately become CFO of a company that, at the time, had only a domain name and two employees, himself and Theo. But the rise that followed was meteoric. Viberly quickly proved to be one of those rare companies that had the ability to take the world by storm. It was a unicorn, by Silicon Valley standards.

Nick had convinced Theo to place the headquarters in Atlanta so he could be close to his mom. Sadly, while his star was rising, hers was on the decline. She had developed arthritis in her hands and could no longer work. Not that she needed to. Nick had paid off her house and transferred more money to her bank account every month than she could possibly spend.

Still, he wanted to be close to her in case she needed him, and since Theo didn’t have any loyalty to a particular city, that was where they went.

Theo and Samantha hit it off right away, which only made Nick’s life easier. She never complained when he had to work late or when he had to fly out of town to meet with investors. She was riding the high of Viberly right along with them.

It was a life filled with private jets and VIP rooms and resorts so exclusive that nobody blinked an eye when they saw Britney Spears or any other celebrity lounging by the pool.

But there was a part of Nick that knew a life like that couldn’t last forever. Not for somebody like him. People who came from his neighborhood did not rise to such heights.

For a long time, he tried to tell himself that he was merely suffering from impostor syndrome, that he deserved this, that there were even greater heights ahead. But now he knew the truth. He had seen the top of the mountain, and there was nowhere left to go but down.

He stepped off the elevator and into the lobby. There was a gray Suburban idling along the curb, waiting for him. The Uber he’d ordered. Nick had a Range Rover parked in the lot only a hundred feet away, but he wouldn’t dare take his own car for a trip like this. Sometimes fame was your friend. Other times anonymity was. This moment was definitely one of the latter.

He climbed into the back of the car. The driver did little more than confirm his name before quietly pulling into traffic. The trip would take Nick from one end of downtown to the other, and if he was lucky, he would make the entire journey in the silence he had enjoyed so far. He had a lot of talking ahead of him. And a lot of thinking he wanted to do before that.

Not that there was a lot of thinking to do. Nick had already made up his mind. The meeting today would simply be the official go-ahead. The final hand-off. The first treacherous step down that mountain.

His wife was going to be furious.

The Uber driver let him out near the corner of Parsons and Idlewood. Another busy part of town, almost indistinguishable from the one he visited daily. From here, there were two ways to reach his destination. He could circle around the block or cut through the alley straight ahead of him. Because he just wanted to get this meeting over with, he chose the alley. The sooner he got there, the sooner he would be done, Nick figured.

As he stepped into that narrow space, the darkness of the buildings engulfed him in shadow. He eased past dumpsters that exuded various foul smells. A group of homeless people crowded around a shopping cart turned and cast their gazes in his direction.

An uneasy feeling crept over him. Maybe this was a bad idea, he thought. He glanced over his shoulder and was considering turning around when somebody else stepped into the alley behind him. Nick saw the stranger for barely a second before the shadows engulfed him as well. But that was enough. In that second, Nick had seen the thick, untamed beard. The biker jacket. The size and shape of a man who could flatten him without the slightest effort.

Nick told himself the man was just another pedestrian taking advantage of the same shortcut he was. Nothing more. But as Nick sped up, breezing past the homeless people so fast he barely heard them when they asked for a handout, he looked back once again and noticed the man behind him was likewise moving faster.

A lot faster.

At Nick’s current pace, that biker was only seconds from catching up with him. Any illusions he’d held that the man might simply have been another pedestrian taking a shortcut immediately fell away.

Nick should have stayed on the main road.

He broke into a sprint, terror driving him forward and his leather dress shoes biting into his feet. If he could think at all, he would have told himself he just had to get to the other end of this alley before that man could close the gap between them.

But the distance was too great. The man was too fast. And before Nick could reach the safety of the busy road ahead, the biker slammed him into the wall on his right. The blow knocked the wind out of him. The bricks, slimy and wet, cut into his face.

Nick scrambled and fought and tried to push away, but it was useless. Then he felt the biker press something small and cold to the back of his head—something that was perhaps the size of a nickel. Something Nick instinctively knew must be the muzzle of a gun—and he stopped fighting.

“Wallet. Phone. Now.” The words were delivered in a kind of gritty whisper, inches from Nick’s ear.

With trembling hands, Nick pulled his wallet out of his pocket and held it up. “Here. Take it. Please, just leave me alone.”

The biker snatched the wallet from his hand, then repeated his previous command. “Phone. Now.”

Nick was not carrying any cash. But even if his wallet had been bursting with hundred-dollar bills, he wouldn’t have put up a fight. No amount of money was worth his life. The phone, though—that was something he needed to protect. Not for what it was worth. For what was on it. He needed the secrets stored in the ones and zeros of that device for the meeting he was about to have. So he did the only thing he could think to do in this situation. He lied.

“I don’t have it on me.”

The biker grabbed him by the shirt, jerking him away from the wall and slamming him back into it even harder than he had before. This blow not only knocked the wind out of Nick, it made him feel like he might vomit.

He fought hard to control the urge, swallowing the stomach acid that had crept into his throat.

“Bullshit,” the biker said. “Give me the phone—now.”

“I can’t. I don’t have it. I swear. Please. I have a family. I have a kid. Please leave me alone.” The words came out shaky, teetering on a whine. But with his fear came a clarity, helping him focus. Helping him stack new lies on top of the old one in hopes of playing on his mugger’s sympathy.

Nick didn’t have any children, and he hadn’t lied because he was afraid the biker would kill him. (Okay, that was not entirely true, but it was what he would have thought if he had been able to take a step back from the situation, to see it through the eyes of an outside observer. A mugger wasn’t interested in a thirty-year prison sentence.) But even if the man didn’t kill him, he might use the butt of the gun to knock him unconscious, then search Nick’s pockets until he found the device.

That would be just as bad as handing it over himself.

“Last chance,” the biker said.

“I swear. Please. I don’t—”

Nick did not hear the boom that ricocheted down the alley. He did not feel his knees buckle or his face collide with the pavement when he collapsed to the ground. He did not even have enough time to regret his lie, because the peace of mind he had not known for weeks had been thrust upon him in an instant. And now, in the darkness, that peace was all he had left.

CHAPTER 2

The next four weeks passed slowly for Samantha and even more slowly for her mother-in-law, Margaret. The fact that Nick was dead was almost unfathomable. Both women seemed to have trouble getting their minds around it. They tried to be there for each other, but as the days wore on, that became increasingly difficult. Each woman was fighting through the different stages of grief at her own pace, which would of course make their shared goal of mutual comfort a herculean task under even the best of circumstances. But what they don’t tell you about grief—what Margaret didn’t know until Nick died—was that those stages do not roll smoothly from one into the other. They are the jagged teeth of suffering, mashing you between them until they finally spit you out, a broken shell of what you once were.

Or that’s how Margaret thought about it, anyway.

And when the two women finally arrived at Connor Callahan’s office, they both looked about as chewed up as she felt.

A receptionist for Red Sky Investigators offered them each a cold bottle of water, which they declined, and then asked them to have a seat. She assured the women someone would be with them shortly.

Margaret collapsed into the chair immediately behind her. She rubbed her hands together, massaging her swollen, arthritic fingers.

“How long do you think we’ll have to wait?” Samantha asked, settling into the seat beside her.

Margaret shrugged in response. Samantha had felt the need to discuss every little thing since her husband had died, and Margaret had grown tired of the questions that, like this one, could not be answered.

Fortunately for them both, Connor opened the door and invited them back before Samantha felt the need to ask again.

Connor was wearing a dark blue button-down shirt that seemed too casual for an office, Margaret thought. Perhaps in part because it was wrinkled and untucked. Add to that the fact that his hair had apparently not seen a brush today, and she found herself wondering how good a private investigator he really was. After all, if you don’t tend properly to your appearance, how much attention are you likely to give to your job?

She was tempted to call this whole thing a mistake.

If it weren’t for Olin, who stood to shake the women’s hands when Connor led them to the conference table, she might have. But Olin appeared to be Connor’s opposite in every way imaginable. Instead of the wild blond strands Connor was sporting, Olin’s hair was dark brown, carefully parted, and precisely cut. He was wearing a button-down as well, but it was pressed and tucked into a creased pair of slacks, like it should have been.

He was—what was the word?—fastidious.

And then there was the woman. Dylan. She had her hair pulled back into a ponytail and was likewise dressed far too casually for an office. But as Margaret sized the team up, she decided that, in spite of that, Dylan might have been an even more compelling reason to stick around. She sensed a quiet intelligence in the woman that she liked.

Everyone sat.

––––––––

As Margaret was sizing up Connor, he was likewise sizing up her. Connor and his team did not take every case that came through their door. They had developed a degree of celebrity thanks to some high-profiles cases on both sides of the Atlantic, which allowed them to pick the ones that interested them the most.

“Why don’t you tell us what’s going on,” he said.

Margaret looked at Samantha and then back to Connor. “My son died last month.”

“That’s not the right way to put it,” Samantha corrected. Then she likewise met Connor’s gaze. “Nick was murdered. Someone shot him in an alley downtown.” She shook her head. “I . . . I couldn’t believe it. They took his phone and his wallet and they just shot him.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Olin said.

Connor was, too. But it sounded like Nick had been mugged, and if that’s all there was to this, he wasn’t sure how much his firm would be able to help. True, most muggers don’t kill their victims, but it did happen sometimes. The victim fights back. The gun goes off by accident. There were probably dozens of ways that a run-of-the-mill mugging could go so wrong. But no matter which of those ways had led to Nick’s death, this seemed squarely to be a matter for the police.

As gently as he could, Connor told the women as much, to which Maragaret replied, “The police aren’t doing anything.” There was a hint of desperation in her voice. “They don’t have any suspects. They’ve stopped returning my calls. I think they have just decided that he was in the wrong part of town and so it’s his fault that it happened.”

“I’m not sure that’s exactly what the police think,” Samantha said. “But she’s right. As far as we know, the police don’t have any suspects, and they have stopped returning our calls. I’m worried they’ve hit a dead end.”

“I don’t know if I would reach that conclusion just yet,” Connor said.

Margaret leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table and anxiously rubbing her hands together. “Do you know how many murders go unsolved every year?”

Connor did. Roughly, anyway. But the question was clearly rhetorical because Margaret had already taken it upon herself to answer.

“Fifty-one percent. That’s according to the Murder Accountability Project.” Then she fished around in her purse, pulled out her wallet, and extracted a picture from it. She placed the picture on the table. It was the headshot of a man in his early thirties. A man that, even without context, Connor knew had to be Nick. “You see that? That’s him. He was too young to die like that. And I don’t want my son’s death to fall on the wrong side of that number.”

Dylan, who was not reluctant to speak up when she had something to say, had remained unusually quiet until now. She looked from the picture to Margaret. “You said he was in the wrong part of town?”

“That’s the way the police put it.”

“Where exactly did this happen?”

“Close to the intersection of Parsons and Idlewood.”

Dylan shot a glance at Connor and Olin, and Connor knew exactly what she was thinking. Then she turned back to Margaret and gave voice to that thought. “That’s not a bad part of downtown.”

“I think what the police meant,” Samantha said, “was only that he shouldn’t have been there.”

“What makes you say that?” Olin asked.

“His didn’t work in that area, and he didn’t have any appointments on his calendar that would have required him to leave the office that day.”

Connor was about to say this was still a matter best left to the police when, perhaps sensing this, Dylan turned her attention to the women and asked, “Would you mind stepping into the lobby to give us a minute to talk?”

They agreed and got to their feet, exiting the room and leaving the picture on the table behind them.

Once the three investigators were alone, Dylan said, “I think we should take this case.”

“Why?” Connor asked. “This is a mugging. It is not the sort of thing we do.”

“He didn’t have any business being in that part of town. You don’t think that’s strange?”

“Maybe he was having an affair. So what? Whatever it was, it doesn’t change what happened to him.”

Dylan turned to Olin. “I really want this.”

Connor knew what she was thinking. Most of the time, they agreed unanimously about the cases they would take. But in situations like this, they would still take the case if two of the three partners wanted it. That made Olin’s the deciding vote.

“Why is it so important to you?” Olin asked, sounding like he was inclined to side with Connor.

“It’s just . . .” Dylan hesitated in a way that was uncharacteristic for her. She was normally defiant, unflinching. Willing to say what she thought, consequences be damned. Finally, she looked down at the picture, pulled herself together, and finished her sentence. “It’s just—the family should know, right?”

And then Connor got it. They had seen more death than anyone ever should, but none of those deaths had affected Dylan like this. Except one. Connor still remembered it clearly. The boom as the floor in the food court crumbled to nothing. Glass exploding. People screaming. A wall of flames churning and rolling from one end of the mall to the other, consuming everything—everybody—in its path.

Dylan was lucky to have survived the blast. All three of them were. But the man she had come to the mall with had not. And when Connor looked down at the picture now, he could see a resemblance between that man and this one.

Dylan had not taken an interest in this crime because she had some keen interest in putting a mugger behind bars. Rather, it was because she felt like she owed it to the ghosts of her past. A sort of survivor’s guilt, misplaced as it was.

Still, Connor could understand it, and because of that, he changed his vote before Olin could weigh in. “All right, since it’s that important to you, we’ll see what we can do to help the family out. But just so you know, this probably won’t amount to anything.”

Her attention shifted to the photo for less than a second before returning to Connor. “Thank you.”

Connor opened the door that separated them from the lobby and delivered the news to Margaret and Samantha. Then he invited them back in to discuss the case in more detail.

CHAPTER 3

There was little else to be learned from the women. Once they were gone, Connor asked Olin and Dylan to start digging into Nick Chase’s life while he went to meet with Detective Alex Shaw to see if there was any insider information the detective would be willing to share.

Alex had been with the Atlanta Police Department for many years now and had first come into Connor’s life when Connor had flown down from New York to help Dylan find a pair of sisters who had mysteriously disappeared only weeks apart. Since then, they’d had a sort of uneasy alliance. Connor knew full well Alex would not tell him everything the police might know about Nick Chase. But that seemed fair enough to Connor, because there were times he had not told Alex everything either. Still, any information he could get from the detective was better than none at all.

Alex suggested they meet at Willington’s Diner. Connor arrived ten minutes early, but the detective was already there, nursing a coffee. He looked tired. He always looked tired.

Connor slid into the booth and ordered a coffee of his own.

“What did you want to ask me about?” Alex said.

When Connor had first called the detective, background noise had made him almost impossible to hear. It sounded like he was standing right next to a jackhammer. For all Connor knew, he might have been. After shouting “What?” back and forth several times, Connor had hung up and sent him a text suggesting they meet in person instead, so it was no surprise this was the way Alex chose to start their conversation.

“I had a woman come into my office today,” Connor began. He felt like it complicated his story too much to explain that it was, in fact, two women who’d come into his office. He did not want to sidetrack the conversation with talk about how the women were related to each other or the victim he would mention in his next sentence. Besides, the specifics of who visited him were irrelevant. “Her husband was mugged downtown about a month ago. Nick Chase. I’m guessing he put up a fight or maybe the mugger just got spooked. Either way, Nick was killed. His wife said she wasn’t hearing much from you guys, so she asked us to see what we could find out.”

The detective did not look pleased, but Connor expected as much. He pressed on. “Do you know anything about that? I just want to make sure we’re not stepping on any toes over there.”

The waitress returned with a steaming mug of coffee for Connor.

Alex waited until they were once again alone before answering. “She shouldn’t have done that.”

“Look, between you and me, I don’t think we’re going to find anything. But . . .” Connor shrugged. “It doesn’t hurt to look, right?”

An expression flashed across the detective’s face that Connor wasn’t sure how to interpret. “I’m not sure I’d normally agree with that, but what the hell? You’re right. It’s not going to go anywhere. Our department has looked into that case every which way. The whole thing’s a dead end. We might catch the guy one day when he does something else, match his DNA to this crime, but right now . . .” Alex shook his head.

“So is there anything you can tell me? Anything that hasn’t been covered by the news?”

“You can tell your client not to waste her money.”

“Come on, Alex.”

“All right, look. I can tell you this. The mugger stole Nick’s phone and wallet. Not unusual, right? Neither was the fact that he didn’t max out the credit cards after the crime. Probably would have if he hadn’t killed Nick, but he was smart enough to know that running up a bunch of charges would have made him much easier to find. I’m guessing he took whatever cash he could, dumped the wallet somewhere, and sold the phone. The phone didn’t ping outside of the area, so he probably shut it off to keep us from being able to track his location with it. Add it all up, and you get exactly what I said you would: nothing.”

“That’s it?”

“I told you. Your client is wasting her money.”

CHAPTER 4

Connor returned to the office and delivered the bad news. Olin and Dylan, it turned out, hadn’t done much better. Perhaps that should not have come as a surprise, but it was nonetheless.

While Connor was a skilled hacker, Dylan knew far more about the shady underbelly of the web than he did. If there were secrets to be found out there, she would be the one to locate them. She said they had begun their search on Google and popular social media sites like Facebook and TikTok, which they used to catalog the information that was easily available. After that, they checked out his postings on Viberly and took a dive into the dark web where they scoured forums and other similar sites Dylan knew about. But when it was all done, every scrap of evidence they found pointed to a wholesome individual who had pulled himself up by his bootstraps and, against all odds, found himself in the C-suite of Viberly.

Of course, it wasn’t Nick’s success that came as a surprise. It was the lack of even a single secret. There wasn’t even a hint of one. And one thing Connor had learned since he had become a private investigator was that most people had a secret. Sure, they were usually benign, but secrets were as much a part of the human experience as breathing. They were part of the hidden self we all have. In the best case, they were the harmless guilty pleasures that all humans enjoyed. (You like that band? You watch that TV show?) In the worst case, they were horrors so extreme Connor sometimes wondered if even the person who kept the secret really understood their gravity.

“So much for an affair,” Olin said.

“Not necessarily,” Connor corrected. “We only know there’s no evidence of one online.” But, Connor had to admit, it seemed unlikely. In the case of an affair, there was almost always something online. A telling picture. A cryptic message.

Here, there was nothing.

Which meant they still didn’t know what Nick was doing in that part of town. Arguably, it was irrelevant. The police felt confident this crime amounted to nothing more than a mugging gone wrong. Connor had even told Dylan he felt the same way. But if they were going to do the job Samantha and Margaret had asked them to do, they were going to have to look at this crime from another angle. After all, trying to track down the mugger wouldn’t get them any further than it had the police. So, the most logical place to start was to find out why Nick was in that alley to begin with.

“He went there straight from the office,” Olin said. “Maybe somebody he works with would know.”

“Maybe,” Connor agreed. He looked at the time on his phone. It was too late to stop by Viberly today. Too many people would already be heading for the exit. They would have to visit the social media company in the morning.

Then they agreed they too should be headed for the exit and called it a day.

CHAPTER 5

When Connor stepped through the door of his apartment, he heard water boiling and smelled baked chicken. His girlfriend, Rebecca Strauss, lived just down the hall. But she had a key to his place, just like he had a key to hers, and they often treated each other’s units as if they were an extension of their own.

Rebecca’s dog, Chloe, circled Connor’s legs excitedly. The Pomeranian was always looking for attention, and Connor rarely disappointed her.

He kneeled down, scratched the dog behind the ears. “I’m home!” he shouted.

Rebecca came out of the kitchen to give him a kiss. Her curly blond hair fell haphazardly around her freckled face. “Surprise!”

Connor assumed she meant the dinner, since they both rarely cooked.

“What’s the occasion?”

“No reason. Just felt like doing something special. Go sit down at the table. The food is almost ready.”

Connor did as instructed.

Rebecca carried a pasta dish to the table that she said she had created herself, and then had a seat opposite him. The food leaned heavily on red sauce and broccoli and, even though Connor secretly had his doubts, it was indeed delicious—perhaps best described as an upgraded version of the spaghetti she had served him on their first date.

“You never cease to amaze,” Connor said. And he meant it.

Rebecca was as smart as she was pretty. She worked in the medical engineering department at Georgia Tech and had perhaps a dozen or so of her own personal inventions scattered throughout her apartment. There was the motion-activated sensor that would turn on the lights when she entered the living room, another device that would do the same for the blinds, and an automatic food dispenser that ensured Chloe’s food bowl was never empty.

She had offered to outfit his unit with similar gadgets, but Connor had declined. Even though he was a whiz with computers and appreciated her ingenuity, he liked the simplicity of his low-tech apartment.

He asked about her day and she asked about his, and it did not take long until the conversation worked its way around to the two women who had visited Red Sky Investigators, looking for Connor’s help.

“We’re going to give it our best shot,” Connor said. “But I'll be honest: I don’t have high hopes for this.”

Rebecca chewed her food slowly. The look on her face told Connor she was thinking seriously about the story he had told her. Then she repeated the victim’s name back to Connor. “Nick Chase?”

“Yeah, why?”

“The CFO from Viberly? The one who was killed a few weeks ago?”

“That’s right.” Connor was not surprised Rebecca knew who Nick was. He was a minor celebrity in the tech space because of Viberly’s success, and there had been plenty of articles covering the murder when he was killed. Olin and Dylan had found over forty when they began cataloging Nick’s life. Most were heavy on his career and light on facts of the murder since, as Connor had learned from Alex Shaw, there were few facts to be had.

“Why do you ask?” Connor continued.

Rebecca shrugged. “I guess I just thought that was all pretty straightforward.”

“And I think that’s exactly what we’re going to find out. I suppose it would be nice to know what he was doing so far from his office, though. Just so we can help tie up the last of the loose ends for his family.”

“Any idea how you’re going to do that?”

Now it was Connor’s turn to shrug. “We’re going to stop by the Viberly offices tomorrow. Maybe somebody there will know what he was up to.”

“You don’t think the police would have already done that?”

“I don’t know,” Connor said truthfully. Alex hadn’t said anything to suggest anyone from his team might have stopped by Nick’s office. Their interest seemed to be entirely on finding the mugger. “It’s all we have to go on, so I guess there’s no harm in giving it a shot.”

Then they ate quietly for a while. Connor thought about Nick and Viberly and how the company fit into the crowded landscape of social media platforms. “You know, I’m not sure this is the right time to say this, but I don’t understand why Viberly is such a big deal.”

Rebecca frowned. “I’m not sure it should be.”

“Have you used it?”

“I tried it once. You?”

Connor shook his head.

“They’ve got these groups of people on there. Some are friends. Others are based on interests. They call them bubbles.”

“Bubbles?” Connor asked. He attempted to keep his tone neutral, but the look Rebecca shot him suggested she could tell how ridiculous he thought that sounded.

“Anyway, you can join any bubble you want. There’s no gatekeeper who has to grant you permission. The only catch is anybody who was already a part of the bubble when you joined can kick you out if they want to.”

“What’s the point of that?”

“I think the idea is to democratize the process of groups. Everyone’s invited, but if you’re a jerk, you’re gone. And you can’t kick out anyone who came before you, so there’s no chance a bubble is going to be hijacked by some troll who’s just out to cause trouble. Seems like it’d be a good idea, but . . .” Rebecca’s expression suggested she was unimpressed.

“What didn’t you like about it?”

“Well, you can post anything you want there, right? You can make posts public or share them only with the groups you select. It seems at first glance like it could be pretty cool. But most people there are just talking about themselves. There’s no real engagement. It’s like shouting into the void, and what’s the point in that? After a couple of times visiting the site, I lost interest and haven’t been back.”

“Do you think you’d ever try it again?”

“Probably not.”

CHAPTER 6

While Connor was sitting down to dinner, Olin was stepping through the doors of Burt’s Gym. It was a members-only boxing club he had joined a couple of months ago when he was looking for a way to get more exercise back into his life.

Through high school and college, Olin had been the epitome of an athlete. He played basketball and soccer; he skied and he hiked. Then tragedy struck, and in a matter of only a few weeks, his life changed forever.

And with that change in his life came a change in his identity. Sports no longer seemed important. Nothing did. If it weren’t for his friendship with Connor and Dylan—which might have been the only good thing that came out of that tragedy—he couldn’t say for certain he would still be here today.

But all these years later, he was here. The world did not seem as dark as it used to, and he was ready to reclaim that part of his youth he had long since abandoned.

Boxing seemed like a good way to do it.

“How’s it going?” Albert asked with a wave as Olin made his way past the front desk. Albert had to be nearing seventy, if he hadn’t already gone sailing past it. The only hair he had left was a thin ring of white that wrapped around the back of his head and came barely to his ears. Like every other time Olin had seen him, he was wearing a red jogging suit and a Burt’s Gym T-shirt. The T-shirt was part of the uniform. Olin knew this because everyone who worked there wore one. The jogging suit, however, was by choice, and made him look a little like he had stepped off the set of a Rocky movie back in the eighties and never taken off his costume.

“Same as always, Al.”

The old man gave him a look.

“Albert. Sorry.” He didn’t like to be called Al, Olin reminded himself.

He circled the ring. Went into the locker room to change. Then he stepped back out onto the floor, slipped on a pair of gloves and began hitting a bag.

As he threw one punch after another, his mind began to wander. Back to the office. Back to the meeting with the two women and the conversation with Connor and Dylan that had followed.

Dylan had asked him to side with her when Connor said they shouldn’t take the case.

Why is it so important to you?

It’s just . . . It’s just—the family should know, right?

He realized later that his question implied he was going to say no too, but that was not his intention. He’d only wanted to know. Dylan was rarely so passionate about a case. If Connor had not spoken up first, he would have sided with her, no matter what she said. Something about the murder didn’t feel right. He couldn’t say what it was. There had been no evidence online to support that feeling, and Connor certainly hadn’t learned anything from Alex that might back it up.

Still, it persisted.

Maybe it was simply that Nick had no business being in that part of town. Well, hopefully they would get some answers at Viberly tomorrow.

“Hey.”

Olin spun around to see Carl standing behind him, decked out in gloves of his own and headgear securely stowed in the crook of his arm.

“Ring’s free,” Carl said. “You want to go a few rounds?”

Olin and Carl frequently sparred. They had both started around the same time and were pretty evenly matched.

Olin nodded. “Yeah. Sure. Let’s do it.”

He liked boxing for the same reason he had liked so many other sports. They helped him clear his mind. Center himself. And that, in turn, made him better at everything else he had to do outside of the gym.

Normally, hitting the bag was enough for Olin to find the inner peace he was after when he came here. Since that didn’t seem to be the case today, maybe a few rounds with Carl would do it, he thought.

CHAPTER 7

Dylan cursed under her breath. She had lost the key to her apartment. She had a spare inside, but that wasn’t going to do her any good right now. She didn’t worry about anybody finding it. There was nothing unique about the key, no way to know which door it might unlock. But it sure made life harder than it had to be when all you wanted to do was pour a drink and zone out in front of the TV.

At least she didn’t have to jump through the hoops so many others would in her situation. There would be no hunting down locksmiths for her. No waiting hours in the hall for him to arrive. This was a problem she could solve on her own. Because she was not only skilled at navigating the dark web, she was also damn good at picking locks. (Those were Connor’s words, but she knew them to be true.)

And it was a skill that had come in handy so often that she now always carried a set of lock picks in her purse.

She removed the two she needed from the set and inserted them into the keyhole, applying gentle pressure with one and pressing on the pins inside the lock with the other.

The whole operation took only seconds.

Once she was inside, she returned her lock picks to her purse, grabbed a beer from the fridge, and collapsed onto the sofa, exactly as she had planned. She flipped through shows on Netflix for a while. Found nothing she wanted to watch. And, like Connor and Olin, started thinking about their new case.

Except for her brief visit with Olin to Viberly.com earlier today, Dylan had never been to the site. She’d never had any interest. Nobody she knew used it. But it was a billion-dollar company. That sort of thing doesn’t happen without a reason. Was she missing out?

Dylan downloaded the app, started poking around. There wasn’t a lot to see that was available to the public. Nick had slightly over fifty posts, and that seemed to be more than most users. If Dylan wanted to understand what all the excitement was about, she was going to have to become a member herself.

So she did. After that, she just had to decide what bubbles she wanted to join. She glanced at the TV screen. The Netflix app was still open. A still for Stranger Things invited her to start the next season. That would do, she decided.

She typed the name of the show into the Viberly search bar and was met with more than a dozen bubbles dedicated to the series. Each included a brief description to help her figure out which ones she would like most. Some were dedicated to fan theories. Others to favorite characters. Dylan selected one that was marked as GENERAL DISCUSSION.

She expected there might be a delay before she was allowed in, but there was not.

The first thing she noticed was that the screen was animated and modern. A stark contrast from the public pages, which leaned into a bland color palette featuring various shades of blue. It was striking, she thought, and before diving into the content, Dylan studied the subtle movements that made the app so compelling. The way the background seemed to ripple like waves on a pond. The way the colors shifted ever so slightly as you turned the phone this way or that. She had to admit, she was impressed.

But then she got into the content, and that sense of wonder began to dissipate. While all of the posts were indeed on topic, there seemed to be almost zero engagement. No comments. No likes. Nothing. Just a bunch of people posting about their favorite moments or spouting theories about the Upside Down world the show featured.

After a while, Dylan began to wonder if this bubble was merely a unified feed of other related bubbles. Perhaps that was why engagement was so low. Perhaps, while posts might be shared between bubbles, comments were not. But then she joined other bubbles and quickly determined that was not the case, since they too were lacking any meaningful engagement.

Well, that was disappointing, she thought. Viberly might be for some people, but it was not for her. No matter how cool the graphics were, she had no interest in doom scrolling through a bunch of strangers’ comments, even if they were on a topic she liked.

She shut down the app with no plan to ever open it again and tossed her phone onto the sofa. Then she returned to Netflix, this time browsing with more determination, and finally found something to watch.

She did not look at her phone again until her show was over. There were layered alerts from Viberly across the bottom of the screen.

insideHAL wants to be your friend

bobby3212 wants to be your friend

jesslovesmike wants to be your friend

There must have been twenty of them in total.

What the hell? Dylan wondered.

She opened the app and clicked through the invitations to see if she recognized any of the users by their picture. She did not, so she rejected them all and went to bed.

But when she got up the next morning, she had ten more waiting for her.

CHAPTER 8

Connor thought about what Rebecca said all night. Although the police were chalking the murder up to a robbery gone wrong, they might indeed have talked to the staff at Viberly. And while it was still an important next step, it no longer seemed like a good idea to use all of their manpower on a task that could be done with less.

He pulled Olin and Dylan onto a call first thing in the morning and suggested they instead split up. “Olin will come with me to Viberly,” he said. “Dylan, I want you to go check out the crime scene. See what you can find out.”

Although the three investigators made decisions together about the cases they would take, Connor was the de facto leader of the group. It was a position that had developed organically, likely dating back to the day he had met each of them and the control he had asserted over the harrowing situation they had found themselves in at that time. Connor remembered it well. His parents were missing, Olin’s parents were missing, and they thought Dylan might be the key to figuring out what had happened to them. She was not, but the alliance they had formed had endured, and the roles they had assumed so many years ago had carried forward to this day.

The only difference now was that Connor was no longer the awkward college student he had been then. He carried himself with a confidence that can only be earned by staring down the barrel of a gun, and he carried a Glock 22 in a shoulder holster under his blazer whenever they went out on a case to make sure he never found himself defenseless in that kind of situation again.

That he did not like guns no longer seemed relevant.

“Sure, I'll do it, but there’s not going to be much to see,” Dylan said.

The implication: The police would have cleaned up that crime scene long ago. Any evidence that they hadn’t taken away with them would have been trampled by pedestrians or washed into the gutter when it rained.

She was probably right. But you don’t know what you don’t know. Maybe a nearby hotdog vendor saw somebody running out of the alley. Maybe he was off the day the police came around asking questions. Maybe he remembered something useful about the killer that could help them find him.

That was a lot of maybes. But that was also the point, wasn’t it? Unless they went down there and checked out the area for themselves, those maybes would always factor into the investigation. Connor did not want to leave them hanging out there.

He thanked Dylan and ended the call by telling Olin he would pick him up in twenty minutes.

––––––––

Viberly occupied the top six floors of a twenty-story glass building. The company name was mounted to the roofline on all four sides, and the letters, which had to be at least twenty feet tall, were painted a bright orange to match the logo on the website.

Connor and Olin made their way through the lobby to a security desk that was staffed by two men in uniform. At Connor’s request, one of them called up to notify Viberly’s receptionist they were here, and she came down to meet them.

She exited the elevator wearing a black pants suit and a matching pair of heels. She crossed the polished tile floor with a sort of military precision to her steps that suggested she was order incarnate. Her hair was pulled into a neat, tight bun, which only furthered that impression. As did the perfectly manicured nails Connor noticed when she offered a hand for them to shake.

“Jessica,” she said. “May I ask what this is about?”

Connor flashed his PI license. “We’re investigating Nick Chase’s murder.”

“I thought the police had that all under control,” she said quickly. “I don’t see how we could be of help.”

Olin flashed a smile. He could be a charmer when he wanted to be. “Just a few questions. Nick’s family asked us to tie up some loose ends. They don’t have any idea what he would have been doing in an alley off Idlewood, and we thought maybe somebody here might be able to tell us. You know, for closure.”

She considered this. Then she responded with a curt, “Hold on,” and stepped over to the elevators so she could make a phone call in private. Less than a minute later, she returned and said, “All right. Theo Lockwood told me he could give you a few minutes.”

She spun on her heel and marched back to the elevator before Connor or Olin could thank her. “Well? Are you coming or not?” she shouted over her shoulder.

Connor and Olin looked at each other, and then hurried to catch up.

Connor knew who Theo was from their research yesterday. He had been hoping they would get a chance to talk to him, but he did not expect it to be their first stop when they got to Viberly.

They rode the elevator to the top floor in silence. The doors opened onto a large space that looked more like a trendy coffee shop than an office. There were a couple of sofas along one wall. A bar with an assortment of coffee machines on the wall opposite. A few scattered tables in between. And way too many colors for Connor’s taste. Too many for anyone’s, really. It was almost as if the designer had set out to use every available color in his palette no matter how hideous it made the room.

The space was empty except for a single woman who seemed to be brewing an espresso at the coffee machine that was without any doubt the most complicated among the bunch.

“I guess this is what you get with a high-end tech company,” Connor said as Jessica led them through the lounge.

“It’s certainly not the kind of thing you would see at an accounting firm,” Olin agreed.

And he would know, Connor thought. Between the time they graduated college and started Red Sky Investigators, Olin had worked for such a firm. He was the reason their agency had stayed in the green during that first hard year and remained the reason it stayed on the right side of the law when it came to the IRS.

It was also the reason he was here now instead of Dylan. Had the case been different, had Nick Chase not been the CFO of Viberly but an ad manager or one of their many software engineers, it might have ended up like that anyway. But his expertise made the situation inevitable. After all, if any of the conversations they had here took a turn toward the company’s finances, Connor wanted somebody with him who would know the right follow-up questions to ask.

The woman at the espresso machine cursed as her cup of coffee went crashing to the floor. Connor and Olin instinctively turned toward the noise. Jessica did not. Which meant she did not see the woman blowing on her finger as if she had burned herself. Presumably because she did not care.

Seconds later, Jessica confirmed that assumption (at least in Connor’s mind) by saying only “Make sure to clean that mess up.”

CHAPTER 9

Jessica led Connor and Olin through a pair of double doors and into a dizzying series of hallways that took them past several large spaces packed with cubicles. Connor heard only the clackity-clack of computer keyboards and suspected these were software developers at work.

Moments later, they were weaving their way past a series of large offices. There were nametags beside each door, and floor-to-ceiling windows made it easy to see who was in and who was not. Connor took note of the names Jack Richardson, Amelia Bell, and Oscar Kelly. They were, respectively, the CTO, COO, and VP of Software Development. Depending on how things went with Theo Lockwood, he might circle back and speak to them as well. He also saw “Nick Chase” on one wall-mounted nameplate. Obviously, there was nobody in there.

Jessica dramatically pushed open the final door on their right. “Gentlemen,” she said, stepping out of the way so Connor and Olin could enter.

The door led to a corner office, which did not surprise Connor. Theo, he assumed, would not have settled for anything less.

The office had a massive oak desk on one side of the room and a glass coffee table surrounded by leather chairs on the other. Several large paintings hung on the walls. A drink cart with a crystal decanter on it had been pushed into the corner.

Theo was sitting at his desk with his back to the windows when Connor and Olin entered. Pressed black suit. Tie snugly knotted. Gold cufflinks on his wrists. Hair brushed away from his face and held firmly in place by far too much gel.

With his cell phone pressed to one ear, he glanced at Connor and Olin, then held up a finger to say he would be finished in a moment. “I hear you, Pat,” he said into the receiver. “Look, I got to go. . . . Pat? Pat, I got to go, okay? I’ll call you back soon.”

He hung up, tossed his phone onto his desk, and looked again at Connor and Olin. “Investors,” he said with a sort of mock frustration. Then he introduced himself and, with an easy smile, directed them over to the leather chairs. “What can I do for you?” he asked once they were all seated.

“We wanted to talk to you about Nick,” Olin said.

Theo’s smile fell away. He sighed as sadness now weighed heavily on his expression. “Yes, Jessica told me as much. How can I help?”

The change was so complete, so sudden, it left Connor wondering which of Theo’s two expressions was genuine. Maybe they both were. A man like Theo was likely skilled at compartmentalizing his emotions. To be effective at his job, he would have to be. With so many important people demanding his attention daily, he couldn’t carry the troubles from one meeting into another or everything could go to hell in a hurry. And he certainly couldn’t let the press get a whiff of any problems he might be having.

“We’re trying to tie up some loose ends for Nick’s family,” Connor said. “Do you have any idea what he was doing over on Parsons Street the day he died?”

“You know, the police have already been here asking that same question.”

Connor nodded like he already knew that. Of course, until now, it was only a possibility. Detective Alex Shaw had said nothing of the sort. Were the police likewise taking a closer look at the murder than they had let on? Or were they simply tying up loose ends like Connor had told Jessica they were doing? He wouldn’t get an answer to that here and wasn’t even sure it mattered all that much. They were going to do the job they were hired to do either way.

“We just wanted to hear it straight from you, make sure the police weren’t leaving anything out.”

Theo sighed, leaned back in his chair. “Well, I’ll tell you what I told them: I don’t know what he was doing there. But I sure as hell wish he hadn’t gone. We started this thing together, and now . . .” He shrugged.

“You can’t think of anything?” Olin asked. “No reason at all? Are you sure? Maybe he said something to you and you forgot.”

Theo shook his head. “I really wish I could help you, but if that’s all you came here for, I’m afraid you’re wasting your time.”

“What about his calendar?” Connor asked. “Did you check that?”

“Obviously I checked that. There was nothing on it at that time.”

Connor wasn’t surprised. He had heard the same thing from Samantha, but he had long since learned that you sometimes had to ask a question two or three times before you got to the truth.

“What was your relationship like?” he asked next.

“It was fine. Good. We don’t hang out like we used to, but the business takes a lot of time. I’d say we were as close as any two people could be considering everything that’s going on. What does that have to do with anything anyway?”

“Just trying to get a picture of Nick’s life before he was killed. Do you know whether he was having problems with anybody?”

Theo exhaled slowly. “Not that I can think of.”

Connor nodded.

Over the next few minutes, he probed a little more, but it didn’t go anywhere. He and Olin stood and thanked Theo for his time. Theo shook their hands. On his way out the door, Connor turned back to Theo and asked, “Mind if we see if anybody else remembers anything?”

“Be my guest,” Theo said, already moving back to his desk to resume a schedule Connor could only imagine was hectic. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help. But, listen, if this goes beyond tying up loose ends, let me know, all right? I’d like to know who killed Nick, and I’ve got plenty of money to throw at the right people if I think they can get the job done.”

Connor nodded and left the room. Once he and Olin were alone in the hall, Connor said, “You think he knows something, don’t you?” There was something about the way Olin had been looking at Theo. Like he had picked up on some small clue Connor had missed.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Like you said, Nick might have been having an affair, so even if Theo does know something, he might have a perfectly good reason to keep it to himself. I mean, if you were cheating on Rebecca and someone killed you, I wouldn’t say anything about it. There wouldn’t be any point. Can you imagine if Samantha had to shoulder not only the loss of her husband but also the knowledge that it had only happened because he was cheating? Something like that could really mess her up. She’d probably blame herself for the rest of her life. If I were Theo, I wouldn’t want to do that to her.”

“Fair enough,” Connor said. “But other people around here might not be so discreet. Let’s ask around and see what else we can find out.”

Olin agreed, and so that is exactly what they did.

From Amelia Bell, the COO, they learned Nick could be a little stingy. “He didn’t like to spend money, was always pushing us to do more with less. It was incredibly frustrating.”

From Oscar Kelly, the VP of software development, they learned he could be a hard-ass when it came to head count. “He made me justify every new hire I wanted to make. Like I don’t know how many people I need.”

And from Jack Richardson, the CTO, they learned he was always harping on licensing fees. “If we wanted to use any third-party software, he would ask for a breakdown comparing the cost of building a similar tool in house. That was an absolute waste of my time. If I thought we could build every tool we needed in a cost-effective way, I wouldn’t be coming to him to begin with.”

It all boiled down to the same thing: Nick had been doing what he was paid to do—he was watching the company’s finances. But none of them seemed to know why he had left the office that day, let alone what he was doing in an alley off Parsons Street.

Once Connor and Olin were back in the hall, Connor nodded toward Nick’s office. “Let’s check in there.”

“You sure we should?”

“If they don’t like it, they can come tell us to get out. But right now, we’re leaving with nothing, so what’s the harm?” Connor turned the doorknob, and Olin reluctantly followed him across the threshold.

Connor made quick work of searching Nick’s desk while Olin went through the contents of a nearby bookshelf. He rifled through the drawers, finding nothing, and Olin reported he had done no better. Apparently, anything of value must have been stored on Nick’s computer (which didn’t come as a surprise). But the empty docking station meant the computer had been removed. Even if it hadn’t been, they knew there was no way Theo was going to let them have a look at it. Companies like Viberly closely guarded their intellectual property.

––––––––

Of course, the executives were not the only people worth interviewing. After they were done with the C-suite, Connor and Olin made their way through Viberly’s floors, talking to most of the staff as they went. The conversations were short. A few said they had spoken to Nick in the breakroom or waved to him from across the hall, but many had had no interaction with the man.

It wasn’t until they reached a software developer plugging away feverishly at his machine that things took a turn. He was wearing a pressed white Polo shirt tucked into a pair of blue jeans and looked to be in his early thirties. According to the plaque on his cubicle, his name was Jeffrey Craft.

When they asked him about Nick, Jeff peeked through the door of his cubicle, perhaps to make sure no one was close by. “Nick spearheaded a big reorg of the finance department recently. Let a lot of people go.”

“We’ve been to the finance department. Nobody said anything about that,” Olin said.

Neither had Theo, Connor thought.

“They probably don’t want you to know about that because they’re worried about how it will look if the press gets hold of that information.”

“And why are you telling me about it, then?”

“Because Nick was my friend, and I got a feeling his murder was not quite as cut-and-dried as the police are saying it is. I must not be the only one either, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”

“Okay, so what do you think happened to him?”

“One of the guys he laid off—Asher Shields—he could be belligerent, argumentative. Always looking for a fight. You probably know the type.”

Connor had met a few people like that in his life.

“Totally creepy dude. I heard he’s got a stack of HR complaints a foot deep.” Jeff shrugged. “Maybe that’s just gossip. Either way, he’s the kind of guy I can see getting pissed enough to come looking for revenge, you know what I mean?”

“You think he killed Nick because Nick fired him?”

“I don’t know. But if this isn’t just a mugging, he’d be the first one I’d be looking at.”

“Did you tell the police this?”

“I tried. They didn’t seem interested.”

CHAPTER 10

Connor thought about returning to Theo’s office to verify Jeff’s story but decided against it. At least for now. Jeff had given them a lead, and for the moment, it was their only one. The least he could do for Jeff was repay his candor with a little discretion.

“Let’s go talk to Asher and see what he can tell us,” Connor said as they made their way out of the building.

“Does that mean you think there might be something here after all?”

“I don’t think anything yet. All we know for sure is we’ve got a company that wants to hide some layoffs and that one of the people who got fired had a temper. That’s still a long ways from making this anything more than a mugging, and it sure as hell doesn’t get us any closer to figuring out what Nick was doing in that part of town to begin with.”

––––––––

Connor parked along the curb in front of a single-story ranch house nestled deep in a quiet suburban neighborhood nearly forty minutes from the Viberly offices. Blue siding, white trim. A tidy patch of grass flanked both sides of a cement walkway that led from the sidewalk to the porch.

Connor had located the address when they got in the car and then tasked Olin with finding out everything he could about the man while he drove. Olin did not have Dylan’s skills when it came to diving deep into the internet, but for the conversation they were about to have, he didn’t need them. Connor just wanted the basics. What did the man look like? Did he have a new job? Had he been ranting on social media about his old boss or saying anything else of interest?

The answers were easy to come by.

Based on photos Olin believed were recent, Asher was thin, lanky, taller than average by a good six inches. He had a full head of brown hair that he parted to the side. Was always wearing a button-down tucked neatly into a pair of pressed slacks.

As far as the job went, he did not have a new one. At least, he hadn’t gotten around to posting it on LinkedIn yet.

And as for his posts online, they were all over the place. He shared funny memes, ranted about a neighbor who refused to cut his tree back from the property line, and made cryptic comments about his adventures with online dating. There was nothing about his job—old or new.

With Olin beside him, Connor approached the front door. He noticed a small tree close to the house with all of the limbs on Asher’s side littering the ground, giving it an awkward, lopsided look. “Seems like he took matters into his own hands,” Connor said.

“Yeah.”

Was that a sign? Connor wondered. Would a man who could be so aggressive with his neighbors be even more aggressive with his former boss? There was no way to answer that question with certainty, but it suggested there was reason to believe Asher did indeed have a temper. So, maybe.

Connor knocked.

Asher pulled the door open almost immediately, already ranting. “I told you, I’m not—” He stopped short when he realized who it was. Connor wasn’t sure if the comment was intended for the neighbor whose tree he had cut or if the man was in the middle of a fight with somebody else. Either way, it clearly wasn’t meant for them.

Surprise smoothed out the lines of anger that had creased his face, but he nonetheless remained ready for a confrontation. If that was not obvious in his expression, it certainly was in his words. “What are you doing here? Are you trying to sell me something?”

Unlike his online photos, he was wearing a bathrobe over a pair of plaid pajama pants and a white undershirt. He had not shaved in days. And he had a generally unpleasant odor about him that suggested he needed a shower.

Connor did his best to ignore all of that. So did Olin.

“Nothing like that,” Connor assured him. He flashed his PI license. “We just want to ask you some questions.”

Asher crossed his arms over his chest. “What about?”

“Nick Chase.”

“That piece of shit? What the hell do you want to know about him?”

“He was killed last month.”

“Good. Serves him right. Now, if you don’t mind . . .” Asher gestured toward the sidewalk. He could have slammed the door, Connor thought, and took the fact that he didn’t as a sign that he did not have to end the conversation yet if he didn’t want to.

“You don’t know anything about that?” he asked, while Olin continued to stand silently next to him.

“Sure don’t.”

“It was on the news.”

“I don’t watch the news.”

“Nobody told you?” Olin asked, finally joining the conversation.

“Why would anybody have told me?”

“I mean—you must know people in common.”

“Not really,” Asher said. “Not anymore. When Nick let me go, I was happy to leave that place behind. Viberly and everyone who worked there. Fuck them. I don’t need that shit in my life.”

Connor took a deep breath, preparing himself for the question he needed to ask, and perhaps the only one that really mattered. “Do you remember where you were on the afternoon of April nineteenth?”

Asher’s eyes narrowed as he processed the question. It did not take long before he understood the implications of it. The lines around his mouth deepened as his lips twisted into a frown. More appeared between his eyebrows. His arms dropped to his sides as his hands knotted into fists. Then, looking down at Connor and Olin like a giant might survey a village he intended to crush, he said, “You better not be saying what I think you are.”

Connor suddenly felt the weight of the gun hidden underneath his jacket. He could have the weapon in hand and aimed straight at Asher in seconds. But that would only escalate things.

Besides, Olin was already holding out his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. There’s no need to get upset. We’re just trying to find out exactly what happened. We’re not saying you had anything to do with it.”

Just as Connor could have used his gun to regain control of the situation, Olin could probably have knocked Asher off his feet with one well-placed punch.

“If you could just tell us where you were,” Olin continued, “we could put all of this unpleasantness behind us.”

“Why should I? You’re not cops. If they thought I had anything to do with this, they’d be down here themselves, wouldn’t they?”

“And let’s hope it doesn’t have to come to that. I don’t know if they would be as nice as we are.”

Connor noted another flash of anger, so he jumped in. “Look, we don’t want to spend any more time here than we need to. Please just answer the question and we’ll be on our way. I know you hate Nick, but we’re doing this for his mom, okay? She wants to know what happened to him. And the sooner we can determine that you had nothing to do with Nick’s murder, the better it will be for all of us, right?”

Asher mulled that over for longer than Connor would have expected. Finally, he said, “I was here, okay? I mean, probably. I can’t say for certain I didn’t pop out for a bite to eat or something, but most of my days have been pretty much the same since I left Viberly. I hit the job ads in the morning, watch TV in the afternoon. That’s about all there is to my life right now. Happy?”

Connor nodded. “Thank you.”

“You can tell his mom I’m sorry for her loss. But he was a shit, and it sounds to me like he got what he deserved.”

Then Asher closed the door, ending their conversation once and for all.

CHAPTER 11

Dylan took the subway downtown and made her way to the intersection of Parsons and Idlewood. The streets were bumper to bumper. Pedestrians flowed in and out of the surrounding shops as they shuffled their way into work.

There was only one alley near that intersection, which made identifying the place Nick had been killed easy enough. She stepped into it. The shadows from the surrounding buildings enveloped her. As her eyes adjusted, she noticed a small group of homeless people huddling near a dumpster fifty feet from where she was. She unzipped her purse to make her pepper spray easy to access in case she needed it and kept walking.

She moved quickly from one end of the alley to the other, giving everything she passed a once-over—for what? She wasn’t sure. Evidence of where Nick had died, obviously. But what would that be? Dried blood, maybe. (Although, as she realized before she set out, if somebody hadn’t already cleaned that up, the rain had probably washed it away.)

The three homeless people watched her pass but did not speak to her. When she reached the far end of the alley, she was not surprised to have found nothing.

She stepped back out into the sunshine and looked around. The only reason Nick would have walked through that alley would have been to shortcut his trip around the block. That meant he had to be going somewhere nearby. If she could track down his destination, that would be a big step forward when it came to filling in the last moments of his life. But she did not know whether he had entered from this side or the other, so knowing exactly where to start her search was anyone’s guess.

Well, maybe not anyone’s. There was no hotdog vendor, as Connor had suggested there might be, but there was the small group of homeless people she had passed. Two men and a woman. Any one of them might have been here on that day. And since she had nothing to lose by speaking to them, she did exactly that.

Dylan no longer worried they might make trouble for her. They had been quietly minding their business so far, so she approached them with the same ease she might any three strangers. A wave. A friendly greeting.

One of the men grunted. The other two responded only by casting their gazes in her direction.

“About a month ago, a man was killed in this alley. Any of you remember that?”

“You a cop?” one of the men asked. He was wearing a worn-out Braves cap and his face was caked in dirt.

Dylan smiled. “No, nothing like that, I assure you.”

“Why do you care?” asked the woman through rotting teeth. She had stringy blond hair that framed a round face pitted by acne.

Dylan resisted the urge to be equally snarky. She did not need to alienate the only possible witnesses she had at this point. So instead, she fished three twenty-dollar bills out of her purse and held them up.

Because this was what it would probably come down to. Money. These people did not care why she wanted to know, she figured. And as long as she wasn’t a cop, they didn’t have any reason to talk to her. They had to be incentivized.

“Were any of you here or not?”

The trio looked at each other, mumbling incoherently.

“I was here,” the man in the Braves cap said, holding his hand out.

“Answer my questions first,” Dylan responded.

With a look of annoyance, the man’s hand fell back to his side. But he grunted again, this time suggesting he agreed to her terms.

“What did you see?”

“Saw a man in a suit enter from down that way.” He pointed toward Dylan’s right. “He was already walking pretty quick, but when another fella entered the alley behind him, let me tell you—he really started to move. Almost like he knew what was coming.”

The homeless man who had so far remained silent mimicked running scared and laughed. The woman punched him in the arm.

“He was just about at the end of the alley when the second fella slammed him up against the wall and shot him in the back of the head,” the man in the Braves cap continued.

“Just like that?” Dylan asked. “He just pushed the man into the wall and shot him?”

“No. I mean, not that quick. Looked like he was saying something to him, but I was too far away to hear what it was.”

“What did the other man look like?”

“Big fella. Biker jacket. Beard. Kinda like a . . . like a ZZ Top wannabe or something.”

“That’s it?”

He shrugged. “Pretty much. Looked like he might have picked the man’s pockets or something after he was dead. Then he came back this way, slipped out of the alley, and I ain’t never seen him again.”

“And what did you do?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did you go check on him or anything? See if he needed help?”

“Does he look stupid to you?” the woman asked, while at the same time, the man in the Braves cap responded, “Hell, no, I didn’t go check on him. I got the hell out of the alley, that’s what I did. If the cops showed up and saw me hovering over that man’s body, who do you think they’d blame for it? I don’t need that sort of trouble.”

Dylan wasn’t sure whether the cops would have indeed blamed him for the murder. He might be homeless, but he was also presumably unarmed. And even if he did have a gun hidden somewhere on him, a ballistics test would prove it wasn’t a match for the murder weapon.

If they did a ballistics test, said a little voice in the back of her head. Whether he was armed or not, the police might simply be happy to have somebody to blame for such a high-profile murder. Dylan could see a situation where they might twist the facts to suit their theory, and despite the homeless man’s protests of innocence, the overworked public defense attorney assigned to him would do little to put up a fight.

She passed over the money—“Thanks for your time”—then headed back down the alley to have one more look around. She still didn’t think she would find anything, but at least this time she had some idea where and how the murder had happened.

CHAPTER 12

She was right. There was no evidence to be found in that alley. Nothing Dylan could see with the naked eye, anyway. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t evidence to be found elsewhere.

She stepped back into the sunlight. Studied the buildings around her to see if she might be able to figure out where Nick was going. There was a Mailboxes Etc., a Subway, and a Starbucks all within sight. There were also dozens of office buildings and, within those, probably hundreds of businesses. From where she stood, none of them seemed like an obvious destination. And since going door to door would be too much work for one person, she formed another plan. She turned and headed back down the alley.

“You lost?” joked the homeless woman as Dylan passed her once again.

When she came out the other side, she had another look around. This time, she was not looking for a destination; she was looking for security cameras. The police would have likely already done the same, but who’s to say they hadn’t missed something? Either way, there was no harm in it.

She saw none that were obvious within sight of the alley, so she decided she would have to start knocking on doors, so to speak. It did not take long before she came across a woman in a magazine shop who was willing to help.

“Yeah, we got a security camera out front,” she said, standing behind the counter and smacking on a piece of gum. She was perhaps eighteen and had an I-don’t-give-a-shit vibe about her that Dylan recognized from her own youth. Her nametag identified her as Bennie. “You want to see what’s on it?”

Bennie did not ask if Dylan was a cop or to see her PI license or even why she wanted to get a look at the footage. As Dylan had already observed, she didn’t give a shit.

“If you don’t mind.”

Bennie nodded for Dylan to follow her to the back of the store. The room was packed so tightly with boxes, they had to move through it single file. When they reached the computer along the back wall, Bennie pushed a few boxes out of the way, giving them enough room to finally stand side by side.

She sat down at the aging, chipped desk and brought up the security feed. Then she provided a quick tutorial on how the software worked and moved out of the way to let Dylan take control.

Although the magazine shop was located directly across the street from the alley, the camera had been angled in such a way that she could not see it. But she could see the street, and that, she decided, still might be enough.

She used the search fields to locate a specific date and time—four p.m. on April 19—and advanced the footage at four times its normal speed. From the facts she had gathered online about the murder, she knew somebody had reported gunfire at around four forty. That meant she had less than an hour’s worth of video to review.

Bennie hovered behind her, watching the world fly past on the monitor. “Whatcha looking for?”

Dylan didn’t answer. She didn’t even hear the question. All of her attention was on the screen, waiting to see a flash of Nick as he passed by.

It happened so quick she almost missed it. This close to the alley, she was expecting him to be on foot, and thus she was focused on the pedestrians moving in and out of the frame. But something at the top of the screen—something that came and went in a flash—compelled her to rewind the footage a little and watch it again, this time in slow motion.

When she did, she saw a car pull up to the curb on the opposite side of the street. A man opened the rear passenger door and stepped out with his back to the magazine shop. If he had not turned toward the driver as he was standing, he would have been nothing but hair and a suit.

Dylan backed up the footage again, this time pausing on the single frame where she could see the man’s face. Although she was certain this was Nick, she pulled up a picture of him on her phone to confirm she was correct. It was a picture she had downloaded from the Viberly website. In it, he was wearing a navy-blue suit, his tie held perfectly in place by a Windsor knot and his expression the very epitome of seriousness.

“That’s who you’re looking for?” Bennie asked.

This time, Dylan acknowledged her. “You know him?”

“No, but I’ve seen the news stories. I heard about what happened to him.”

Dylan pressed Play and let the footage run at normal speed. In addition to Nick’s face, she had noticed an Uber sticker stuck to the driver’s windshield. She was not able to see the license plate, though, so there would be no tracking down the driver to find out if Nick might have told him anything.

“Have the police seen this?” she asked.

Bennie shrugged.

Dylan hoped that meant she had found a lead no one else had. Of course, she realized, they might have come by when someone else was working, but she kept her eyes glued to the screen just in case she was right.

According to the timestamp on the video, Nick had stepped out of the car at 4:32 p.m. That left a scant ten minutes for the killer to arrive, kill Nick, and come barreling out this end of the alley.

At 4:38, she saw a man crossing in front of the magazine shop flinch and turn his head quickly toward the alley. Then he frantically pulled his phone out of his pocket and placed a call. There was no sound on the video, but she assumed that he was reacting to gunfire, dialing 911, which meant that had to be the precise moment Nick was killed.

There had been no ZZ Top wannabe crossing in front of the magazine shop’s camera before the murder. After another three minutes, she was confident in concluding there had not been one to cross in front of it afterwards, either.

CHAPTER 13

Connor and Olin were already back at the office, huddled around Connor’s computer and doing a deep dive into Asher’s life by the time Dylan returned. She slid a chair over to Connor’s desk and collapsed into it. “Find out anything useful?” she asked.

“Maybe,” Olin said. “Nick put his department through a round of layoffs shortly before the murder, and one of the people he fired has got one hell of a temper.”

“Really?”

“Not much of an alibi, either. Says he was at home watching TV.”

“Big guy? Beard?”

Connor, who had continued to punch at his keyboard until now, slid back from desk. He could tell from Dylan’s questions that she had something. “No. Why?”

“Because that’s what our killer looks like.”

“How do you know that?”

She told them about her conversation with the homeless people and how it had led her to the magazine shop’s footage. “Unfortunately, he didn’t pass by the shop on his way out of the alley, but we’ve got more to go on now than we did. We know a little about what he looks like. We know which way he went when he came out of the alley. And perhaps just as important, we know Nick made that trip across town in an Uber. I was hoping to get a license plate so we could track down the driver, but no such luck. Still, it’s something.”

Olin looked from Dylan to Connor. “Maybe Asher hired someone?”

Connor shook his head. “Doubt it. He probably would have had a better alibi if that was the case.” Turned to Dylan. “Did you try any other businesses in the area? Maybe we’ll find our guy on someone else’s security footage.”

“I tried. No such luck. Seems like this guy knew what he was doing.”

“That doesn’t sound like a mugging to me,” Olin said.

Connor had to agree, and where he had more or less been going through the motions before, now he suddenly took a keen interest in finding out more about what had happened. “If this wasn’t a run-of-the-mill mugging, he killed Nick for a reason.” Connor thought for a moment. “He took Nick’s wallet and phone, right?”

Dylan nodded. “That’s right.”

“Do you know what kind of phone he had?”

Dylan gestured to say she didn’t know. Neither did Olin.

“We need to call his wife and find out.”

“Why?” Olin asked. “What are you thinking?”

“Well, it’s strange that he took an Uber down there to begin with, right? I mean, he must have a car.”

“It could have been in the shop,” Olin said.

“We’ll ask the wife about that, too. Either way, maybe the killer took the wallet simply to make it look like a mugging. Maybe he was really after the phone the whole time.”

“You think he had something on it the killer wanted?”

“That’s what we need to find out.”

CHAPTER 14

Margaret sat at the breakfast table in the kitchen and watched as a whirlwind of excitement unfolded around her.

Samantha moved swiftly around the island as she prepared a pot roast for dinner. She was not a fan of pot roast, but Margaret’s husband, Stan, liked it, and so did Samantha’s brother, Louis.

The four of them had eaten many meals together before and after Nick’s murder. Around the time of the funeral, those meals had included extended family from all across the country. But this was the first one she had cooked since that tragic day. She was tired of takeout, she had told Margaret. And was tired of sitting on her hands. She needed to do something.

For her part, Margaret was simply happy that she did not have to make yet another decision for her daughter-in-law. Samantha was the one who had decided to cook. Samantha had selected the meal. All Margaret had to do was sit back and try to stay out of the way—a job that neither Louis nor Stan seemed to be handling well.

The men shuffled around the kitchen, trying to help. They removed pots and pans and various cooking utensils, only to have Samantha put them back where they belonged or replace them with others. They read off ingredients from the recipe that Margaret knew she had already included. And in a series of mishaps that might have been comical on a different day, they nearly collided twice when circling the island.

Margaret assumed this was because both men did not often cook. Stan depended on Margaret to make their meals, and Louis’s idea of cooking usually involved little more than opening a bottle of Heineken and a bag of chips.

In Margaret’s opinion, Louis was not much of a man. She could not remember the last time he had held down a job for more than six months. The beer had made him large in the middle. He rarely shaved. His clothes were always wrinkled—even at the funeral.

He was nice to everyone in the family because Samantha was his meal ticket. Actually, Nick had been his meal ticket. But Samantha had been the one to write the checks, and now that Nick was gone, she was writing even bigger ones.

The breakfast table sat beside a large bay window that provided a pleasant view of the manicured yard and the gazebo at the far end of it. When Margaret wasn’t watching the chaos in the kitchen, she stared out that window, thinking of nothing in particular and trying not to let the pain she still felt overwhelm her.

This was the table where the family took all their meals outside of major holidays (and now funerals), and it was already set. Forks on the left. Knives on the right. Cloth napkins folded decoratively on matching plates. In this household, there was nothing unusual about that.

As long as you ignored the fact that Samantha’s phone was also on the table, that is. Normally, once the table was set, Samantha would allow nothing else to touch its surface until the meal was served. But she wanted to keep her phone within earshot in case Connor called, and as it turned out, it was a good thing she did.

When the phone rang, Samantha hurried over to take the call. She grabbed her phone. Looked at the screen. Didn’t recognize the number. It could have been from anyone. Samantha had not programmed Connor’s number into the device. But she answered because it might be him. It was, and she mouthed the name “Connor” to Margaret.

“You have news already?” she said. That was followed by “Uh-huh. . . . He has a Range Rover. . . . It was in the office parking lot. . . . I didn’t think it was important. . . . An iPhone. . . . Yes, stop by anytime.”

“So? What did he have to say?” Margaret asked when Samantha ended the call. “Did he find something?”

“He just had some questions about Nick.”

“Is he coming here?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know why?”

“I didn’t ask.”

Before Margaret could ask any more questions, Louis joined the conversation with one of his own. “What did you need to go hiring a PI for, anyway? You know you’re just wasting your money on something like that.”

Better she gives it to you? Margaret thought. But she knew she shouldn’t say something like that aloud. Nobody wanted to be on the wrong side of Louis when he got angry. Besides, Samantha was already rolling her eyes, telling the men to get out of the kitchen and let her work.

CHAPTER 15

Connor ended the call with Samantha thinking that this did indeed look more and more strange. No longer was it merely a possibility that Nick had taken an Uber when he could have taken his own car. The question was: Why?

Whatever the reason, add that to everything else they had learned and, more than ever, Connor wanted to find out if there had been anything on his iPhone worth killing for.

Obviously, without the device, the possibilities he had for answering that question were limited to one, and even it wasn’t ideal.

He placed his phone on his desk, looked at Olin and Dylan. “We’ll have to get into his iCloud account and see what’s there.”

“That might not get us everything,” Dylan said, which was exactly why Connor considered the solution less than ideal. But if Nick had left the default settings on his phone in place, who knows what they might find? Apple backed up all sorts of things to the cloud automatically. And his response was to tell her as much.

“Yeah, well, how do you propose we get into the iCloud account?” Olin asked. “Not even you are going to be able to hack your way into that.”

This was also true. Connor was a hacker at the top of his game, but even teams of FBI agents had been thwarted by Apple’s security. And the truth was that while you could get through a lot of locked doors with a good hack, you could not get through them all.

“That’s why we’re going to Samantha’s,” he replied.

He could see the implications of that statement dawn on Olin and Dylan simultaneously. Only once had they ever needed to access someone’s iCloud account before, and they had done that by using a computer that had already been logged in.

Dylan pointed at Connor. “So you’re thinking . . .”

“Exactly.”

––––––––

Connor and his associates arrived at Samantha’s house half an hour later. To call it a house understated the size of the property. A lengthy stone driveway meandered its way through the property’s private gardens and eventually led them to a sprawling European-inspired mansion that dwarfed even the most luxurious properties Connor had seen.

Even calling it a mansion did not seem to do it justice. Olin had come from money. His parents had lived in a mansion. This was on an entirely different scale.

It was so luxurious, in fact, that Connor would not have been surprised to see a butler answer the door and a live-in staff busying themselves with the countless tasks that were no doubt required to keep a place like this in pristine condition.

But no butler answered the door, and there were no live-in staff he could see when they entered. There was only Samantha. She greeted them warmly and invited them to follow her into the kitchen.

They moved from the foyer to the hall, past a formal living room, a library, and numerous closed doors that hid spaces Connor could not even imagine. As they closed in on the kitchen, he smelled the aroma of a dinner in progress.

“I hope we didn’t catch you at a bad time,” Olin said.

“You are here about Nick, right?” Samantha replied.

“Yes.”

“Then there is never a bad time.”

She pushed her way through a swinging door that led them into the kitchen. Two men were huddled around a breakfast table on the far side of the room. Margaret was standing at one of the ovens, door cracked and peeking in.

She closed the oven and turned toward the investigators with a smile.

“What can I do for you?” Samantha asked.

On the phone, Connor had told her only that they were still looking into the murder. He had specifically avoided providing her with any of the facts they had uncovered since he didn’t yet know who he could trust. Just because Samantha and Margaret had hired Connor’s team to look into the murder did not mean they were both above suspicion. Especially Samantha. There were plenty of statistics that pointed to the spouse as the most likely culprit in a situation like this, and a guilty person might hire someone like Connor hoping for insight into the police investigation they were not otherwise able to get.

Now that he was here, though, now that he could look her in the eye and watch her reaction, it was time to get down to business.

“We think the killer might have been after Nick’s phone,” he said.

Samantha looked genuinely confused. “I don’t understand. What—”

“Well, duh,” interrupted the younger man. He stood, crossed the room. A bottle of Heineken hung from between the first two fingers of his right hand. “Obviously he was after the phone. We already know that. He could probably get a couple hundred bucks for that thing, right?” He shifted his gaze from Connor to Samantha. “I told you you’re wasting your money with these guys.”

“Hey,” Dylan snapped. “Can it. No one was talking to you.”

The man’s head snapped back like Dylan had slapped him. “Excuse me?”

“She’s right, Louis,” Samantha said. “If you’re not going to be helpful, then please stay out of this.”

Louis grumbled under his breath and returned to his seat.

“We don’t necessarily think he took the phone to sell it,” Connor continued, getting back to the matter at hand. “We think he might have taken it for what was on it.”

“What makes you think that?” Margaret asked.

“I’d rather not say yet. It’s still just a theory. We have a long ways to go before I would be comfortable calling that a fact.” He was also only willing to tell the women what was necessary to get what he wanted out of them. After all, despite the look of confusion on Samantha’s face moments earlier, she wasn’t in the clear. And even if she was—his attention shifted briefly to Louis—she wasn’t the only person in the room who could have been involved. “But we’d like to get a look at his iCloud account. If we’re right, maybe there will be something there that will help us figure out what the killer was after.”

“Okay,” she said. “If you think it will help.”

She led Connor and his associates out of the kitchen, opened one of the mysterious doors in the hall. On the other side was an expansive office with a mahogany desk and floor-to-ceiling bookcases along the rear wall. The recessed lighting was controlled by a dimmer, which Samantha turned all the way up. Then she directed them over to the desk. A laptop and monitor were sitting on top of it. There was also an ornate pen holder with a dozen or so equally ornate pens in it. Other than that, the surface was bare. The keyboard and mouse were stowed on a tray behind a faux drawer on the front of the desk.

Samantha sat down, pulled the tray out. Then she powered the computer on, opened a browser, and went to icloud.com, where she was stopped by a sign-in screen.

“So much for doing this the easy way,” Dylan said.

“Well, that sucks,” Olin agreed.

“Wait.” Samantha began navigating through folders on the computer. “When Nick passed away, I had to find all of his logins so I could close out his online accounts. He’s got a file with them all written down. It might be there.”

Connor watched her closely as she worked. When he had first entered the house, Samantha did not seem as upset as she had when she had first visited his office, but as the minutes wore on, he was starting to notice a certain darkness creeping back over her. He could see it in the way she slumped forward ever so slightly, the way her voice was becoming increasingly monotone.

She double-clicked an icon and up popped a notepad file with a series of usernames and passwords on it.

“Thanks,” Connor said. “I can take it from here.”

Samantha ignored him. She scrolled until she found one labeled iCloud and entered the values into the login screen.

“Really,” Connor tried again. “I’ve got this.”

“All right,” Samantha said, finally giving up her seat. “I suppose you know what you’re looking for better than I do.”

He let out a quiet sigh of relief. As long as she was in control of the computer, it would have been too easy for her to delete a file—accidently or on purpose—that might prove essential to this investigation.

Turned out, however, that it wouldn’t have made any difference. Nick’s iCloud account had been cleaned out.

CHAPTER 16

Connor stared at the blank screen for several long seconds. He could hardly believe what he was seeing. “It’s gone,” he finally said. “Everything’s gone.”

There were no stored documents, no events on the calendar, nothing under Notes or Mail. Connor tried the handful of apps in the lower left corner to see if he might find anything there, but they too proved fruitless.

“What does that mean?” Samantha asked.

Connor regrouped. What had first struck him as surprising might not mean much, he realized. Nick would not likely be using his Apple mail for work—he probably had a Viberly.com address—and might not be using it at all. The same could be true for the calendar and the notes app. He probably had some pictures on his phone, but iCloud Photos wasn’t enabled, so Connor wasn’t going to be able to see those here.

“Maybe nothing,” he said.

When he really thought about it, the only thing that struck him as odd was the fact that the drive was empty. The drive was where Apple stored any documents that had been saved to the device, including attachments sent by email. In Connor’s experience, there was almost always a couple of things there. But even that didn’t mean the phone or the iCloud account had been wiped clean. Most likely, it simply meant that they would have to get a backup of Nick’s phone restored if they wanted to see what was on it.

And they were going to need Samantha to do that, too.

“Hey, you know, we’re about to have dinner. Is this something you really need to be doing right now?” said a voice from across the room.

Connor looked over the monitor to see Louis leaning against the doorframe. He looked even more annoyed than he had when Dylan snapped at him in the kitchen.

“Louis, please,” Samantha said. “Don’t be difficult.”

“What do they think they’re going to find anyway?”

“We’re not going to know unless we look, are we?” Dylan said.

This time, Louis appeared to be gearing up for a retort. Connor cut him off by turning to Samantha and asking, “Could you come with us to an Apple store so we can get his phone restored?”

“Sure. When?”

“Could we do it now?” Olin asked.

“Great. So dinner’s ruined,” Louis said.

Samantha waved a hand at him dismissively. “Oh, you’re not incompetent. Just pull the pot roast out of the oven when the timer goes off.”

––––––––

After Samantha got the phone restored, she handed the device to Connor. Then she told him Nick’s passcode, and they went their separate ways.

Connor and his associates returned to the office. Huddled around the conference table, he scoured the phone while Olin and Dylan waited to see what he would find. When Samantha had first handed him the device, the phone appeared to be fine. It did not take long for him to realize that was not the case.

While there were more than a hundred apps Connor could have gone through if he wanted to, he was certain Nick did not use most of them often. He started by clicking on the icon marked Mail and was met with only two words: NO MAIL.

“Hey, guys. I think we got a motive.”

“You found something?” Olin asked, leaning forward in his chair.

“It’s more like what I didn’t find,” Connor said, turning the phone around so Olin and Dylan could see the screen.

He did not have to explain what those two words meant. They got it immediately. Somebody had not only taken this phone for what was on it, but then deleted all of Nick’s email to make sure the stolen information would not be seen by anyone else.

“We might still be able to get to it online,” Dylan said.

“Maybe,” Connor replied, but he doubted the killer would delete the email from Nick’s phone and then leave it floating out there on the web to be found another way. Besides, they didn’t even know which email account to start with. Theo could get them access to Nick’s work email and Samantha could probably give them the login information for his personal one. Even if they didn’t, Connor could certainly hack his way into the accounts. But if Nick was harboring secrets in his email, he probably would have used a different address entirely.

And what secrets could that be? What secrets could Nick possibly have had that would be worth killing for? Dylan had found no evidence of a hidden self when she researched him online. No alter ego. No nothing. So what the hell could he have had on his phone?

“I think I might have a better idea.” Connor moved from the conference table to his desk. Olin and Dylan followed. He brought up the Uber website on his computer and logged in using the code the site sent to Nick’s device.

“What are you thinking?” Olin asked.

“Maybe that was not the only time he took an Uber recently.”

“So you’re thinking if we can find out where he was going—” she began.

“—we might be able to find out why he was killed. Exactly,” Connor finished.

“I had the same thought when I went to check out the alley, but there are just too many businesses around there. There’s no way to know.”

This time, Connor did not respond. He navigated to a screen that provided a list of Nick’s recent trips. There had not been many. In fact, aside from the trip that had placed him at the corner of Parsons and Idlewood, there had been exactly three, and they all went to the same general area.

Using Google Maps’ Street View, they were able to determine that one of those locations was in front of an AT&T building. The next was a dying strip mall with little more than a CVS and a bar called Chuck’s. And the last was a church of some sort—the sign in front of it was blurry, making the name unreadable.

But the church was not what interested Connor anyway. Nor did the other locations. What interested him was the relationship these three spots had with each other as well as the relationship they had with the intersection of Parsons and Idlewood.

“Nick had no business going to that part of town to begin with, right?” Connor asked rhetorically. “Everyone said that.”

Dylan and Olin had both pulled chairs around Connor’s desk and were now sitting beside him. “What are you thinking?” Olin asked.

“I’m thinking that he was being just as careful about where he went as about what car he took. That despite these drop-off points, he didn’t actually go to four different locations.” Connor used the directions tool on Google Maps to link the four places to each other with a series of blue lines. Then he pointed to the space between those four locations. “I’m thinking, wherever he was going, it was probably somewhere in here.”

Connor zoomed in closer. The area between the blue lines comprised slightly more than three blocks.

Dylan leaned in toward the monitor. “Why didn’t I think of that sooner? Now that’s an area we can search.”

CHAPTER 17

Connor, Olin, and Dylan each took a block. The morning air was crisp. Olin could see his breath. Before he set out, he double-checked his phone to make sure he still had the photo Dylan had sent him last night.

It was a picture of Nick she had downloaded from the Viberly website.

When Olin first saw it, it struck him as too serious. When he had been working in finance, everyone he knew had a decent sense of humor. Nick probably did too. Then again, that was not the quality you wanted your CFO to project. Especially on the company website. Viberly might paint itself as a fun app to use, but money was serious business no matter how the company brought the cash in.

Regardless, his thinking now was that even if the people he questioned didn’t know Nick by name, someone might know his face.

It was a good idea too, Olin soon found out.

He was standing in a check-cashing operation called PayNow when the photo (Olin thought later with amusement) paid off. As he had at every other business, he flashed his PI license and then asked if any of the staff knew a man by the name of Nick Chase. In the case of PayNow, that meant asking a staff of one.

The man behind the counter was wearing a wrinkled gray button-down with indiscernible stains on it. He introduced himself as Frank and smelled like stale cigarettes. Said he did not know anybody by the name Nick Chase. But then Olin showed him the picture, and his attitude changed.

Until that moment, he had been leaning lazily on the counter, as if it alone was keeping him from falling to the floor in a crusty, gray heap.

He pushed himself upright. “Well, hot damn.” His words were drenched in a Southern accent so thick Olin could barely understand him.

“Does that mean you know him?”

“Know him? No. He ain’t never been in here. But I’ve seen him. Passing in and out of that place across the street a couple of times.” He nodded toward a twelve-story office building on the other side of the road. “I remember him because he was always looking around real funny. Like he had something to hide, you know?”

Olin, of course, did not know. Not exactly. But he could imagine how a man in Nick’s position—a man so worried somebody would find out what he was up to that he never took an Uber to the same place twice—might approach such a building.

Hands fidgeting nervously in his pockets. Head on a swivel.

He could imagine it because Connor had pressed him into similar situations on past cases.

Unlike Connor and Dylan, Olin was not comfortable breaking the law. Even a minor infraction could put his nerves on edge, and some of the things Connor had asked him to do definitely were not minor infractions.

That’s not to say that Nick had necessarily been breaking the law. Just that he would have been acting like somebody who had.

“Do you know what he was doing over there?” Olin asked.

“I got no idea,” Frank said, shaking his head.

The door chimed and a customer entered, drawing Frank’s attention away from his conversation with Olin.

That was fine with him. Olin didn’t think he would get anything else out of this man anyway.

With a quick wave goodbye that Frank did not return, he hurried across the street, dodging oncoming traffic and slipping into the revolving door that Nick had likely used on at least four occasions.

The lobby was empty except for a few potted plants and a directory on the wall between the elevators. Olin scanned the directory for anything that might stand out. With two floors to itself, Brickwell Property Management was by far the biggest company in the building, but Olin was certain that Nick was not sneaking off for clandestine meetings about real estate. (There would have been no reason to keep those off his calendar.) He was likewise certain Nick had not been interested in the tutoring services offered by Sayer’s Learning or the wedding services offered by Bride to Be.

By the time he had finished scanning the list, Olin felt confident that there was only one place in this entire building Nick might have gone. Bartelli Investigators.

Olin looked up the company on his phone. It was a PI agency similar to his own.

Interesting. Dylan had said she didn’t think Nick had any secrets. But if he was going to see a PI, somebody did. Maybe it wasn’t Nick’s secret that had gotten him killed.

––––––––

Olin took the elevator to the ninth floor and found a single door with the name of the agency printed on a plaque underneath the number 902. He entered, expecting to find a small lobby like he had at his office, but was met instead with only a single room that was clearly the investigator’s. A sturdy oak desk sat in the middle of the space, facing the door. Behind it, floor-to-ceiling windows provided a view of the city obscured by surrounding buildings. The walls were decorated with photographs that featured far more stunning skylines. Among them, Olin recognized only Chicago and New York.

The man at the desk stood so he could see his guest over his monitor and gestured for Olin to come closer. “Come in, come in,” he said, holding out a hand for Olin to shake. His voice was a little raspy, his skin weathered and cracked. He was sixty if he was a day, Olin thought. Maybe even older than that.

“Andrew Bartelli,” the man said as they took their seats, Andrew behind his desk and Olin in one of the two chairs facing him. From the angle at which they sat, the monitor was not in their way. “What can I do for you?”

“I wanted to talk to you about Nick Chase.”

“Oh, yeah? What about?”

“He was a client, right?”

“Yeah,” Andrew said, sliding back into his chair. “Real shame what happened to him. But what’s this got to do with you?”

“Can you tell me why he came to you?”

Andrew shook his head. “Oh, I don’t think I can do that. He was a client. Privacy comes first in my business. Besides, I don’t even know who you are.”

Olin thought he might say something like that and flashed his PI license. Frankly, he probably should have started with this move.

Andrew leaned in close to get a better look at it. “Well, isn’t that something? You got your own little license and everything there. Good for you.”

There was no mistaking the condescension in the aging PI’s voice. Perhaps he did not like another man getting in on the game. Or maybe he just thought Olin was too young to be any good at the job yet. Whatever the reason, Olin decided he would get further with Andrew if he continued to show him the respect that he had not yet received. “His wife asked us to look into his murder. She’s not sure the police are right about why he was killed.”

Andrew smirked. “His wife, huh?”

“Yeah, why? Something funny about that?”

“No, no,” Andrew said, his expression slipping back into something more serious. “I’m just surprised, that’s all.”

“Why’s that?”

He shrugged. “No reason, I guess.”

Olin could tell Andrew was not sharing with him everything he knew. He was quickly getting frustrated and decided to try one last approach. “Professional courtesy. Why did Nick come to see you? If you tell me, I might be able to button up this case and save his family any more grief.”

“Sorry,” Andrew said, holding up his arms, wrist to wrist. “My hands are tied.”

“Come on. Seriously?”

“Seriously. The Pope himself could walk in here asking about Nick, and I’d tell him the same thing.”

Olin huffed, pushed himself out of the chair. “Thanks for nothing.”

He was almost out the door when Andrew said a single word that caused him to stop. “But . . .”

“But what?”

Andrew shrugged and likewise got to his feet. “Well, if you were to bring me on, sort of like ‘join forces,’ if you will, I could probably tell you then.”

CHAPTER 18

Dylan scoffed. “Yeah, right. We’re not working with him. I bet he doesn’t give a shit about Nick’s privacy. He’s just looking to cash in on what he knows.”

“So what are we going to do?” Olin asked.

Connor and his associates had reconvened at a nearby Starbucks and gathered around a small table in the corner with their drinks. He had been thinking about the kind of man Andrew must be and had remained largely quiet so far.

Andrew was likely the kind of man who would tell them some of the things he knew, but not necessarily everything, Connor decided. At least not all at once. He would dole out the facts on a schedule that suited his bottom line and probably wouldn’t be above stealing their client if he got the chance.

Dylan was right. They were not working with him. But they did need to find out what he knew, and there was clearly only one way they were going to be able to do that.

“You know what we’re going to have to do,” he said to Dylan.

She took a sip from her coffee as she parsed Connor’s unspoken words. “I think you’re right.”

Olin shook his head. “Oh, no. I’m not doing that. If you want to break into—”

“Keep your voice down,” Dylan snapped.

Olin glanced over his shoulder at the only other customer sitting nearby. She was occupied with her laptop and bopping her head to the music pumping out of her earbuds. He lowered his voice. “He already knows what I look like. If he sees me . . .”

“He won’t even be there,” Dylan said.

“Maybe. It’s his place. Far as I can tell, he’s the only one who works there. He could show up at any time he wanted.”

“It’s fine,” Connor said. “You’re right. He’s seen you. We’ll handle this on our own.” Then he paused and added, “I just need you to do one thing first.”

CHAPTER 19

It was nearly two a.m. before Connor and Dylan returned to Bartelli’s building. They parked on a side street and approached the building from the rear.

Dylan pointed to a steel door close to a dumpster. “That’s got to be it.”

Connor figured she was probably right. They made their way over to the door and climbed the three cement steps that led to it. He grabbed the handle and pulled, half expecting nothing would happen.

But the door opened with ease, and a second or two later, they found themselves standing in a narrow hallway at the back of the building.

“We’re in,” Connor whispered, as he removed the strip of duct tape that was discreetly covering the latch, allowing the door to close and lock properly.

“Another stellar report from Captain Obvious,” Dylan replied.

Connor wanted to laugh, but in an effort to remain as quiet as possible, he settled for a smile instead. He had no doubt that Olin would come through with his part of the plan. All he’d had to do was buy a roll of duct tape, return to the building he had so recently left, and tape over the latch on this door or any other emergency exit.

There was one security camera monitoring the rear of the building and another one in here, but as long as nobody else broke in tonight, the staff would not likely bother to look at the footage, putting all three of them in the clear.

They eased around the corner to the stairs and climbed the nine flights, taking them two at a time. Then they located the sign that read BARTELLI INVESTIGATORS. Connor knocked once, just to be sure the man was not working late. When no one came, he positioned himself halfway between the elevator and the stairs while Dylan did her thing. She pulled her set of lock picks from her pocket, found the ones she needed, and worked them into the lock.

“We’re in,” she said less than a minute later.

Connor returned to Bartelli’s office and followed Dylan through the door. The room was dark. He found the light switch by touch and flipped it. The fluorescents overhead buzzed and flooded the space with so much light Connor felt the need to squint while his eyes adjusted.

The entire office consisted of one room and, with only a desk and a filing cabinet, not a lot of places to put anything.

“Looks like he was taking some liberty with the word ‘investigators.’” Dylan put air quotes around the last word to emphasize her point.

Connor did not pay the comment much attention. He was following his own train of thought. “Hopefully this won’t take long,” he said, by which he did not mean searching the filing cabinet or the desk itself, but rather the computer that sat on top of it.

Dylan nodded in agreement. “Let’s get to it.”

As she crossed to the filing cabinet, Connor circled the desk. He assumed Bartelli had a laptop—Olin had seen the monitor but couldn’t tell Connor what type of computer the man had—and for that reason worried Bartelli might have taken it home with him when he left for the day. If that had been the case, their search might have been hampered to the point of being useless. After all, what were the odds Bartelli had printed off his case notes and filed them away in physical form? It wasn’t nothing, of course, which was why Dylan went through it now. But the odds were low. Even if he had printed some things, he likely hadn’t printed all of it.

But apparently that was a worry rooted in nothing more than conjecture. Bartelli did not have a laptop. He had a desktop. A tower unit that was stowed away discreetly underneath the desk and wasn’t going anywhere.

Unlike an iCloud account, Connor could get into this thing.

He pulled a flash drive from his pocket and plugged it in to the USB slot. Next, he used a series of keyboard commands to prompt the computer to boot from the flash drive instead of its C drive, bypassing the need to test his luck with Bartelli’s password. And with that, the world of secrets Bartelli thought he had secured safely in the ones and zeros of this machine opened up to him.

“How’s it going?” Connor asked over his shoulder as he opened a search bar and entered the name Nick Chase.

“There’s a lot of crap in here,” Dylan said as she rifled through the contents of the filing cabinet. “There are no labels on any of the files and no order to any of it, as far as I can tell. I don’t know how the hell he finds anything in this mess.”

Hoping he did not run into the same problem with the man’s computer, he hit ENTER and waited for the results to populate on the screen.

There must have been dozens of files that came back, but what interested him the most was a folder at the top of the list. While the files all had obscure names that were no doubt returned because Nick’s name could be found somewhere inside of them, the folder was titled simply NICK CHASE and, according to the additional details in the results, was nested in another one called CLIENTS.

A shot of adrenaline hit Connor’s brain. It was different from the uneasy excitement he felt by being somewhere he was not supposed to be, but it was not unfamiliar. He had been hacking into strangers’ computers since he was in high school, and every single time he had, he’d felt a similar shot of adrenaline. It never got old.

He opened the folder and scanned the contents, looking for anything that might stand out. But there were just a lot of lengthy descriptions about surveillance operations that seemed to go nowhere. There likewise seemed to be no information about what Bartelli hoped to accomplish with them or who he was surveilling. It was all “Subject does this” and “Subject does that.” By the time Connor was halfway through the files, he didn’t even know if the subject was a man or a woman.

He had, however, begun to make sense of the obscure naming convention Bartelli had used for his files. They were the dates of each operation. And from what Connor could tell, they started about five months ago and stopped six weeks prior to Nick’s murder.

Before Connor could ponder the implications of that, Dylan spoke up again. This time she said only two words. “Holy shit.”

There was no mistaking the genuine surprise behind that statement. Connor spun around in the chair to face her, momentarily forgetting all about the computer. “What is it? What have you got?”

What she had, Connor realized once he was facing her, was pictures. What he didn’t yet know was what they meant. But they had to be good because Dylan couldn’t take her eyes off them. She flipped from one to the next as she stood and crossed over to Connor. “You’re not going to believe this.”

She laid the first picture down on the desk. It was a long-distance shot of Samantha coming out of her house. Without any more information, Connor had a feeling he knew where this was going. Red Sky had done their share of similar investigations before they had been able to be more selective with their cases. Still, he gave words to his thought, if only to make sure he and Dylan were on the same page. “Nick suspected his wife was having an affair.”

“That’s right,” Dylan replied in a sing-song voice. “Looks like we were right about the affair, just not who was involved.” She continued to place the pictures down on the desk, one after the other. “I bet you’ll never guess who it was with.”

“Just tell me.”

She paused, pulled a picture out of the middle of the stack, and placed it down dramatically on top of the others. The picture also featured Samantha, this time stepping through a door that looked as if it led to a restaurant. But unlike the rest of the stack, she was not alone in it. Theo Lockwood was also there, holding the door for her, touching her elbow as she stepped through it.

“That can’t be right,” Connor said.

Dylan responded by flipping over another photo. This one left no room for interpretation. It was the money shot. Which was probably why Dylan had saved it for last.

In this picture, Theo and Samantha were still standing in front of that same door. Based on Samantha’s long white dress and Theo’s pressed blue dress shirt, Connor assumed this photo was taken on the same day as the other. Whether this was before or after they ate, though, was anyone’s guess.

What mattered here—what made this the money shot—was the fact that Theo was not just touching Samantha’s elbow. Instead, they were locked in a tight embrace, sharing a kiss that even frozen in time could not be mistaken for anything other than a kiss between lovers.

As the significance of the affair snapped into place, so many other things did as well. Like the files Connor had been reading only moments earlier. He replayed the most recent ones in his mind and knew the “Subject” Bartelli had been referring to had to be Samantha. Which also explained why Nick had never taken an Uber to the same place twice. Deniability. If Samantha ever got into his account, he would not have wanted her finding multiple trips to this building. Especially since it wouldn’t have taken much effort to figure out why he was here.

But why hadn’t he used his own car? Was it because he already believed Theo was involved? Was he worried Theo might have him followed if he began to suspect Nick was on to them?

That seemed farfetched. It was also irrelevant, at least for now. What mattered was that they now had a motive for murder. A possible one, anyway.

Connor did not need to say as much to Dylan. They had both been doing this so long he knew she was thinking the same thing.

But there was a problem with this motive, wasn’t there? And that was a thought worth giving voice to. “If Samantha killed her husband, why did she hire us to look into his death?”

Dylan shrugged. “That could have been Margaret’s idea. Maybe Samantha just went along with it so she could keep tabs on the investigation.”

Connor had already considered a similar scenario the first time they went to her house, but he was asking it out loud now for another reason. And since Dylan seemed to have missed the point, he clarified his question by saying, “Why be so helpful?”

Samantha had recovered the contents of Nick’s cell phone for them, helped them get into his iCloud account. Was that the sort of thing a guilty person would do?

Dylan had an answer for that too, and as soon as she said what it was, Connor realized it was obvious. “She had all his passcodes. She knew what we would find when we got into his iCloud account. And if we’re right about the fact that the killer took the cellphone for what was on it, she could have already deleted everything that might have pointed to the affair weeks ago.”

Which meant the restored device Connor had back at the office would not have any evidence either.

“What better way to make yourself look innocent?” Connor said, finishing her thought.

“Exactly.”

This theory still did not completely hold together. Connor could not say why at the moment. He would have to give it some more thought when he had the time. Right now, they needed to get out of here.

Connor copied the files pertaining to Nick onto his flash drive while Dylan used her phone to take pictures of the incriminating photographs. Then they put everything back where they had found it, turned off the light, and slipped back out the door into the hallway.

There was only one last thing to do to call this mission a success: reengage the deadbolt. They did not need Bartelli showing up here the next morning and wondering why his door was unlocked.

Once again using her lock picks, Dylan began working the deadbolt back into place.

This time, instead of acting as lookout, Connor hung around by the door and waited. He was no longer worried that Bartelli or anybody else might come roaming these halls late at night, but he should have been. Because the building had a security guard. And right now, the security guard was making his rounds. And those rounds had finally brought him up to the ninth floor.

Several seconds passed after Connor heard the ding of the elevator before he consciously registered the sound. Dylan was too wrapped up in her work to notice it.

He grabbed her arm. “We have to go,” he whispered, pulling her to her feet. “Someone’s here.”

Dylan looked down the hall to her left, probably since that was the shortest distance between Bartelli’s office and the elevator. But the reality was that the hallway circled the entire floor, and if the person who was on this floor with them was not specifically coming to Bartelli’s office—if, say, they were a security guard making their rounds—they were just as likely to approach from the right.

Then she glanced at the lock. “I can get us back into Bartelli’s office fast.”

As quick as Dylan could be with a lock pick, she might not be quick enough to pull that off before someone saw them. Connor shook his head. Too much of a risk. They were going to have to find somewhere else to hide.

He gestured for her to follow him down the hall to the right and around the corner, if only because it put more distance between them and the elevator. Then he stopped, held up a finger telling her to wait, and concentrated on the silence. Sonner or later, there would be some small sound that gave away the mysterious visitor’s location. The sound of footsteps. The bathroom door opening and closing. Something.

He just had to wait for it.

After fifteen or twenty seconds, Dylan whispered, “Maybe he’s gone.”

Maybe. Still, Connor continued to listen. He wasn’t ready to call them safe yet. Finally, he heard what he was waiting for. A faint shuffle of shoes on carpet. Connor moved quickly down the hall away from the sound, being careful not to make any noise of his own, and Dylan did the same.

They circled back to the stairs, where he then quietly pushed the door open. Dylan stepped through it first, and he closed it just as quietly behind them.

“Let’s go,” he whispered as he started down the stairs.

“We can’t,” Dylan replied. “The lock.”

“It’s fine.”

“No, it’s not—not completely—and when Bartelli comes back, he might notice. I have to go back and finish.”

Connor let out a huff of frustration, but he knew she was right. If the keyhole on that lock was not facing straight up the next time Bartelli was here, he would probably notice. Connor certainly would. “All right, but let’s give it at least five minutes before we go back out there. I’d rather be safe than sorry.”

Dylan nodded in agreement.

Once they decided the coast was clear, they slipped through the door, listened some more, and slowly made their way back to Bartelli’s office, peering cautiously around every corner as they went.

CHAPTER 20

Theo Lockwood did not always sleep well. He would toss and turn most nights. Especially when he was alone. Samantha had told him it would be a good idea if they didn’t see each other until things cooled down, and he had agreed, but it made nights like this especially hard.

Often, he attributed his success to that lack of sleep. He had told more than one person that the idea for Viberly had come to him while he was hanging around in his dorm room alone late one night, bored and wishing he had someone to talk to.

It was also due to his nighttime restlessness that he had put in so many long hours—some weeks clocking in over a hundred of them—which were especially important during the company’s formative years.

And with nothing better to do right now, he decided he might as well clock in a few more.

Dressed in only his boxers and an undershirt, Theo pushed himself out of bed and made his way downstairs. It was going on 3:00 a.m. He would not go back to sleep tonight; he knew that much for sure. So he stopped by the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee before heading into his home office.

When the company was new, that office had consisted of nothing more than a converted bedroom in a modest suburban home. These days, with both his home and the office within it built to his specifications, it was a massive nine hundred square feet but still occupied only a fraction of his entire house.

It had polished hardwood floors that had been stained a dark gray, recessed lighting, and included an equally massive desk right in the middle of the space. There was a sofa and a small meeting table on one side of the room that he never used and a bar on the other that he sometimes did. A sixty-inch monitor had been mounted on the wall behind him for video conferencing. Enlarged framed press clippings were displayed on the wall ahead of him for inspiration.

He sat down at his desk, placed his cup of coffee on top of it, and fired up his computer. The twin monitors in front of him came to life.

He started his day by catching up on all the emails he had not yet seen. There was a constant flow of communication passing through his inbox. Decisions that had to be made. Questions that had to be answered. All of it presented as urgent.

Right now, he had sixty-two unread messages in his inbox. He started from the bottom and worked his way up.

He was nearly twenty emails in when his perfectly ordinary morning took a sharp turn to the left. He had to read the subject line twice to make sure it said what he thought it did.

SUBJECT: YOU’LL PAY ONE WAY OR ANOTHER

Theo’s hands began to shake even before he clicked the message to read it. He knew it was going to be bad—there was no doubt about that—but it was so much worse than he could ever have imagined.

CHAPTER 21

Connor and Dylan made it out of Bartelli’s building without running into anyone, and once they were back in the car, they agreed the affair was the sort of news that was worth waking Olin up for.

Connor had to call twice to get past his friend’s Do Not Disturb settings, but when Olin finally answered, he sounded fully awake. “What’s up?”

That’s not to say he had been awake seconds earlier. Rather, it meant that he assumed Connor was calling because something had gone wrong. Dylan had been shot. Connor was in jail. Something had gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Connor could hear the alarm in his voice. “Everything’s fine,” he said, trying to calm Olin down as fast as possible. “But we have news. Big news.” He placed the call on speaker.

“It couldn’t wait,” Dylan added.

“Nothing’s wrong?” Olin asked, still shifting gears away from the trouble he was expecting.

“No, nothing’s wrong,” Connor assured him.

“But we have news,” Dylan said, emphasizing Connor’s original statement.

Olin took a deep, audible breath. “Okay, what is it?”

“Samantha was having an affair,” Connor said.

“And you’ll never guess who she was sleeping with,” Dylan said.

“Okay, so what’s going on?” Olin asked. “Is something about to happen? Do you need me to come meet you somewhere?”

Dylan took the phone from Connor so she could speak directly into the microphone. Then, as she leaned back in the passenger seat, she said, “Pay attention, sleepyhead. We found a motive. You don’t think that’s the kind of thing worth calling about?”

Maybe this could have waited until morning, Connor realized. He and Dylan were both high on adrenaline, which had probably made the news seem more urgent than it was. But nothing about their case was likely to change in the next few hours. They did not need Olin to come meet them somewhere. And the fact of the matter was: “We found a possible motive.”

Another deep exhalation into the phone. This time, instead of relief, Connor could hear annoyance. But Olin was too nice to give words to his frustration. “Who was she seeing?” he asked.

“I said to guess,” Dylan replied.

Connor took the phone away from her and answered Olin’s question before he had the chance to get even more annoyed. “Theo Lockwood.”

“Theo Lockwood?” Olin repeated, his emotions shifting once again, this time to surprise. “Nick’s college roommate? His partner at Viberly? Are you sure?”

“We’re sure.”

“Shit, this could be big,” Olin said.

“That’s why we called,” Dylan said.

Connor pressed the Start button beside the steering wheel and pulled away from the curb. Since he had already woken Olin up and Olin did indeed seem intrigued, he said, “We’re going back to the office now to see what we can make of this. I got some additional files off Bartelli’s computer. I want to read through those and see what else we can find out. You feel like joining us?”

“I'll be there in half an hour.”

––––––––

Connor quickly read through the files he had taken off Bartelli’s computer while Olin and Dylan hung around, brainstorming theories about the crime.

“If Nick knew about the affair, why didn’t he kick her out?” Olin asked as he loaded a fresh filter into the coffee maker.

Dylan, who was sitting in a chair on the opposite side of Connor’s desk, considered the question. “Maybe they were trying to work it out.”

“But then why didn’t she tell the police about it? Or us? If she knew that he was aware of the affair, she must have considered the possibility that word would get out after his death. After all, what if Nick had told somebody else about it? It wouldn’t have looked good for her or Theo if they didn’t come clean about it right up front.”

“It doesn’t look good for them either way,” Connor said, only half listening.

Olin finished putting fresh coffee in the machine and turned it on. “All right, well, maybe she didn’t know.”

“And what? He just kept it to himself?” Dylan asked.

Olin sat down beside her. Shrugged.

“Why would he do that?”

“How am I supposed to know? It’s just a theory.”

“It’s not a very good one,” Dylan said, rolling her eyes and then directing her next question at Connor. “How’s it coming over there? You find anything useful?”

Connor had made his way through most of the files by this point. Reading them through the lens that the “Subject” was Samantha provided a lot of clarity, but nothing in any of the files pointed to a murder plot. Not even with the broadest possible interpretation of these words. Samantha had not visited any sketchy bars looking for a hired killer. She had not bought a gun. She had not even visited a gun shop or anywhere else where she might have bought one. At least not by the time Bartelli had terminated his surveillance.

But that did not mean a plan for murder had not been discussed. Perhaps Theo had been the one to go in search of a hired killer. Or perhaps a man of his means did not have to slum his way through the darkest and least desirable corners of the city to find what he was looking for. Perhaps a man of his means could hire a professional killer with just a phone call—the kind of killer who would know where to park so he wouldn’t be caught on camera, who would know how to commit a crime like that without leaving behind the kind of evidence that would eventually trace back to him.

But this was simply more conjecture, Connor knew. All they had so far was a possible motive. They needed more than that before they could say for sure why Nick had been killed or who was responsible.

Connor relayed his assessment to Olin and Dylan, and then asked Dylan to do another deep dive into all of their possible suspects: Theo, Samantha, and Asher.

Dylan shrugged—“All right, if that’s what you want”—and went to get her laptop.

As she settled back into the chair next to Olin, he raised an important point: “You know, when most people kill over an affair, there’s usually something else at play.”

Olin did not need to detail what that something else might be. As soon as he raised the point, it was obvious to Connor what he was referring to. Usually an affair turns to murder when one partner won’t grant the other a divorce. Or perhaps they do, but there’s a dispute over custody of the children or the division of assets. Nick and Samantha had no children, and Nick earned more money than most people could ever dream of, which meant any settlement they might eventually have agreed to would certainly have been more than sufficient for both parties.

In most cases, that would leave only the possibility that Nick was not willing to grant her a divorce.

But again, Connor didn’t think Samantha knew Nick had found out about the affair. He couldn’t get over the idea that she would have told the police about it right up front if she knew he had.

So what would the reason be here?

“Huh,” Dylan said, disrupting his train of thought.

“What?” Olin asked.

“Looks like Theo and Nick were not the only two people to go to Princeton.”

“What are you talking about?” Connor asked.

“Asher graduated from Princeton also.”

“Same year?”

Dylan nodded.

“So they might have all known each other,” Olin said.

“Oh, they knew each other.”

“What makes you so sure?”

Dylan moved back from the screen to reveal a photo of the three men together in an old article on The Daily Princetonian’s website. The school had been highlighting its volunteer efforts, and all three men were dressed in hair nets, aprons, and gloves. If there was any doubt about who they were, the caption detailed their names and, of less importance to Connor, the name of the soup kitchen they were working at.

“Seems like Asher would have mentioned that,” Olin said.

Connor leaned back from the screen. “He was pretty pissed about being fired when we met with him.”

Olin looked like he was weighing the possibilities of what this might mean. “You don’t think . . . ?”

“That Asher and Theo worked together to kill Nick?” Dylan finished for him. “Who knows?”

“Maybe Theo paid Asher to kill him,” Olin said. “He still doesn’t have a job, and when we were there, he didn’t seem all that concerned about finding one.”

“The killer had a beard,” Dylan pointed out.

“Maybe it was fake.”

“So . . . what? Asher went to a costume shop and got himself some fake ZZ Top beard so he’d be harder to identify?”

“Well . . . ” Olin began, pausing to regroup, “eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable, and who was it who told you he had a beard anyway? A group of homeless people you met in the alley where he was killed? No offense, but were they even sober?”

As Connor listened to Olin and Dylan bicker, an idea began to form. “Guys,” he said, trying to break the mounting tension between them. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. But I think I know what will.”

CHAPTER 22

At Connor’s urging, Dylan dug further into the lives of their suspects. When she did, she stumbled across a press release that she was sure she would have found sooner if she had been investigating Viberly directly. It didn’t have anything to do with Nick’s murder, but it was one of those things that made Connor wonder how many secrets they had not yet uncovered.

“Viberly’s going through an IPO soon,” she said. “According to this, the company’s got some serious investors who are really pushing for it.”

The article went on to mention a number of the investors by name. Sarah Powers. Howard Franklin. Luke Mcarthy. They were all powerhouses in Silicon Valley, but perhaps most notable among them was Pat Hawkins, the legendary investor who had made headlines over the years for taking big gambles on companies other people didn’t believe in.

Olin slid his phone back into his pocket. Connor rolled back from his computer. Both gave her their full attention.

“When?” Connor asked.

“Sixty days. More or less.”

“Somebody should have mentioned that,” Olin said.

Connor agreed with him completely. Whether it had anything to do with their investigation should have been their choice to make, and Theo—who certainly had to be thinking about that pending windfall every minute he wasn’t thinking about Nick’s death or screwing his wife—shouldn’t have assumed they already knew about it. Or worse, perhaps he’d assumed that they simply didn’t need to.

“Damn straight they should have mentioned it,” he said.

By now, the sun was starting to peek over the horizon, flooding their office with a hazy yellow light. Connor suggested they head over to the nearby Starbucks for a change of scenery.

As the elevator descended to the first floor, Dylan shrugged and said, “It’s interesting, but it’s not relevant.”

“Why don’t you think the IPO is relevant?” Connor asked.

“Why would it be? Between the affair and Asher getting fired, we’ve already got plenty of motive. And it’s like you said: Nick already had more money than God, and Theo has more money than him. So what difference would an IPO make here?”

That wasn’t exactly what Connor had said, but the essence of her statement was correct.

The elevator doors opened. He led his friends out onto the sidewalk. “But this is on a-whole-nother level. I think we should find out who Nick’s shares went to.”

Samantha was the obvious answer, but there was probably a contract of some sort stipulating who they could go to and under what conditions, which meant it was also possible those shares would be returned to the company upon Nick’s death. Especially since the company had not gone public yet.

Could money alone be the motive?

They made their way down the sidewalk, past the bumper-to-bumper traffic. Then, at the Starbucks two blocks away, they took a table in the corner and resumed their conversation, now drinking coffee that was far superior to the swamp water they could make in their office.

––––––––

Dylan hoped that with the fresh coffee might come fresh insight, but such was not the case. They bounced around ideas about their growing list of suspects and motives, but eventually ended up back in the same place they had started, which amounted to nothing more than a long list of what ifs.

“We should go back to talk to Asher again,” Olin finally suggested. “Let’s see if he’ll come clean about knowing Nick and Theo in college. That might be something we could work with.”

Dylan’s gaze shifted briefly toward a man who was sitting at a table nearby. He was stocky, average height, a little pudgy around the jawline. Mid-forties, probably. In short, there was nothing remarkable about him. He was the kind of person you probably wouldn’t even notice. Especially when he was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt like he was now.

Staring at an iPad and sipping his coffee, he shouldn’t have been anybody of interest. But she couldn’t shake this feeling that he was listening to their conversation. That bothered her. Sure, there were nosey people everywhere. But this one just felt . . . off.

“That’s a good idea,” Connor said, agreeing with Olin. “We could even—”

Dylan slid back her chair without any attempt to be subtle. As the legs squealed across the floor, more than a half-dozen coffee drinkers turned to look at her. Strangely, the stocky fellow nearby was not one of them. He did not even shoot her a quick glance over the top of his iPad. Which meant that there was either something particularly interesting on the screen or, more likely, he was making a point of not looking at her.

The only person who would do something like that would be somebody who was trying to blend into the background, she thought.

Well, if he thinks he’s just going to listen to our whole conversation without hearing a word from me about it, he’s got a world of disappointment coming his way.

Like the half-dozen strangers nearby, Connor and Olin had also turned their attention to Dylan.

“What’s going on?” Connor asked.

Then, as she started to move, Olin added, “Where are you going?”

She approached the stocky man with the iPad. “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?”

By the time he looked away from his screen, she was hovering over him. He tilted his head up to see her. “Excuse me?”

He sounded confused, she thought. But at the same time, it did not strike her as genuine. There was no sense of surprise behind his question, no alarm. That didn’t seem right. If he was indeed minding his own business moments ago, shouldn’t he at least be a little concerned?

“Our conversation is none of your business,” she said. “Find another way to entertain yourself.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Dylan could see Olin staring slack-jawed at the confrontation. He was mortified. Connor, however, merely looked intrigued.

The stocky man closed the iPad’s leather case around the device, placed it down on the table. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yeah, right.” She nodded toward the door. “Get out of here and leave us in peace, all right? Go find someone else to snoop on.”

The man looked like he was about to say something else. Then, biting back his words, he grabbed his coffee and his iPad and charged out of the Starbucks. “Crazy bitch,” he mumbled on his way out the door.

Dylan didn’t care. She had been called worse.

“What was that about?” Connor asked once she had returned to her seat.

“He was listening to our conversation.”

“Are you sure?” Olin asked. “He looked like he was just reading something on his iPad to me.”

“His iPad wasn’t on.”

“That can’t be right.”

But it was. When Dylan was hovering over the creep, she could see his screen well enough to know the device was turned off. She assumed he had not realized that, which was why he’d made a point of closing the iPad’s case before placing it on the table.

“Trust me. He was listening to us.”

“Dylan—”

“He was behind us on the street, too. He’s been following us ever since we came out of our building.”

She had not realized that when she had first seen him sitting nearby. Not consciously, anyway. It wasn’t until she was hovering over him, looking down at the dark screen on his iPad, that a flash of memory connected the dots for her.

When they’d exited the lobby of Connor’s building, he was talking on his phone about twenty feet from the door. Or maybe, like with the iPad, he was only pretending to be. She hadn’t thought anything of it at the time. Just like she hadn’t thought it was important that he had started moving in their direction shortly after they had stepped onto the sidewalk.

But it was probably all of that, combined with the fact that he had decided to take a table at the very same Starbucks they had, that led her to suspect there was something—as she had put it—off about him.

Connor shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “If that’s true, somebody’s worried about what we’re going to find out.”

“You think he has anything to do with Bartelli?” Olin asked.

“I don’t know,” Dylan said. “But just in case I’m right, we’d better be careful. Somebody already killed Nick. If they think we’re getting too close to the truth, they might come after us, too.”

CHAPTER 23

Theo stewed over the email. He had to pay the blackmailer in a mere twelve hours if he didn’t want his secret going public. And, of course, he didn’t. Something like that could be devastating for his IPO.

But the blackmailer didn’t just know Theo’s secret. He knew Theo’s habits. That he compulsively checked his email. Maybe even that he had trouble sleeping.

It was why the blackmailer felt comfortable giving Theo such a short deadline. Twelve hours was plenty of time to get the ransom together but not enough time for much of anything else. Especially since going to the police wasn’t an option with something like this. That would be even worse than paying the blackmailer.

But Theo did have options, didn’t he? At least one.

There were no windows in his office, but he could see the faintest rays of sunlight stretching across the living room floor beyond it. He looked at the time on his computer screen. It was 6:23 a.m.

Samantha was an early riser. She would probably be awake by now.

He grabbed his cell phone, dialed her number, and waited three long rings for her to answer. With every passing second, the tension in his neck grew tighter.

“Theo?” she said. She sounded groggy, like she had not quite made it out of bed yet.

“I need to see you, Sammy. Right away.”

“Are you . . .” She paused, as if she needed a moment to process Theo’s words. Then: “That’s not a good idea.”

“I know, but things have changed.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Not on the phone. Come over. I’ll tell you in person.”

Samantha took another beat. When she spoke again, she sounded uneasy. “Okay. Okay, sure. I’ll be right there.”

Theo ended the call without saying goodbye, then looked once again at the blackmailer’s email. YOU’LL PAY ONE WAY OR ANOTHER. He was not normally given to paranoia. If he had been thinking clearly, he would have told himself there was nobody listening in on his phone call. No reason to make Samantha come over to the house before telling her about the blackmail. But he wasn’t thinking clearly. Because somebody was out there. Somebody knew. Which meant a risk of any size was too much for him right now.

He returned to the kitchen to make a second cup of coffee if only so he had something to do while he waited. Then he drank it in one long swallow and made a third.

By the time Samantha arrived, he’d had so much coffee, his hands were shaking.

Samantha noticed the tremor as soon as Theo opened the door. Mistaking it for emotional rather than chemical, she took his hands in hers, perhaps in hopes of alleviating his anxiety. “What’s going on, Theo?”

Theo gently pulled them away, stepped back from the front door. “Not out here.” Talking outside would be even riskier than talking on the phone.

Samantha entered the foyer. Theo closed and locked the door. Then he spun around to face her and finally, without worrying he might be overheard by devices either high-tech or low, got down to the matter at hand. “I’m being blackmailed.” He attempted to deliver the words in a matter-of-fact way, but he could hear an edge in his voice that betrayed him.

“What? Are you serious? Oh, Theo. Why?”

“You know why.”

Samantha shook her head. “That’s impossible. How could anyone know?”

“It doesn’t matter, does it? All that matters is they do.”

Samantha stepped from the foyer into the living room and fell into the nearest chair, a black leather wingback that faced the fireplace. She slumped forward, resting her elbows on her knees, interlocking her fingers, dropping her head.

Theo took a seat on the matching sofa. He was close enough to touch her but decided against it. He wanted to give her the time and space she needed to process this news in her own way.

When she was finished, she lifted her head, looked at him. “We should go to the police.”

“Oh, no. We can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“If we do that, it’ll go public, for sure, and how do you think that will look? Nick dead. The two of us sleeping together. You know what people will think. It’ll kill the IPO. Not to mention the fact that the police will probably start crawling into every nook and cranny of our lives to see what they can find.”

Samantha slumped forward again, her face now collapsing into her hands. “This is terrible. This is just . . .” She shook her head, as if she could not find the words to adequately describe how truly terrible the situation was. “What are we going to do?”

“Hey,” Theo said, now gently taking her hands into his so she would look up, meet his gaze, and know how serious he was when he added, “Don’t worry about it. I’m going to pay them.”

“Are you sure?”

Maybe it was because he felt like he needed to be strong for them both, but he noticed his tremor had subsided, his voice was steadier. Which made it easier to say what he had to say next. “I’m sure. The only thing is: People like this—it’s not always one and done. Sometimes, when they find out you’ll pay, they’ll just keep coming back to that well over and over. I can’t have that. I don’t want to be worried that these bastards will come back a second time. Especially not after we go public. Who knows how much money they might ask for then?”

“That’s why . . .” Samantha trailed off. Theo could hear the unformed words: That’s why we need to go to the police.

But she didn’t finish the thought, perhaps because once she started, she’d remember what it would mean if they did. Before she could present another equally bad idea, however, he said, “That’s why we need your brother.”

Samantha’s face knotted up with confusion. “What?”

“We need somebody we can trust. Not a cop. Not a PI. Somebody who will be loyal only to us.”

“What for?”

“I want to know who’s behind this.”

“How’s he going to be able to help you with that? Like you said, he’s not a cop.”

“No, he’s not. But there are things he can do that a cop cannot. Will you talk to him for me?”

CHAPTER 24

Samantha didn’t like the idea of bringing Louis into this mess. His whole life had been a disaster of one sort or another. He had been to jail twice for petty theft, and since she could afford it, she regularly wrote him checks now to keep him from doing something that would land him behind bars for a third time.

A third strike would count as a felony no matter how much he stole. Unlike his first two sentences, which spanned six months each, he could end up going away for five years or more this time.

But Theo wasn’t suggesting Louis steal anything. He just wanted somebody to watch the blackmailer, to follow him, to find out where he went. “And maybe snap a couple of pictures, if he can,” Theo said. “That should be more than enough for me to figure out who this guy is.”

Samantha reluctantly agreed. Because Theo was right: with only hours to go, there was nobody else they could turn to for something like this. Besides, nothing Theo wanted Louis to do was illegal.

When she got home, she found her brother sitting at the kitchen table in his boxers and an undershirt. His eyes were bloodshot from the drinks he’d had last night, and he was nursing his hangover with a bottle of Heineken.

He raised the beer when he saw her, as if in a toast. “Hair of the dog.” Then he took a swig and returned it to the table. In addition to the beer, he had a small plate with two pieces of dry toast on it and a large cup of coffee. “Where’d you go off to so early?”

Samantha poured her own cup of coffee. Black. Then sat down next to him. Louis’s life was not a disaster because the world was against him. It was a disaster because he lacked discipline, made poor decisions, drank too much. She looked down at his pathetic excuse for a breakfast. Case in point.

But that’s who he was. He wasn’t going to change. She had long since accepted that.

“Louis, I need to talk to you about something.”

He bit into a piece of the dry toast. “Sure, sis,” he said, crumbs falling out of his mouth and into his lap. “What is it?”

“I need your help.”

He nodded, as if to indicate that wouldn’t be a problem. She didn’t expect any other response. Not as long as she kept writing him checks.

“Somebody is blackmailing Theo.”

“That piece of shit? Serves him right.” The two men had met at a bar one night shortly after Theo had moved to Atlanta and Louis had taken an instant dislike to him. Most of that was because Louis had pushed Theo for a job at Viberly minutes after Samantha had introduced them. As far as Louis was concerned, it didn’t matter that he didn’t have any qualifications. Nor did it matter that he hadn’t finished college or that his limited job history could be called spotty, at best. All that mattered to him was that he was Samantha’s brother. Nick was her husband. And those were the only qualifications he needed.

Samantha had been mortified. Louis had already tried asking Nick for a job, but Nick had wriggled out of that situation by saying it wasn’t his decision. The company was still small back then, and Theo made all the hiring decisions personally. Neither one of them thought he would make a pitch for employment directly to the head of the company.

Of course Theo had told him no, which would have gotten under Louis’s skin either way. But the way he did it didn’t help matters. He’d all but laughed in Louis’s face, told him he didn’t have any room in his organization for a college dropout. “You’d be better off trying your luck at McDonald’s.”

Louis was furious. He’d turned his almost-empty bottle of beer around in his hand like he was getting ready to use it as a weapon and probably would have smashed it across Theo’s head if Samantha hadn’t pushed herself between them and talked him down.

At her urging (and at the risk of being cut off financially), Louis had maintained a civil tone with Theo going forward. Privately, however, he did not hesitate to voice his dislike for the man.

“Don’t say he’s a piece of shit,” Samantha said.

Louis shrugged. “I just call ’em like I see ’em.”

“Yeah, well, either way, I need you to help him.”

“Oh, so now he’s not too good for me, huh?” Louis took another swig from his beer. Samantha could see the anger of his wounded ego simmering just below the surface. She waited for him to get control of himself. He swished the beer around in his mouth, took a second drink, and then finally said, “So what does he want me to do?”

“He wants you to watch the drop. Take a couple of pictures of him. Find out where he goes.”

Another swig of beer while Louis considered his sister’s request. “He doesn’t want to go to the police with this? Somebody must have some real dirt on him, huh? How about that? Look at Mister High-and-Mighty now. Slumming it down here with us college dropouts.”

Now Samantha was getting annoyed too. Louis did not know about her relationship with Theo. If he had, he would not have spoken that way about him—at least not in front of her. But she wasn’t about to tell him about it. Especially not right now, when Theo was about to pay a small fortune to keep that secret under wraps.

“You’ll do it, right?” she said, trying not to snap at him.

“What’s he willing to pay me for it?”

“How about this? If you don’t do it, you’re not getting another dime from me. Sound fair?”

He held up his hands. “Whoa. Relax, Sis. I was just asking. So do you know what the blackmailer has on him?”

“No, and it’s none of your business either.” Louis was about to take another drink. She grabbed the beer out of his hand, poured it down the sink. “And I don’t want you having another one of these until it’s over, you hear me?”

Louis grumbled something about it being her time of the month, but she pretended not to hear him. Then she told him to call Theo and stormed out of the room before he said anything else that might irritate her.

CHAPTER 25

When Asher opened the door for Connor, he was once again in a foul mood. He was not, however, dressed in his pajamas and a bathrobe. Instead, he was wearing a pressed white button-down and a pair of pleated tan slacks. He had also shaved off the stubble that had been threatening to become a beard and taken a shower to wash away the smell.

Connor theorized he must have recently returned from an interview that had not gone well, but he wasn’t about to ask.

Asher’s lips curled into a frown. “You again. What do you want this time?”

“Just had a few follow-up questions for you. Mind if I come in?”

Asher took a step into the doorway, barring Connor’s entry. “Let’s talk out here.”

“Fine. Whatever you want,” Connor said as casually as he could.

“I want you to leave.”

“I’ll be quick. Promise.”

Asher’s frown deepened. “Fine. Go ahead. Ask your questions.”

“You went to Princeton, right?”

“Yeah. So?”

“And that’s where you met Nick and Theo?” Connor asked. He had made this trip alone because he didn’t want Asher to feel like they were ganging up on him. As private investigators, they had no authority to demand answers from Asher. If he slammed the door shut without a single word, there wouldn’t have been a thing they could do about it.

It was a good thing Connor had insisted on coming alone, too. He could tell from the way Asher’s hand seemed to be sliding toward the door handle that he was thinking about doing just that if he didn’t like the way the conversation was going.

“What are you talking about? I met Nick and Theo when I started working at Viberly.”

“Really? Because I have reason to believe otherwise.”

Asher’s hand came to rest on the door handle, but he did not attempt to close the door. In fact, he actually looked amused. “Tell me—what is it you have reason to believe?”

“Does the Harbor House Soup Kitchen sound familiar?”

“Not really.”

“You don’t remember volunteering there?”

“Oh, that.” Asher shifted his weight from one foot to the other impatiently. “You’re quite the little Sherlock Holmes, aren’t you? Yeah, I volunteered at a soup kitchen once when I was at Princeton. I only did it because I thought it would look good on my resume. If I met Theo or Nick there, I sure as hell didn’t know who they were.”

The sarcasm was obvious, but Connor stood his ground. “Come on. Stop screwing around. When you say stuff like that, it just makes you look guilty.”

“Guilty of what exactly?” Then his posture shifted again, and his eyes narrowed just a little. He suddenly looked defensive in a way Connor couldn’t quite put his finger on. “Oh, I see. You’ve worked up this idea where I helped Theo kill Nick, am I right?”

Connor resisted the urge to respond. Better to just stay quiet and see where Asher went next with his train of thought. It didn’t seem like he was going to confirm that he knew either of the men, but he still might let something slip. Something useful. So Connor waited.

At first, it seemed like Asher was willing to wait just as long, until finally he said, “You know what? Think that if you want. I couldn’t care less. But if you really want to find something out, maybe start looking into the shakeup at Viberly that got me fired.”

“What are you saying?”

“Hell if I know, but it all seemed kinda fishy to me.”

“Why’s that?”

“You figure it out. That’s what you’re getting paid for, isn’t it? Now fuck off.” Asher slammed the door in Connor’s face, and Connor flinched.

Apparently, that was the end of that conversation. And it was clear that if Connor wanted to come back here and talk to Asher again, he had better come armed with a lot more information.

Connor backed away from the house, trying discreetly to get a look inside through the large windows in front. The blinds obstructed most of his view and the sunlight reflecting off the glass obstructed the rest.

He wasn’t sure what he would see anyway. It wasn’t as if there would be evidence of murder sitting in plain sight. There would be no fake beard hanging over the edge of the sofa, no gun on the coffee table, no picture of Nick hanging on the wall for Asher to use as target practice.

If he wanted to find anything that fell remotely into that camp, he’d have to come back with Dylan when Asher wasn’t around. She could get Connor past just about any lock the man had. But just as there wasn’t any point in returning to talk to Asher until he had more information, nor was there any reason to break into his house. Not yet, anyway.

Besides, they had plenty of other good leads to follow. The affair, obviously. And now that Asher had mentioned it, the shakeup that Nick had put his department through might be something too. Sure, he had always considered it a lead in the sense that it had put Asher on their radar. But could it have been more than that? Connor knew the company had made a point of keeping it quiet because they worried about how it would look if the press found out about it. At first, that seemed like pretty run-of-the-mill PR for a company as big as Viberly. When Connor had found out they planned to go public soon, it made even more sense.

But what was the reason for the shakeup?

––––––––

“That’s a good question,” Dylan agreed once Connor was back at the office.

The three investigators were once again sitting around their conference table, discussing the case. Their receptionist had taken a few days off, so they were the only ones there. Dylan was working her way through her third cup of coffee. It was never good, but the receptionist made it better than she did, and after every sip, Connor could tell from her expression how little she was enjoying it. But after what had happened at Starbucks that morning, neither he nor anyone else at the table was about to suggest they take their conversation back to that public space.

“Viberly is making money hand over fist,” Olin added. “They certainly didn’t do it because they were strapped for cash.” And he would be the one to know. While none of them had been invited to have a look at the company’s books, his background as an accountant—even as limited as it was—had taught him enough about the ins and outs of a company’s finances that he was able to sketch out a rough outline of their cash flow using publicly available information.

“We need to ask Theo,” Connor said.

“We need to ask him about a lot of things,” Dylan added.

Olin leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. “Someone needs to talk to Samantha also.”

Connor agreed. If they were going to talk to Theo, they needed to talk to her too. Just as important, they needed to do it at the same. Odds were good she had heard something about the shakeup in Nick’s department. Even if she hadn’t, she would certainly have something to say about the affair. And Connor did not want the two of them to have the chance to get their stories straight—at least not any more than they might have already.

“Let’s see what we can do to make that happen,” he said, pulling his phone out of his pocket. He dialed Theo’s cell and was eventually routed to the CEO’s voicemail. Instead of leaving a message, he then called Viberly, where Theo’s receptionist told Connor he would be unavailable until four o’clock.

“It is urgent that we speak to him as soon as possible. Do you know where we could find him?”

“Sorry,” she said. “His calendar’s blocked. That’s all I can tell you.”

CHAPTER 26

Theo walked into a swank downtown restaurant called Twin Blades, which he always assumed was a nod to the thinly sliced steak that had earned them rave reviews when they’d opened two years earlier.

The lunch crowd was starting to file in. A few scattered tables across the dining room were occupied. Theo found Louis sitting at a booth near the restrooms, a bottle of beer in front of him. He was wearing an unbuttoned and untucked Hawaiian shirt over a plain white tee. He couldn’t have looked more out of place among the small crowd of wealthy diners if he tried.

“You’re early,” Theo said, who had himself arrived ten minutes before they were supposed to meet.

Louis looked away from the tall windows beside him and met Theo’s gaze. Then he grabbed the bottle of beer off the table and raised it in Theo’s direction. “Here’s to being on time.”

Theo slid the cash-filled briefcase he was carrying onto the bench across from Louis and sat down beside it. He was barely in his seat before a waiter was at their table asking him what he would like to drink.

“Soda water.”

“And another one of these,” Louis said, shaking the bottle of beer in his hand.

The waiter nodded and disappeared. If he was at all put off by serving somebody like Louis, he was too professional to show it.

Once the waiter was gone, Louis drank until he had finished his beer and then slid the empty bottle to the far side of the table. “You got a little blackmailer problem, huh?”

“Keep your voice down.”

Louis dramatically looked over his shoulder, as if to point out there was nobody close enough to hear him, but nonetheless lowered his voice. “What do they have on you?”

“Samantha didn’t tell you?”

“She didn’t tell me shit.”

“Then let’s just leave it like that.”

Louis shrugged. “Fine. Whatever. Samantha said you want me to take some pictures of the blackmailer when they pick up the money. Is that right?”

“I also want you to follow him, find out where he goes,” Theo said.

“Right, I remember Samantha saying something about that.”

The waiter returned with their drinks, placed them on the table, and quietly departed when Theo told him they were not ready to order food. Of course, they would not be ordering food at all. This would be nothing more than a quick meeting before the two men left for the drop location, but the waiter didn’t need to know that.

“You got a camera for me to use?” Louis asked.

It was a stupid question, but not one that came as much of a surprise considering the man who’d asked it. “Use your phone.”

“The quality won’t be as good.”

“You don’t think the blackmailer is going to notice some numbskull aiming a camera in his direction?”

“You might want to watch how you’re talking to me unless you want to do this on your own.”

Theo sighed. “Fine. Sorry.”

Louis took a sip from his beer. “So what’s in it for me if I help you?”

Theo was not ready for that question. Samantha had told him he would not have to pay anything for Louis’s help, but he wasn’t surprised this scumbag would try to change the deal at the last minute. If this was any other day, he would tell Louis to go to hell, but since Theo needed him, he decided he had better negotiate. “How about five percent if I find out who’s behind this?”

“Sounds like you don’t really want my help.”

“Five percent is—”

“You know what? You should just take this to the police. Let them handle it. You won’t have to pay them a dime.”

So apparently Louis had decided to engage in a little blackmail of his own. Theo bit back the words he wanted to say, instead settling on: “How much do you want?”

“Twenty percent.”

“Fifteen.”

Louis looked out the window again, thinking the offer over. “Fine.”

“But only if I find out who’s behind this,” Theo repeated.

Louis agreed. Then, after they talked through the details of the drop, Theo placed enough cash on the table to cover the bill without waiting to find out the exact amount they owed and led Louis out of the restaurant.

––––––––

At first, Piedmont Park seemed like a strange place for the drop. It was a wide-open space with winding trails and nowhere to hide. However, as Theo parked his BMW along the curb at the northeast corner, he began to realize how clever the blackmailer had been by selecting this spot.

Louis had trailed Theo in his own car and parked behind him. The plan had been to scout the park together for the best place for Louis to take pictures. Theo wanted to find somewhere that would give Louis a good view of the blackmailer while at the same time not drawing attention to himself. There were enough people lounging lazily on blankets nearby that Louis could have done the same if he had brought one. But he didn’t have a blanket, and, when Theo thought about it, he decided no one was going to believe a man who looked like Louis would be out there sunbathing, blanket or not.

But that was beside the point for the moment because they weren’t going to be scouting for the best locations together. The wide-open nature of the park meant the blackmailer could be watching him as soon as he stepped out of the car, and he’d never know it.

That was the genius of this location, Theo realized. The blackmailer knew Theo wasn’t going to call the cops, which meant he didn’t have to worry about undercover officers watching him pick up the money. It also meant that if Theo came with anybody who wasn’t police, he would know about it long before the drop ever took place.

Theo pulled out his phone and called Louis just as Louis was stepping out of his car.

“How about a little patience?” Louis snapped as he slammed the door shut.

“Don’t come this way.”

“What?” Louis asked and started heading toward Theo’s car.

“Keep walking!”

“What? Why?”

“Just do it.”

Finally, Louis listened. He turned away from Theo’s BMW and headed into the park. Theo sighed with relief, watched him ease down a gentle hill, past the bench at the northeast corner where Theo was supposed to leave the money.

“You want to tell me what’s going on?” Louis asked.

Theo filled him in on his theory.

“Shit, that’s clever.”

Theo shrugged. Even though it was indeed clever, it was also a trap that was easy to avoid as long as you thought a couple of steps ahead. And Theo would not be where he was today if he didn’t always think a couple of steps ahead.

“Just find somewhere inconspicuous,” Theo said.

“Yeah, sure.” Louis hung up, meandered over to another bench, and took a seat. Despite the clear view of the northeast corner Louis would have from there, Theo worried he was too far away to get much of a picture. However, he also did not want to draw the blackmailer’s attention to Louis by asking him to move, so he decided that would have to do.

Theo waited another ten minutes, during which Louis had the good sense to keep himself busy with his phone so he looked like he was there for the same reason so many other people were—the sun. Then he meandered up to the bench with his briefcase swinging casually from one arm and settled onto the side of it that was closest to his car. He placed the briefcase on the ground by his feet, made a point of looking at his phone for several minutes as well, and walked away.

Both as he approached the bench and as he left, he kept his eyes peeled for anyone suspicious. No one stood out. He got back into his car, praying that Louis would not drop the ball on this, and drove away.

CHAPTER 27

Although Louis held his phone in his lap and scrolled idly through his Facebook feed, his eyes were squarely on the briefcase Theo had left sitting next to the park bench. And it didn’t take long before someone came to collect it.

Theo’s car was barely out of sight before activity from a black Ford Focus parked closer to the bench drew Louis’s attention. The driver’s door opened. A man stepped out. He was wearing a Braves baseball cap and a pair of sunglasses. If he removed those and shaved off the full beard he was sporting, he would be unrecognizable.

The man wasted no time. He moved quickly over to the briefcase, grabbed it, and headed back to his car.

Louis snapped more than a dozen photos of the blackmailer, but he doubted any of them would be worth much. Then he instinctively glanced around at the sunbathers and a group of teenagers tossing a football nearby. To his surprise, nobody else seemed to notice what was happening.

Louis did not wait for the blackmailer to return to his vehicle before quickly heading for his own. If he failed to get a picture of that man’s plate, the blackmailer would be gone for good. While that might not have mattered much to him when his sister pressured him into this job, it mattered quite a bit now. Fifteen percent of that was his, after all.

The man with the beard looked back at him twice, then broke into a sprint, closing the final few yards to his car.

Louis did the same. He jumped into his own car, pulled into traffic, and rounded the corner fast enough to put him directly behind the blackmailer’s car, which was now in motion. He tried to memorize the plate number, but with the beer in his system, the random series of letters and numbers wouldn’t stick. He would have to get a photo, and that wasn’t going to be possible just yet. Not with the way that man was driving.

The blackmailer raced down the two-lane street, horn blaring, and swerving around pedestrians who were stupid enough to step out into the road. He soared through a four-way stop. Turned right at the next corner.

Louis might not be able to remember the license plate right now, but the beer did take the edge off. He matched the blackmailer turn for turn. Once they were weaving through the heavy traffic on Peachtree Street, though, he knew it was just a matter of time until the man got away. If he wanted to get a picture, he’d have to do it now.

He worked his phone out of his pocket with one hand while recklessly racing between vehicles, but his fingers slipped. It tumbled to the floor. “Shit!”

With a limited amount of clear road ahead of him, he reached down to grab it. Just as he wrapped his hand around the device, a car somewhere nearby laid on its horn. He bolted upright to see that while his lane was still clear, he had pulled the car into oncoming traffic when his eyes were off the road.

He jerked the steering wheel to the right, narrowly avoiding a collision. Then, phone finally in hand, he opened the camera app and began randomly snapping photos without actually looking to see what he was capturing.

Swerve around one car. Click, click. Slip between two others. Click.

He probably had fifty or more by the time the blackmailer raced through a red light at a busy intersection, narrowly avoiding a collision of his own.

The alcohol might have been enough to steady Louis’s nerves when racing between cars, but he was neither drunk enough nor stupid enough to follow the man through six lanes of cross traffic.

He slammed on the brakes, rolled up onto the sidewalk to avoid hitting the car in front of him, and came to a stop only inches from a NO PARKING sign.

CHAPTER 28

Connor waited at the Viberly offices for Theo to return. Olin waited at his home. And Dylan parked her car along the curb within sight of Samantha’s house. They figured Theo would likely show up at his home or his office sooner or later, and when he did, they wanted Dylan in place so she could question Samantha at the same time.

Of course they were right.

Theo came marching down the hall to his office at 3:45 p.m., which was only slightly before his secretary had told Connor he would be available. He looked stressed, tired, angry. Perhaps there was a problem with the plan to go public. Or perhaps Connor was merely witnessing the effects of the daily stressors that can take their toll on a man in his position.

Whatever the cause, it wasn’t Connor’s concern. He had come for answers, and he wasn’t going to leave until he got them.

He stood up, leaving the magazine he had been reading on his chair, and approached Theo as Theo likewise approached him.

“Can I help you with something?” Theo asked. He sounded as stressed as he looked.

“We just have some follow-up questions about Nick. Can we talk in your office?”

Theo gestured for Connor to lead the way, which he did. On his way to Theo’s office, Connor quickly sent a thumbs up emoji to a group chat that Olin and Dylan were both on, indicating that he was about to start his conversation with the CEO.

Then he opened the office door, stepped inside, and Theo closed it behind him.

“Fire away,” Theo said as he sat down behind his desk.

Without waiting to be asked, Connor took a seat in one of the two chairs on the opposite side of it. He was about to spring a series of surprises on the man and did not want him to feel like Connor was trying to intimidate him by towering over him when he did. “I understand you’re going public soon,” he said, starting with the easiest one first.

Theo relaxed back into his chair. “Yeah. So?”

“Don’t you think that’s something you should have told us?”

“It’s not exactly a secret. I mean, there’s plenty of news out there about it. But even if there wasn’t, I don’t see why that would have anything to do with what happened to Nick.”

There was a hard edge underneath everything Theo said that hadn’t been there last time they spoke. Connor didn’t think it had anything to do with his question, though. Theo had come in hot, and in spite of that, delivered his answer with an ease that suggested he had nothing to hide.

Still, Theo should have told them about the plan to go public, and Connor wanted to make sure he drove that point home before moving on. “If there’s anything else that you think we should know, don’t wait for us to find out on our own.”

“Sure. Whatever.”

And since that made for the perfect segue into the more difficult questions, Connor decided it would be a good idea to first give Theo a chance to come clean on his own. “Is there anything?”

“Like what?”

“Anything else you think we should know.”

Theo shrugged.

“How about you start by telling me why Nick put his department through a reorg recently. Was there an issue of some sort?”

“I have no idea. Nick was the CFO. He was all numbers. Thought about everything that way. I’ve never been good with that sort of thing.”

It was another answer that sounded angry, but also sounded true. Which didn’t make Connor particularly happy. So far, Theo didn’t seem to know any more than he did. He decided he’d better press a little. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and clasping his hands together. “You don’t know why Nick let a whole bunch of people go? That didn’t seem like the kind of thing you would want to ask about?”

“I trusted him to manage his department however he thought was best. I’ve known him since college. I didn’t need to check up on him. Frankly, if I had to ask him about everything he did, he wouldn’t be a very good CFO, would he?”

Another honest answer, but also another opening.

“What about Asher Shields?”

“Who?”

“He—”

“—worked for Nick,” Theo interrupted. “Right. I remember him now. What about him?”

“Did you know him when you were at college also?”

“Why would I have?”

“He went to Princeton.”

“So did a lot of people.”

“You volunteered at a soup kitchen with him while you were there.”

“I did that once. Met a lot of people that day. I couldn’t tell you a thing about a single one of them.”

“He worked here.”

“Connor, I’m not sure if you realize this, but over half of our staff has an Ivy League background. That hardly makes him unique in this building. But to answer your question directly: no, I didn’t know him. What would it matter if I did?”

The edge beneath Theo’s words was getting harder. It was almost as if he could intuit the theory Connor had formed with Olin and Dylan that placed Asher—and, by extension, Theo—right at the center of the crime.

“It might matter a great deal if, say, you were having an affair with Samantha, don’t you think?”

Theo rocked forward. “Excuse me?”

Connor reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. He unfolded it deliberately, passed it over to Theo. On it was one of the photos Dylan had taken while they were at Andrew Bartelli’s office. The picture of Theo and Samantha locked in a passionate embrace occupied most of the frame. This was, as Dylan had called it, the money shot.

Theo looked at the picture for hardly a second before tossing it onto his desk. “Where did you get this?” he asked calmly. But when he did not get an immediate response, he stood and repeated the words, this time shouting them instead. “Where did you get this?”

“That’s not your business,” Connor replied, as calmly as he could. “It sure does raise a few questions, though, doesn’t it?”

CHAPTER 29

When Dylan received the thumbs up emoji on the group chat, she immediately moved her car from the curb to Samantha’s driveway and knocked on the door.

Samantha answered wearing an old paint-stained T-shirt and a pair of jeans. Her hair was pulled back into a loose ponytail. Errant strands hung around her face. She wasn’t wearing any makeup—not even a base. Clearly, she wasn’t expecting company.

The first words out of her mouth were: “You have news about Nick?”

“Kind of. Can I come in?”

Samantha stepped out of the way, allowing Dylan enough room to enter. Once the two women were standing in the foyer, Dylan then asked if she could have a glass of water. Anything to get them deeper into the house. She did not want to show Samantha the money shot here, where it would be so easy for her to kick her out.

Samantha led her into the kitchen, filled a glass of water using the dispenser on the fridge, and the two women had a seat at the breakfast table.

The house was quiet, Dylan noticed. There didn’t seem to be anyone else here right now.

After she took a sip of water, she placed the glass on the table.

“So what have you got?” Samantha prompted.

Dylan first ran through many of the same initial questions Connor had. Why didn’t she tell them Viberly was about to go public? Did she know why Nick had recently replaced a bunch of people in the finance department? Had Nick or Theo been friends with a man named Asher in college?

The responses she received were also more or less the same.

“I didn’t think about whether Viberly was going public. It doesn’t really matter anyway, does it?” and “Nick didn’t tell me much about what happened in his department. I’m sure if he replaced a bunch of people, he must have had a reason for it,” and “I never heard about anyone named Asher. I guess I couldn’t say for sure if either one of them knew him, but they probably weren’t close since no one ever mentioned him to me.”

“What about Nick’s shares?” Dylan asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Who got them when he passed away?”

“I did. Why?” A look crossed Samantha’s face as she realized what the question implied. “I didn’t kill my husband for shares in Viberly,” she snapped. “How could you even think such a thing?”

“Take the crazy down a notch, okay? I was just asking you what happened to the stock now that he’s dead, that’s all.”

“But it means—”

“It means we’re trying to cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s. That’s what you hired us to do.”

“I didn’t hire you to blame me!”

Now Dylan was getting annoyed too. She was planning on taking her time getting into the affair. She hadn’t wanted Samantha to shut down when the topic came up. But screw it. Samantha might already be on the verge of shutting down. Might as well see where the woman’s anger would take her. Maybe in the heat of the moment, Samantha would say something she wouldn’t have said otherwise.

Dylan pulled her phone out of her purse, quickly sifted through the photos on it until she found the money shot, and placed it down on the table. “I wasn’t blaming you. But I wouldn’t be out of line if I was, now, would I?”

Samantha’s expression immediately transformed from fury to shock. Staring down at the photo, she began to babble, stumbling through half-formed ideas, unable to finish a single sentence as she processed what this picture must mean. “How did you— Where . . . ?”

Dylan had no doubt her reaction was genuine. Clearly Nick hadn’t told Samantha he knew about the affair. But that didn’t mean Samantha and Theo hadn’t conspired to kill Nick to get him out of the picture. Of course, that was still just a theory, and so far, this conversation hadn’t gotten Dylan any closer to proving it.

“Nick hired a private investigator.”

Samantha’s gaze shifted slowly from the picture to Dylan. “You?”

“Not us.”

“Then how do you know about this?”

“We’re good at what we do.”

“Look, it’s not what you think. It just kind of happened. The three of us used to hang out together a lot. And one night, all three of us were supposed to meet for drinks. Nick said he couldn’t make it, said he was going to have to work late. Anyway, Theo and I had put back a few too many and . . . it just kind of happened.”

“And kept happening.”

“I like him.”

“That’s your reason?”

Samantha pressed the button on the side of the phone. The screen went dark. Presumably she didn’t want to look at the picture anymore. Then she slid the device back across the table to Dylan. “It’s more than that. Nick and I were good together in high school. Things started to change as we got older. We just didn’t click the same way we used to. I wanted to tell Nick about it. We both did. But it would have devastated him. We didn’t know what to do.”

“That’s awfully considerate of you.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with Nick’s death.” Samantha let out an exasperated sigh. “This was a mistake. I shouldn’t have hired you. The police will get this sorted out eventually. I should let them do their job.”

“You can’t fire us.”

“I sure can!” She stood up dramatically, the chair squealing as it slid across the tile floor, and pointed to the door. “Get out! You’re fired!”

Dylan didn’t move. “How do you think your mother-in-law is going to react when she finds out about all this?” She gestured to her phone. “You think she’s going to want us off the case? We’re on this until it’s done. So if I were you, I’d stop hiding things from us, because it sure doesn’t look good.”

Samantha paced the kitchen to the far end and back. She looked like she wanted to scream. She looked like she wanted to hit something. She didn’t do either. Eventually, she returned to her seat and said, “Fine. How can I assure you I wasn’t involved?”

“Let’s start with Theo. Do you know where he was at the time of the murder?”

Although eyewitnesses were unreliable, Dylan did not think anyone would mistake a petite woman like Samantha for a man with a beard. But it was certainly possible that man could have been Theo.

“I was with him,” Samantha said.

“Where? At his house?”

She hesitated. “No. He rented an apartment for us. Someplace only we would know about.”

“Why? He’s not married.” They obviously didn’t want Nick to know about the affair, but there wouldn’t have been anybody at Theo’s house to worry about. At least nobody Dylan knew about.

“Nick might not have known as much about computers as Theo does, but he worked for a technology company.”

“What’s your point?”

“He knew a few things.”

“Like?”

Samantha nodded toward Dylan’s phone. “You know that thing tracks everywhere you’ve been.”

Dylan did know that. She had worked with Connor and Olin on a case where they had used that very feature. Still, she had not thought about how that fact would apply to this situation until now. “You were worried he would find out you were meeting Theo at his house and figure out what was going on.”

“Looks like he figured it out anyway.”

“What were you going to tell him if he found out you were going to that apartment?”

“It was a couple of blocks from a spa I like called Detente. I would just park there, leave my phone in the car, and walk. He knew I didn’t answer if I was in the middle of a treatment, so he wouldn’t think much about it if he got my voicemail when he called.”

“It was just the two of you?”

Samantha nodded.

“How long were you there?”

“A couple of hours.”

“Anybody see you?”

“I don’t . . .” Samantha shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. But, hey, listen, can you make sure this whole thing stays between us? It would be bad if word got out about the affair right now.”

“I'll do my best.”

CHAPTER 30

Connor, Olin, and Dylan met back at the office to discuss what they had learned from Theo and Samantha.

If what they said was true, Theo still might have hired somebody. Either one of them could have. But like everything else when it came to an investigation like this, solving the case was as much a matter of subtraction as it was addition. And the next thing they needed to find out was whether Theo and Samantha really were at that apartment together.

It helped that after Theo got over his shock, he told Connor more or less the same story. But that alone was not enough. If they had coordinated their alibis prior to the ambush, the stories would obviously match up.

Connor wanted independent verification. Olin and Dylan did too. So he drove them to the Overlook Apartments and parked in a public lot across the street. The building was sixteen stories of glass that curved at its corners, making it as sleek and modern as the Viberly offices.

“Look for security cameras,” Connor said as they stepped from the shade of the covered parking deck into the sun. “That would be the easiest way to verify they were here.”

They had struck out when employing a similar tactic to find their killer at the intersection of Parsons and Idlewood, but things might go better this time. A place like this had to have security cameras somewhere. Connor wouldn’t have been surprised if they were aimed at every entrance, in every elevator, and covering every square inch of the lobby.

Theo and Samantha might have been able to hide from Nick here, but nobody was getting in or out of this place without leaving a trail.

The cameras, as it turned out, were not hard to find. And they were indeed covering both the front and side entrances to the building. But now that Connor had that information, the question was whether they were going to be able to access the security footage. He couldn’t exactly hack his way into a closed-circuit system, and they could see through the large windows on the ground floor that, even though there was a security desk, it was unmanned.

Connor tired his luck with the main door, but it was locked.

“We’ll have to reach out to the management company.” Dylan pulled out her phone and began a search. “Got it,” she said a minute later. “They’re called Modern Living.” She tapped a link to call their number and, after several rings, it rolled over to voicemail.

“We should probably go talk to them in person,” Olin said. “They’re not going to help us over the phone anyway.”

Connor didn’t like the idea of walking away from the building empty-handed. Maybe if he could get to that unmanned desk, he would be able to access the security feed. Maybe if he talked to a neighbor, they would remember something. Then again, he didn’t have to choose between going or staying, did he? He handed his keys to Olin. “See what you can find out.”

“You’re not coming?”

“I want to do a little more snooping around this place.”

“How? You can’t even get inside.”

Connor smiled and walked over to the callbox by the door. He selected an apartment at random and waited for someone to answer.

“Domino’s,” he said once they did.

“Wrong apartment.”

“It’ll work eventually,” Connor told Olin after the call ended, and then tried another number.

Olin watched him with his arms crossed over his chest and a look of annoyance on his face. “This is so stupid,” he mumbled as Connor was rebuffed time and again.

“Not stupid,” Dylan insisted. “Brilliant.”

Connor was about to dial his sixth apartment when a woman stepped off the elevator. She was dressed in black from head to toe and coming their way. Connor stood back so she had room to exit.

“Thanks,” he said, grabbing the door handle as she stepped out. “Lost my keycard. I wasn’t sure how I was going to get inside.”

“He can be so forgetful,” Dylan added, getting in on the act.

The woman, however, hardly even glanced in their direction as she passed by. Either she didn’t care or she didn’t want to get involved. Either way, Connor was in.

Dylan waved to Olin as she followed Connor over the threshold. “See you later.”

Olin’s expression left no doubt how he felt about this plan, but since the woman in black was still within earshot, he rolled his eyes and stormed off.

“He’ll get over it,” Dylan said.

Connor knew that was true. Olin’s moral compass was sometimes a little too finely tuned. After all, they weren’t even doing anything all that bad this time.

“I mean—it’s not like we’re breaking into someone’s office,” Dylan added, tapping into Connor’s train of thought and clearly referring to Bartelli.

Connor studied the space with fresh eyes—the polished white tile floor, the matching white sofas—and noticed security cameras mounted to the ceiling in every corner. The glare off the glass had made them impossible to see from outside. Those might prove useful as well, Connor thought. Especially if they captured audio.

Dylan was already on her way to the security desk by the time Connor had finished assessing the room. He hurried over to join her. There were two built-in monitors behind it, both of which sat nearly flush with the surface of the desk. And both of which were off.

There were no guarantees that anyone at Modern Living would be willing to help Olin when he arrived. If they didn’t, that would prove to be a dead end. So even though the monitors were off, Connor did not intend on walking away from this desk until he was certain the feeds were indeed inaccessible.

He pulled on the small doors beneath them, assuming he would find a computer he could power on. They were locked.

“As if that’s going to stop us,” Dylan said, already fishing around in her purse for her set of lock picks.

Connor moved out of the way and let her work.

Less than a minute later, she pulled open the doors—“Ta-da!”—revealing the computer he expected would be there. He pressed the button. A login screen appeared on each monitor simultaneously.

“Now it’s your turn for a little magic,” Dylan said.

Connor kneeled, searched the computer for a USB port. Maybe, he thought, he could bypass the security here the same way he had at Andrew Bartelli’s office. He still had the flash drive in his pocket. But he quickly realized there was no USB port. No CD drive. No way of accessing the computer at all except for through the login screen. Which meant: “We’re out of luck.”

Dylan was disappointed but not surprised. They shut off the computer and locked the cabinet doors, removing all evidence of what they had done. Then they took the elevator to the seventh floor. Samantha and Theo had both claimed they’d met at Unit 702. Dylan had not been able to verify this apartment was rented under Theo’s name using any of her usual methods online, but if there was a neighbor who had seen either of them, it would probably be somebody on this floor.

Connor started at one end of the hall and Dylan started at the other. Knocking and waiting. Knocking and waiting. Very few people were home. Whenever somebody answered, Connor showed them the printed photo of Theo and Samantha, whereas Dylan cycled through a short series of images on her phone. Nobody they spoke to was able to recognize the couple.

However, that did not mean Theo and Samantha weren’t at the apartment together when Nick was murdered. And it certainly didn’t mean Connor and Dylan were done.

CHAPTER 31

Without access to the security cameras and no neighbors who could confirm they had seen Theo or Samantha, Connor and Dylan at least needed to find out whether this apartment was theirs.

Connor knocked once before Dylan pulled her tools out of her purse for a second time. If this was not the love nest Samantha and Theo claimed it to be, he did not want to startle anybody who might be on the other side of that door.

“That’s one point in their favor,” Dylan said after nobody answered.

Of course, it was still possible this unit was rented to somebody other than Theo. But Connor had to agree—that was a point in their favor. Now they just had to get inside and make sure all the other possible points were in their favor also.

He looked down the hall in both directions. “All right, seems like it’s as clear as it’s going to get. Be quick about it.” If anybody had entered the lobby while they were behind the security desk, it would have been easy for them to duck out of sight until the coast was clear. Here, there was nowhere to hide.

The apartment consisted of four rooms. A living room, a kitchen, a bedroom, and a bathroom. The living room was big enough to do double duty as a dining room, but barely. The apartment was cramped, and the furniture—all expensive, Connor could tell—was packed in so tightly, he suspected he might become claustrophobic if he spent too much time in here.

“I’ll start in the bedroom,” Dylan said. “You look out here.”

Connor nodded and then began a careful search of the living room. Not that there was much to search. The apartment felt cramped not because there was a lot of furniture, but because the rooms were just so small. A sofa, a coffee table, and a lamp had been enough to make this room feel like it was bursting at the seams.

Connor tilted the coffee table back to make sure there was nothing underneath it. He removed the sofa cushions. Checked between the sofa and the wall. And with that, he was done, ready to move on to the next room in the apartment.

The entire search took less than ten minutes. Connor had no idea what he had hoped to find when they started. A picture of the couple, maybe? That seemed improbable for a love nest. If you were looking to count points in favor of Theo and Samantha, though, then you had to admit that it was the lack of personal items that made such a compelling argument in this case. There were no clothes in the closet. The fridge contained only a six-pack of bottled water. The kitchen cabinets: a box of chamomile tea and two mugs.

If this wasn’t Theo and Samantha’s love nest, it sure as shit was somebody’s.

“Hey, come here,” Dylan shouted.

Connor had been sitting on the sofa, waiting for Dylan to make one last pass through the bathroom before giving up, if only because there was not enough room between the sink and the toilet for both of them.

The bathroom had two doors. One opened onto the bedroom, the other the living room. Connor made his way to the one that opened onto the living room. “You found something?”

Dylan held out her hand. She was cradling a pair of cufflinks in her palm. “They have the initials ‘T.L.’ on them.”

Theo Lockwood, Connor thought, which was enough evidence for him that at least this part of their story was true. Unit 702 was Theo and Samantha’s love nest. But were they here when Nick was killed? And since they could have hired someone to do the killing, did it even matter?

CHAPTER 32

Theo had received a series of text messages while he was talking to Connor. His phone was on silent, but he could feel the device vibrating in his pocket incessantly. Each vibration was accompanied by a small buzzing sound Connor didn’t seem to notice. It had to be Louis, and if the timing of the messages was any indication, the blackmailer had not waited long to pick up the cash.

Every time his phone vibrated, he could feel his nerves—already wound as tight as they could be—grow even tighter.

There had been no reason to deny the affair. Not with the photo Connor had shown him. But once the phone started buzzing, he didn’t put up a fight when it came to any of Connor’s questions. He told him about the apartment he and Samantha used and the fact that they were both there when Nick was killed. Whatever it took to get Connor out of his office faster.

As soon as he was alone, he pulled the phone out of his pocket and scanned through the messages.

Shit oh shit man

Are you going to answer or what?

That crazy fucker almost got me killed

Hello?

Theo noticed that he also had nine missed calls. So the incessant buzzing wasn’t just text messages. Which, now that Theo thought about it, made sense. But Theo did not want to engage in any conversation about the blackmailer by text or phone, and by this point, Louis should know that.

Three dots appeared at the bottom of their one-sided conversation. As of this moment, Louis hadn’t said anything Theo couldn’t explain away if he had to. But that could change quite literally any second.

Stop, he replied before the next message came through.

Thankfully, Louis did.

Once the three dots vanished, Theo added: Come to my office. I’ll be waiting.

In a benign but equally frustrating response, Louis said, Got it.

Theo tossed his phone onto his desk and collapsed back into his chair. He ran his hands through his hair and down his face. Sighed. Then spun his chair around to face the windows behind him and waited.

––––––––

Sweaty and red-faced, Louis charged into Theo’s office. “That was some fucked-up shit.” He slammed the door behind him and dropped into one of the two chairs on the opposite side of the desk.

Theo was still facing the windows when Louis entered, but he knew who it was without looking. That gritty, half-drunken slur was unmistakable, and every action Louis took from the moment he spoke Theo could practically see play out in his mind’s eye.

He spun around to face Sammy’s brother. Louis looked nothing like her. Sammy was a goddess. The long blonde hair. The perfect body. He understood what she had seen in Nick—he had risen farther and faster in the tech world than most people ever did—but Theo had known from the moment they met that she deserved better. She did not deserve a prince. She deserved a king.

Especially with a brother like this. A leech. A slovenly half-wit. How two people so different could come from the same family was beyond him, yet here was the evidence that it was possible—sitting right on the opposite side of his desk.

“Did you get a picture of the blackmailer?”

“Yeah, I got it, but I don’t think you’re going to be real happy with how it turned out.”

Theo had worried Louis would drop the ball. At least he couldn’t say he was surprised. He held out a hand, gestured for the half-wit to pass him the phone. “Let’s see how bad it is.” Pictures of the man’s feet, maybe? A blurry photo featuring an ear?

Louis logged in, brought up the pictures of the blackmailer, and handed the device over.

The pictures were better than Theo expected them to be. Turned out Louis hadn’t done so badly after all. If the blackmailer’s face wasn’t obscured by the sunglasses and the beard, he might have actually had something he could work with.

But it was obscured, so he didn’t, which meant he was just as disappointed as he would have been if Louis had taken a blurry photo of an ear. Only maybe this was worse, because now he didn’t have anybody he could blame.

“I told you you wouldn’t like it.”

“You’re a genius,” Theo replied dryly.

“But,” Louis said, perking up, “it gets better. Keep going.”

Theo did. He swiped past the half-decent photos of the man with the beard to a series of pictures that were every bit as blurry as he had originally expected. The first couple appeared to be from the inside of a car. There was one of a leg. A steering wheel. Then random cars.

As he swiped, Louis came around the desk and peered over Theo’s shoulder so that he too could see the pictures. “I had to chase that fucker through traffic. It was absolutely insane. You should have seen the way he was swerving in and out between cars. Like he was a pro or something. I did what I could to keep up, but, man, it wasn’t easy. I’m telling you right now, I earned that fifteen percent.”

Theo grunted. He was impressed that Louis had chased the blackmailer through traffic, but a few pictures of a man with a beard and some random shots of cars were not going to be enough for Theo to find him, which meant they weren’t going to be enough for Louis to collect his payment. A deal was a deal.

Then a flash of memory brought to mind the detective who had been working Nick’s murder. He could not remember the detective’s name, but it didn’t matter. They had only spoken once. The detective had stopped by the office asking Theo and others about Nick, but he’d seemed disinterested in anything Theo had to say. As far as he could tell, the detective already seemed convinced that Nick had been killed in a mugging gone wrong. “Not sure we’re ever going to find him. Only eyewitnesses we got are some homeless people in an alley, and about all they could tell us is that it was a guy with a beard.”

Could this be the same man? He shook the thought away, dismissing it as unlikely. “Did you find out where he went?”

“I tried. Like I said, he was zooming in and out of traffic like a pro. I did my best to keep up, but then he went flying through a red light at Peachtree and Third. You should have seen it. People slamming on their brakes, honking their horns. He was lucky somebody didn’t plow right into him. Hell, I’m lucky I made it out of that shitstorm in one piece. Nearly smashed into the back of another car when he pulled that crap.”

Theo passed the phone back to Louis. “Nice try, but I’m not going to be able to find the guy with these.”

“What are you talking about?” Now Louis shuffled through the photos on the phone and then turned it around so that Theo could see the screen. “That. Right there. You see that black Ford Focus? That’s what the blackmailer was driving.” He pinched the screen and zoomed in. “And that right there is his license plate.”

CHAPTER 33

Theo did not see how the license plate was going to help him. A picture—sure (if it had been any good). An address—probably. But a license plate? There was nothing he could do with that. He wasn’t a cop.

“Don’t need a cop,” Louis said. “I got something just as good.”

“And that is?”

“A contact at the DMV.”

“You’re saying you can find out who owns that car?”

Louis walked smugly back around the desk and returned to his chair. “Sure, but you know, he’s not going to give me that information for nothing.”

Another shakedown. Theo cracked his knuckles under the desk. “What’s it going to cost me?”

Louis bobbed his head from side to side while he considered his answer. “Another five percent.”

That put them back at the twenty percent Louis had asked for originally. Only now, Louis was not simply a hired gun; he was a man with something to barter.

“All right. Another five percent. As long as I find the guy behind this, it’s all yours.”

Louis shook his head. “Na-ah. Not after what I’ve been through. This is some valuable information I got here. Half of that’s mine whether you find him or not. That’s ten percent as soon as I give you a name, deal?”

“Fine. Sure. Whatever.” Theo waved a hand dismissively at Louis. “But don’t come back here asking for any money until you have a name, you hear me?”

––––––––

Louis left the office and headed straight for the DMV, texting his friend Randy on the way: Get ready to make some quick cash.

Although Louis and Randy had been friends for three years, Louis knew surprisingly little about him. They had been drinking buddies at the Red Light Tavern, where they dreamed up crimes together that they rarely remembered and even more rarely executed. When they were their drunkest, those crimes sometimes involved complexities that not even a crew in a Hollywood film could pull off successfully.

In reality, they stuck to the sort of petty theft that had gotten Louis pinched twice.

Which was how Louis knew Randy had the moral flexibility necessary for the task at hand. And, as an employee at the DMV, the necessary access.

Randy: What are you talking about?

Louis: Meet me in the parking lot in ten minutes.

Randy did. In fact, when Louis arrived, the man was already there, standing by the back door and smoking a cigarette. He must have recognized Louis’s car, because as soon as Randy turned his head toward the vehicle, he flicked his cigarette away and eased down the steps that would take him to the parking lot.

He was wearing a pair of brown slacks and a blue button-down, but they did little to make him look like the upstanding employee he was supposed to be. Even Louis could have told him that much. He wasn’t sure if it was the mullet or the gold pinky ring or a just a vibe Randy gave off, but he also didn’t care. Randy was his friend, and his sketchy moral character was one of the things Louis liked most about him.

“Whatcha got for me?” Randy asked as Louis stepped out of his car.

“I need you to run a plate.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Randy smiled in a slimy snake-oil salesman way. “What’s in it for me if I do?”

Louis had expected that question. Nobody was doing anything for a free in a situation like this. It was why he had told Theo he needed another five percent.

But five percent was thousands of dollars, way more than Randy would want for a job that would take him all of five minutes, and Louis had instead decided to offer a mere fraction of that. “How’s two hundred dollars sound?”

“Sounds like you got yourself a deal. What’s the plate number?”

Louis passed him a CVS receipt. It had been one of the many pieces of trash littering the floor of his car. On the back of it, he had written the plate number.

“What do you want to know?”

“Name and address will be fine.”

“This guy owe you money?” Randy asked, looking down at the plate number.

“Not exactly.”

Randy slipped the paper into his back pocket, squeezed his friend’s shoulder. “Hey, that’s all right with me. Long as you got that two hundred dollars, I don’t care what you want it for. Be right back.” Then he made his way back up the stairs and disappeared into the building.

Louis had settled on two hundred dollars in part because he was certain Randy would do the job for that amount. He had also settled on that figure because he didn’t have much more than that in his checking account, and if he wanted Randy to get him the information without demanding a premium, he was going to have to pay for it while he was here.

Randy returned a couple of minutes later with Louis’s CVS receipt and a one-page document, fresh from the printer, that contained everything Louis had asked for. Louis handed over a thin stack of cash.

“Always a pleasure doing business,” Randy said. He turned back toward the building while Louis scanned the document for the vehicle owner’s name and address.

“What’s this?” he shouted, moments before Randy stepped back inside.

Randy turned, one hand on the doorknob. “It’s what you asked for.”

“There’s no name on here.”

“Sure there is. Don’t know how much help it’s going to be, but’s it’s there.”

Louis looked at the paper again. The first time, he had simply scanned the words for a name, without taking the time to understand them. Now he read the page more carefully.

Theo wasn’t going to like this one bit, he thought, once he realized what the words meant. But then again, that wasn’t his problem, was it?

––––––––

Theo was still at the office when his cell phone rang. The days at Viberly could be long, even when he wasn’t being blackmailed or on the verge of going public. But with all those things weighing on his mind, he had no interest in rambling around his large house alone.

He looked away from the big screen of his computer—where he had multiple spreadsheets open, and on them a dizzying array of numbers—to the small screen of his phone. As he suspected, it was Louis. He was pissed with the half-wit all over again. By this point, the man really should know not to call or text until this was all over. Theo should ignore it. If he did, Louis would eventually get the message that he was going to have to come here to deliver the news in person.

But that meant he would have to wait too, and with the blackmailer’s identity on the other end of that line, he did not want to wait. He had a small fortune floating out there in the wild, getting farther from recovery with every passing minute. Worse still, the man in possession of that cash also carried with him a secret that could destroy him if it was exposed.

Theo had exercised patience when it came to the drop. He had exercised it again when Louis tried to reach out to him afterward. Which was all to say that his capacity for that beloved virtue had run dry. He wanted to know who the blackmailer was, and he wanted to know now.

He clicked to answer, lifted the phone to his ear, and was about to ask what Louis had found out, but Louis was already talking.

“I got what you’re after. I told you I could do it. But you’re going to have to pay me first.”

“Slow down. You really got it?”

“I told you I got a friend at the—”

“Stop,” Theo said, cutting him off. “Just give me what I asked for, then I’ll transfer you the money.” He had wondered several times why the blackmailer had insisted on an old-fashioned money drop when digital options were available and decided they were merely being careful. If he didn’t have an account in the Caymans or some other such place, handing over his banking information could have been as bad for him as handing over his name. But a wire transfer would be perfectly acceptable between Theo and Louis. If anyone asked, he could say he was merely helping the man out.

“No way. Like I said, money first.”

Something about that felt wrong to Theo. Maybe he was just being paranoid. Louis probably didn’t trust Theo any more than Theo trusted him. The uneasy alliance they’d had since Theo denied him a job could only carry their relationship so far.

“Fine.” Louis wasn’t going to screw him, he told himself. Sammy wouldn’t stand for it. Besides, he’d answered the phone because he wanted that information right away, and now that he knew Louis had it, he only wanted it more.

He ended the call, transferred the money through Zelle, and received a text message a few minutes later with a photo of the DMV document attached. Unlike Louis, he did not need to read the document more than once to understand what it said. He was pissed. The car belonged to Hertz Global Holdings, or, as most people knew it, Hertz Rental.

He called Louis back immediately. “What is this shit? How am I supposed to do anything with this?”

“You asked me to find out who owned the car. I did that. It’s not my fault it’s a rental. And don’t try to screw me out of the rest of my money if you find that guy, you hear me?”

Theo hung up without another word. Find the guy? With this information? That seemed unlikely.

He placed his next call to Sammy. The news might not be good, but she would still want to know how the drop had gone.

“Maybe Connor can find out who rented the car?” she suggested.

“You want to bring them into this?”

“Look, at this point, I don’t like them any more than you do, but they already know about the affair.”

“We’re not going to Connor with this—not him or anybody else on his team. You hear me?”

“Theo—”

“Sammy, no. Okay? I don’t want them involved. Promise me you’ll keep them out of this.”

Samantha sighed. “All right, I promise.”

CHAPTER 34

Olin did not make any progress with Modern Living. They did things by the book, the receptionist told him. Without a warrant, he wasn’t going to be getting anywhere near the security footage.

And while Connor and Dylan had determined Unit 702 was rented to Theo, they had done no better when it came to verifying whether he had been there with Samantha at the time of the murder.

On their way out of the apartment building, Dylan had suggested they stop by Detente to see if Samantha was parked in the lot at that time. After all, she said she always parked there when she met Theo at the apartment, and there was no reason to assume she would have done anything different on that day.

However, Detente had no security cameras in the back of their building, so whether they might have been willing to share the footage was irrelevant.

“If Samantha and Theo had anything to do with that murder, they would have made damn sure they had an alibi if they needed it,” Dylan said once all three investigators were back in Connor’s car.

“So what’s that leave us with?” Olin asked.

“Not much,” Connor said. While they hadn’t officially ruled out anyone yet, Dylan was right. Samantha and Theo would have almost certainly made sure they had an alibi if they had been involved. Asher would have too.

They needed a new lead if they were going to solve this case. A new way of looking at the problem.

And when Samantha called Connor, asking him if he could stop by, they began to hope that maybe, just maybe, they were going to get it.

She shot a look of annoyance at Dylan as Connor and his friends crossed her threshold but said nothing. Then she led them once more to the kitchen where they all gathered around the breakfast table.

“What did you want to see us about?” Connor asked.

“Before I tell you anything, you’ve got to promise me you’re not going to mention any of this to Theo.”

Connor shared a look with Olin and Dylan that would have meant nothing to anyone else. There was no gesture, no expression, not even a subtle nod. But Connor knew how to read those blank stares. He knew it meant Olin and Dylan were both willing to agree to Samantha’s terms.

“All right,” he said to her. “We can do that.”

Then she too shot her gaze toward each of the investigators, no doubt taking far less from those inscrutable faces than Connor had. “All right.” She grabbed her phone off the kitchen island and returned to the table. Placed it face up so everyone could see the screen. Scrolled through a series of three pictures. Two of the blackmailer. One of the car.

“This man has been blackmailing Theo. He knows about the affair, and he threatened to tell the world. You can imagine how that would play out. It would have been bad for Viberly even if . . .” She trailed off, and Connor was able to finish the unspoken thought in his head: even if Nick wasn’t dead.

But he was only half listening. For the most part, he was thinking about the man in the picture. The man with the sunglasses and the beard.

“How did you get these pictures?” Dylan asked.

“Louis sent them to me. Theo asked him to monitor the drop so he could see if he could find out who the blackmailer was.”

“He already paid the ransom?” Connor asked.

Samantha leaned back in her chair, leaving the phone where it was. Screen on. The blackmailer staring at them through that frozen moment in time. “He didn’t have any choice. The blackmailer didn’t even give him twelve hours to get the money together.”

“Why didn’t he go to the police?” Connor asked.

“Like I said, it happened fast. He didn’t have much time to think about it. And he was worried how it might play out in the press. People are already talking about . . . well, you know. The last thing Theo needed right now was something like this getting out. People might think that he was involved. And nobody wants their CEO wrapped up in a murder investigation on the eve of an IPO.”

Connor suspected the end of that statement was directed squarely at them but decided not to say anything.

“Anyway,” she continued, “I thought you might be able to help us figure out who was behind this. Maybe there’s a connection.”

Connor had had the same thought as soon as he saw the picture. While a beard alone was not much to go on, could it really be a coincidence that both the killer and the blackmailer had one?

Dylan slid the phone closer so she could get a better look at the image. “Why doesn’t Theo want us to know about this?”

Samantha shrugged, shot another annoyed look at Dylan. “I think after you guys accused us of killing Nick, he didn’t want to have anything to do with you.”

“We weren’t accusing you,” Olin jumped in. “We were just trying to put the pieces together so we could figure out what happened to him.”

“You know, like you asked us to do,” Dylan added, staring back at Samantha defiantly.

The tension lasted for several quiet seconds before Samantha broke eye contact. She turned her attention to Connor. “Can you help me or not?”

“We’ll help,” he replied. “But I’d like to get some more information, if we can. How did the blackmailer contact Theo?”

“Email.”

“Okay. That could be good. If we could get a copy of that email, we might be able to track down where it was sent from . . .”

Samantha was already shaking her head. “I don’t think Theo’s going to give me that. Not unless I tell him what it’s for, and then he definitely won’t give it to me. Like I said, he doesn’t want you anywhere near this. But I do have something else that might be helpful.”

Once again, she crossed to the kitchen island, this time returning with a piece of paper. She placed it on the table as well. “Louis knows somebody at the DMV. He was able to match the plate number to the owner of the vehicle.”

“This is the car the blackmailer was driving?” Connor asked.

Dylan leaned in to get a better look at the piece of paper. “You already have a name?”

“No. That’s the problem.” She pointed to a line that read Hertz Global Holdings. “He rented a car. I thought maybe you could use this to find out who he was.”

Connor grabbed the piece of paper. He could feel excitement tingling all the way into his fingertips. A picture was good. This was better. This could indeed get them a name—he already knew how he was going to do it—and with a name, everything might change.

CHAPTER 35

Andrew Bartelli’s office had not been the first place Connor and his associates had broken into after hours, but he had no intention of trying to do that at a Hertz Rental location. Places like that usually had good visibility from the street. Even if they managed to get inside without trigging an alarm, somebody might see them and call the cops. Besides, who was to say their computer system wasn’t as walled off from the outside world as the one at the security desk had been? Sure, this one would have an internet connection so it could interface with the rest of the Hertz system, but if it didn’t have a USB port, Connor still wouldn’t be able to access it quickly.

But that was not their only option.

Connor dropped Olin off at a Jersey Mike’s directly across the street from the Hertz Rental Dylan had targeted. (After extensive online research, she had settled on this location because it did not do a lot of business and as such usually operated with only a single agent on duty.) Then he parked in the lot beside the Hertz, where he and Dylan waited for Olin to get into position.

Once Olin was seated at one of the outdoor tables, he texted a thumbs up to Connor, giving him the go-ahead. Olin then unwrapped his sandwich. Just a man on his lunch break. Which he was anything but.

Connor turned to Dylan. “You’re up.”

She nodded, exited the vehicle, and made her way around the corner to the front of the building.

Connor watched her until she was out of sight. What happened next happened only in his head, but he knew the plan well enough to be confident the details were more or less correct.

He could imagine Dylan approaching the rental counter. The agent behind it asking how she could help. (Connor knew it was woman because he had seen her through the window when they pulled around to the lot.)

Dylan would ask to rent a car. The agent would have her fill out the required paperwork. Then the two of them would exit the building together to examine the selected vehicle, at which point she would send Connor a thumbs up of her own.

He figured the entire thing would take no more than ten minutes, and he was right. At eight minutes in, the text came through.

Connor glanced over at Olin to make sure he was still in position. Entered the building.

The space was small. Gray carpet. White paint. A single counter with a computer and the black and yellow Hertz sign hanging on the wall behind it.

Connor made a beeline for the computer. Just as he estimated it would take Dylan ten minutes to complete the paperwork, he estimated she would spend another three with the agent outside. That was not a lot of time.

––––––––

The agent led Dylan to a red Nissan Versa and passed over a pen and a sheet of paper with an outline of a car on it. “Have a walk around and note any damage you see on the vehicle,” she said. “I’ll be in the office. Just bring it back in when you’re done.”

“Wait,” Dylan said, desperately looking for a reason—any reason—to keep the agent here. “This is the only option?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Well . . . it’s red. I don’t like red.”

“You want a different color?”

Dylan looked slowly around the lot, stretching out the delay until it was almost uncomfortable. “Yeah, like, blue. What about that?” She pointed to a car in the far corner—“Can we go have a look at that?”—and started to move toward it, expecting the agent to follow.

“That’s a more expensive car,” the agent replied, without moving.

“That’s okay.”

The agent sighed. “I’ll go check the system to make sure it’s not reserved.”

Shit.

Dylan scurried back to the Nissan Versa. “You know what? Don’t go to the trouble. This one is fine.”

“Are you sure?”

Dylan could tell the woman was getting annoyed, but she didn’t care. She was determined to buy Connor as much time as she could. She looked through the windows, as if examining the interior of the vehicle. “It’s automatic, right?”

“Yes. Please just fill out the paper and bring it back inside, okay?” The agent turned to leave again.

This time, she nearly made it out of the parking lot before Dylan drew her back with a “What’s this?” She was leaning over, studying a scratch on the trunk that was so small even she could barely see it.

“That’s nothing to worry about.”

“But I don’t want to be charged for it later.”

“You won’t be.”

“I might be, right? That’s why I’m filling this thing out,” Dylan said, holding up the piece of paper in her left hand.

“If you’re worried about it, then put it on the sheet.” The agent spoke through gritted teeth, no longer trying to suppress her frustration.

“All right. No need to get snippy.”

This time, the agent said nothing. She once again headed back toward the office.

“What about this?” Dylan shouted, pointing to another scratch.

The agent huffed, returned to the car, and yanked the paper out of Dylan’s hand. “How about I do this for you, okay?”

––––––––

It took Connor only a minute or so to familiarize himself with the interface. Once he had, he clicked around until he found a screen where he could search for a vehicle by the license plate and then, after entering the seven digits Samantha had given him, clicked some more until he found a history of people who had rented the car.

But Connor did not have more than a few seconds with the information before he received another thumbs up from Olin. In this case, that meant the agent was on her way back to the office.

Connor didn’t have anywhere near enough time to make sense of the screen in front of him, let alone to determine which of these names most likely belonged to the blackmailer. But he also hadn’t come this far only to leave with nothing. He swapped the messaging app for his camera, snapped a picture of the screen, and closed the search box. Then he stepped back around the desk and, just like Olin was a man on his lunch break, Connor was now a man waiting to rent a car.

If he had spent even another five seconds behind that desk, he would not have made it. The agent came barreling through the door. She was annoyed beyond all reason. Connor had no idea what Dylan had said to her, but he had known her long enough to know she was certainly capable of making somebody that angry.

“I just want to make sure I get the right vehicle,” Dylan said as she followed the agent inside. “How am I supposed to drive something that’s all scratched up like that? You guys might charge me an arm and leg when I bring it back. I don’t need you sticking me with a bill for something I didn’t do.”

She shot a look at Connor, and Connor subtly nodded in response. “You know what? Forget it. I don’t like your attitude. Keep your stupid car.” She grabbed Connor’s arm. “Come on, honey. We’re going somewhere else.” Then she all but dragged him out the door.

CHAPTER 36

Back at the office, without the pressure that he would be discovered at any second, Connor could easily tell who had last rented the Ford Focus driven by the mysterious bearded man: Jeffrey Craft.

The name sounded familiar, and a Google search led him to LinkedIn, where he found himself staring at a picture of a man he recognized. A man he had last seen wearing a pressed white Polo shirt tucked into a pair of blue jeans.

He looked over his shoulder at Olin, who was standing directly behind him, and tapped the screen. “You know who that is, don’t you?”

Olin frowned thoughtfully, shook his head.

Connor spun a little farther around in his chair so he could see Dylan as well. “That’s the man we talked to at Viberly. The one who told me about Asher.”

Olin leaned in to get a better look. “Whoa. You’re right.”

“How’s he involved with all this?” Dylan asked.

Connor swung back around so he could get another look at the monitor. “I don’t know.”

“Do you think we’re barking up the wrong tree with the affair?” Dylan asked.

Connor looked at her. “What are you suggesting?”

“Samantha didn’t seem to know Nick had hired Bartelli. So, if she killed him over the affair, it wasn’t because he was threatening to divorce her. What if there was another reason for it? What if this guy is the one who killed Nick?”

Killed Nick, blackmailed Theo. A man with a beard was behind them both, and even though Jeff didn’t have one, it would have been easy enough for him to buy one to use as a disguise. But if that was true, there was still the question of why.

“Samantha told us Theo was being blackmailed over the affair,” Connor said. “What if that wasn’t true either? She might only think that because that’s what Theo told her. She said he didn’t want her to ask us for help and that he certainly wasn’t going to let us take a look at the email.”

“He wasn’t real happy with us when we confronted him about the affair,” Olin said.

“Still, I’m not sure that’s enough to explain it. We need to see that email for ourselves.”

Olin and Dylan agreed, so Connor went to work, doing what he did best. He composed a phishing email that Olin and Dylan both checked for errors. (A typo would be a dead giveaway that the email was fraudulent.) Then he set up a rudimentary network of web pages that would download custom software to the user’s computer and then route them to the Bank of America website.

The entire series of events would be triggered by the receiver clicking on a simple link in the email. And the subject of that email? WE HAVE NOTICED UNUSUAL ACTIVITY ON YOUR ACCOUNT.

That was sure to get the attention of someone.

Connor wasn’t going to send this email to Theo alone, either, so it didn’t even have to work for him. While he prepared the attack, Olin and Dylan scoured LinkedIn for Viberly employees. He was going to target every name they could find. A click from any of them would get him into the company’s network, where he could eventually find his way to the information he was looking for.

He didn’t even have to know the employees’ email addresses to make the attack work. Most companies used one of a handful of structures when it came to their email, and when he was ready to send the phishing message, he sent it to all of them.

“Now we wait,” he said, finally stepping away from the computer. “I’ll get a notification when somebody clicks the link and then we’ll see what we can find out.”

From the word go, the entire process had taken four hours of non-stop work. Connor was physically and mentally exhausted. Looking at Olin and Dylan, he figured they were too. No surprise, since it was going on midnight. “Let’s go home and get some rest. We’ll regroup tomorrow. Not likely anybody will click the link tonight anyway.”

CHAPTER 37

Connor knew what he’d told Olin and Dylan was true. Nobody was likely to click the link tonight. Still, as he lay in bed next to his girlfriend, listening to her breathe quietly and slowly as she slept, he couldn’t help but check his phone every hour or two to see if a notification had arrived.

And at 4:32 a.m., it did.

Apparently, somebody was getting a head start on the day, which was fine with Connor, because now he could too.

He crept out of the bedroom, careful not to disturb Rebecca, and set up his laptop on the dining room table. Then he began another long session at the computer, navigating the Viberly network until he found his way into Theo’s email.

“You’re up early,” Rebecca said when she came out of the bedroom wearing a pair of black-and-white striped pajamas.

Connor’s eyes flicked to her and then back to the screen. “I’m in.”

He did not have to say any more than that. When he came home last night, he’d told her what they were up to. It hadn’t been worth the trouble to launch such a complex attack when they had learned all of Nick’s email had been deleted since they weren’t sure they would find anything even if they got in. But now, with the blackmailer’s name, with this picture of the man with the beard, Connor expected it would be worth the trouble no matter how difficult it was. Because Dylan was right—there was something more going on here than the affair.

“You’re in Theo’s email?” Rebecca asked.

Connor nodded.

“You find anything?”

“Not yet.”

Rebecca poured a cup of coffee and had a seat next to him at the table. She watched silently as he tapped from one email to the next.

He wasn’t sure exactly what he was looking for until he saw the subject line: YOU’LL PAY ONE WAY OR ANOTHER.

“I think we’ve got a winner,” Connor said, clicking on the message.

Then he read. Rebecca read. And they looked at each other.

“This is what Theo was hiding,” Connor said.

CHAPTER 38

Dylan’s phone rang at exactly six forty-five. Barely conscious, she rolled over in bed, pressed a button to send the call to voicemail, and immediately drifted back into the deep sleep she so desperately needed.

It was a cycle that repeated twice more before she reluctantly accepted that the caller wasn’t giving up. She grabbed the phone to see what sort of psycho thought it would be a good idea to call anyone at this hour.

That psycho, it turned out, was Connor.

There could only be one reason he would be calling so early: someone had clicked the link. Connor was in the system.

She sat up in bed, adrenaline driving away any remaining exhaustion, and answered the call. “You have something?”

“That’s an understatement.”

“What is it?”

“You remember how you thought the blackmail might be about something other than the affair?”

Obviously, she remembered that. “Get to the point.”

“All right, well, looks like Viberly has been engaged in some pretty serious fraud.”

“What are you talking about?”

“A whole bunch of the users on their system aren’t real.”

Dylan got out of bed, began to make her way to the kitchen. “What do you mean they’re not real?”

“They’re bots.”

“All sites like that have bots on them.” If anyone should know about that, it was Connor. He was the one who’d told her about them. They were run by click farms and all sorts of bad actors. They aimed to drive up costs on competitors’ ads, liked and shared posts to increase visibility on controversial content, and consumed the endless stream of data created by sites like that for all sorts of nefarious purposes. Frankly, if Viberly didn’t have any bots on it, Dylan would have been surprised.

“No, not like that,” Connor said. “These belong to Viberly. They’re posting content and doing all sorts of things a normal user would do. The company is trying to make the userbase look bigger than it is.”

Dylan did not need to ask why they would do that. The advantages of such a scheme were self-evident. With a larger userbase, they could charge more for advertising, bring in more money from investors, and claim a higher valuation, increasing the price of their stock when they went public.

She thought about the one time she had tried to use the site. All the messages she’d seen seemed to have been posted by passionate fans of Stranger Things, yet almost all of them lacked any engagement. It was like all those users were just shouting into the void, like they had something to say but they didn’t actually give a damn whether anybody heard it.

She thought about the many friend requests she had received within hours of joining and all the others that had come in since. She was up to sixty-two last time she checked, and every single one of them was a stranger.

It was the sort of behavior that defied logic. Unless they were all bots.

“So that’s what the blackmail was about?” Dylan asked, removing a tin of instant coffee from the cabinet.

“Exactly.”

“Wow. That is big. And you’re thinking this might have been what got Nick killed.”

“It makes more sense than the affair. I’d bet he found out about it and was going to tell someone. He was the CFO, after all. If anybody there was going to get wrapped up in a fraud charge, it was going to be him.”

Dylan stirred a spoonful of the instant coffee into a mug of hot water. “Theo would have the most to lose from something like that.”

“You’re probably right,” Connor agreed.

“So maybe he was working with someone. It just wasn’t Asher.”

This time, Connor said nothing.

Dylan dropped her spoon into the sink, took her first sip while she thought some more. “If Jeff had been part of the fake user scheme from the beginning, he’d probably want Nick stopped just as much as Theo did.”

Connor made a sound that suggested he disagreed.

“What?”

“Why blackmail Theo if he was involved from the beginning?”

Dylan sat down at the kitchen table, popped open a box of mini doughnuts. She was about to put one in her mouth when she had an idea. “So imagine this—maybe Theo wants to keep the fake users away from the C-suite. Maybe he’s got a relationship with Jeff that we haven’t been able to find yet. And Jeff is all on board when it comes to making the fake users because Theo has promised him a large slice of the pie when Viberly goes public.”

“Okay,” Connor says. “I’m with you so far.”

“Well, if Theo hired someone to kill Nick because he found out about it, there’s a good chance Jeff would know about that too. He could have gotten it into his head to blackmail Theo, figuring there was no way Theo was going to let this scheme go public.”

“And you’re thinking he wore a fake beard to the drop because he wanted Theo to think the killer was behind the blackmail?”

“Exactly.”

“That’s sounds like a lot of maybes to me.”

“Well, we know he’s involved, that’s for sure.”

“Absolutely. But if we’re going to figure out how, we’re going to have to talk to him.”

“We should let Samantha know what’s going on too,” Dylan said, speaking through a mouthful of doughnut. “For her own safety, she needs to know Theo might be a killer. Have you told Olin about this yet?”

“Not yet. I called you first.”

“Patch him in. He’s going to want to hear about this.”

CHAPTER 39

Connor rang Samantha’s doorbell with Olin and Dylan standing behind him.

Louis answered in a bathrobe. “What did you find out?”

There was nothing friendly in his tone. Connor could tell the man still wasn’t happy his sister had hired them. But he wasn’t openly hostile anymore either. “Can we come in?”

Louis stepped out of the way to let them pass. “Sis! Connor’s here!” he shouted, closing the door behind them.

Samantha stepped out of the hall. Unlike Louis, she looked like she had been up for a while. She was wearing a pair of black slacks and a white, loose-fitting blouse. Makeup applied. Hair styled.

She moved closer to the group before speaking. “So? What is it?”

Connor had called to tell her they were coming but declined to give any information on the phone. And it made her nervous. Connor had heard it in her voice then and could hear it again now.

“We know who rented the car,” he said.

Louis pumped a fist in the air. “Yes! That’s what I’m talking about. I suppose you’re not totally useless after all.”

Samantha shot him a confused look, and Connor had to admit Louis’s enthusiasm seemed to be excessive. Why should he care so much whether they had figured out who the blackmailer was?

That might be a question for later, but for now, Connor shrugged it off. Best to stay focused on why he was here. “The man’s name is Jeffrey Craft.”

“He’s a software developer at Viberly,” Dylan added.

“How would he know about . . . ?” Samantha trailed off.

“What?” Louis asked.

“Nothing.”

“That wasn’t nothing. You know why Theo was being blackmailed?”

“It’s not important.”

Louis cinched his robe tighter. “I almost got killed trying to chase that guy down to get a picture. If you know why he was being blackmailed, I want to know.”

Samantha sighed. “Fine. Theo and—”

“It’s not that,” Connor interrupted, trying to save her the embarrassment of sharing the secret of her affair with Louis. Especially since the blackmail had nothing to do with it. “Theo was up to something much worse.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You ever notice how there’s not a lot of activity on any of the posts on Viberly?” Dylan asked.

Samantha shook her head. “I don’t use it.”

“You’ll have to take my word for it, then. And there’s a reason for it. All those users Viberly has—a good chunk of them don’t even exist.”

Louis’s mouth dropped open as the implications of that statement hit home. “Are you telling us . . . ?”

Olin nodded, but Connor, who did not want to leave any room for ambiguity, said, “Somebody launched a bunch of bots at Viberly. They’re posing as real users. Posting content and everything. The purpose seems to be to make the site appear more successful than it actually is. Theo not only knew about it, but it looks like he’s behind it.”

“With the company about to go public, that would be devastating if it got out,” Dylan added.

Now came the hard part. Samantha was already visibly upset. Connor didn’t want to deliver the rest of the news standing around in the foyer like this. “Can we go sit down?”

She moved her head in a way that might have been a nod and said, “Yes. Yes, of course.” She led them into the living room, where she took a seat at one end of the sofa and Louis took a seat in an adjacent chair. Dylan sat opposite him, and Connor and Olin, neither of whom thought it would be a good idea to crowd in close to Samantha, remained standing.

“First off, I want to apologize for accusing you of killing your husband,” Connor said, even though it was technically Dylan who had implied she might be involved.

Samantha did not respond. Perhaps this was because she was still hurt by the accusation. But with the way she was sitting—back straight, jaw tensed, hands clasped together in her lap—Connor thought it was more likely she could tell something worse was coming. He decided he had better get to it. “But we are more convinced than ever that Theo might have been involved.”

Samantha stared at him incredulously. “How could you say that? They were friends. And, anyway, I told you—he was with me when Nick was killed.”

“We think Nick found out about the fake users.”

The rest did not have to be spelled out. Nick had found out about the fake users. He had been planning to tell someone. And Theo had him killed to make sure his secret did not get out.

Samantha slumped forward, placing her face in her hands. “I can’t believe that. That can’t be right. Theo might have hired someone to dummy up some users. I can see that. He was determined to make Viberly successful. But to kill Nick? They were friends since college.”

Samantha made that last point as if that bond alone was enough to make such a crime impossible.

“You knew him since high school,” Dylan said.

Samantha pulled herself together, took one long, deep breath. She looked like she was ready to lunge across the sofa at Dylan. “An affair is not the same thing as murder.”

Louis’s eyes widened. His head rocked back like he had been struck. “Whoa. Wait a second. You and Theo—”

“Yes, I had an affair. Get over it. All of you. It’s not like I’m the first person do that.”

“We’re not saying for sure Theo killed Nick or that he did it over the fake users,” Olin pointed out, perhaps trying to ease the tension.

Connor would have said something similar if he had gotten to it first. Since he hadn’t, he added, “We just want you to stay away from him until we get this all sorted out. If we’re right about Theo and you tell him you know about the fake users, well, it could be bad.”

“You, too,” Dylan said to Louis. “Until we get a handle on this, we don’t want anybody saying a word to him. Got it?”

Samantha took a beat to process the request. “How sure are you about this?”

Connor looked from Olin to Dylan. “Pretty sure.”

Another beat. “All right. We’ll stay away from him. But you’re wrong about this. You hear me?”

CHAPTER 40

Connor had heard her, and he hoped like hell he was wrong. But the evidence so far was not in Theo’s favor.

“Do you think she’ll do it?” Olin asked as the three detectives headed back to Connor’s car. “Do you think Samantha will stay away from Theo?”

“I don’t know,” Connor said. He tried to imagine how he would feel if someone came to him with similar news about Rebecca. Could he really keep it to himself? He shook his head. “I guess we’ll find out.”

Dylan climbed into the front passenger seat. “She just has to keep her mouth shut for an hour.”

Connor hoped that was indeed all the time they would need to confirm their theory.

Their next stop was Viberly, where they intended to confront Jeff. Once they presented him with all of the evidence they had, Connor couldn’t imagine him doing anything but coming clean. At least about the pieces they already knew. The question was whether he would come clean about the ones they did not.

They found Jeff in his cubicle and crowded around the doorway, blocking his only exit. Unless he wanted to try to crawl over the wall, he wasn’t going anywhere they didn’t want him to.

But that wasn’t a concern. Not right away, at least. Jeff was so wrapped up in his work, he hadn’t even noticed they were there.

Connor cleared his throat to draw the man’s attention.

Jeff spun around in his chair, pushing his glasses up his nose and looking directly at Connor. “You’re back. Can I help you with something?”

To Connor’s surprise, he did not sound the least bit alarmed, and that only made him look more guilty.

“Did you find Asher?” Jeff asked.

“We found him.”

“Okay, so how can I help you?”

Connor glanced at the cubicle next to Jeff’s. There was a woman sitting there, and the adjoining cubicles were filled with yet more employees. Although he’d planned to have the conversation with Jeff right here, right now, he realized it might go better if they spoke in private.

He looked around the office, saw an empty conference room. “You mind if we talk in there?” he asked, gesturing toward the space.

Jeff stood up, peered over the edge of his cubicle. “Sure,” he said with a shrug, still as casual as ever.

The three investigators stepped back to allow room for Jeff to exit the cubicle. Then they crossed to the conference room with Connor in the lead and Olin and Dylan behind Jeff to make sure he didn’t make a run for it.

Once they were all inside, Olin closed the door. He leaned against it and crossed his arms over his chest in a move that was perhaps intended to look casual but, Connor knew, was in fact designed to keep Jeff squarely where they wanted him.

“Have a seat,” Connor said, sliding into the chair at the head of the table. Jeff took the one to his right, and Dylan chose the seat opposite their suspect.

The mahogany table was polished to a shine and capable of seating fourteen. A large display was mounted to the wall farthest from the door. Only glass separated this space from the rest of the office.

It was thick enough to contain their conversation, Connor was certain, but any curious employee was free to watch the confrontation unfold and speculate about what it might mean.

“We know what you did,” Connor said. He was referring to the blackmail, but was intentionally being vague to see where the conversation might lead. It was a tactic that had worked well at other points in his career, and he was hoping for similar results here.

A twitch played at one corner of Jeff’s lips. He tried to smile, but it fell away almost as fast as it had formed. Still, he tried to keep up his confident and casual front. “What are you talking about?”

Dylan pulled out her phone, found the picture of the blackmailer that Louis had taken, and showed it to Jeff. “We know that’s you.”

“You’re crazy,” he said, but he did not sound as confident or casual as he had a moment ago. “What is this about anyway?”

“Stop lying,” Connor said. “We know you’re the one who blackmailed Theo.” He pointed to the picture. “We’ve confirmed you’re the one who rented the car he drove. If we show this to the police, I don’t think it will take them much work to figure out where you bought the fake beard and charge you, do you?”

This time, Jeff said nothing. He glanced at the door like he was trying to figure out whether he could muscle his way past Olin and seemed to think better of it.

“But that’s not what we want to do,” Connor said, now applying a little honey to his threat. “We’re not here about the blackmail. That’s between you and God. We’re here to find out who killed Nick, which all comes back to the fake users, doesn’t it? And we know you played a role in that too. So, if you don’t want to walk out of this room in handcuffs, you’re going to need to start talking.”

Olin held up his phone to draw Jeff’s attention to it. “I’ve got the police on speed dial. They can be here in fifteen minutes if I call them.”

Obviously, the police weren’t going to show up and arrest Jeff if Olin called them. Not even Connor’s relationship with Detective Alex Shaw was enough to make that happen. But if Jeff didn’t think too hard about it, he might believe they would.

It worked. Jeff leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table, an unexpected look of defeat weighing him down. “All right. Look, don’t call the cops. I will tell you what you want to know. But this stays between you and me, okay? If the police get involved, a scandal like this will bring down the whole company. Hundreds of people will be out of work. And who cares if I scammed someone like Theo, right?”

“Tell us what you had to do with the fake users,” Connor said.

“What? Me? Nothing.”

“Make the call,” Dylan said to Olin.

Jeff threw out his hands, signaling for Olin to stop. “No, really. I didn’t.”

“How did you know about it, then?” Connor asked.

“I found something strange in the code, and I started following the breadcrumbs. It didn’t make any sense at first, but then . . . it just kind of clicked.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s the truth. Really.”

Connor certainly knew what he was saying could be the truth, but he wasn’t yet convinced that it was. And this was as good a time as any to start tying the blackmail back to the murder. “So you weren’t involved in it from the beginning?”

Jeff held up his right hand. “I swear.”

“So what? The whole fake beard thing was just an idea you stumbled upon? It was just a coincidence that Nick’s killer had a beard too?”

“Wait. You think I had something to do with Nick’s murder?”

“What would you think if you were us?” Olin asked.

“Okay, really. I didn’t know anything about the fake users until a few days ago, and I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Nick. As far as the beard goes—when the police came around asking questions, it came up. That’s how I learned about it, and I thought: Why not use a fake beard? In case there was anybody there watching—which you obviously know there was—I needed a disguise of some sort. Not that it did me a lot of good, I suppose.”

Connor knew that this, too, could be the truth. The police had come around asking questions. But he also wasn’t going to get another chance to interrogate Jeff. Not like this, anyway.

The walls around him had started coming down as soon as Dylan brought up the picture of him in the park. If they had to return again later, those walls would be built back up, stronger and more impenetrable than before. Any truth they didn’t get out of Jeff in this meeting, they might not get at all.

“I can prove it,” Jeff said.

“How?” Dylan asked.

Jeff got up, moved toward the door. “Come with me to my desk. I'll show you.”

Connor considered the request. They had no legal right to hold him in this room, no matter how much they might want to. Besides, with the three of them here, he wouldn’t get far if he tried to run.

Connor nodded to Olin, and Olin stepped out of the way. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Once they were back at Jeff’s computer, he walked them through the code that had tipped him off to the fake users. Since the nearest coworkers were no doubt listening, he kept his voice to a whisper and avoided saying anything that might clue them in.

Connor had pulled a chair over from an empty cubicle and positioned himself next to Jeff. As they did before, Olin and Dylan blocked the only way in or out of the space.

“How do I know you didn’t write that?” Connor asked.

“Because of this.” Then Jeff opened another screen on his computer, and Connor knew immediately what he was looking at. This was a history of all work done on the current file. Since the current file existed primarily to service the fake users, any developer who worked on it would be able to be tracked down by the information now on Jeff’s screen.

According to this, all of the modifications had been made by a single person who went by the user ID RSmith.

First initial, last name. Connor was sure of that as soon as he saw it. “Who is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“There’s nobody at the company that could match that username?”

“No. Look.” Jeff brought up another screen and navigated to the company directory. A quick search revealed that there was nobody with the last name Smith who worked at Viberly.

“It still could have been you,” Dylan said. “I mean, it couldn’t be hard to give you a second user.”

“Why bother? If this ever got out, the whole company would be fucked, no matter who did the work.”

CHAPTER 41

“Find RSmith, and you’ll find the person behind the fake users,” Jeff had said. But what was just as important was what he had not said: Find the person behind the fake users, and you’ll find your killer.

There was nothing more to get from him, so Connor and his team had left Jeff with a promise that they would turn everything they had over to the police if they found out he was lying. They talked among themselves, contemplating their next move, on the drive back to the office.

They could try making another run at Theo, now armed with this new information, but they would probably once again be told that Theo had been with Samantha at the apartment. And if he had hired someone to kill Nick—even if that someone was RSmith —Connor wouldn’t get anything new out of that conversation.

The best thing they could do for the moment was keep that information to themselves. At least until they knew more about the person behind that mysterious username.

Connor pulled up to a red light. As he came to a stop, he turned to Dylan and asked, “How did Nick find out about the fake user scheme anyway?”

It was a question they had never answered. While it was obvious why he would turn that information over to the police once he had discovered it, it wasn’t the kind of thing a CFO was likely to come across. Even if he had bothered nosing around the code like Jeff had, he wouldn’t have been able to make any sense of it.

So were they just guessing again when it came to motive?

“I don’t know,” Dylan said. “If Bartelli would tell us something—”

“Maybe he wasn’t going to meet with Bartelli,” Olin said from the backseat.

Connor spun around in his seat to look at him. “What are you thinking?”

“It just occurred to me: If he was planning on going to the police to turn over evidence like this, he would probably go to a lawyer first. You know, just to make sure he didn’t end up getting blamed somehow.”

“You think he went to a lawyer so close to the PI’s office?” Dylan asked. “What are the odds?”

“I’d say they’re pretty good if the PI recommended him,” Olin said.

Connor nodded to himself as the probability of this scenario sank in. Then a car behind him laid on its horn, and he whipped his head around, shifted his foot from the brake to the gas.

He made a U-turn at the next light. “Let’s go back downtown and see if we can find any law firms in the area.”

Olin grabbed hold of Connor’s headrest to keep from being thrown to the opposite side of the car. “They’re not going to talk to us even if we find them.”

“We’ll deal with that if it comes to it, okay?”

––––––––

Connor parked along the curb, close to the intersection of Parsons and Idlewood. Then Dylan led them through the alley where Nick had been killed and out the other side. There were no homeless people camped out there today. Just the smell of rotting meat coming from one of the dumpsters and the residue of something that might have been vomit near another.

As they stepped from shadow to sunlight, Connor pulled out his phone. Typed into his browser: find lawyers near me.

A list of a dozen possible options came back. The closest was a mere five hundred feet and, if Connor was correct, located in a building on the opposite side of the street. But according to their website, they specialized in family law. And while he had no doubt that was exactly where Bartelli might have sent Nick if he was considering a divorce, Nick would not have gone there if he was seeking a criminal defense attorney—even if it was the one and only lawyer Bartelli knew.

Connor kept looking.

“This could be it,” Connor said, tapping the screen on his phone. “Cartman and Brown.” The partners boasted they had more than fifty years of experience in criminal law between them, and the office was only two blocks away.

“It’s a place to start,” Dylan agreed.

They made their way to the address and entered a high-rise. When they stepped off the elevator, Connor was surprised to find himself inside the law firm’s lobby. Apparently, they occupied the entire floor.

A receptionist sat behind a desk nearby. Even from across the room, Connor could tell she was the epitome of professionalism. She had her dark hair pulled back into a tight bun. Understated gold earrings. Just a touch of makeup. Her pressed green blouse featured a high neckline and long sleeves. Even her smile was professional—tight-lipped but friendly.

“Can I help you?” she asked as Connor and his team made their way across the lobby.

Like the receptionist, the lobby came across as understated. Only, instead of understated professionalism, the room suggested understated wealth. Recessed lighting shone down on top-of-the-line leather sofas. A deep shag carpet was spread across an ebony wood floor. It was the kind of office that smelled like success. It was also the kind of place you couldn’t afford if you were worried about the cost.

Connor flashed his PI license. While he didn’t know how far that would get him in a place like this, it would at least frame the conversation as one professional talking to another. “I need to ask you about a client.” He still wasn’t certain this was the law firm Nick had hired—or that he was going to a law firm at all when he was killed. But if he had hired one, this was probably the kind of place that would have appealed to him.

The receptionist’s smile faltered. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to—”

“His name is Nick Chase, the CFO for Viberly. He’s dead. You may have heard about that? We’re trying to find out what happened to him.”

The receptionist looked at each investigator in turn. “Hold on.” She picked up her phone, pressed a button. “There’s someone here who needs to talk to you,” she said into the receiver. That was followed by an “Uh-huh” and a “Yes, sir,” and then she hung up. Turned her attention back to Connor. “Have a seat. Brad Hughes will be out in a minute.”

Connor and his associates did as instructed, choosing a small collection of leather chairs directly across the lobby from the receptionist. “So far, so good,” he whispered.

“That doesn’t mean anybody’s going to talk to us,” Olin said.

“It doesn’t mean we’re in the right place either,” Dylan said. “But Connor’s right. It looks promising.”

A man stepped out of a hallway wearing a dark three-piece suit offset by a white pocket square. His tie was held snugly in place by a gold tie clip. His blond hair was swept back from his face and likewise held snugly in place (this from an excess of hairspray). He looked like he was in his mid-forties, but the lack of wrinkles when he smiled suggested he’d had at least a little Botox, so who could say for sure?

He glanced at the receptionist, and she pointed him toward Connor.

“Brad Hughes,” he said as the investigators got to their feet. He already had his hand held out in front of him, ready to shake.

Once they got the introductions out of the way, he asked how he could help, and Connor gave him the same answer he had the receptionist.

Brad took a deep breath, puffing out his cheeks as he exhaled. “Yeah, that’s just awful, isn’t it? Look, Nick was my client, okay? But I can’t talk about his case.”

“But he’s dead,” Dylan said, as if the point needed to be repeated.

“It doesn’t matter. Attorney–client privilege survives death.”

“Told you,” Olin mumbled.

“Is there anyone you could talk to?” Dylan asked.

Brad made a face, once again implying there was nothing he could say.

“So that’s it? Case closed on this matter, consequences be damned, right?”

Brad glanced over his shoulder, perhaps making sure they were alone, perhaps just considering what he could and couldn’t say. “All right, I guess there’s no harm in telling you his wife was my client also. I could talk to her.”

“Samantha?” Connor asked, confused.

“Yes.”

“She’s been to your office?”

Brad held up his hand, signaling for them to stop. “I’ve said all I can.” Then he spun on his heel and returned the way he had come.

Connor turned to face Olin and Dylan. “Samantha was a client?”

“Why didn’t she tell us?” Dylan asked.

Connor could feel the receptionist watching them, and led Olin and Dylan toward the elevator so they could have a little privacy. “Let’s call her,” he said, pulling out his cell phone.

CHAPTER 42

When Connor and his associates left, Samantha was pissed. Not at them. She was pissed at Theo. She still did not think he had anything to do with Nick’s murder. She just couldn’t see it. But the fake users on Viberly? How could he have been so reckless? People could go to jail for that sort of thing. Nick could have gone to jail for it.

Her relationship with the two men was complicated. She cared deeply for them both. Even up until the day Nick died, she had been wrestling with those feelings: How could she cheat on Nick? How could she walk away from Theo?

But now complicated didn’t seem to cut it.

She thought she knew all of Theo’s secrets. She thought she could trust him. Apparently, she was wrong.

She poured a vodka tonic to try to calm herself down. Louis joined her. He said to hell with Connor. They should turn over the name of the blackmailer to Theo. Samantha still didn’t know why it mattered so much to him, but she didn’t have any room in her head right now to figure it out.

When the drinking didn’t make her feel any better, she stormed around the house, looking for a way to blow off some steam. But when nothing came to mind, she took Louis up on his advice and said to hell with her promise to Connor. Called Theo. Not to hand over the name—she didn’t care one bit about helping Theo find the blackmailer right now. She wanted answers. She might even go so far as to say she deserved them.

He didn’t pick up. Nor did he respond to either of her two texts.

She had no intention of sitting around here all day, hoping to hear from the man who had almost screwed them all over. She looked at the time. Odds were good Theo would be in his office right now, so that was where she went.

She charged out of her house, and Louis charged out after her. “You’re not coming with me,” she told him. “This is between me and Theo.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Stay here,” she demanded. She hopped into her car and sped off, blowing through red lights as her rage grew. By the time she reached the parking lot at Viberly, she was madder than she had ever been.

Nick could have gone to jail. Theo could have gone to jail. Could she have gone to jail too? She didn’t think so, but she couldn’t say for certain. Either way, her life would have been ruined. Devoured by legal fees and rumors. The house she lived in now—gone. The life she had built for herself—gone. The simple, starry-eyed girl who had fallen in love with Nick so many years ago, who had seen nothing but a bright future for herself, would be horrified by the way it had all worked out.

She raced down the hall to Theo’s office. Jack Richardson, the CTO, glanced up from his desk as she passed by. So did Amelia Bell, the COO. They both looked concerned by her presence. Who could blame them? She was sure she appeared every bit as mad as she felt. She met their gazes and each, in turn, looked quickly back to their work.

Did they know about the fake users too? she wondered.

She barged into Theo’s office, slammed the door shut behind her. “How could you?”

Theo turned his attention from his computer to her. “Slow down. What are you talking about? Is this about the blackmail?”

“I can’t believe you made a bunch of fake users just so people would think Viberly was successful.”

He stood and moved quickly around the desk, perhaps afraid that somebody would overhear her. “Calm down. It’s not what you think.” He tried to put an arm around her.

She pushed him away. “Don’t patronize me! I know exactly what this is!”

“Do you know how hard it is to get a company like Viberly off the ground? You have to have engagement. Nobody wants to go to a site like that and find out they’re all alone. To be successful, you first have to look successful. That’s all this is. And the IPO has really been giving us the shot in the arm we need to shut those users off for good. Everyone’s talking about us. People are signing up. It was a necessary evil, Sammy. Nothing more. But it’s almost over, okay?”

She slumped down into a chair as she tried to process that. On its face, everything about it had seemed wrong. But if it was just to launch the site, was it that bad? And if that’s all it was, could Nick have known about it from the beginning?

She couldn’t imagine Nick going along with something like this, not even for a little while, but there was no way to know for certain. Not without asking Theo, and how could she be sure he would tell her the truth?

She was still trying to think through the chaos of her conflicting emotions, to figure out what she should say next, when Theo asked, “How did you know about that?”

She shook her head, tried to figure out how to respond, and settled on the truth. “Connor. He was trying to find out what happened to Nick.” Then, since she had already gone that far: “You didn’t have anything to do with . . . ?”

She didn’t have to finish the question. The implication was clear.

He shook his head, sitting down beside her, and took her hands into his. “No way, Sammy. I couldn’t possibly . . .”

Samantha nodded. Tried desperately to bring her emotions under control. She needed to think clearly if she was going to figure out what she was going to do about all this. Her relationship with Theo. The fake users. Was Connor right? Was that why Nick was killed? And what would he have done if she hadn’t been sleeping with Theo? Sat on the information? Ridden out the IPO?

But perhaps most importantly: What was she going to do about it now?

She opened her mouth to speak when her phone rang. She pulled her hands away from Theo’s, removed her cell from her purse, and checked the caller ID.

Connor Callahan.

She was not expecting to hear from him again so soon. Did this mean he had found something out? Something about Theo or the fake users or the blackmailer or—really—God knew what else might be out there at this point?

Whatever it was, she needed to know, and since she didn’t have any idea what she was going to say to Theo about all this anyway, she answered.

“Can you come down to Cartman and Brown right away?” Connor asked.

“What is that?”

There was muffled conversation on the other end of the line, like Connor had his hand over the microphone. Then he was back. “It’s a law firm downtown.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“It’s about Nick.”

It sounded like Connor had indeed found something out. And if he said she needed to get down there right away, she was going to do just that.

“Sure. I guess,” she told him, and ended the call. “I have to go,” she told Theo, already on her feet and heading toward the door.

“What was that about?” Theo said, likewise getting to his feet.

“I . . . I’ll tell you later.” Samantha wasn’t sure whether she would or not. (She still couldn’t make sense of the fake users and Theo’s excuse for them and how her life seemed to have become one big tangled mess.) It probably depended on what Connor wanted to see her about.

CHAPTER 43

Huddled with Olin and Dylan near the elevators at Cartman and Brown, Connor listened to the phone ring. When Samantha answered, he asked, “Can you come down to Cartman and Brown right away?” He listened for a moment, placed his free hand over the microphone. “She doesn’t know about Cartman and Brown.”

“So she says,” Dylan replied.

Then, back to the phone: “It’s a law firm downtown. . . . It’s about Nick. . . . Good. See you soon.”

He hung up. “She’s on her way.”

“It’s going to be hard for her to say she doesn’t know this place when that prep-school lawyer sees her,” Dylan said.

Connor ignored the comment. If Samantha had ever met the lawyer, that was obviously true. But if she had, why lie about it now? More likely, Nick had added her as a client as well when he’d hired Brad. She would have been protected legally by spousal privilege if Nick said anything to her. Perhaps he just wanted to make sure all his bases were covered. (It was amazing what some people would do for those they love, Connor thought, even when they have been betrayed.)

“You stay here and wait for her,” Connor said to Olin. “When she gets here, find out what you can from Brad. Dylan and I will go back to the office and see if we can dig up anything on RSmith. Maybe he’s used that same username somewhere else.”

Olin nodded—“All right.”—and returned to the sofa.

Connor pressed the button to call the elevator. The lawyer could blow this whole thing wide open, he thought. He could tell them whether Nick had been on his way to meet him the day he died and whether he had indeed been aware of the fake users. That would be half of the puzzle, right there. The rest would be a matter of linking the name RSmith to a real person.

If the theory Connor had put together was correct, RSmith might not be the killer, but he would probably know who was.

CHAPTER 44

Connor knows.

That meant his whole team did as well.

Theo was pretty sure he could trust Samantha to keep her mouth shut, but Connor and his associates had to be dealt with. He, of course, was not the man for that job, but he knew who was.

Pat Hawkins.

Pat was an early investor in Viberly. He had sunk a lot of money into the idea when nobody else would, and he had said more than once that he would do whatever it took to make sure that investment paid off.

At the time, Theo didn’t have any doubt that was true. Pat had built his fortune one brick at a time. He had worked his way up through the illegal drug trade, first as a dealer and then eventually as a supplier, before branching out into casinos and then, as various IT stocks started heating up (where the payoffs could be even bigger), setting up shop in Silicon Valley and building a reputation as someone who was willing to bet on the moonshots.

“Big risk equals big reward,” he had said to Theo when they made the deal.

But his big risks had often failed to pan out. He said he wasn’t going to let that happen this time. When Theo came to him to report the low adoption rate, he was the one who came up with the fake user scheme. He outsourced the user generation and code modifications to a sketchy outfit overseas that didn’t advertise anywhere and pushed hard to take the company public, betting that the value of the stock would explode when that happened and he could finally turn a profit.

Theo had hoped that the IPO would generate fresh interest in the company and, instead of merely being a scam, the fake users would be a vehicle to make the company as successful as it appeared to be.

All indications were it was working too. The sign-up rate had been steadily increasing since the announcement, and if it kept going like it was, it wouldn’t be long until they could retire the fake users altogether.

Nick would not have approved of any of that. It was easy for him to take the high ground, though. This wasn’t his baby, like it was Theo’s. And he hadn’t sunk a bunch of money into it, like Pat had. For those reasons, Theo did not tell him about their struggling adoption rate, the fake users, or the real reason he was pushing for an IPO.

Theo still didn’t know how he had put it all together, but he was sure that he had. Nick had started acting cagey about a week before he died. Theo had begun wondering if he knew about the affair. Samantha hadn’t said anything to Theo that might suggest he did, but that alone wasn’t proof he didn’t. And since Theo couldn’t come right out and ask him, he did the only thing he could do—he set up spyware on Nick’s computer so he could monitor all of his friend’s communication. It wasn’t a perfect plan. There was no way for Theo to monitor Nick’s cell. But if Nick was communicating with a divorce attorney or finding some other way to set up an exit plan via his computer, Theo would know about it.

But that was not what he found.

What he found was much worse . . .

Nick was communicating with a lawyer, but it wasn’t a divorce attorney. It was a man named Brad Hughes. His specialty: criminal defense. Nick had sent the emails from his Gmail account, and had it not been for the spyware, Theo would have never known about them.

The messages consisted of little more than an effort to coordinate schedules. But it was at that point that he knew what Nick had found. Because if it was anything else, Nick would have come to him, confided in him, asked for his advice, like he had done so many times before.

Theo kept digging and found that Nick had downloaded a copy of the code and then exported it to a ZIP file that he subsequently stored on his phone.

In a panic, Theo took the information to Pat, who said he would deal with the problem. It wasn’t until Nick was dead that he knew what Pat had actually meant. But by then it was too late, of course. And if he said anything about it, his company’s secrets would not be the only thing at risk. So would his freedom. He could argue that he had not meant for Nick to get killed, but would the police believe him? Would a jury? If the police seized Nick’s computer, they might find the spyware. Even if Theo erased it, he knew things like that lived on in the ones and zeros and that a good computer forensics investigator might stumble upon it. That would be all a prosecutor needed to make a case.

That meant going to the police was not an option. It also meant going to Pat now, letting him deal with this too, was his only option.

He thought about the first time Connor came to visit his office. He had been on the phone with Pat at that moment. And there Connor was—looking for the man who had killed Nick and was now about to kill him. Was that ironic? Theo wasn’t sure. He also didn’t want to think too much about it. He didn’t like knowing that his choices would lead to another murder, but there also wasn’t any way around it.

And it wasn’t like any of this would come as a surprise to Pat. He was probably expecting it. Theo and Pat had talked several times during the investigation. Pat had become increasingly annoyed with Connor as it dragged on and had even gone so far as to start following him and his team around from time to time to see what he could find out.

Theo slumped back into his desk chair. At this point, he was just putting off the inevitable. Better just to get it over with, he told himself, and then called Pat and filled him in. He was careful not to say anything incriminating, just like he had been with Louis. But the substance of the message was clear. Connor knew. His associates knew. They had to be dealt with.

CHAPTER 45

Connor parked in the deck behind their building. As he and Dylan made their way to the lobby, Dylan rattled off some of the places she might be able to track down the identity of RSmith. They included some sketchy forums and some even sketchier places on the dark web.

If you knew where to look, you could buy lists of usernames that had been stolen in the many data breaches over the years, and with them, you would get all sorts of personal information on the user.

“There’s a good chance it’ll be out there somewhere.”

Connor wasn’t sure he would call the odds good, or that they would even find the right RSmith, but it was certainly a possibility.

As they crossed to the elevator, neither of them noticed the large man sitting in one of the chairs in the lobby. Nor did they notice that he folded his newspaper and started to stand as their elevator doors began to close. But they did notice him when Connor was unlocking the door to their suite and that same man stepped off the elevator onto their floor.

He was tall, with a wide chest and broad shoulders. His thick beard did not look like it had been trimmed in months. His leather biker jacket tightly hugged his massive arms. Even though Connor had never seen this man before, he recognized him immediately. This was the man who had killed Nick.

The weather was too warm to need a jacket like that, and Connor knew instantly why he was wearing it. He was wearing it for the same reason Connor wore his blazer.

As the man approached them, he did not smile or wave. In fact, he made no effort at all to pretend he was there for any reason other than to kill them. If that wasn’t obvious on its face, it sure was when he pulled his gun out of his shoulder holster.

Connor knew he didn’t have time to reach for his own. The killer was moving fast, wrapping his hands around his gun in a double-handed grip, about to pull the trigger. The only chance Connor and Dylan had of leaving this hallway alive was to get the hell out of it.

He charged through the door to the office, Dylan right behind him. Two shots rang out, both a little louder than a handclap. That was the sound of a silencer at work. Connor hadn’t noticed it when the killer pulled the gun out from beneath his jacket, but he had also seen the weapon for less than a second.

Dylan screamed as the bullets whizzed past. Connor slammed the door shut, engaged the lock. Thank God their receptionist was off today. At least they did not have to worry about anything happening to her.

“Come on,” Connor said, grabbing Dylan’s arm and guiding her through the doorway that would take them from the lobby to the rest of the suite.

They had barely made it over the threshold when more shots rang out. Five of them. Straight through the front door. The bullets drilled holes into the floor and the receptionist’s desk. But these were not blind shots. The killer was not depending on luck to hit his targets. He was aiming for the lock itself. Or rather, the wood around it.

“Hide over there,” Connor told Dylan, pointing in the general direction of her desk.

She nodded, crossed the room silently, and tucked herself into the kneehole. There was nowhere in this room she would be safe from gunfire, but at least underneath the desk she was out of sight. And since she didn’t carry a weapon of her own, hiding was the best thing she could do for now.

Connor ducked behind the door that separated the waiting area from the rest of the suite and pulled his gun. Waited.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he wondered who had sent this killer. Samantha and Louis knew they had uncovered the fake user scheme. So did Jeff. Connor still didn’t think Samantha was involved, but what about Louis? He seemed oddly excited that they had tracked down the blackmailer. Or maybe Jeff had played a larger role in this whole thing than it seemed.

But Connor wasn’t going to be able to sort any of that out right now. And when he heard the thud of a shoe hitting the main door and the door slamming into the wall, the thought evaporated. Now all of his attention was on the killer and what he would do next.

Connor could not hear the sound of footsteps, but he knew the man was there. Moving silently across the lobby. Perhaps checking the kneehole of the receptionist’s desk.

Connor took slow, steady breaths. Lifted the gun so that it was in front of his chest. The man was only seconds from stepping through this doorway. There was a faint creak as the man stepped on the threshold, and then the door moved slightly as he pushed it farther open. Connor watched it inch toward him, steeling himself for what he had to do next.

As the killer surveyed the space, he moved further into the room. Once Connor could see him, he stepped out from behind the door and leveled his gun at the man. “Drop it.”

The killer froze. Then he raised his hands over his head, but did not in fact drop the weapon. Without further instruction, he turned slowly to face Connor.

“Put the weapon on the ground now,” Connor said. He had never gotten used to the feel of a firearm, still didn’t like them.

Thankfully, the killer seemed unable to pick up on that thought. With his eyes on Connor, he kneeled even more slowly than he had turned and placed his gun on the floor. Once he was again standing, Connor told him to kick it away, which he also did.

“Good. Now, go have a seat over there.” Connor gestured to one of the chairs that surrounded the conference table.

Still without a word, the killer crossed the room. Every step was deliberate, perhaps so as not to draw Connor’s fire.

Connor had to admit—this was going better than he had expected. Once the killer was seated, he could bind the man’s wrists to the chair’s arms and call the police. Odds were good this man wouldn’t say a word to him about who had hired him or why, but Detective Alex Shaw could probably get it out of him.

The killer pulled a chair away from the table. Another slow and deliberate move.

Connor began to relax. “Come on out, Dylan.”

He could hear soft knocks against the wood as she shuffled out of the kneehole, pepper spray in hand. “You’re a real piece of shit,” she said to the killer as he spun the chair around so that the seat was facing him.

He stopped. His head tilted toward her.

“What are you smiling about?” she asked.

Dylan had barely gotten the words out before Connor realized what they meant, but that wasn’t fast enough for him to do anything about what happened next.

In a single, sweeping move, the killer wrapped his hands around the arms the of chair, lifted it off the ground, and threw it at Connor. Together, they went crashing to the floor, the chair tumbling one way, Connor the other. His gun thudded across the carpet, landing just out of reach.

Connor rolled to his side, mind racing, and reached for his weapon. This was bad, and it was going to get much worse if the killer got to his own gun first. Because he was moving. As soon as the chair connected with Connor, he had kicked his pace up from first gear to fifth.

The killer raced across the room, scooped the weapon up in mid-stride, and swung around, likely ready to start firing.

At this distance, there was no way he was going to miss.

Connor would have been completely screwed if Dylan had not also broken into a run when the killer threw the chair. She lunged on top of him, sending his gun skittering away again, and now the two of them went tumbling to the floor as well.

Once again, both guns were in play. And once again, they were both out of everyone’s reach.

But Connor could see where this was going. This man was not going to give up until he and Dylan were dead.

He was already pushing her off him, reaching for his weapon. Dylan tried to fire the pepper spray into his eyes. He ripped it out of her hand before she could, elbowed her in the stomach.

As she rolled away, gasping, he got to his feet and was about to use the pepper spray on her (probably both of them, Connor thought), when Connor regained his feet and kicked him hard in the back. The killer stumbled across the room, buying them seconds. That might not be enough time to get to the gun first—either gun—but it was enough time to escape.

“Run,” he shouted, bolting straight for the door.

Once he was in the hall, he looked back to see Dylan immediately behind him. There were no other tenants within sight. Either they had heard the gunshots and were hiding out, waiting for the police, or the rest of the floor was empty. Since Connor had never seen anyone but Olin or Dylan in this hallway, it could have been either one.

“Stairs,” he said and started to move again.

He yanked open the door below the glowing red EXIT sign and the two of them charged through it. Another gunshot missed Dylan by only inches, shattering the small pane of glass in the door.

This time, she did not scream.

They raced down the stairs, launching themselves onto landings, determined to get out of this building before the killer could get close enough to take another shot. Two floors down, Connor heard a door open above them and someone else moving just as fast.

They barreled through the door that led to the lobby. Connor pointed to his right. “That way,” he said, which would take them out to the street.

“But—” Dylan shouted, gesturing in the opposite direction.

Connor grabbed her arm and pulled. There was no time to debate this. She wanted to go to the parking garage, to get to Connor’s car—her own car keys were in her purse and her purse was still in the office. That would mean making their way up three floors with the killer right behind them. The killer and no one else. If they were on the street, they would at least have the benefit of the crowd. Pedestrians. Traffic. It was the safer choice.

Or so it seemed until they closed in on the glass doors that separated the lobby from the street and saw another man standing just on the other side of them. He was stocky, a little pudgy around the jawline.

“That’s the guy from Starbucks,” Dylan said.

Last time they had seen him, he had been wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Now he also had on a blazer like Connor’s, and from underneath it he too produced a gun.

Connor cursed, and they immediately turned back the way they had come. Looked like it would have to be the garage after all.

They raced through a door at the opposite end of the lobby just as the biker stepped out of the stairwell. Connor did not turn around to see if both men were after them now. He had to assume they were.

Halfway across the deck, they took shelter behind an old Buick LeSabre. This was not an ideal hiding place, but it was better than trying to make their way to the stairs out here, where they would be easy targets for far too long.

Connor held a finger to his lips, telling Dylan to be quiet and bringing back memories of a kidnapper he’d encountered long ago. Then he sent two texts. The first was to Detective Alex Shaw, asking for help. The second was to Olin, telling him to stay away.

He also asked Olin to call 911. He dared not do it himself. The killer—and perhaps both men—had already come out after them. They were somewhere close by. In this quiet parking garage, even a whisper might be enough to give away their location.

CHAPTER 46

As Connor and Dylan were fleeing down the stairs, Samantha and Olin settled into chairs in Brad Hughes’s office. If the lobby had suggested understated wealth, this space left no room for doubt. And nothing about it was understated.

Brad leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk and looking directly at Samantha. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

She shifted her attention between the lawyer and Olin. “I don’t understand. Why am I here? Why did my husband come to see you?”

Her confusion struck Olin as genuine. Even if it hadn’t, Brad had introduced himself to Samantha in the lobby as if they were meeting for the first time. Despite what Dylan had said, these two did not know each other.

“This is a lot to take in,” the lawyer said. “I get it. But let me just say—your husband was one of the most upstanding people I have ever known. I’m not sure most people in his situation would have had the courage to do what he was about to do.”

“Does this have to do with the fake users?” Olin asked, trying to get to the point.

“That is exactly what it has to do with. Nick said it wasn’t right, that he couldn’t be a part of it. He said he could get us proof about what Viberly was doing, and he wanted us to take it to the DA.”

“Why didn’t he take it to them directly?” Samantha asked.

“He wanted to make sure he didn’t wind up getting in any trouble over it. Things like this can get dicey sometimes. If the DA started to think Theo and Nick had had a falling out—and after, well, you know, he might—the DA might also start to think Nick knew about the fake users from the beginning. That he was only coming forward now because he wanted revenge.”

Samantha stared at him with a mix of embarrassment and surprise. “You know about me and Theo?”

The lawyer nodded.

Samantha looked down at her lap while she considered what that must mean. “Do you know why he didn’t tell me he knew?”

Brad sighed. “As far as I know, Nick hadn’t decided what to do about it yet.”

Samantha considered that too. “Why did he add me as a client?”

“He wanted to make sure you were protected.”

“But I didn’t have anything to do with the fake users,” Samantha said, while at the same time Olin asked, “Wouldn’t spousal privilege have covered her?”

“Not if Theo had told her something. If he told her about the fake users, an aggressive DA could have decided to indict her too.” Brad paused, perhaps to let that sink in, then added, “Nick loved you, Samantha.”

Olin could see the weight of her betrayal weighing heavily on her, and he felt the need to shift the subject, if only slightly, to give her a break. She had done a bad thing. Nobody would argue with that. But he did not believe she was a bad person. “How did he find out about the fake users?”

The lawyer steepled his fingers. “Apparently Theo processed a payment through the company account that struck him as odd. Nick said he wasn’t sure what to make of it at first. But when he started digging into it, he started finding some red flags.”

“Do you know who received the payment?”

“Unfortunately, no. Some outfit in Brazil, according to Nick.”

“I don’t understand,” Olin said. “Why didn’t he just go to Theo and ask him about the payment if he thought it was odd?”

Brad shot him a look, and Olin realized they were right back at the affair again. Nick probably didn’t feel like talking to Theo about anything at that moment that he didn’t absolutely have to.

“Well, how did he get from a suspicious payment to figuring out about the fake users?”

“I can’t say for certain. I think there might have been . . .”

Brad continued talking, but Olin was no longer paying attention. As he’d asked his question, his phone had begun vibrating in his pocket, and when the lawyer started to answer, he was already reading the message on the screen.

Do not come back to the office. The killer is here. Call 911.

“I have to go,” Olin said, interrupting Brad mid-sentence. He got hastily to his feet and dashed out the door, already punching 911 into his keypad.

Samantha could get any additional information they needed from the lawyer. If there was something she overlooked, they could follow up later. Right now, Olin’s friends needed him.

CHAPTER 47

Connor and Dylan slowly eased their way from one car to another, keeping down and moving as silently as they could. Every move forward was preceded by a glance under the vehicle to make sure there was nobody close by. The process felt interminably slow.

Connor had received messages back from both Olin and Alex Shaw. The detective said he was on his way. Olin said he had called 911. That had been almost fifteen minutes ago.

Suddenly the door that led to the lobby flew open with a metallic clank, and Connor heard footsteps racing across the pavement. But not the thunderous roar of a squad of officers coming to their rescue. These footsteps belonged to a single person.

Connor dared to look over the car just in time to see Olin stop, turn three hundred and sixty degrees, and shout his name. In his left hand, he was holding Connor’s gun. He must have stopped by the office first and only made his way out here when he couldn’t find them.

“Is that Olin?” Dylan whispered. It was the first time either she or Connor had said a word since they entered the parking garage. “I thought you told him to stay away.”

“I did.”

Olin spun again. “Connor, where are you?”

Then another set of footsteps drew Connor’s attention to the right, where he saw the bearded killer coming down the ramp that led to the second level, and further still to the pudgy man now guarding the stairwell.

Connor could immediately tell how this was going to play out, and it was too late to do anything about it.

The bearded man leveled his gun and fired a single shot. Olin, who had his back to the biker, collapsed to the ground in a motionless heap.

Connor’s mouth dropped open in shock. Even single fiber of his being was telling him he needed to get to Olin, to see if he was still alive. If he acted quickly, it might not be too late to save him.

But going over there would be a death sentence for them both. Dylan too. As much as Connor hated it, he had to stay put. The police would be here any second, he told himself.

The killer finished descending the ramp at a casual pace now, gun swinging by his side. Connor watched in horror as he approached Olin and, standing over him, aimed the gun directly at his head.

Hiding here silently, waiting for the police, was no longer an option. If Connor was going to save his friend, he was going to have to do something now. The first idea that came to mind was to create a distraction. Since there wasn’t time for a second, he went with it, tossing his phone as far as he could while keeping its arc below the roofline of the cars.

The phone clattered on the ground behind a Honda Accord seven cars away. The biker, who was perhaps less than a second from pulling the trigger, swung the gun up and fired in the general direction of the sound. The bullet smashed through the Honda’s windshield. The car alarm went off. Lights flashing. Siren wailing.

“What are you thinking?” Dylan said. She was no longer trying to whisper. There was no way anybody could hear her over the sound of that siren.

His only response: “Move.” If they didn’t want to be next, they needed to put as much distance between themselves and that Honda as possible.

They scurried past another twelve vehicles, staying close to the wall of the garage, and then rounded a GMC Sierra, taking cover between it and a Mercedes.

Connor once again lifted himself up only high enough to take the lay of the land. The pudgy man was still by the stairwell, his gun at the ready. The killer, who had found the cell phone and figured out it was a ruse, was now moving quickly in their direction. He aimed the gun between every pair of cars he passed, presumably ready to pull the trigger as soon as he found Connor and Dylan.

“We need to keep going,” Connor said. But then he saw the killer gesture toward the man by the stairwell, who nodded and started heading for them from the opposite direction.

They were seconds from being boxed in and shot. Connor needed another plan right away. Something better than tossing his cell phone. He thought about hiding under the truck they were now crouching behind, but that wouldn’t buy them more than a few seconds. As soon as the two men cleared this row, they would certainly get to their knees and peer underneath the vehicles to see if Connor’s and Dylan’s feet were visible. Picking the lock of either car wasn’t an option either. Even if Dylan had her kit with her, it would take more time than they had, and that’s to say nothing of the time she would need to hotwire the ignition switch (assuming she could).

They were out of options. The killer was only two cars away now.

Connor held his breath. Prayed for a bit of luck. And to his surprise, he got it.

That luck came in the form of Olin’s voice. “Hey,” Olin said, drawing not only the attention of both armed men, but Connor’s and Dylan’s as well.

Olin was standing where he had been shot, one hand pressed to his shoulder and blood seeping between his fingers. In his free hand, he held Connor’s gun. This time he had it trained on the killer instead of dangling at his side. But his hand was shaking and Connor knew his odds of hitting the man were next to nothing if he pulled the trigger. “The police are on their way. You should get out of here.” He sounded weak, his voice rising and falling as he spoke.

The killer must have likewise assumed his aim would be terrible because he did not hesitate to fire a second shot at Olin. Once again, Connor watched helplessly as his friend collapsed to the ground.

Olin had clearly figured out that Connor had thrown the cell phone to save Olin’s life. And then, knowing that the armed men were closing in on Connor and Dylan, seconds from shooting them too, he had repaid the favor by creating the only distraction he could.

Connor could not let that sacrifice be in vain. With a roar, he surged out from behind the vehicle and lunged at the killer. The biker stumbled forward, swatting at the air behind him, with Connor on his back. The pudgy man swung his gun toward him but, as Connor hoped, did not open fire.

Connor grabbed the killer by the jaw, pulled his head backward. At the same time, Dylan scoured the bed of the Sierra, looking for anything she could use to help him out. She settled on a tire iron and, appearing from between the vehicles, swung it at the killer’s knee.

There was a sickening crunch. The killer screamed and finally went crashing to the ground.

Although the pudgy man was clearly reluctant to shoot at Connor as long as he was on the killer’s back, he had no such qualms when it came to Dylan. He fired off two quick shots. Both missed her. She scurried back between the vehicles. At the same time, Connor was finally able to wrench the killer’s gun from his hand.

He rolled away and then up to one knee. The killer was no longer a threat. He was curled on the ground, holding his knee with both hands and groaning between clenched teeth. The pudgy man, however, was very much still a threat. In fact, he was closing in on Connor at that very moment, his gun leveled at him.

Connor could hear the faint sound of sirens in the distance. The police were coming. Detective Alex Shaw might even be with them. But waiting for them to arrive was not an option. Somebody was going to have to shoot first, and it needed to be Connor. If not, the pudgy man would make sure all three of them were dead and would still probably have enough time to get out of this garage before the police showed up.

To Connor’s surprise, he realized he wanted to pull the trigger. For the first time that he could remember, he didn’t just want to save someone. He wanted to hurt someone. And this man deserved it. If Olin was dead, there would not be enough pain he could level against these two pieces of shit to ever make things right.

Connor fired three shots before he realized it, and all three hit his intended target. The pudgy man fell to the concrete floor with a thud. Then Connor shifted his focus and fired another three shots at the bearded man.

Now Olin wasn’t the only man on the ground, blood pooling around him on the parking deck.

Connor and Dylan scrambled over to their friend. He was still. Eyes closed.

“Put your hands over the wound,” Dylan said, and Connor was about to do just that when four uniformed officers charged into the garage, guns drawn and screaming for everyone to get down.

CHAPTER 48

Detective Alex Shaw burst into the garage with the rest of the officers and was quickly able to bring order to the scene. He joined Connor and Dylan at Olin’s side, checked for a pulse. “He’s not dead,” he said, but his face told Connor that it would be a miracle if Olin made it through this. He called for EMTs while the rest of the officers checked on the other two men.

They were gone. Connor had shot the killer straight through the heart and hit the pudgy man in the throat.

The EMTs arrived and were able to stabilize Olin before transporting him to Piedmont Hospital for emergency surgery. Once Connor and Dylan were allowed to see him, Dylan squeezed his hand and Connor said, “You better not do anything that stupid again.”

Olin did his best to smile. “Don’t worry. Next time I’ll let him shoot you instead.”

The next morning, Connor and Dylan went back to see Olin again and Connor filled him in on everything Samantha had learned from Brad Hughes. Connor and Dylan had been sitting nervously in the hospital waiting room during Olin’s surgery when she called, and Connor had been thankful for the distraction. In addition to the information Olin had been present for, she had relayed to Connor the reason Nick had put his department through a reorg.

“He hadn’t been able to determine which of them, if any, might have been involved in the fake user scam,” she said. “Somebody had authorized that payment, and they had done it in Nick’s name.”

He’d felt like he was surrounded by wolves, the lawyer had told her. Everybody scheming. Everybody watching. He’d decided to surround himself only with people he could trust.

One of those people was Jeff Craft. Connor remembered that Jeff had said he was friends with Nick, but he did not mention that he was the one who had helped Nick put the pieces together. In fact, when he was speaking to Connor, he even went so far as to say he didn’t know about the fake user scheme until after Nick’s death. Apparently, he’d turned to blackmail because he felt like he had to do something to avenge his friend’s murder, and unlike Nick, who saw the world in starker shades of black and white, he figured he might as well get a little something out of it.

“That’s why he pointed us to Asher,” Dylan said, gently sliding her hand out of Olin’s grasp.

“That’s what I think too,” Connor added. “He didn’t want us to get too close, and he probably figured Asher would be a good scapegoat. Especially with that stack of HR complaints that had been filed against him.”

“But we never would have found enough evidence for the police to make an arrest,” Olin croaked.

“No, but if we became convinced he was involved in Nick’s murder, we also wouldn’t have looked any deeper.”

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Olin spent several more days in the hospital, during which Connor was also able to figure out why Nick had taken an Uber the day he died instead of driving his own car. According to the records on the Uber account, he had been to the area three times. The police had determined that when he was dealing with the private investigator, though, he had been there much more often. The three trips in question were all ones he’d made to see Brad. Appointments on the lawyer’s calendar confirmed it. Apparently, he had been as worried about Theo tracking where he went as Samantha had been about Nick digitally tailing her.

Connor shared everything he knew with Detective Alex Shaw, which Alex assured Connor was more than enough to serve search warrants on Viberly, Theo, and Jeff. After that, the dominos started falling quickly.

With Connor’s help, the Atlanta Police Department’s forensics team had no trouble finding the code behind the fraud. Theo and Jeff were arrested shortly thereafter. They both had a laundry list of charges leveled against them. In Theo’s case, that included a whole host of financial crimes and, after the police applied enough pressure to get him to come clean about his conversations with Pat, accessory to murder in the case of Nick and attempted murder of Connor, Dylan, and Olin.

“What about the company behind the fake users?” Connor asked when Alex filled him in on the arrests.

“They’re overseas. Brazil, it looks like. We’re working with Interpol, but . . .” The detective trailed off, and Connor knew why. It was almost impossible to arrest the people behind companies like that. They had no doubt committed similar crimes before and would again in the future. For now, Connor had to be satisfied with the knowledge that the worst offenders in this case were either dead or in jail awaiting trial.

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When Olin was discharged, Connor and Dylan picked him up, and as they wheeled him down the hospital’s main-floor corridor toward the exit, Connor shared that information with him as well.

“What about Viberly?” he asked as Dylan helped him out of the wheelchair and into the car.

“Who knows?” she said. “They’re still operational at the moment. As I understand it, the CTO has replaced Theo at the helm, but I don’t think the company’s going to be around much longer. It has been eviscerated in the press. Investors are pulling their money out. If Viberly makes it another six months, I’ll be surprised.”

Olin nodded soberly. When he was released, the doctor had told him to take it easy for a while. He had promised he would, and Dylan had said she would make sure of it. Connor would too. Unlike the two men he had killed the parking garage, Connor was going to do what he could to make sure Olin still had many good years ahead of him.

He thought about the scene in the parking garage often and was thinking about it again when he pulled out of the hospital loading zone. He wasn’t sure if it had been within his legal right to kill the biker—the man had been unarmed, after all, and arguably not a threat at that moment—but nobody had questioned it.

It was just three quick shots, and then three more, but on that day, Connor had gone from a man who wasn’t sure he could kill another human being to one who was glad he had. He had no doubt that a lot of people had suffered because of those men. (Pat Hawkins’s roots in the drug trade had forged him into a man that would always be dangerous and the biker, born Diesel Flemming, had been a trusted associate from all those years ago.)  

By pulling the trigger, he had prevented them from harming anyone else in future. But what mattered more was that by taking their lives he had saved not only his own but those of the two people who mattered most to him.

And as Olin began the long road to recovery, and Connor and Dylan fretted over the challenging weeks ahead, he had no doubt he would do it again if he had to.

ALSO BY REAGAN KEETER

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THE CONNOR CALLAHAN SERIES

Gone

A Good Plan

Last Trip to London

Reckless

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STANDALONES

The Redwood Con

Misery Rock

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Reagan Keeter is the author of multiple Amazon bestsellers and a National Indie Excellence Awards finalist. He has worked as a writer and editor at Georgia newspapers. From Georgia State University, he earned his undergraduate degree in Journalism and, from Southern Polytechnic State University, his master’s in Technical and Professional Communication. He lives with his wife in Atlanta, Georgia.

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You can connect with him via:

His website: reagankeeter.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorReaganKeeter/

Email: reagan@reagankeeter.com

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