27. Ari
CHAPTER 27
ARI
O nce we explained the plan to Kelsey, she readily agreed. We’d given her a panic button, and Dusk had brought a camera/mic comms unit built into a tulip-shaped brooch. Kelsey was using the brooch to pin her blouse closed at the neck. She could talk to us, but she didn’t feel comfortable wearing an earpiece in case Jace spotted it, so if we wanted to communicate with her, we had to send a text message. She also had a can of pepper spray—we’d made sure of that.
Now we just had to wait.
On Monday morning, Dusk and I sat in front of her laptop, watching. Selene Fuller was in the apartment, dressed in a shift dress and heels, perfectly made up even though she showed no signs of going out anywhere. An illusion of happiness. She’d brought Kelsey coffee and home-baked cookies before slipping away, leaving her to talk architecture with Jace in his office. He’d swallowed the story about her memory issues on Friday night and accepted her apology for running out on him with a wave of his hand.
“Forget about it,” he said .
No chance of that.
We’d spent yesterday researching the wider Fuller family as well as brainstorming ways to teach them a lesson. I wanted to honeytrap Jace and gain irrefutable evidence of him drugging a woman’s drink. Dusk said she knew just the girl for that, but what about the rest of the family? Erin thought we should release mice in the Neptune and report them to the health department. Dusk joked about controlled demolition. At least, I hoped she was joking.
“Did you see the bruise?” Kelsey whispered when Jace left the office to take a phone call. There was a full-size mockup of the golf course complex on a table beside his desk. “Her left eye is bruised. She’s tried to cover it with make-up, but you can still see it.”
We hadn’t, but when Dusk rewound the footage and zoomed in, there was a definite purplish tinge.
“Wouldn’t surprise me if he took his anger out on Selene after Erin and Rusty foiled his plans for Kelsey on Friday night,” she said. “When Kelsey left with someone else, Jace would have seen that as a rejection, and that rejection would have sent him into a rage. That’s how narcissists work.”
There was a bitterness in her voice I hadn’t heard before. Did she speak from experience?
“You think Jace is a narcissist?”
“The signs are there.”
“You’re familiar with the signs? Hell, you didn’t date a narcissist, did you?”
Dusk didn’t look at me. “I watched my dad ruin two good women.”
“I’m so sorry. Your father sounds like a real asshole.”
“He was. We got him a headstone that says ‘In a better place now.’”
“Clever. ”
“More subtle than ‘rot in hell,’ anyway.” She sighed. “It’s so easy to fall into the trap. Growing up, I thought it was normal for men to act that way—we all did. Booker’s best friend was the first person to realise what my father was really like, and the three of us—and Huck—spent years plotting our escape. Getting Kitty out was the problem. We didn’t have the resources then that I have now.”
“Kitty?”
“Dad’s second wife.”
“Couldn’t your mom help? I mean, if she’d gotten away…”
“I found her hanging from the banister when I was eight.”
The words were delivered matter-of-factly, no emotion behind them, but they still hit like a punch to the gut. Dusk’s mom had died by suicide? My heart ached for the little girl she’d been, the one who’d lost her childhood to a monster, and before I could think better of it, I gave her a hug.
“I’m so sorry.”
“It’s in the past,” she mumbled against my shoulder.
“Your brother’s friend sounds like a real stand-up guy.”
“He was. I still miss him.”
Oh, hell. “Tell me he didn’t die too?”
Dusk gave a strangled laugh as she extricated herself from my arms. “Our lives spiralled in different directions, that’s all. I joined the Army; he moved to Los Angeles.”
“That was a big step.”
She nodded. “He never wanted to stay in Nebraska, and originally, we were going to move to New York—he was an artist, and he’d been talking to some big-name agent about his own show. We had so many dreams.” She gave a sad smile. “Then the show fell through, and a buddy from high school landed a job in California, so he figured he’d try living somewhere warmer while I did my three years. ”
“You were dating?”
“Oh, yeah, we were engaged. He was the love of my damn life.”
“So what happened?”
“Three years can change a person. At the end of it, we’d both been offered roles we couldn’t turn down.”
“And yours meant working with Jerry and Priest?”
“No, the Choir didn’t even exist then.” The Choir? That’s what their group was called? “He wanted me to quit, come live the Hollywood dream, but that was his dream, not mine. And I’d never ask him to give it up, so…”
“So you walked away?”
“I walked away.”
“When you say ‘the Hollywood dream’… Was he an actor?”
“If I told you his name, you’d recognise it. But like I said, it’s in the past.” Her eyes glistened as she turned back to the screen. “Jace Fuller reminds me so much of my dad.”
But there were also definite differences in the relationship. From the snippets Dusk had let slip, her father had preyed on young women, charming them with bullshit and dazzling them with money. But Selene hadn’t needed money because she’d inherited her own, or so the gossip pages said, anyway. Like Dusk’s mysterious fiancé, Selene’s grandfather had been an artist, and even while he was alive, his paintings had sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now they were worth millions. Modern art in bright colours, pop art, cubism, and occasionally collage. Selene had been his assistant and sole heir.
Photos showed her in his studio, at gallery shows, even creating artwork of her own, and in those days, she’d always been ready with a genuine smile. Then she’d married Jace Fuller and more or less disappeared from public life, only popping up on his arm at the occasional event .
Now I understood why Dusk had spent every day with us since the GHB incident. She saw her mom in Selene, except these days, she had the ability to launch a rescue.
Assuming Selene wanted to be rescued, of course.
There was still a question mark over that.
We knew the stats—on average, it took seven attempts for a woman to leave an abusive partner, and seventy-five percent of deaths from domestic violence happened after the woman ended the relationship. There were so many reasons Selene might choose to stay: fear of retaliation, lack of access to money, fear of homelessness, low self-esteem, a belief in Jace’s threats or apologies. And maybe lurking underneath, there was a frayed thread of love. She had married the man, after all, and he could be charming when he wanted to.
All we could do was remove as many obstacles to her leaving as we could, and hope she took the escape route we offered.
“Did you arrange the meeting with Mr. Fuller Senior yet?” Kelsey asked Jace on-screen. “When I spoke with him on my last trip, he did say he wanted to be kept up to date with any developments, so we really should get a date scheduled.”
“He had to go away for a few days.”
“Oh? I thought I saw him across the lobby this morning.”
“Yeah, he was on his way to the airport.”
“He was walking into the hotel.”
“Then he probably forgot something. Look, he put me in charge of this project—don’t sweat the small stuff.”
I didn’t sweat, but I did give the matter some thought. Why wouldn’t Jace want Kelsey to meet with his father? Afraid she might spill the beans about his sexual proclivities? Or…or…
“Stanley doesn’t know,” I whispered .
Dusk finished crunching a mouthful of apple. “Huh?”
“About the golf course. Stanley Fuller doesn’t know. Or at least, he doesn’t know how far along the project has gotten. Ten bucks says he signed off on the feasibility study, but he doesn’t realise that Jace brought Kelsey here to work on the next stage. When Kelsey said Jace was holding their meetings in his apartment, I figured he was just trying to hit on her—and let’s face it, he does have form—but his wife is there. Think about it—he can explain skulking around with a pretty woman because that’s what he always does, but he can’t justify bringing a top architect to Vegas for weeks on end to work on a project that’s supposed to be in its infancy.”
“So Jace has gone rogue?”
Ever since we’d focused in on the Fullers, I’d been working through my Vegas connections, trying to build up a picture of the family. Stanley was, by all accounts, a sharp businessman who couldn’t keep his dick in his pants. But he’d been married to the same woman for the last twenty-two years—his first wife had passed away—and they showed no indication of divorcing. Wife number two showed up with him at various events, usually wearing designer labels and dripping with jewellery. A friend knew her stylist—the consensus was that Marilyn Fuller had made peace with her husband’s philandering ways years ago, and she turned a blind eye as long as he kept her in the lifestyle to which she’d grown accustomed. That was perhaps why I’d made assumptions about Selene’s relationship with Jace.
But Stanley and Marilyn appeared to show remnants of genuine affection toward each other, and they were fond of philanthropy too.
Jackson didn’t spend much time in Vegas, so he was still something of a mystery. He wasn’t married, and since he split from his long-term girlfriend two years ago, I hadn’t found any evidence of him dating seriously. Word was that he’d decided to focus on golf for now, and his climb in the rankings agreed with that.
Jace? Well, he was different. Men invariably thought he was “savvy, a good businessman” and “smart, knows what he wants and knows how to get it.” Among women, the views weren’t quite so clear-cut. Some found him handsome, charming, and generous. Others described him as “kinda slick” and said, “There’s something off about him, you know what I mean?”
But the most interesting snippet of information had come to light yesterday during a chat with a friend of my old boss’s. When I was twenty and struggling with life, a veteran PI named Morty Coulson had taken me under his wing and taught me most of what I knew about investigative work, and when he passed, I’d inherited a bunch of his contacts. One of those was a realtor named Peggy, and Peggy loved to talk. Last year, she’d heard on the realtor grapevine that Stanley and Jace were going through a rough patch, and Jace had even gone as far as looking for somewhere else to live before ultimately staying in the penthouse at the Neptune. Most of the time. He also owned a two-bedroom apartment in the Arts District, and that was where he took the women who weren’t his wife.
Honestly, I could have kissed Peggy. As it was, I hugged her and promised not to leave it so long between catch-ups next time.
Dusk had grinned when I gave her the news, and I’d caught another glimpse of the crazy in her eyes.
“We can work with that,” she’d said.
Yes, we could.
The Arts District apartment was where Kina was currently waiting with one of her colleagues, a girl new to Vegas who’d made the mistake of getting into Jace Fuller’s bed and ended up with the damage to show for it. Revenge would be so, so sweet.
“Yes, Jace has gone rogue,” I said to Dusk.
“How about Jackson?”
“I’m not sure right now, but I don’t think Stanley’s involved.”
“So, Jace lent Uncle Mike a million bucks in Bitcoin, and when Mike couldn’t pay it back, Jace planned to use it as leverage to get the Galaxy?”
“Exactly. And maybe he used Selene’s money? She doesn’t seem to have much control over her own life, and I bet he has access to her bank accounts.”
“What’s a little financial abuse on top of the emotional abuse?”
My phone pinged with a message.
Kina
Ready?
Me
Go now.
I gave Dusk a nervous glance. “Time to find out if we’re right.”