Chapter 45 Remy
REMY
I finished my morning workout, slugged back some electrolytes, and headed for the kitchen. I expected everyone to still be asleep — we’d stayed up late in Maeve’s bed cuddling, because Maeve was on her period and feeling crampy — but I almost crashed into Bram as I was leaving the gym.
I knew something was up right away. Bram usually woke up like a bear just coming out of hibernation, but now his expression was stony, his stride purposeful.
“What’s up?” I asked, following him into the living room.
“Aloha’s in.” Bram headed for the stairs.
“He’s… in?” It took me a second to realize what he was talking about. “He cracked the phone?”
“Yeah.”
“And where are you going exactly?”
“To the warehouse,” Bram said, like I was an idiot. “Aloha said it would be easier to show us everything on his equipment.”
“Riiiight… and you’re going to go without Maeve?”
He froze. “She’s not feeling well. I figured I’d get the info and bring it back.”
“You’re going to leave Maeve here while you hear what Aloha found on Todd’s phone?” I mean, I didn’t want to spell it out for him but…
“She’ll be pissed,” he said, like it was just occurring to him.
I snapped and pointed at him. “Now you’re catching on.”
He turned around and headed away from the stairs toward the kitchen.
Smart man.
“I’ll make her some toast and a cup of tea,” he said.
I threw together my smoothie and went to wake up Poe and Maeve. They were out cold, Ray curled up at their feet, but Maeve shot up like a rocket when I nudged her and asked if she wanted to go with us to Aloha’s warehouse to hear what he’d found on Todd’s phone.
“Give me five minutes,” she said, throwing back the covers.
I laughed. “There’s no rush, killer. Bram’s making you something to eat.”
As if on cue, he entered the room carrying a tray with two Tylenol, a steaming mug, a plate of toast, and little pot of jam, which Maeve bought for the loft because she said it was nicer to have your own tiny jam than to dip into the jar where everyone else left their toast crumbs (she hadn’t named names but I was pretty sure she’d been talking about Bram).
“Do I have time?” she asked, scooting back on the bed.
“You have time,” Bram said, setting the tray carefully on her lap. “Aloha’s not going anywhere. How are you feeling?”
“It’s a battle of wills between my uterus and me and I’m determined to win,” she said.
She looked at the steaming mug, then looked up at Bram. “You made me tea?”
“Doesn’t coffee make your cramps worse?” he asked.
She smiled. “Yeah, I just didn’t know you’d remember.”
Ray had lifted his head, like he wanted to be part of the conversation.
“I’ll take Ray out while you eat,” I said.
I got the dog outside, fed the stray cat that had been coming around (I don’t know what Bram was talking about when he called it a demon, the cat always purred when I fed him and was more than happy to let me pick him up), and went back inside to change.
An hour later we were leaving the loft and heading for Aloha’s place on foot. It was only a couple blocks north and even though it was cold Maeve had insisted she wasn’t an invalid and didn’t need someone to drive her two blocks.
We stood around her, trying to keep her warm while we waited for Aloha to buzz us in, and a minute later we were stepping into the old warehouse that was his headquarters.
“This is where he works?” Maeve said, taking in the cavernous warehouse, the old equipment shadowed in the faint light that leaked in from the gray February morning.
“In the back,” Poe said, taking her hand.
We crossed the warehouse floor and a large walled off box came into view. I’d been to Aloha’s enough that it had stopped seeming unusual, but I imagined it must look pretty weird to Maeve, like a big black box had been dropped into the warehouse by aliens.
A security panel glowed next to the door and two cameras pointed at our position.
A few seconds later Aloha buzzed us in and we stepped into a room about a thousand foot square, the only light emanating from banks of computers lined up on worktables and a couple of laptops manned by Nyx and Echo (hackers were weird), two of Aloha’s people.
Nyx, a beautiful older woman with dark skin and a bald head looked up from her screen with a nod before returning to her work. Echo didn’t even look up, and I caught site of his ear buds under a black beanie that almost completely covered his brown hair.
“Yo,” Aloha said, turning in his chair to greet us. Multiple computer screens glowed behind him, his bald head lit purple by the LED strips that glowed where the ceiling of the box met its walls. “You gave me a dumpster fire.”
“What can I say?” Bram stepped closer. “I never promised you a rose garden.”
“Hey, Maeve,” Aloha said.
“Hey,” she said. “Thanks for doing this for us.”
“No problem. I just hope it helps."
Bram looked annoyed, probably because if we’d said thank you Aloha would have pointed out that he didn’t really have a choice, which was true.
But Aloha had been sweet on Maeve since the beginning.
Not in an I’m-going-to-steal-your-girl kind of way — he’d be dead if that were the case — but in a you-lucky-sonofabitches kind of way.
“What did you find?” Bram asked, crossing his arms over his chest.
“What didn’t I find?” He turned to face his screen. “Let’s just say this dude has some… interesting connections.”
“What kind of connections?” Poe asked.
“I didn’t run them all down, but lots of Russian names, quite a few Eastern Europeans, and get this… more than one rich and powerful American.”
“Define rich and powerful,” I said.
“Politicians, tech bros, business dudes, even a few celebrities. That kind of shit.”
“They’re Ethan’s clients,” Maeve said. “They have to be.”
I understood why she drew the conclusion. Ethan Todd wasn’t some trust fund baby with old money. If he was well connected, it was because he had something to offer. Add in the sex trafficking operation and it wasn’t hard to put two and two together.
“Probably,” Aloha said. “There’s nothing overtly incriminating in their conversations on the phone — the guy’s stayed out of jail this long for a reason — but definitely some cryptic language that hints at bad shit.”
“Anything on locations?” Bram asked.
He was cutting to the chase: where the fuck was Ethan Todd hiding?
“That’s a big question,” Aloha said, tapping at his keyboard. “This guy’s not exactly standing still. He’s been all over the fucking place. California, New York, Miami, Prague, even fucking Romania.”
I exchanged glances with Bram, Poe, and Maeve. We knew all about Romania.
Obviously.
“Anything that says where he might be now?” Poe asked. “Plans made with other people, reservations booked, flight plans registered?”
“No flight plans since Romania, probably because he’s been using someone else’s plane, but I saw your other questions coming, which is why I pulled locations where he’s holed up for more than a day or two in the past.”
“And?” Bram asked.
“Five of them in the rotation: Prague, St. Moritz, London, Paris, St. Kitts.”
“Where is St. Kitts?” Poe asked.
“Caribbean,” Aloha said. “I had to look it up.”
“It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack,” Maeve said.
She wasn’t wrong. Aloha had named cities all over the globe: Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, England, France, the Caribbean. How the fuck were we supposed to narrow it down?
“And there’s nothing in there that might indicate where he is now?” I asked.
Aloha shook his head. “It’s good you got the phone, but…”
“It was one of the only ways we could have tracked him.” Maeve said.
Aloha had given us instructions for disabling tracking on the phone and we’d done it as soon as we’d left the city. Otherwise he could have used it to track us.
Aloha nodded. “Double edged sword and all that.”
“Fuck,” Bram muttered.
“Probably doesn’t help, but it looks like he was in Prague most recently, staying at a fancy apartment owned by Dimitri Kaprolov,” Aloha said.
“What a surprise,” I muttered.
“He won’t go back there,” Maeve said. “He’ll go somewhere else, somewhere he thinks we won’t be able to find him.”
None of us asked her how she knew. Maeve had returned from Romania with a kind of synergistic psychic connection to Todd. It was why of all of us, she’d been the most sure Ethan would show up at Apex.
She couldn’t read his mind, but she was good at getting inside his head.
“At least he’s on the run,” Poe said. “People make mistakes when they’re on the run.”
“I can keep looking at the phone,” Aloha said. “There’s enough data here to keep us busy for weeks. Unless…”
Bram cocked an eyebrow. “Unless?”
“Unless you want to take it to the police,” Aloha said. “Let their forensics team go through it?”
We played out that scenario in silence.
“I wouldn’t trust the BPD with digital forensics if my life depended on it,” I finally said.
“Agreed,” Maeve said.
“I’m assuming there’s nothing they can do that you can’t do better?” Bram asked Aloha.
He shrugged. “You said it.”
“Keep working the phone,” Bram said. “Let us know if you come up with anything else.”
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
I couldn’t hide my surprise. Aloha wasn’t usually invested in the shit we asked him to do. We told him what we needed and he did it and went on to his next project.
But he was in it now with the rest us, wanting to take Todd down for Maeve.
“We’ll work on the five cities you gave us,” Maeve said. “Maybe we can turn up a connection with all the other stuff we’ve learned about Todd along the way.”
“Good idea,” Aloha said. “Doubt he’ll use his plane when he knows we’ve got the tail number, but want me to keep an eye on it anyway?”
“Please,” Maeve said. “We should cover every base, just in case.”
“You got it, Maeve.” Why was he using her name? Fucker. “Just let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help.”
Fucking Aloha, the bald motherfucker, had obviously been as domesticated by Maeve as the rest of us.
We said our goodbyes and stepped out of the box, then made our way through the empty warehouse to the exit.
“Shit,” Maeve said when we stepped outside.
I took her hand. “At least we have someplace to start.”
Five cities wasn’t exactly a hot lead, but it was something.
“I guess,” she said with a sigh.
Poe’s phone dinged as we headed toward the loft. He looked at it with a scowl, then shoved it back into his pocket.
“Everything okay?” Maeve asked.
“My gramps and gran both have the flu,” he said. “They want me to go see Whit tomorrow in their place.”
Poe had a complicated relationship with Whit, one he mostly conducted at a distance. I thought he was avoiding some hard talk with his brother, but he hadn’t asked my opinion so I didn’t give it.
“I’ll go with you,” Maeve offered.
Poe shook his head. “I wouldn’t ask you to do that. It’s not a nice place.”
She slipped her hand into his. “You’re not asking. And in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve gotten pretty good at navigating not-nice places.”
It was true. But I still hated it.
All the things I’d rejected about my upbringing — the normalcy, the sameness, the fucking averageness of it all — were now all the things I wanted for Maeve.
For myself.
Go fucking figure.