Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
I slept like the dead, which was ironic given my line of work.
No nightmares. No hospital corridors stretching ahead of me, no locked doors, no silence where crying used to be.
Just deep, dreamless black. Sleep that only came when my body was too exhausted to torment me and Jack had worn me out thoroughly enough that my brain couldn’t find the energy to spiral.
I woke to sunlight slicing through the large picture window and the smell of coffee drifting up from downstairs. Jack was a man who believed life was too short for bad coffee and bad women, and he’d told me more than once that he’d gotten lucky on both counts.
The clock read seven fifteen. Late for us.
Almost decadent. My phone was on the nightstand, and I checked it while the rest of me worked up the ambition to move.
Two texts from Daniels—lab results from the foot residue samples were being expedited, preliminary report expected by end of day.
One from Derby—he’d pulled fifty-three building permits in the dock district so far and was finding interesting patterns in the ownership records.
From somewhere on the second floor, bass thumped through the ceiling in a muffled, rhythmic pulse that vibrated faintly through the headboard—Doug’s music, an electronic noise that sounded like robots having a nervous breakdown in a warehouse.
That kid ran on energy drinks and obsession the way normal humans ran on sleep and good intentions.
He’d probably been at it all night, mining the phone records and financial data Jack had forwarded, building webs of connection that only he and his digital girlfriend could see.
The shower was hot and quick, and I dressed for a day I expected to spend split between the office and fieldwork—dark jeans, a fitted black V-neck, my black blazer. Functional. Professional enough for interviews, practical enough to squat beside a body if I had to.
Jack was at the kitchen table when I came down, his laptop open in front of him and a cup of coffee at his elbow that he’d barely touched, which meant whatever was on the screen had his full attention.
He was already in uniform—black BDUs, black polo with the sheriff’s office logo, his duty belt and badge laid out on the counter beside his windbreaker.
Morning light came through the kitchen windows at a low angle that caught the planes of his face, the set of his jaw that told me he’d been thinking hard about something and hadn’t liked where the thinking took him.
“Phone company finally came through,” he said without looking up. “Daniels’s contact lit the fire. Dre’s phone records hit my email twenty minutes ago.”
That woke me up faster than caffeine. “Anything jump out?”
“Haven’t had time to go through all of it yet.
I forwarded everything to Doug—he’s been up all night anyway, so Margot’s already chewing through it.
But at a glance—there’s a burner number that shows up constantly in the last two months.
Multiple calls a day, sometimes at two and three in the morning.
And the last call Dre received was from that burner, Friday at 7:14 p.m.”
Friday at seven fourteen. Less than an hour before he was supposed to meet Tiana for dinner. The dinner he never showed up to.
“That’s the abduction window,” I said.
“That’s what I’m thinking.” Jack took a sip of his coffee. “Whoever called him from that burner lured him somewhere. Maybe told him to meet, changed the dinner plans, whatever. And by the time he realized something was wrong—”
“He was already outnumbered.”
Jack nodded. “Doug’s going to trace that burner. Even prepaid phones leave a trail—where they were purchased, what towers they ping off. If we can place that burner in the dock district on Friday night, we can start building a timeline of where Dre was taken and when.”
I poured my coffee and leaned against the counter, wrapping both hands around the mug and letting the warmth seep into my fingers.
The kitchen was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator, the tick of the old clock above the stove that had survived the rebuild, and the faint percussion of Doug’s music filtering down through two floors of hardwood and plaster like a heartbeat the house had developed on its own.
“Are we any closer on the shell companies?”
“Margot’s still working it. The domestic accounts are straightforward—Iron House LLC is Vic’s, and the money flowing through it matches the notebook ledger.
But the offshore and crypto wallets are going to take time.
We’ll need formal international requests, and those move at the speed of diplomacy. ”
“So slowly.”
“Glacially.” He closed his laptop and reached for his duty belt, threading it through the loops of his BDUs.
The weapon went into the holster, the badge clipped on to his belt, and the windbreaker went over everything—the thin layer of civilian camouflage that was supposed to make the public feel less nervous about their sheriff carrying a forty-caliber sidearm into the local breakfast spot.
“Cole’s meeting us at Martha’s Diner,” Jack said. “He wants to talk about the fighter protection detail before we head to the office.”
“Martha’s sounds perfect. It’s been a long time since I’ve been hungry for breakfast.”
“It’ll be even better if you don’t throw it back up.”
I sighed. “Truer words, my friend.”
* * *
Martha’s occupied a narrow brick building on the east side of the Towne Square, wedged between an antique shop and a law office with brass nameplates that had been there since before I was born.
The building itself was original to the square—1802, according to the date carved into the cornerstone—and Martha Smith had run the breakfast counter for forty-three of those years with an iron spatula and a personality that could strip paint.
The Towne Square was where the four towns in King George County met, and many of the buildings surrounding it were on the historical register. Martha’s Diner was on the Bloody Mary side of the square, and her son Stewart was one of Jack’s captains at the sheriff’s department.
This early on a Friday morning, the square was already humming with small-town activity that made King George feel like a place time had decided to treat gently.
Old men gathered on their usual benches near the fountain, already deep into whatever argument they’d been having for the last decade or so.
A woman was unlocking the door to the bookshop with a stack of mail tucked under her arm.
Two mothers pushed strollers along the brick sidewalk that had been laid before the Revolutionary War, their conversation punctuated by the babble of toddlers who had opinions about everything and vocabulary for none of it.
Cole was already in the back booth when we walked in, his Stetson on the seat beside him, a cup of coffee in front of him.
“You’re late,” Cole said. “You two must have been giving Margot some more blackmail data.”
“Don’t get cocky,” I said. “Pretty soon she’ll be able to send her army of robots directly to your house to listen through your bedroom door.”
Jack slid into the booth beside me, across from Cole.
The air smelled like bacon grease and strong coffee and biscuits baking somewhere in the back—that combination that could make a person religious if they weren’t already.
Martha had a rule about biscuits—they came out of the oven every twenty minutes from 5 a.m. to noon, and if you weren’t there when a batch was ready, that was your own personal failure.
“What can I get you, sugar?” Martha appeared in front of me, a coffeepot in each hand—regular in the right, decaf in the left.
She was in her mid-seventies, built like a fire hydrant, with silver hair pinned up in a style that hadn’t changed since Carter was president and reading glasses on a beaded chain around her neck.
“Scrambled eggs, bacon, biscuit, and whatever fruit you’ve got. And coffee.”
Jack ordered the same thing he always ordered—oatmeal and whole wheat toast. Jack’s body was a temple. Or whatever.
Cole had his usual—country ham, eggs sunny side up, and hash browns crispy enough to shatter—and Martha wrote it all down with the stub of a pencil she kept behind her ear, even though she’d been serving the same men the same breakfast for years and could have done it blindfolded.
The pleasantries lasted about as long as it took Martha to top off the coffees and disappear toward the kitchen, her orthopedic shoes squeaking softly on the black-and-white checkered floor.
Then Cole leaned in, dropping his voice below the ambient clatter of silverware and morning conversation that filled the diner like white noise.
“The three fighters,” he said. “I’ve got deputies on all of them. Overnight, nothing unusual. T-Bone’s at his sister’s place across town. Marco’s at his apartment—had an overnight female guest. Darnell lives with his mom and was home all night.”
“Anyone approach them?” Jack asked.
“Not that my guys have seen. Day’s still young yet.
” Cole turned his coffee cup in his hands—a habit he had when his mind was working faster than his mouth.
“Scared people do one of two things. They run, or they reach out to whoever they think can protect them. If any of these guys are connected to Stavros, or if they get desperate enough to go to him, our tails will see it.”
“And if one of them leads us straight to the top,” Jack said. “We let them.”
“That’s the idea.” Cole glanced around the diner—an automatic sweep, the kind every cop did in every room without thinking about it, looking for exits and threats the way most people read menu items. “But there’s a flip side.
Gyms talk. Fighters talk. And Vic knows we had conversations with T-Bone, Marco, and Darnell.
Even if he doesn’t know what they said, he knows we showed interest. If he passes that up the chain to Stavros—”