Chapter Five #2
Lady Leo's mouth became a thin line. "The sharks who were banned from my club for what they did to one of my patrons.
They were involved in the Playground operation.
When the Grizzly went down, some of them scattered.
The ones who took my son—" She stopped. Breathed.
The control was immaculate. "The ones who may have taken my son, would be from that group. They have a grudge."
Nero wrote it down. The Playground connection. Banned sharks with a grudge. That narrowed the field. The Playground bust had generated extensive files on the shark network, names, associates, known locations. If the kidnappers were from that pool, the investigation had a starting point.
Bethany was on the phone, her voice low and urgent. She hung up and turned to them. "No answer at his apartment. Marco says he went off patrol at three thirty, everything was quiet. He didn't see anyone."
"Amani left the club at four," Lady Leo said. She was doing the math. Nero could see it in her eyes. "Thirty minutes between Marco's last pass and Amani walking out. That's their window."
Nero nodded. "I need his route home. The specific path he takes from the club to his apartment."
Bethany was already pulling up a map on her phone.
"Four blocks. He always walks. He doesn't have a car, uses ride apps when he needs to go further.
Here—" She held the phone out and traced the route with her finger.
A straight shot through the warehouse district.
Quiet at that hour. Minimal foot traffic. Minimal witnesses.
A perfect hunting ground, if a predator knew the prey's schedule.
"I need a photo of him," Nero said.
Bethany scrolled through her camera roll and turned the phone around.
The face on the screen hit Nero like a sudden change in altitude, unexpected, physical, something that required a moment to adjust to.
The kid was stunning. Amber eyes, sharp jaw, a grin that suggested he knew exactly how good-looking he was and considered it a personal achievement.
He was behind a bar, shirtless, holding up a cocktail with an umbrella in it, and the photo had the warm, slightly blurred quality of something taken mid-laugh.
Nero looked at the photo and thought: how does a guy who looks like that not have someone in his life?
Then he thought: maybe he's just an asshole. A lot of big cats were. Top predators, social graces optional.
Then he put both thoughts away because they were irrelevant to the job.
"Send that to me." He gave Bethany his number. "Does he have any friends outside the club? Anyone he might have gone to instead of home?"
Bethany shook her head. "Amani's life is this place. He works here, his friends are here, his family is here. If he's not at the club or his apartment, something is wrong. Something is very wrong." Her voice cracked on the last word and she pressed her lips together hard.
Lady Leo put a hand on her daughter's shoulder.
The touch was brief, a lioness steadying her cub, and then she was all business again.
"Detective, my network is at your disposal.
I have people who can move faster than your department.
I've already activated our security contacts for the Playground case, the same infrastructure.
If the sharks are involved, my people may find them before yours do. "
Nero had worked with Lady Leo's network before, indirectly, through the Playground task force.
She wasn't wrong. Her resources were extensive and her intelligence was often better than what enforcement could produce through official channels.
But there was a difference between cooperation and a private army, and a mother looking for her kidnapped son was likely to cross that line without blinking.
"I appreciate that," Nero said carefully.
"And I'll take any intelligence your people can provide.
But I need you to let me run the investigation.
If your security team finds the sharks before we do, they call me.
They don't engage. If this goes to prosecution, and it will, I need the evidence chain clean. "
Lady Leo studied him for a long moment. He could feel her assessing him the way a predator assesses another predator, not for threat but for capability. Whether he was good enough to be trusted with this. Whether he was fast enough to be worth waiting for.
"You have forty-eight hours," she said. "After that, I find my son my way."
"With respect, that's not enough time. If the sharks sold him to someone outside the city, I need to trace the money, find the buyer, and confirm the location before I move. Rushing that gets people killed. I need a week."
"A week." The word came out of her like something she wanted to bite in half.
"Five days. That's my minimum for a clean investigation with a clean evidence chain. If I go in too fast on bad intel, your son is the one at risk."
Lady Leo's fingers tightened on the stem of her martini glass.
He watched her run the math — the mother's math, which was different from the cop's math, which was different from the businesswoman's math.
Three calculations happening simultaneously behind eyes that had never once in their life accepted a timeline they hadn't set.
"Five days," she said. "Not six. Not five and a half. On day six I stop waiting and you will not like what that looks like."
"Understood," he said. "I'll need one more thing. Something of Amani's. Something with his scent on it."
Bethany disappeared into a back room and returned with a plastic bag containing a pair of tiny black shorts. "These are his. From his locker. He—" She faltered. "He wears them every shift. They're kind of his thing."
Nero took the bag. The shorts weighed almost nothing. Somewhere out in the desert, the person who wore those was in the hands of someone who'd paid to have him delivered, and the last thing that person had done before it happened was text his mother that the frittata was good.
He sealed the bag and put it in his shoulder case. "I'll be in touch within the hour."
He turned to leave, then stopped. Turned back.
"We'll find him," he said. He said it to Lady Leo but he meant it for Bethany, whose composure was held together with nothing but willpower and the certainty that if she fell apart her mother would not forgive her for it. "I'm good at my job and I don't stop until I'm done. We'll find him."
Lady Leo's expression didn't change. But a fraction of the fear gave way to something that might, in better light, have been the beginning of trust.
"Forty-eight hours," she said again.
Nero nodded, once, and walked out into the sunlight and heat.
He called Harold from the parking lot. Harold was a hound shifter, the best tracker on the force, and the only partner Nero had ever worked with who didn't annoy him within the first fifteen minutes of a shift.
Harold was also the only person Nero knew who could follow a scent trail that was twelve hours old through a neighborhood that stank of diesel and salt water and still tell you which way the target had been facing when they stopped moving.
"Nero, I hear we've got a case." Harold's voice was sleep-rough. Sunday morning. Nero didn't care.
"Sharks kidnapped Lady Leo's kid. Twenty-year-old male, lion shifter, name's Amani. Taken sometime between four and four thirty this morning. I need you on Alder Street in the warehouse district in thirty minutes with your nose on."
Harold was quiet for a second. Then: "Lady Leo's son. Jesus. She must be losing her mind."
"She gave me forty-eight hours before she goes private."
"Then we better move fast. Twenty minutes."
Harold was there in fifteen. He pulled up to the curb near the club in his personal car, a sedan that smelled like dog treats and old coffee, and unfolded himself from the driver's seat.
He was tall, long-faced, with perpetually disheveled brown hair and the look of a man who was always one cup of coffee behind where he needed to be.
But his eyes were sharp and his nose was sharper, and when Nero handed him the evidence bag with Amani's shorts, he opened it and took one long, focused breath.
"Lion," Harold confirmed. "Young. Male. Healthy.
Spent a lot of time around alcohol and leather, which tracks for a bartender in a kink club.
" He closed the bag. "Shark scent is distinctive, dirty salt water and fish.
They're all over this town though, so I need more than that to separate the ones we want from the ambient stink. "
"The route from the club to his apartment runs along here." Nero pulled up the map Bethany had shown him. "Four blocks. He walks it every night. Same time, same path."
"Consistent pattern. Easy to stake out." Harold shook his head. "Stupid brave of him to walk alone at four in the morning."
"He's a lion. They don't think anything can touch them." Nero pocketed his phone. "Let's see what you can find."
Harold walked the route. Back and forth along the sidewalk on the club's side first, then crossing the street, methodical and unhurried, his head moving in the small, precise adjustments of a hound locking onto a trail.
Nero watched from a distance and let him work.
Don't rush a tracker. Don't talk to a tracker.
Waited until they had something and then listen.
Half a block down from the club, Harold stopped. His nose wrinkled. Then he waved.
Nero crossed to him. "What?"
"Trail. About half a day old, which fits the timeline.
" Harold pointed in the direction of Amani's apartment.
"Lion scent heading north, strong and clean.
Then here—" He took three steps and stopped again.
"Sharks. Minimum three. They all smell so similar it's hard to separate individuals, but the concentration says at least three bodies, probably coming from that alley there.
" He pointed to a gap between two warehouses.
"Cut him off. The lion scent spikes, adrenaline, fear, and then it drops to ground level. He went down right here."
Nero looked at the sidewalk. Clean concrete. Almost no visible evidence. But Harold's nose was reading a story that eyes couldn't see, a twenty-year-old walking home, the ambush, the tackle, the needle.
Then he saw it. Three feet from where Harold had stopped, near the base of the wall, a phone. Face down, screen shattered, the case cracked clean through. Nero crouched and turned it over with a pen. The lock screen was dead. He bagged it.
"His phone," Nero said. "Broke in the fall. Lady Leo has location sharing on it. It would have stopped pinging right here."
"So she'll know where he went down but not where they took him."
"Exactly."
"Vehicle?"
Harold walked a few more yards and nodded toward the curb. "Van. Diesel. Parked here for at least an hour before the grab, the exhaust residue is heavy. They were waiting for him. This wasn't improvised."
Planned. Staked out. They knew his route and his schedule and they waited.
Nero looked up at the intersection ahead and spotted what he was looking for: a traffic camera on the light pole, and two security cameras mounted on the warehouse across the street.
"Cameras. Traffic cam should be easy to pull.
The warehouse footage might take a warrant. "
Harold nodded. "The traffic camera should give us the van. Make, model, plates if we're lucky. Warehouse cams might have caught the actual grab."
Nero was already on the phone. "I'll get the traffic footage expedited. You keep working the scent trail, see if you can pick up anything from the alley where they staged. I want to know if they left anything behind."
Harold headed for the alley. Nero made three calls in five minutes: traffic division for the camera footage, his supervisor for case authorization, and the analyst on duty to start pulling files on every shark associated with the Playground network who was currently unaccounted for.
The machinery of an investigation, grinding into motion.
Slow but inevitable. The work that didn't make for exciting television but that found people, consistently, relentlessly, one piece of evidence at a time.
He looked down at his phone. The photo of Amani was still on the screen, amber eyes, sharp grin, shirtless behind the bar with a cocktail umbrella and the unshakable confidence of someone who had never once considered the possibility that the world might not be safe.
Nero put his phone away and went to work.