Chapter 26. Grey, the Detective
Grey, the Detective
PRESENT DAY
For once, Grey was content to lose herself in the frenetic rhythms of Saturday service at the Serpent Room.
It had been a long, grueling week—Rosie Wright, the journalist who’d broken the story on Scout, had been found dead, and The New York Times refused to tell Grey what Wright had been working on, citing the First Amendment.
Public attention to the Sage case was escalating by the day, reporters calling the department for statements every hour and fake tipsters every five minutes until all the phone lines had jammed up and Captain Xie had come out of his office roaring.
The captain was breathing down her neck, warning her not to make a single misstep, and now, on top of everything, the FBI had thrust itself into her investigation, led by Special Agent Brooks Yardley, a man so handsome she’d had to look up his background to make sure he wasn’t some male escort hired by Fasiano and the others to give her a hard time.
And that was when the unease she felt around Yardley clicked: She recognized his name from Georgia Sage’s case file.
Yardley had been on the witness list ten years ago.
He’d been Isabel Cruz’s boyfriend, even briefly considered a suspect.
He’d attended the infamous Christmas party. He had a relationship with her suspect.
Grey had raised the conflict to the FBI immediately, but they’d come back and said Yardley was an exemplary agent who swore he hadn’t crossed paths with Sage in a decade.
It was boys’ club bullshit. Since Grey couldn’t trust Yardley farther than she could throw him, it meant the FBI wasn’t an asset to her, they were yet another liability. Another headache.
But tonight, for one all-hell’s-broken-loose Saturday night, Grey was going to focus on slinging drinks, clearing tables, and palming tips. It would practically be a vacation.
“I need two bottles of the welcome Dom for table eight,” she called to Nico, the bartender, sliding up to the bar and punching in the order.
“And if you could give me the old brand of sparklers, I’d appreciate it.
The new brand almost lit my hair on fire.
The sparks are so chaotic it’s a public safety hazard. ”
Grey bit her lip, regretting how easily cop lingo like public safety hazard slid into her vocabulary. The whole point of being undercover at the Serpent was to present herself as a safe, non-law-enforcement presence the staff could confide in.
Luckily, the bartender was moving fast, quartering limes and wedging them onto shots of tequila, and didn’t seem to catch it. “You got it,” he said, sliding the tray of shots to another girl, Keisha, who waved her thanks.
Grey was relieved to see Nico behind the bar.
He was older, probably early forties, and a pro, by far the most skilled bartender at the Serpent—way better than Anders, the twentysomething who spent half his time trying to flirt.
Nico seemed nice enough, but when it came to men, Grey was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Call it a hazard of the job.
Nico looked up, a grin splitting his pale face.
His full name was Nicolae Kovalenko and he was Eastern European, or so she’d heard.
She’d managed to sneak into the manager’s office a handful of times to search his paperwork, but she’d never found Nico’s employment file to corroborate.
“I think John bought the discount sparklers in a sad attempt to save a few bucks,” the bartender confessed.
“The label on the box says, ‘Warning: May or May Not Ignite.’”
“Oh, they ignite all right.” Grey raised her eyebrows, and the warmth of Nico’s laughter caught her off guard. She smiled back.
He braced his hands on the bar, eyeing her. “You know, when you smile, you look so much like her.”
Grey’s heart stuttered to a stop.
“It’s hard to see the resemblance otherwise, but on the rare occasions you smile…” Nico shook his head. “Dead ringer. She was always smiling.”
“Who?” The word barely made it out of her. She was certain she knew who Nico was talking about but wondered how it was possible.
“Alice,” he said. “Your cousin. Or maybe … sister?”
“How…”
Nico shrugged, tossing a white bar towel over his shoulder.
The pulsing music and high volume of conversation in the club faded into the background, a trick afforded by Grey’s focus.
“The resemblance, plus you asked John a bunch of questions about Alice and Daisy. I put two and two together.” He circled a finger at the club. “People here talk, you know.”
“Not to me.” She swallowed a lump in her throat. “I’ve been trying for months.”
He shrugged again, and it looked like he was about to turn back to work, so she blurted, “How did you know her?”
“We used to work together.”
“But…” Grey shook her head. “That’s impossible.
” She’d scoured the case file. Memorized the list of Serpent employees.
Every name in that file, she knew; every person, she’d talked to.
And there had been no Nico, or Nicolae, or anything close.
“I’ve seen the police records. As her sister,” she added, still not wanting to reveal what she did for her day job. “There was no mention of you.”
“Yeah, well.” Nico looked down at his feet. “I don’t talk to the police. Not now, or back when Alice disappeared. They show up, I get gone.” He must’ve read the confusion on her face, because he added, “John lets me work under the table. He’s a pretty good guy under the gruff exterior.”
The goddamn service industry and their under-the-tables. First Daisy, now Nico. For months, she’d been working alongside someone else who’d known Alice, and she’d had no idea.
“Do you have a criminal record?” Grey asked, right as another server hustled over. Nico’s face turned red, and he didn’t respond to Grey until the other woman sprinted away.
“Nothing like that.” He spoke so quietly she almost didn’t hear him. “I’m just … not exactly in this country legally.” When he turned his eyes to her again, there was a quiet plea in them. “I try to lay low.”
A thought sprang into Grey’s mind: Alice had disappeared in 2016, a year of global upheaval, though in retrospect it was nothing compared to now.
Back then, it was Syria, Turkey, Ukraine—she opened her mouth to ask Nico which he’d been running from, but stopped herself.
It would only be invasive. The important thing was, Nico had slipped through the cracks, slipped past the original investigators’ notice. What else had slipped?
Grey pushed past the swinging door into the bar to stand beside him, not caring that she was violating protocol. “Were you there that night?” she asked in a low, urgent voice.
His eyes widened at her nearness, but he didn’t back away. “Yes.”
“What do you remember? Please,” she added preemptively, accustomed to people not wanting to talk. “I’ll take anything. Any detail.”
He leaned against the bar and crossed his arms, ignoring the printer spouting out orders. Grey was ignoring her own tables, too. She didn’t care.
“Not much,” he said, sounding regretful.
“It was a regular Friday, which, as you know, means we were slammed. I think Alice was off that night, but they’d called her in to pinch-hit.
All the girls were running around begging me to do their drink orders first, offering me favors.
They used to do that as a joke.” The corners of his mouth lifted in the ghost of a smile.
“Do you remember who she served that night?” Later, Grey would spend time combing over the little details, like the affection in Nico’s voice when he spoke of Alice, but right now, she needed to get as much information as he would give.
A new witness out of the blue, like a gift from heaven.
“Did anyone stick out to you as dangerous or even a little off? Anything out of the ordinary?”
He shook his head. “Not that I remember.”
Grey deflated. “Anything?”
He sighed. “I don’t get to see clients from back here, which honestly, I prefer. I mostly interact with you guys.” Something lit in his eyes, a sudden thought. “You know, I do remember Daisy following Alice around that night, begging her for something.”
Grey actually fell back against the bar—it was only a few inches, the metal sinks stopping her, but her bones felt hollow. She’d never heard that detail before. “For what?”
“Well, you probably already know this, but Daisy was a wild child.”
Grey hadn’t known—not even a hint. “When you say ‘child,’ do you mean she was younger than the other girls?” It was one of her theories, that Daisy had lied on her application because she wasn’t twenty-one, the minimum age to serve alcohol at the club.
Nico cocked his head, thinking. “I couldn’t say.
No offense, but you all look young to me.
One thing’s for sure, though, Daisy was always cooking up trouble.
” He shook his head. “She was the one organizing the after-parties, and I always thought she might’ve dealt harder stuff on the side, but I could never prove it.
I remember there was something she was begging Alice to do with her that night, and Alice didn’t seem like she wanted to. ”
He waved at the side of the bar, near the computer. “They’d talk about it whenever they came to place an order. Daisy kept pressing until Alice gave in. I remember Daisy, you know, hugging her, all excited. But that’s pretty much it.”
Nico was quiet for a beat. The new information swirled inside Grey. What did you get yourself into, Alice?
“She was always too nice, your sister,” Nico said suddenly. “A real tender heart. That’s why everyone loved her.”
Grey’s throat grew thick. “They did?” Grey had been fifteen when Alice disappeared.
Neither she nor her father had even known Alice was working here until she went missing.
By the time Grey was seventeen, her father had informed the captain of the LAPD that he believed his own colleagues were involved in covering up his daughter’s disappearance.
Grey had been eighteen when he was fired for it, twenty when he died of a heart attack at his private security job.
Twenty and a day when she vowed to finish what he’d started.
“Absolutely.” Nico nodded. “Alice was everyone’s favorite.”
Of course she was—she’d always been Grey’s favorite person. That was the real Alice, the one she remembered—the tender heart. Not the reckless, hard-living girl who’d brought it upon herself. But maybe Alice wasn’t the woman she should be focusing on.
“Nico,” she said, ignoring the servers now gathered around the bar, sighing for the bartender’s attention. “If I take you to a diner after work and buy you some really good pancakes, will you tell me everything you remember about Daisy?”