Chapter Sixteen
A police escort apparently got you through E.R quickly. The doctor who examined Laodice wasn’t happy about her hitting her head, but after running through an exhaustive list of questions, she concluded Laodice probably didn’t have a concussion.
“We’ll keep you in for observation,” she said. “Fluids, a mild painkiller, and rest.”
A nurse gave her pills and a large bottle of water. Then he cleaned Sarah’s blood off her, helped her into a hospital gown, and got her into bed.
“Mostly you need sleep,” he said. “Let your body do the healing.”
The morning was well and truly started. She could see daylight edging around the pulled curtains, and the hospital was full of beeps and murmurs as staff and patients moved around their days.
“I don’t think I can sleep.”
The nurse smiled at her. “Then lie there and close your eyes for a bit,” he suggested.
Laodice thought about reminding him that she was a grown woman, not a four-year-old insisting she wanted another story, but instead she closed her eyes.
She woke up hours later. Telfer was in the chair beside her bed, head thrown back, snoring with impressive volume.
Laodice looked at him fondly for a moment.
He snuffled, made a truly revolting noise in the back of his throat, and let another snore rip. Well, the angle his neck was at couldn’t be good for him. She’d be waking him up for his own benefit, as well as hers.
“Telfer,” she said.
He woke. She watched awareness flow back into his eyes, that moment when personality entered the picture, and wondered how she’d ever thought him unreadable. You just had to know how to look.
“How’re you feeling?”
Laodice mentally cataloged her injuries, starting with the nearly-healed slice along her cheekbone, counting up the bruises and scrapes from falling into the ditch, and finishing with the tender bump on the back of her head. “Good,” she said cautiously. “Considering.”
“I wasn’t sure if you wanted me to get in touch with your family.”
“Did you?” she asked, alarmed. On consideration, this was a dumb question. If he had, there’d be a lot more people in the room.
“No.”
She beamed at him. “Good call. I want to get back to the city first. And I need to write the story before I have to process a lot of feelings about it. Are the local news on it already?”
Telfer looked smug. “Yes, but most of what they have is ‘more details to come.’ We were embedded in the story. Plus, we’re going to be let back into Halcyon under police supervision, to pack our stuff and get your car.”
“Oooh, that inside touch. Our room isn’t part of the crime scene?”
“No. Though your laptop is, downstairs. You’re welcome to use mine.”
“ Thank you.”
“I made some notes,” he added.
She laughed. “Of course you did. Honestly, I’m a little surprised you haven’t already filed something.”
“I figure I get dibs on the follow-ups,” he said blandly, then stood up and closed the door to her room. “Britt wants to see us,” he said quietly.
“Do you think we can get anything out of her?” Laodice said.
“Maybe. I’ve been thinking about what could be on that server. The bugs Jesse found were wired into the speakers. Samuel thinks they were installed with the rest of the system.”
“Was someone listening to everything we said? No, can’t have been. They’d have stopped us sooner.”
“Right. I think everything was being recorded , but not transmitted anywhere offsite, not yet. I was thinking about the kind of people who could afford Halcyon. People with money. Lawyers, tech people, finance guys. People with sensitive information, maybe people vulnerable to blackmail—that’s obviously why Jesse wanted to go. Isolated, forced into artificial intimacy, not in their usual environments or with their usual defenses.”
“Danielle was talking about her bosses being a big deal. She was running something else the whole time.” She met Telfer’s eyes. “And Halcyon is owned by Argive Holdings.”
“Yeah,” Telfer said.
“Okay,” Laodice said, and swung her legs off the bed. “Let’s go meet Britt.”
Britt wasn’t alone. Carrick was looking rumpled and anxious. He was arranging her pillows when Telfer and Laodice came in.
One of Britt’s legs was propped up in a cast. “Torn ligament,” she said, when Laodice’s eyes went to it. “Surgery later today.” She coughed.
“Do you need some water?” Carrick asked immediately.
Britt’s eyes softened slightly. “Thank you.” She sipped from the glass he poured and looked at Telfer and Laodice. “Sit down. Let’s go over what you can and can’t say.”
“Is this the fun kind of censorship?” Laodice asked brightly. She stayed standing, with Telfer upright beside her.
“You can call it whatever you want.”
“So you’re investigating Argive Holdings,” Telfer said.
Britt glared at him and said nothing.
“Off the record,” Telfer said. “I need to know. We deserve to know.” He sounded wonderful, absolutely unrelenting in his search for the truth.
Britt’s mouth was a firm line.
“Argive Holdings is an international money laundering hub,” Carrick said.
Telfer smacked his thigh. “ Yes, ” he said.
“Carrick!” Britt protested.
Carrick looked stubborn. “If we don’t tell them, they’ll try to work it out on their own.”
“For how long?” Telfer asked, jumping in before Britt could speak again.
“Decades. I got brought into it slowly, little by little. Only small things to start, safeguards I was told to skip or hand over to someone else. Big bonuses, if I just kept my mouth shut. Then I was asked to do something way over the line.” He sighed. “And then I knew how deep I was. It was so much money that I didn’t think I could say survive saying no. I shut my mouth and kept working.
“Jesse found out about one of the small things, I don’t know how, and tried to blackmail me.” He grimaced. “He had no fucking idea who he was dealing with. If I’d passed his name up the line, I think it would have been taken care of. Permanently.”
“And you didn’t want to do that,” Laodice said, leaning in and smiling at him.
“I thought about doing it,” Carrick admitted. “And then I thought about how I’d have to live with it afterwards. I didn’t want to be a murderer. Not even by proxy. The next day I called the tipline for the money laundering guys at the Treasury Department. They were very interested in what I had to say.”
“You’re a whistleblower,” Laodice said, impressed. She wouldn’t have thought Carrick had the guts.
Britt sighed. “Confidential informant.”
“And you’re his handler,” Telfer said. “You’re with Treasury? I didn’t know they had law enforcement.”
“I’m on loan,” Britt said. “Look, this is all incredibly need-to-know. And they don’t need to know, Carrick!”
“They do,” Carrick insisted. “This way they know why they shouldn’t write about it.”
Britt looked dubious. “I was planning some patriotic threats.”
Telfer snorted and Britt eyed him. Carrick apparently took this as permission, because he continued: “Anyway, Treasury gave me the money to pay Jesse off, and I started doing more for the shady side of Argive. Then I got ‘engaged’ to Britt, and she helped me work myself deeper in.” He gestured out the window, in the vague direction of Halcyon. “This whole retreat thing was a gift for the last ‘favor’ I did them.”
Telfer hummed thoughtfully. “And you’re getting Britt entry to Dammond’s inner circle?”
Britt shot Carrick a look, but he missed it. “Well, I’m trying,” he said anxiously. “It’s kind of hard to keep up with Dammond, but he likes that we went to school together.”
“So Dammond is directly involved in the money laundering,” Laodice said. “Is Adrestus Argive? Are the Argives in charge?”
“Yes,” Carrick said, at the same time that Britt said, “Carrick, shut up, I mean it .”
Carrick subsided, giving her a guilty look.
Britt rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Fuck,” she said, with feeling. “Right. This is a federal case we’ve been building for years. Do you two know anything about the conviction rates of federal prosecutions?”
“Something like ninety percent of the accused don’t even go to trial,” Laodice said. Telfer gave her a warm look, probably because she was being a statistics nerd again. “There’s so much evidence against them that they usually just plead guilty.”
“Right. And if people do go to trial and plead not guilty, mostly we convict them. The moral of the story is, if we get to the stage of laying charges, you probably committed the crime.”
Telfer made a face at that, but Britt ran over the top of him. “But nearly ten percent of cases get thrown out of court, because of mishandled evidence or failures in process. Guys like this—rich guys, powerful guys, celebrity lawyers on tap—we don’t pull the trigger on a case until we’re certain , you get me? Not only certain they did it, but certain we can nail them on it.”
“And you can’t nail them yet.”
“No,” Britt said. “Not yet. And in the meantime, if either of you two says a word to anyone , I will have you both charged with obstruction of justice and interference in an investigation, and whatever else I can make stick. I’ve already had to talk to the others about keeping quiet about the bugs in the speakers, but you two are my biggest concern.”
“We’ll have to write something ,” Laodice said. “A series of murders at a fancy retreat for engaged couples? Not writing the story would be even more suspicious.”
“Fine. But you cannot mention the surveillance, or the server, or Argive Holdings. Danielle killed Jesse and Sarah for unknown reasons—feel free to speculate, as long as you don’t get anywhere close to the truth. And she died in a car crash on the way to the station.”
“What does Bernard think of that story?” Telfer inquired.
“Detective Bernard knows how to weigh immediate gains against the greater public interest. Do you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Laodice said.
“All right. Fine. Yes, we think the Argive family is ultimately in charge of the whole operation. Adrestus Argive is a cunning son of a bitch who does everything through minions and managers, but Dammond’s more careless. He was our best bet of breaking the whole thing open and making it stick. But thanks to Halcyon and Danielle and that fucking server, my entire cover is blown. If the Argives haven’t heard I’m law yet, they will soon.”
“Are you going to be safe?”
“We’re both going into witness protection,” Carrick said. “Honestly, I’ll be happy to get away from it. But I hate that everything I did was for nothing.
Britt patted his hand, her eyes softening again. “You gave us vital information,” she assured him. “When it’s possible for you to testify, you’ll be a huge prosecution asset.”
Telfer grimaced. “But for now, they get away with it?”
Britt’s face went grim. “Various organizations are pursuing various angles,” she said. “And that’s the last thing I’m telling you.”
Laodice’s brain had jumped tracks, putting together what she’d heard from Cassie about her would-be-murderer Theo having too much money, about his house being burned down after he’d been arrested, about Cassie running into Dammond Argive in Weeping Rock, which he apparently always visited on the first day of spring… “Were the Argives laundering money through Tantalus Vineyard?” she asked. “Is that what Manny’s uncle was so desperate to cover up?”
Britt was good. Her face barely moved. But Laodice was looking straight at her, and she saw the flicker of recognition in the depths of her eyes. “As I said, I have nothing further to tell you.”
“Fine,” Laodice said tightly. She wanted to run to Cassie immediately, wanted to tell her that she had the key to unlocking the mystery that had plagued her sister this past fifteen months. But she couldn’t. If Dammond Argive was going down—and she really, really wanted him to go down—then Britt was right. She couldn’t tell anyone, and neither could Telfer. They couldn’t endanger the case.
“One last question,” Telfer said, and Britt looked furious, but he held up his hand. “For Carrick. If you knew Argive was dirty, why did you keep trying to recruit me?”
Carrick looked abashed. “It was getting kind of lonely, being the only good guy. You’re smart. I figured you’d work it out, and then there’d be two of us.” He made finger guns. “Partners in anti-crime!”
“Oh.”
“Plus, the salary and bennies are great. You can’t be making much at Olympus.”
“Probably not comparable, no,” Telfer said, and looked at Laodice. His eyes were dark and unfathomable. “But as it happens, I’m happy where I am.”
***
Once Laodice was discharged, they went back to Halcyon, for what Telfer fervently hoped was going to be the last time. The police had retrieved their phones from the locked box—the batteries were fully drained, naturally—and allowed them to go upstairs and pack. Their escort had obviously been told that they were media; even Laodice’s most innocently phrased questions didn’t get any traction, and Telfer didn’t bother to try.
He swung their cases into the trunk of Laodice’s Spider with a sense of vast relief, and slammed the lid down.
Laodice was sitting in the passenger seat, his laptop open on her knees.
“Um?” he said.
She looked at him severely. “You are about to be privileged as no man has ever been,” she said, and tossed him the keys. “Don’t fuck it up.”
Telfer cocked his head at her. “So you’re assuming I can drive stick.”
Laodice’s jaw dropped. “You can , right?”
“As it happens, Uncle Burak insisted,” he said, and folded himself into the driver’s seat, carefully testing the pedals, which were way too close for comfort. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
For the first twenty minutes or so, Laodice barely typed a word, tensing as he approached every corner and obviously biting back commentary. But she didn’t voice any of it, and after a while there was the steady tap of keys and the occasional mumble as she tried a phrase out loud. Telfer put in a sentence or two, and halfway to the city they had an excellent argument about split infinitives, but the lion’s part was definitely Laodice’s work.
Telfer wanted the journey to last forever.
But afternoon faded into evening and light drained from the sky, and as they hit the outskirts of the city, Laodice cleared her throat and said, “Can I read this to you?”
“Please.”
She did. Telfer listened. He had to consciously keep part of his brain focused on stoplights and corners, moving with the—fortunately slow-paced—traffic around them. Laodice had turned the messy, bloody chaos of the actual events into an elegant story of love and murder, juxtaposing the bonds of the couples with Danielle’s apparently senseless murders-for-murder’s sake. Jesse’s true character was only lightly sketched, and Sarah was depicted as a self-made woman on the rise. Not accurate, perhaps, but merciful.
It was told from Laodice’s point-of-view, which was to say that of a journalist undercover who had stumbled into an entirely different story. In that sense, it was unashamedly biased, but it captured very well the confusion and determination of those days, which already seemed weirdly distant.
“What do you think?” she said at last.
“It’s good,” Telfer said. “It’s really good.”
“No comments at all?”
“Some of your adjectives are a bit flowery, and the comparison to a monastery is too much.”
“There he is,” Laodice said, and when he risked a glance at her, she was smiling fondly. “I was thinking I’d pitch it to Vanguard .”
“ New Argus might be a better shot, if you want follow-ups. They have a budget for fact-checking. Is this… Is this maybe the kind of story you want to do more of?”
“No,” Laodice said. “I’m glad I could write this one. But I want Bridal.”
“Right,” Telfer said., and they both fell into silence. After the easy, working quiet of the journey, this silence felt strained.
“So, um,” he said, at the same time Laodice said, “I was wondering—”
“You go first,” she said.
“No, you.”
“I was wondering,” Laodice said, staring straight ahead, “If you would ever think about breaking your no-dating rule. On a trial basis. With me.”
Telfer’s lungs emptied out. He felt joy zing through his body.
But it was immediately swallowed by a rush of fear. “I— I have to think about it.”
“Sure.”
“There’s the job and everything. It would be complicated.” He could barely believe the words coming out of his mouth. Laodice had asked him out. Or next to it. He should have been delighted that she wanted to extend their time together.
Instead, he was terrified. He was at the top of a cliff, with dark water yawning below, scrambling for the safety of the edge.
Another moment of silence.
“No worries,” Laodice said brightly. “Can you turn off here? Great.” Her voice sounded light, but when he glanced at her, he saw her hands were clenched in her lap, rumpling the fabric of her skirt.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be. You were clear from the start.” She loosened her grip and gave him a cheery thumbs up. “Excellent communication skills, Terzi. Okay, the parking entrance is up there, on the right.”
“You have a building with parking?”
“Uptown life has its charms. Plus the super gave me a deal on his second space, because he likes me.”
“Everyone likes you,” Telfer said. His lips felt numb. He followed her instructions and parked in the narrow basement space next to a white van. “Okay. Great story. Really.”
Laodice peered at him. “Come inside,” she suggested. “Charge your phone, have something to eat. It’s rush hour, the subway will be packed. You don’t want to take a suitcase on the train right now.”
Telfer hesitated, then cursed himself for his weakness. “All right,” he said. “But I can’t stay for long.”
***
Okay. She’d been shot down.
Laodice considered the metaphor from a few angles, and decided that after being up close and personal with a gun in her face, she didn’t like it.
Fine. She’d asked Telfer out and he’d rejected the idea. Technically, he’d said “I need to think about it,” but that was no , especially combined with the panicked look he’d given her.
It was a shame, but that was all. It wasn’t devastating , she wasn’t feeling a sense of deep loss, and she absolutely wasn’t regretting the weakness that had made her invite him in, stretching out their unlikely union for even one more hour.
The story was good. The story was great . On top of that, she’d had a wild week, with some excellent sex, and she could probably count Telfer as a work friend instead of an antagonistic colleague. All of that was positive.
So why did she feel so terrible?
“Nice building,” Telfer said, as they rounded the sixth landing and mounted the last flight of stairs.
“Good for my cardio,” Laodice said, trying to sound flippant. Why on earth had she offered to feed him? What did she even have? Half a loaf of frozen bread and the scrapings from the peanut butter jar weren’t much of a last meal for a lover.
There was music coming from her apartment. Terrible whiny-boy pop-punk she recognized all too well.
“What’s that?” Telfer asked.
“My fucking ex ,” Laodice snarled, and opened her door with a secret relief. Finally, someone she could yell at.
Eli was sitting at her breakfast bar. Laodice’s ceramic frog was on the bench, badly patched together with hot glue. The mouth was misaligned, gaining an edge that was distinctly demonic.
Eli’s own face, surprised and welcoming, faltered when he saw Telfer. “Who’s this guy?” he demanded.
“Telfer Terzi. We’ve met.”
“None of your business,” Laodice said over top of him. “What the fuck are you doing here, Eli?”
“I wondered if you might be back early, considering.” Eli said. “Look, I fixed your frog.”
Laodice parked her suitcase with some force. “I broke up with you, Eli.”
“I really think we need to talk about that,” Eli said.
“We don’t. We’re done. Give me your key, take your stuff, and go.”
Eli glared at Telfer. “Could you give us some time alone?”
Telfer glanced at Laodice, who shook her head. “Nope,” he said, and held the door open. “Looks like you’re leaving.”
“Unbelievable,” Eli said. He was actually pouting, and Laodice was finding it difficult to remember why she’d ever thought him handsome. Next to Telfer, he looked like a whiny little boy. “What is this, Laodice? We have a fight, so you immediately fuck someone else to get back at me?”
“We broke up ,” Laodice said. “I dumped you . After that, I could have fucked ten thousand guys and it would be nothing to do with you. Get the hell out of my home, and never come back.” She paused. “Wait. What did you mean, you thought I’d be back early? Considering what?”
“Considering what happened to Xena,” Eli said.
Laodice wasn’t sure what her face did, but a second later Telfer had her in a dining chair with her head forced between her knees, his hand on the back of her neck.
“Breathe,” he said, sounding calm and authoritative, and Laodice sucked in a deep gulp of air and felt the blood return to her brain. She came up again and stared at Eli, who was staring at her, wide-eyed.
“ What happened to my sister? ” she demanded.
“Nothing bad!” Eli said. “I mean, pretty bad. But no one’s dead!”
Laodice gripped her skirt and willed her heartbeat to slow down. “What happened?”
Eli fumbled for his phone, searching for something. “Look, you know I like Xena, great girl, but she really shit the bed on this one.”
“Give me your phone,” Telfer said, striding over to him, and when Eli didn’t move fast enough he simply plucked it out of his hand.
Rude, Laodice thought, as he tossed it to her. High-handed. Kind of hot as hell.
Laodice found Xena’s channel. There wasn’t anything terrible there, just her usual mix of inspiration, fitness investigation and sponcon, but the latest video had tens of thousands of comments, all of them talking about something else altogether and half of them berating Xena for deleting it.
This was the internet. Everything was there forever.
She searched Xena’s name and got dozens of recent links. There was a hashtag. There were memes. There were reactions and commentary and of course, there was the video that had served as a catalyst, replicated over and over. Xena’s deletion must have been sheer panic.
Xena had thrown…oh no. She’d thrown a livestreamed surprise engagement party for her boyfriend, Zac. This was the cool thing she’d teased in the sisterly group chat.
But she clearly hadn’t discussed it with Zac at all.
Because he’d turned her down.
Live.
Oh, this was bad .
People were mocking Xena’s own previous videos about consent and communication. There were thousands of comments from disgusting trolls, but worse than that was the commentary from her own fans. Or rather, her previous fans.
Xena was being cancelled, live and raw and in progress. Her reputation was being tarnished, her sponsorships were vanishing, her entire career was disappearing.
“Oh no,” Laodice said, and looked up at Telfer. “I’m sorry, I can’t, I have to—”
“Your phone and charger are in your purse, keep my laptop for now, and I’ll see you at work,” Telfer said, calm and reasonable, and she wanted to hold him and have him hold her for the agonizing minutes it was going to take until she could get hold of Xena.
But she couldn’t. He wasn’t hers.
“Here,” she said, and handed Eli’s phone back to him. “You can leave now.”
“It’s all right,” Eli said soothingly. “I can stay.”
Laodice looked at Telfer. “I don’t have time for him,” she said.
Without a word, Telfer grabbed Eli by the scruff of the neck and marched him out the door. At the last moment, he turned back to look at her.
“Good luck,” he said.
Laodice wished, with all her heart, that it didn’t sound so much like “goodbye.”