Chapter 36
“What the fuck do you two think you’re doing?” Marcus Allen demanded.
After spending an hour searching for the goddamn watch that was nowhere to be found and confirming that Martin had been right-handed and thus would never inject into his right arm, the CSU and ME took over.
Alex and Con had then promptly been ordered back to the office.
“We’re doing exactly what you told us to do. Finding out who pirated the videos,” Con replied calmly.
“Yeah, and you’re doing a fantastic job of that,” Marcus said sourly. “Now we’re dealing with a fucking murder.”
Con glanced over at Alex, trying to impress on her that she should remain quiet—the last thing he wanted was for the Special Agent in Charge to direct his ire at her.
She got the gist.
“And what is this deal with that LAPD police chief?” Marcus continued, his face reddening.
“As I said back at Martin’s house, I asked him to consultant on the case.”
“ Why? ”
“I thought maybe his experience—”
Marcus held up his hand and waved it aggressively.
“I don’t give a shit. Get rid of him. He’s a clout chaser—all he wants is to take credit for this case when it’s solved. And it will be solved. Got it?”
“We’re working on it.”
“Well, work fucking harder!” Marcus shouted. He tossed a clipboard across his desk. It skittered over the surface and landed closest to Alex, so she bent to pick it up. “Leave it! I want this thing closed now!”
This seemed to Con to be a dismissal and both of them got up to leave.
“Agent Frost, stay behind,” Marcus instructed.
Con left, Alex didn’t.
He went back to his desk alone and pulled out his phone.
Four missed calls this time, not from Marcus but from Dwight.
The man probably wanted to know how it went at the Midnight Matinee and then would transition to asking for information about Martin’s death which, if it hadn’t already, would very soon be making the 24-hour news cycle.
Con was sick of owing people favors.
First AA and now Dwight.
Marcus had ordered him to take AA off the case, but the man wasn’t actually involved. At least, not yet. But Marcus was right about one thing: AA wanted credit for when they solved this thing.
Art wasn’t dumb. Solving the murder of a Hollywood CEO pulled a lot more weight than the word of a soon-to-be ex-FBI agent.
Con turned his phone over and reached for his computer mouse. Just moving the shitty plastic device around the pad hurt.
Everything hurt.
He’d spent the entire night digging at that stupid fucking rock. And for what?
Absolutely nothing.
His email was filled with spam.
It was still two days from the anniversary of his sister’s disappearance, but he thought, What the hell?
If Dwight Dozier could write an article about The Sandman’s arrest eleven years and three months after it happened, then Con could be two days early when he sent his annual email to Matthew Nelson Neil requesting a meeting.
These emails, which Matthew was only permitted to read because, once again, Con had offered a favor to some prison guards in return for this privilege, ran the gamut from aggressive to apologetic.
Anything to get the man to finally speak with him.
But there was never any reply and when Con called San Quentin to follow-up, he was met with the same response: Inmate 98441–143 has denied your request for visitation.
Maybe he was too tired to put together a proper email. Maybe he was just fed up.
The only thing that Con wrote to the private email that the San Quentin prison guards had created for this sole purpose was: Mojave Desert. Rock outcropping. 35.0110 N., 115.4734 W.
That was it.
Con’s cursor hovered over the send button. When the door to Marcus Allen’s office opened behind him, he clicked it.
Alex, looking as pale as Martin Yeo’s corpse, slumped into the chair next to him.
“What the hell happened?” he asked.
Alex just shook her head.
Con felt terrible about everything that happened to the woman. She didn’t deserve this. This was her first job, and it was an absolute hot mess.
“I’m—”
Con was interrupted by an alert from his computer of an incoming email. His first thought was that it was Matthew replying, but that couldn’t be.
There was no subject line, and he was about to mark it as spam when the sender gave him pause.
The same name as the user who had uploaded the pirated movies.
Curious, Con opened the email.
Again, there was no text. Instead, a video was embedded in the body of the email.
Alex had been right when she’d assumed that he was no computer expert. But he knew better than to open random attachments or to view embedded videos.
But this was the FBI. Surely, if there was a virus, it would be blocked, wouldn’t it?
He wasn’t in the caring mood, either way.
Con took a chance and pressed play.
The video was grainy, low resolution, but it wasn’t so bad that he didn’t recognize the location.
It was outside the bar that he and Alex had gone to after work.
When Con saw himself exiting the bar, his throat tightened. Alex came next, and things played out the way he remembered it.
The dropped keys, the nearly knocking of their heads, the attempted kiss.
The video ended suddenly and Con leaned back in his chair.
Someone was recording us from across the street. Why?
Con scratched the back of his head. He could still feel sand in his hair.
Another alert, another email from the same address.
It was like the first: no subject, no text, just a video.
He didn’t hesitate in playing it this time.
The recording was equally if not darker than the first, and it took Con a little longer to tell what he was looking at.
The inside of Midnight Matinee.
He saw the back of Alex’s head, saw the movie on the dirty screen.
And then the kid came in, conversed briefly with Alex, took her money, and attacked. Con appeared moments later, and the scene ended with him handcuffing the kid to the radiator.
Con made a mental note to ask AA what he’d done with the prick.
And to give his fucking cuffs back.
Someone is watching me. Someone is watching us .
Con was aware that Alex was observing him now, but he was too caught up in what he was seeing to pay her any heed.
Especially when a third email arrived.
It was shot from high up in Martin Yeo’s house.
Con cringed when he again saw himself and Alex. Winced when he saw them kiss.
It looked… well, it looked a little raunchy.
Definitely wrong.
Fuck.
He closed this video before it ended.
No sooner had he done this did a fourth email arrive.
This time it was taken from much farther away. A quarter mile, maybe. The footage was shaky.
Con saw himself in the desert, standing with a shovel in his hand, surrounded by holes that he’d dug.
At one point, he shouted and slammed the shovel against the rock.
Con had been so tired that he couldn’t remember doing this. He was about to stop the video when he noticed something else.
Moving his face closer to the screen, he saw that he wasn’t alone.
In the foreground, between Con and the person taking the video, a female figure appeared, her back to the camera.
It looked like Alex.
Who the fuck—
A hand came down on his shoulder and he jumped.
“Jesus!”
Alex leaned away, hands up.
“Sorry.”
Her eyes darted to the computer screen and Con scrambled to log out of his email. His hand was so mutilated that it took him three times to click the ‘x’ on the top right corner of the browser.
She’d seen.
She had to have seen.
But maybe she didn’t need to.
Maybe Alex had followed him into the desert.
“Con, I think we should go somewhere to talk,” his partner said, and he knew that it was time to finally come clean.