Chapter 12
Twelve
Luca looked at the text message on his watch.
Jamie
Done.
“Anything I should know about?”
He glanced at Kira, sitting beside him at the table. White tablecloth. A glass vase in the center had been filled with cut flowers and little twinkly lights. Even with how the space had been decorated for this event, she was still the most beautiful thing here.
The kind of woman who took his breath away.
“When I was in Alaska last year, one of the firefighters started dating this woman, Jamie Winters. She’s the CEO of a finance company and pretty amazing with numbers.
” He left out how she had grown her business from nothing to the point she was in fact worth billions.
“I asked her to make a donation to the foundation so she could track where the money went. It’s something she’s done before, so I figured it didn’t hurt to ask. ”
“And she agreed?”
He nodded. “She jumped at the chance to help us figure this out. She was actually part of rescuing Hammer’s wife and son just a few months ago. She tracked Sierra’s cell phone, and Hammer was able to get there in time to save them both.”
“Wow, that’s pretty amazing.”
“I’m a lucky guy, considering there are so many amazing women in my life.” Enough that he had never given up the idea he might one day meet someone like that. A woman who would be his one and only.
Not every guy was wired to find the one person God had saved just for them.
But he had always been traditional like that.
Even before he became a believer, Luca had known that there was someone out there for him.
It seemed as if the minute he met Kira, his heart already knew what she would mean to him, even if it had taken the rest of him a while to catch up.
“It shouldn’t take her long to figure out what’s behind the scenes of this foundation.”
Kira took a sip of her drink. “As long as the money actually moves. If Destiny and her people leave it where it is for a while, there’s not going to be anything to find.”
“So let’s hope they’ve got this thing on automatic and the money shifts accounts right away.”
Several of the items had already been auctioned off, and Destiny had told them all there would be a short reprieve before the winners of the next batch of items were announced.
An older couple came over to their table, striking up a conversation with Kira.
She introduced them as being board members for the hospital.
The husband just wanted to talk about an upcoming budget meeting while the wife stared into space, so when Luca’s phone rang and he saw the name Butler on the screen, he touched Kira’s shoulder.
When she turned to him, he kissed her cheek. “I should take this. I’ll be back in a second.”
She nodded. “Of course.”
Luca found a quiet corner of the room, away from where most of the crowd gathered. “Saxon.”
“Figured you might want an update. Busy?”
“Hit me with it.”
The marshal said, “The person who stabbed Jenkins in lockup is the same guy who attacked Dr. Yassan outside the hospital. Stuart Parker. He was being kept for the weekend and took the opportunity to try and kill Jenkins. Now there’s no way they’re letting him out.
Judge Mullinax set bail at one million, and the DA wants Parker to tell the police who hired him to do it. ”
“Any update on Jenkins’s status?” Luca glanced around to make sure no one was listening to him.
“I haven’t heard anything since he came out of surgery. The knife nicked his spleen and they had to take it out, so he’s still touch and go.”
That was as much as Luca already knew from talking to Mack on the way here.
It wasn’t a surprise that the kid had mixed feelings about his father’s condition.
He was also wrestling with the idea of forgiving Jenkins, something Hammer had told him they both needed to do in order to move on with their lives.
“What about the cartel guy the police brought in? Have you discovered anything about why he and his buddy were tailing Dr. Torres earlier?”
Ethan said, “Our techs are still trying to get in his phone, but at this point, if he doesn’t voluntarily unlock it for us, we might not be able to get anything from it.”
“How is that possible, with all the technology you guys have? Can’t you just compel him to unlock it for you?”
“Usually we’d be in it by now. But this phone isn’t like anything our techs have seen before.
It’s like it runs on a whole different network.
” Ethan paused. “If this is the future of unregistered phones, it doesn’t bode well for us getting intel.
We can’t locate a phone company that runs the operating system on this device.
The techs tell me it seems to be some kind of proprietary operating system. ”
“Like a criminal phone network?”
Ethan said, “I hope not.”
Luca shook his head, his gaze catching on the corner of one of the posters. An image of two Afghan girls smiling, clutching books. “Has he said anything?”
“We ran his prints. The file that Homeland had on him matches up with what we found. Plus a couple of extras they weren’t aware of,” Ethan said.
“The US Attorney is going to pressure him on the two missing persons cases we have in Arizona. Young girls who never turned up, but his fingerprints were found on their cell phones. Looks like he took them and left the phones behind in both cases.”
“It’s a good thing this guy is off the streets.” Not that it entirely solved the problem. “His friend is still out there.”
“Has Dr. Torres shown up?”
“Not according to Detective Martinelli. He’s the one watching the patient right now. I’ll be back there later tonight to check on things, and first thing tomorrow, I’ll be on the door for the day.”
He wasn’t sure what Kira’s plans were and wanted to ask. But they would get there. Maybe she’d want to go to dinner tomorrow night.
“Sounds good,” Ethan said. “Martinelli is a solid cop.”
Luca wasn’t going to reaffirm that he knew what he was doing. The proof would come when Francisco was done with his treatment and could be back in the Marshals’ custody.
All because Judge Mullinax wouldn’t allow the Marshals to protect the witness before he testified. He would only authorize the detail once Francisco had given the Marshals what they needed to know. A deal with some significant strings attached.
And those strings were getting tangled, considering members of the cartel were here to cause trouble. The doctor had run off, as had another man.
Right now, Luca didn’t even know if the doctor was alive. The other man might’ve caught up to him, and anything could’ve happened after that. But the patient, Francisco, would be safe either way. Kira could administer the treatment, if it came to that, and the deal could be salvaged.
“That’s all I have right now.”
Luca said, “I appreciate the update.”
“I appreciate you doing this job for us. It’s a regular lovefest over here.
” Ethan chuckled. “We’re thinking about privatizing the entire agency.
Contracting all our work out to guys like you so we can stay in the office all the time eating our admin assistant’s brownies and cookies.
” Ethan hung up the phone, still laughing to himself.
Luca’s gaze snagged on the corner of the poster.
A slight discoloration that shouldn’t be there on the image, given the rest of the picture didn’t contain that color.
It almost looked like the edge of a watermark.
Had the foundation used stock photography instead of an original image one of their people had taken showing real people they had helped?
He could understand if every single one of the images they used might not be their own. But still, he wondered if it was an indication that things about the foundation weren’t quite honest below the surface.
As soon as the money moved, Jamie would see where it went and track her funds—how they were distributed, the kinds of accounts they landed in.
It was just another way to untangle the web of what was going on.
If Destiny and her nonprofit were legit, then great.
But if it was somehow connected to the Shadow Syndicate, then Luca needed to know.
He saw Roger Rousseau duck out of a side door of the main hall, checking first that no one saw him by looking around.
Then he disappeared out of sight. Luca knew that look on the man’s face, and it didn’t bode well.
He was up to something. Even if that something was only that he needed to duck out and smoke where his mother wouldn’t see.
The son of Ralph and Destiny was older than Luca. Someone who had been around Renegade for a while.
Luca glanced across the ballroom to see Kira now talking to a different couple that he didn’t recognize. She chuckled at something the woman said.
He took the opportunity and ducked into the hall, glancing to the end to where Roger had gone.
The younger man turned the corner at the far side of the hall, the walls all lined with wallpaper that looked like fabric. A giant vase of fresh flowers sat on a tiny table halfway down.
Luca followed Roger, picking up his pace to catch up and then stopping before the end of the hall. He peered around the corner and saw Roger in an intense conversation with another man in street clothes. Not dressed for the foundation gala. No, this was the man that had gone after Torres today.
Luca gave it a second, assessing the conversation and both men’s body language. Seeing that Roger wasn’t in any danger let him relax a little. In fact, it seemed more like he was giving the other man orders.
They broke off their conversation, and the man who had come after Torres turned away. He headed for the exit at the end. Roger watched him for a second, then headed back toward Luca.
Luca stepped around the corner.
Roger spotted him coming.
Luca lifted his chin. “Is the restroom down here?”
“How should I know?” The guy’s tone dripped with disdain.