Chapter 30
CHAPTER THIRTY
“ D etective,” Kaine greeted the cop as he slid into the back of his SUV.
The two were meeting in a grocery store parking lot.
It was busy, seeing as how it was a Saturday morning.
St. Claire was dressed down in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt.
The cop held a folder in one hand and reusable grocery bags in the other.
The bags were empty and folded, tucked beneath his arm.
Now that they were meeting in person, Kaine could feel the tiger beneath the cop’s skin, raw and untamed.
The cold-blooded animal inside matched the rough-and-tumble appearance of the male’s exterior.
St. Claire was muscular, his brown skin marked by tattoos and scars.
The male’s face was chiseled granite, hard and unyielding as his dark gaze observed Kaine.
The shifter didn’t avert his eyes and he could respect that.
His own tiger raised, curious and alert.
Wild, feral energy filled the truck interior, two predators meeting and sizing one another up.
“This where you decided to meet?” Kaine asked after a tense moment.
He glanced outside of his tinted windows. None of the people passing by would be able to see into his car, but as far as safety measures went, Kaine couldn’t fault the detective.
“I got shit to do today. May as well kill two birds with one stone.” The detective’s voice was rugged, his accent marking him as a new resident to the South.
“What you got for me?”
Saint looked toward the front seat. Kaine sighed and nodded for Griff and the driver to exit the truck. The two men in the back were silent until the doors closed on either side of the front.
“Something my men can’t overhear?” Kaine focused his attention on the cop.
“I’ve been finding out a lot about you these past few weeks,” Saint commented.
“I didn’t kill my grandfather, so why are you wasting time on me?” Irritation filled him.
Saint shrugged and handed him a folder. “Someone from your company probably did, though.”
Kaine snatched the file from his hand and opened it. His eyes skimmed the pictures of a dead body before moving to phone records and bank statements.
“What am I looking at?”
“That’s the man who killed your grandfather. He’s human. A white supremacist who, according to his computer history, had a grudge against shifters. He’d been on anti-shifter forums bragging about his kills, making plans for more.”
Kaine scoffed. No way a human got the drop on his grandfather. Saint read his disdain easily enough.
“According to the autopsy, your grandfather was killed in his sleep. No marks to indicate a fight or resistance. One silver bullet to the temple as he lay in bed.”
“Bullshit,” Kaine muttered. “And how does that tie back to HB Inc.?”
Saint pulled out the phone records and pointed at the highlighted numbers. Kaine frowned because it was from the exchange of numbers they used at HB Inc. He then flipped to the pages with bank account deposits listed. Kaine scanned the page, his jaw ticking.
“Calls from those numbers on his phone, deposits from a couple different accounts. One right after the murder, the other a day before the killer’s supposed suicide.”
“I don’t recognize these accounts. And trust me, I don’t play with my money,” Kaine snapped.
Saint hummed. “The trail disappears offshore, but some of the shell companies I was able to track led back to HB Inc. That’s too much of a coincidence. Why would anyone in your company be in contact with a supremacist?”
Kaine put the file on his lap and sat back.
What the hell was going on? HB Inc. housed a few different shell companies for the Aces.
Since he knew that no one within his grandfather’s company would hire a human to kill Henry, that further led back to the Aces.
It wasn’t like he could tell the detective that.
Giving a cop permission to look into the Aces would never fly with the organization.
“I’ll take it from here,” he told Saint, his mind spinning.
“As far as my captain is concerned, we found the killer. Never mind that he was dropped in our lap.”
Kaine raised an eyebrow. “Dropped how?”
Saint passed him a thumb drive from his pocket.
“A journal was found at the scene, taking credit for Henry Browne’s death, along with four other shifters further outside of the city.
Handwriting for the entry talking about your grandfather’s murder is different enough from the others to indicate either duress or a clever forgery.
” Saint shook his head. “We both know it’s bullshit, but proving otherwise was raising too many red flags.
With the confession, my hands are tied.”
“And my grandmother?”
Saint nodded at the thumb drive. “Same accounts paying the supremacist paid the pilot flying your grandmother’s plane and an air traffic controller in Arizona the day of her death.
The air traffic controller died a week later.
Like I said, they all dead-end offshore.
Alone, it’s not anything suspicious, but together… ”
It was thin, but enough to give Kaine pause. “Thank you for your help.”
“I wish I could say anytime, but I’ve had enough of dealing with rich assholes to solve this, so I will bid you good bye.” Saint got out of the car and headed toward the grocery store.
Kaine didn’t move, processing the information the detective had dropped into his lap.
As far as the police was concerned, Henry’s killer was caught.
He should leave it at that, but payments and calls to the killer had come from within their organization.
The cop couldn’t do anything, but Kaine would.
His tiger wouldn’t rest until they found out who had his grandfather murdered.
His grandmother’s death was three years ago, ruled a fatal accident.
Henry had changed with Diane’s death. His grandfather had always been ruthless, but after the loss of his mate, he’d become brutal and callous.
Cutthroat in how he’d ran the Aces. Like St Claire, he didn’t believe in coincidences either.
Had Diane’s death been the first strike in a move against his grandfather?
Griff and the driver getting back in the car shook him from his thoughts.
“Home?” Griff asked.
He checked his watch, his mind going to his mate. She’d been with his mother for two hours now. He wondered how the women were getting along. He trusted Evie to referee between the two if it got bad, but he hoped it didn’t get to that.
“Yeah, home.”
“What did the cop say?”
Kaine hid his thoughts behind a mask. “They found Henry’s killer.”
Griff smiled. “Damn, and I thought trusting the cop was a bad move. When are we handling that?”
“It’s been handled already. The human who did it is dead,” Kaine told his enforcer.
Griff frowned. “They’re saying a human took out a tiger shifter?”
“According to the evidence.”
Nothing else was said. He had to tell his siblings what he’d found and he didn’t look forward to that.
The house was empty by the time they got back.
Kaine went straight to his office to securely email the information the detective gave him to Josiah.
Saint may not have been able to get through the maze of offshore accounts, but he knew Josiah could.
Two more hours had passed with him and his cousin going through the information.
The front gate alerted him that his family had returned and Kaine shuffled the file into a locked drawer.
He would go over it with his siblings later.
He was getting ready to stand when his mother stomped into his office, her face pinched in displeasure. He looked behind Vivian, frowning at the fact that she was alone.
“Your mate donated a quarter of a million dollars to the various charities at the regatta today,” his mother complained.
A tiny quirk of the side of his lip was his only reaction to that. He should’ve known when he sent Lucky with his mother that the two would butt heads.
“Did you hear me, Ezra?”
“What would you have me say, mother? Isn’t that a good thing for your committee?”
Vivian stared at him, her jaw working, her tiger lighting her eyes. “Are you sure about this girl? She’s so?—”
“I would be careful about the next words that leave your lips,” he said lowly.
Vivian sighed. “Your father and I don’t know anything about this panther you’ve decided to mate.”
“I’m not sure how that’s my problem, mother. Perhaps if you visited your children more, you would know what was going on in their lives.”
The same invitation wouldn’t be extended to their father.
As far as the triplets were concerned, the less they saw of Jeffrey Kaine, the better.
He could own his part in their strained relationship, but his parents took the bulk of the blame, and Kaine had long stopped pretending otherwise.
Vivian averted her eyes, but not before he glimpsed the guilt within her gaze.
Straightening her jacket, she sighed. “Still. A quarter of a million dollars, Ezra. It’s gauche,” she repeated for lack of anything else to say.
Did she want him to get mad at his mate?
She would be waiting a long time if that were the case.
“Why do you care what my mate has spent our money on?”
With nothing to say to that, Vivian growled and stormed out of his office.
Kaine sought out Lucky, finding her in their room, taking off her clothes in the closet.
The sound of the water running in their bathroom signaled her intent to soak in the tub, something he’d quickly realized his mate liked to do.
“Are you trying to save my soul through good deeds, princess?”
She smirked. “Your mother told you about the donations?”
He wrapped his arms around her waist and snuggled into the back of her neck. If someone had told him he would be this affectionate with any woman, he would’ve shot them in the face for wasting his time. This woman had a hold on him.
“If she hadn’t been so snooty about it, I wouldn’t have added so many zeros.”
“I don’t care how you spend our money,” he muttered against her skin. He pressed down on her back, bending her over the island in her closet. Sliding down his pants, Kaine freed his dick.
“Our.” She looked back at him and licked her lips.
That was about the time he lost interest in the conversation. He lined up his dick and slid into his favorite place. The way her pussy gripped him sent a shiver down his spine.
“This is heaven right here,” he murmured, sliding out before punching forward. “It’s worth any amount of money.”
His mate smiled, the playful one he loved so much, and he decided that he would spend the rest of his evening in the heaven between her thighs.