Chapter 4
KNOX
It hadn’t taken long for Brandon and Clark to report back from Jones’s place. The moment I stepped out of the car right outside Jones’s house, Brandon met me at the main gate.
Jones lived in a typical suburban house with a white picket fence and a neatly trimmed lawn.
We strode along the narrow, paved walkway leading to the entrance steps. “Update?”
“Sir, the place is clean. No sign of a struggle or a kidnapping. But…”
I stopped at the front door, my fingers resting on the doorknob as I met Brandon’s eyes. “But?”
Brandon touched his ear and cringed, as if the words tasted sour in his mouth. “We found a different kind of evidence.”
“Spit it out.”
“Jones abused his wife.”
Not many things surprised me, but this did. Not because I had any faith in Jones’s character, but because I didn’t catch it.
“And the evidence is solid?”
Brandon nodded and walked into the house.
I followed and found Clark tagging the place with a series of yellow evidence markers and clicking pictures. I walked to the first marker, and it was a hidden locker on the wall. The painting that hid it was leaning against the adjacent wall.
When I raised a questioning eyebrow at Brandon, he cleared his throat. “We noticed that the painting was slightly tilted and spotted the outline of the locker. The key was stuck behind the painting. When we opened it, we found the photos.”
Brandon handed me a stack of pictures. With each photo I flipped through, the blood boiled hotter in my veins.
One after the other, the bruised face of Jones’s wife stared back at me.
Some of them revealed the cigarette burns along the top of her arm, her breasts, and her stomach.
The photos spanned several years, given how young his wife looked in some of them.
Jones, a detective in my squad, was an abusive fuck. How the fuck did I not see it?
My eyes met Brandon’s, and his face was a mixture of rage and shame.
It seemed like a natural reaction for a man to find out that his colleague, the person he spent most of his time with day in and day out, was an abuser.
That the man you thought you knew was an impostor.
That, as a cop, he could’ve protected a person, but failed them.
But I wasn’t a normal man, and I didn’t feel normal emotions.
I loathed abusive men. Weak men like Jones would always prey on people weaker than themselves.
They would never dare stand up against an equally strong opponent.
While I was furious at Jones, I was even angrier with myself for failing to recognize the true nature of the man working under me.
Had I known, I’d have killed the fucker myself.
Because I didn’t feel any guilt or shame at the act of my detective, I could see as clear as day that the evidence had landed in our laps a little too conveniently. If his wife indeed kept a locker of proofs, she would never have had the painting tilted.
The evidence pointed pretty clearly to the wife as a suspect.
But if she were capable of killing him, she would’ve done that a long time ago.
Maybe she reached a breaking point and killed him and then took care of the body.
Perhaps she ran away to escape him, and Jones went after her.
Or maybe the wife reached out to our local vigilante and asked him to kill Jones.
Until we found Jones’s body, we would never be able to tell what happened.
“Did we find anything on the wife?” I asked Brandon.
He shook his head. “No, sir.”
Once Clark finished documenting the scene, he came to stand beside us. He, too, was frazzled. He rubbed his jaw and shook his head in disgust. “You think you know someone.”
Poor guy didn’t know the masks people wore around the world, hiding their true nature. “You never know anybody, Clark.”
My gaze scanned the empty house. The lack of photos on the wall was a clear sign of the lack of love and joy within a family. The pristine condition of the house was likely the wife’s desperate attempt to avoid abuse. Guess it didn’t work for her. It never did.
My instincts screamed that Jones was dead. That our local vigilante was responsible for his disappearance. But it was all speculation at this point, just pure cop instinct. But an instinct without evidence was nothing but words written in thin air.
The only evidence, the singular suspect, I had in the case of the vigilante was the billionaire Dominic Park.
He was the only person I knew with a motive and the means to become a vigilante.
After I interrogated him a few months ago, I immediately dug up his history.
His sister was raped about five months prior to his “kidnapping” by the Russians.
He was right when he said that the cops assigned to his sister’s case hadn’t done jack shit.
They were all sellouts, deep in the pockets of then Senator Thomas Cooper, who, by the way, was also found dead. Coincidence? I think the fuck not.
And last, the fact that a rival gang attacked the Russians right when they had Dominic was a little too convenient to be plausible.
However, according to Brandon’s research, the vigilante has been active for at least ten years.
Dominic hadn’t had a motive to become one until about six months ago.
If Dominic wasn’t the vigilante, he had to know him.
He must’ve hired the guy to take out Thomas Cooper’s son, one of the three suspects who had assaulted his sister.
There was no way of knowing whether Dominic still kept in touch with the vigilante guy, since all the suspects involved in Dominic’s sister’s rape case were dead. But what choice did I have?
Dominic was my only lead. I was certain he knew the vigilante. And I was going to find that fucker myself.
I turned to Brandon and Clark, who waited for my orders. “Get me Dominic Park’s address and his work location. We’re going to find the vigilante fucker.”
I changed into civilian clothes, a simple black tee and jeans, and parked my personal car across the street from Dominic’s giant-ass building. The rich fucker owned the motherfucking skyscraper, and like any rich fucker, he lived in the penthouse on the top floor.
I took in the glimmering glass facade of the high-rise before stepping out of my car.
Pulling my baseball cap low over my eyes, I covered my face as much as possible and slung a small black duffel bag across my back.
I didn’t need Dominic catching me lurking in his lobby in case our paths crossed.
This investigation was off the books for now.
With confident steps, I walked to the entrance. Two doormen stood guard, carrying weapons that would give anybody pause. However, they didn’t stop anyone from entering the lobby, what with the sheer number of residences in the building.
I strolled into the massive lobby. Large chandeliers hung from a thirty-foot-high ceiling, and a rich, sophisticated scent infused the cool, climate-controlled air. Three receptionists, dressed in sharp suits, sat behind a wide black desk, assisting several people.
I lingered near the people in the line, pretending to wait my turn, as I took in the space. The lobby only had one point of entry and exit. The hallway behind the reception desk led toward the elevator banks, where two other guards monitored the entrance.
I caught six cameras installed at various corners of the lobby. Any infiltration inside the building from the main lobby was an immediate no-go. As the line in front of me moved forward, I did a casual pivot and almost crashed into a large black Doberman.
I almost tripped over the beast of a dog, who was already dragging the tiny woman in a hoodie, clutching his leash. People really needed to get dogs that they could actually handle. Tiny women being dragged by giant dogs was a recipe for disaster on the street.
I shrugged my shoulder and made my way outside the building, pretending to talk on the phone to avoid suspicion from the doormen.
The moment I was back on the sidewalk, I turned right, walking along the perimeter of the building. The high-rise occupied the entire city block, which meant there had to be an entrance to an underground parking garage.
I rounded the corner, and right there, about twenty feet ahead of me, a large automatic roll-up door began to open for a car.
I quickly pretended to read something on my phone as I walked toward the parking entrance.
As a car drove out of the building, I made a run for the slowly closing automatic shutter.
The moment I slipped in, three cameras pointed at me from different vantage points. I tugged my cap lower. Up ahead, two small shacks were occupied by security guards at the boom barrier that would let the cars through. I ducked behind the thick concrete column and took in the sprawling space.
Right as another car approached the boom barrier, I slipped under the adjacent barrier, using the car as a shield, and walked into the parking lot. Once inside, I walked farther down the ramps, one level after another, until I reached the very last level at seven floors underground.
The bottom level was only half the size of the rest of the parking levels. Most likely to provide the rich people some exclusivity for their precious vehicles.
There were no signs of any covert operations or suspicious vehicles as I walked around the parking space. Just rich people’s cars parked in their shining glory.
On my way back up the ramps, I pulled several tiny wireless cameras from my bag, sticking them in the darkest corners with the best vantage point. Considering I didn’t have a giant-ass ladder, I had to get creative, but I got the job done.
By the time I walked out of the building, forty-seven cameras covered every movement from the bottom of the parking lot to the motherfucking exit.
I pulled out my phone and opened the app showing me the live feed from all the cameras.
And for the first time today, my lips stretched into a motherfucking smile.
“C’mon, Dominic. Prove me right.”