Chapter Five #2
“Top of the list,” Tyler instructed. “Double-click and let me watch the container.”
01-DCR opened into a second folder tree with photos, financials, and medical info. Each subfolder was populated. The photos folder alone held what looked like forty files. Inside the medical folder were three PDFs. A folder labeled “family” held its own nested set.
Anja clicked on the photos folder. The thumbnails rendered in a slow cascade, and Leo stopped breathing.
The man in the photographs was Devonte Cross, and Leo knew him better than he knew most of his own extended family.
Devonte was twenty-six years old, a two-time Pro Bowl wide receiver for the Tennessee Titans, and the kid Leo had personally walked through the draft process during Devonte’s final year at LSU.
Leo had eaten dinner at his mother’s table in Baton Rouge the night before the combine.
He had held Devonte’s firstborn son in a hospital room in Nashville eighteen months ago.
Devonte’s wife, Andrea, called him Uncle Leo on her Christmas cards.
The photographs on the screen had been taken without Devonte’s knowledge.
They showed him leaving a Nashville hotel early in the morning, at a backroom blackjack table in a private club Leo didn’t recognize, and in a car with a woman who was most definitely not Andrea.
They showed his mother walking out of a bank in Baton Rouge with a well-dressed man and Andrea in a parking lot at an obstetrician’s office.
Leo’s hands were flat on the counter. He could see them, so he knew they were there, but he couldn’t feel them.
“Leo.”
Anja’s voice was close but not quite touching him. A butterfly fluttering away.
“Leo.”
He jerked at the barked command. She’d certainly roused him out of his stupor. “I’m here.”
She clicked out of the photos folder without asking and opened the financials instead.
A spreadsheet unfolded across the screen.
It had information on Devonte’s bank accounts, his mother’s accounts, his cousin’s in Shreveport, and an LLC in Devonte’s wife’s maiden name that Leo had never heard of.
Transactions were highlighted in yellow.
Patterns sketched in red. Someone had done this over time. A forensic accountant. A professional.
Medical came next. Devonte’s orthopedic records from an injury he’d hidden from the team two seasons ago.
Andrea’s pregnancy history, including a loss Leo had known about because Devonte had told him in confidence over a bottle of bourbon on Leo’s balcony.
That detail existed in only two places: Devonte’s marriage and inside Leo’s trust.
Family was the worst of the four.
There were profiles meticulous enough to have been written by a biographer on Devonte’s mother, his wife, his toddler son, his sister in college, his cousin the accountant, and the priest at the church where Devonte and Andrea had gotten married.
Each profile listed addresses, workplaces, daily routines, vehicles, and known associates.
His son’s profile listed his daycare, the pickup window, the name of his primary caregiver, and a photograph of the building taken from across the street.
Leo closed his eyes.
He did it slowly because if he moved too fast, he was going to lose the battle with his stomach, and the list of ways he’d imagined seeing Anja again had never once included projectile vomiting.
There were some things a man simply couldn’t recover from.
“Leo.”
“I’m here.”
“Take a breath for me.”
He took one.
“And another.”
He did as instructed.
“Okay. I need you to stay with me for ninety more seconds. I’m going to open the next folder, and I need you to tell me if you recognize the athlete. Can you do that?”
No. “Yes.”
She clicked 02-MAS.
The photos subfolder opened, and Leo’s stomach did a slow, sickening thing it hadn’t done since a runner’s cleats had come into his knee during his fifth season.
Miles Ashworth.
Miles had been Leo’s client for three years.
He was an All-Star point guard for the Milwaukee Bucks, a kid from Gary, Indiana, who’d come up through the AAU circuit.
He’d signed with Leo out of Villanova because Leo had been the only agent in the room who hadn’t talked down to his grandmother.
Miles had left Leo nine months ago, under circumstances that still didn’t sit right, and gone to an agent named Danica Webb at a firm Leo had never respected.
Miles had been polite about it. He’d insisted it was a business decision without ever looking Leo in the eye.
Leo had eaten the loss and moved on, because that was the job, and there were more clients. You didn’t chase the ones who left.
The photographs on the screen showed Miles at a nightclub in Miami with people Leo didn’t recognize.
Miles’s grandmother leaving a doctor’s office in Gary in a wheelchair.
Miles’s younger sister, who was seventeen and starting at Notre Dame in the fall, walking across her high school parking lot with a friend.
Without meaning to, Leo jumped to his feet, the stool scraping hard on the oak floor. He took two steps away, stopped, put his hands on the back of his head, and stared at the ceiling until it came back into focus.
Breathe, De Luca. They are your clients. Devonte and Miles. You put both of them in rooms where people heard them say things in confidence. You introduced them to people you vouched for, and you walked them through the machinery of their careers. Somebody used that access to build this.
“Leo.”
Anja had come around the island. She was standing three feet away from him, close enough that he could feel her focused attention, far enough that she wasn’t crowding him.
Her hands hung loosely at her sides, and her voice held the calm he recognized from cops and ER nurses and people who knew how to hold someone else’s worst day.