Chapter Five #3
“I need to hear your thoughts out loud.”
“Devonte Cross and Miles Ashworth are mine.”
“Current?”
“Devonte, yes. I signed him coming out of LSU five years ago. His son is my godson.”
“And Ashworth?”
“He left me nine months ago. He went with Danica Webb at Kellerman Gates. The move didn’t make sense to me at the time. It doesn’t now.”
Anja went still, just as she had on the Clayton sidewalk months ago, half a second before a bad guy had tried to put a bullet through his brainpan.
“Say that again.”
“Miles left me for Danica Webb nine months ago.”
“Is there any reason a rival agent would want your client badly enough to run something irregular to get him?”
Leo made himself think, which was harder than it should have been, because his hands were still not quite attached to his arms, and his head felt as if it were stuffed full of packing peanuts.
“Miles Ashworth is worth roughly four hundred million dollars in career earnings across the next decade if his knees hold up. The agent of record takes four percent. So yes. There’s a reason.”
Tyler’s voice came from the laptop. “Anja, I’m logging that name. Danica Webb, Kellerman Gates. You want me to start a background?”
“Yes. Off the books, same as this call. I want her client list, financial footprint, and travel history for the last two years. I want to know if she’s been anywhere near Kansas City in the last six months. Do not flag anything to her or to her firm.”
“Anja, please.” Tyler sounded genuinely insulted.
“Sorry, Tyler. My bad. No offense.”
“None taken. Anything else while I’m in here?”
“One more thing.” Anja glanced at Leo. “Leo’s got a voicemail from Shaw on his phone, recorded the night before he died. It cuts off mid-sentence and sounds interrupted rather than dropped. I want it pulled and mirrored somewhere you control before tonight’s over. Audio file, metadata, all of it.”
“Send it through the secure client. I’ll grab it server-side.” Tyler’s eyes hadn’t left his own screen, fingers moving. “Two minutes, tops.”
Leo watched Anja access the message he’d forwarded to her and send it through.
“Got it,” Tyler confirmed a second later. “Mirrored in three places on my end, none of them near St. Louis. It’s not going anywhere now.”
“Good. That’s one thing in this whole mess we don’t have to worry about losing.”
“Small mercies,” Leo murmured.
Anja turned her attention back to him. “Leo, listen to me carefully. I’m going to tell you what we’re looking at and then what we do next. Are you with me?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve probably already realized it, but what’s on that drive is a blackmail library.
It was built over years. Not months. Years.
Shaw didn’t create it. He stumbled onto it, started following the trail, and got killed.
Two of the eight athletes in that library are your clients, which is not a coincidence, and one of them left your agency under circumstances that made little sense at the time.
Neither happened by accident. I need you to look at the other six names to see if they are or ever have been your clients. ”
Leo nodded and returned to his seat. Anja opened the remaining files. He recognized the athletes but they weren’t his. Only Devonte and Miles.
“The question isn’t who has this drive. Shaw mailed it to you for a reason. We need to find who assembled the library, and the answer is somebody who has had access to the inside of a sports agency for a long time.”
“Anja.”
“Yes?”
“There’s a very good chance the person we’re looking for is someone I’ve had lunch with.”
“I know.”
Whatever she saw in his expression must have alarmed her, because her face softened at the edges. She didn’t reach for him. She didn’t have to. The softening was enough.
“First we eat. You promised me eggs.”
“I did.”
“I’m collecting on that now, because you’re pale and I need you fed. Tyler’s going to keep the drive imaging while we take twenty minutes. Tyler?”
“I’ve got it from here. Eat. Hydrate. Don’t let my friend stand up too fast. I don’t have time to troubleshoot him too. I’ll ping you when the second pass completes.”
“Copy.”
She killed the video and moved close enough that Leo could smell her clean, flowery scent. Then she crossed to his refrigerator with the easy familiarity of someone who’d been in his condo a hundred times before and planned on being there for a hundred more.
Leo sat back down on the stool.
Anja cracked eggs into a ceramic bowl with the side of a wooden spoon. Leo put his face in his hands for five seconds because she was the only person in the world he could afford to let see him do it, and then he lifted his head.
There was work to do, and somebody had watched his godson’s mother walk into an obstetrician’s parking lot on a day Leo hadn’t known about, and the man who’d warned him about it was dead.
He reached for his water and took a drink.
Then he got up, walked around his own island, and started pulling a pan out of the cabinet next to the stove. Anja was here, and she was hungry. Everything else could wait.