Chapter Eight
The gala had run long. Longer than she’d budgeted for.
Dinner had stretched into dessert, dessert into the foundation’s presentation, and the presentation into a round of applause before the gradual reshuffling of a room full of people who had drinks to finish.
Devonte had presented his foundation’s check with Andrea at his side and a smile so practiced and complete that nobody in the ballroom would’ve suspected he’d spent the day managing a threat to his family.
Anja had looked at him and seen exactly that.
Leo tipped the valet and held the passenger door as she climbed inside.
The April air off the street had that spring-night quality, cool and damp and faintly green, and it cleared her head somewhat.
Leo slid into the driver’s seat, adjusted the mirror out of habit, and pulled into the light Saturday traffic without speaking.
She appreciated that about him. He didn’t fill the silence because he was uncomfortable. He left it where it was and let her work in it.
“What did Devonte say?”
Leo told her about the package delivered to Devonte’s mom’s house in Baton Rouge with no return address and the photograph of his sister at college with a red circle drawn around her head.
Anja had noticed how well Leo handled the conversation as it was happening, and it was better than most trained agents could have managed.
He’d kept his face neutral, his tone casual, and his hands loose on the table.
He’d given Devonte the only thing that actually mattered in that moment, which was the assurance that someone knew and was going to do something about it.
Trust me was the right call. Tonight wasn’t the place for the full picture.
Tomorrow would require a different conversation.
“You were good in there,” she told him.
Leo glanced over briefly. “With Devonte?”
“With all of it.” She turned to face him. “You held your cover through five hours at a table with people you’ve known for years. That’s not easy.”
“It was a little easier after the third time Brad Hatton told the same story about a contract negotiation in Tampa.” He checked his mirror and changed lanes. “I’ve heard it a dozen times. I know how it ends. The suspense is gone.”
She chuckled. “I wasn’t paying attention. How does it end?”
“He wins. He always wins. The other party inexplicably forgets every piece of clout they came in with, and Brad emerges victorious before taking everyone to dinner where he orders the most expensive thing on the menu.” He paused. “In fairness, he does pick up the check pretty often.”
“So he’s not without virtue.”
“He has only that one redeeming quality, and he deploys it strategically.”
Anja laughed as she filed that away, along with everything else she’d noted about Brad Hatton throughout the evening.
His nervous energy during cocktails had leveled off by the time dinner was served, which meant whatever he’d been watching for either hadn’t materialized or had resolved itself in a way she couldn’t see from her seat.
Or he had been drunk and didn’t care. She’d put money on the latter.
She wanted Tyler to run Brad Hatton’s financials, but not tonight. There was a more immediate problem.
“Devonte’s sister,” she began. “Is she close with the family?”
“Deja.” Leo nodded. “Twenty-two, pre-med at Tulane. She and Devonte talk at least twice a week, and she talks daily with her mom.” He braked at a light. “But she loves being on her own. She’s not going to want to leave her dorm.”
“She doesn’t have to want to, but she still has to do it.”
“I know.” He sighed. “How do we make that happen without telling her everything?”
“We tell her enough. A credible threat against a public figure’s family member doesn’t need a full explanation to justify a temporary relocation. We move her with the family, we give her a reason that holds up under a twenty-two-year-old’s scrutiny, and we keep tabs on her.”
The Central West End neighborhood came into view ahead of them, the late-night bars still lit. A few people on the sidewalks were making their way home. “And Devonte’s mother? She’s not going to want to leave at all. She grew up in that house.”
Anja had run through the options three times since dinner. “She’s seen the photo of her daughter, so she knows there’s a threat out there. We tell her we’re moving her entire family into a safe house until the person can be caught.”
“Can you do that?”
“I can make a call tonight.”
He glanced over again, and this time the look held a second longer than the road strictly allowed. She let him have it.
“Anja.”
“Yeah?”
“How many calls are you going to have to make tonight?”
She considered being vague but decided against it. He’d been straight with her all evening. It was the least she owed him. “A few. I need to loop in my bosses first, then secure safe houses.”
Leo turned onto his street, pulled into the garage entrance, and waited for the gate. The concrete and low lighting folded around them as he followed the ramp down to his level.
“I told Devonte I’d get him the full answer tomorrow.”
“I’ll have more of it by then.” She unclipped her seatbelt as he pulled into his designated space. “You did the right thing tonight. He needed to hear that it was being handled before he could hear how.”
Leo cut the engine and sat with his hands on the wheel, staring at the wall in front of them.
In the dim garage light, he appeared less like the man who’d worked a room full of colleagues for four hours and more like the version of him she’d found in his kitchen last night.
The one with the weight of it sitting on his shoulders and nowhere good to put it down.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
He turned to look at her, and she could see him deciding whether to give her the functional answer or the real one. She waited him out.
“I shook hands with dozens of people tonight,” he answered, “and I spent the whole time doing math on which one of them might have built a file on Devonte’s kid.” He exhaled through his nose. “That’s a hard room to be in.”
“I know.”
“You handled it better than I did.”
“I wasn’t looking at people I know. That’s not a flaw, Leo. That’s what six years of trust looks like when someone takes a hammer to it.”
He absorbed that without trying to walk away from it. She’d noticed early on that Leo took difficult stuff straight on instead of approaching them from the side, and it was one of the things she respected most about him. And one of the most inconvenient.
“Okay.” He reached for the door. “Let’s go make your calls.”
She got out, and they crossed the garage to the elevator together. The heels Larisa had chosen were, in fact, practical enough to run in. Thankfully, she didn’t need to put them to the test tonight.
Leo pressed the call button, and the elevator arrived.
In the close quarters of the cab, with the gala behind them and the rest of the night ahead, she was acutely aware of how little distance there was between them. He was cognizant of it too, laser-focused on the floor indicator as a substitute for looking at something else.
She understood the feeling.
The elevator opened on his floor, and she stepped out first. Neither of them mentioned it, which was, in its own way, a conversation.
Leo unlocked the door. “For the record, that’s a very good dress.”
Her mouth twitched. “I’ll tell Larisa you approve.”
#
“That woman frightens me . . .” Leo’s voice trailed off as he opened the door.
Lying flat on the hardwood where the hallway met the threshold was a manila envelope. It looked brand new with no folds or wrinkles. His name was printed on the front, but there was no return address or postage.
Hand-delivered.
He didn’t reach for it. “Anja.”
“I see it.”
She crouched, studied it from two angles without making contact, then straightened. “Can you get me a dish towel?”
Without comment, he went to the kitchen and came back with a clean one. She worked the envelope up from the floor by its edges, walked it to the kitchen island, and set it under the pendant lights.
“Gloves are in the front pocket of my bag along with a knife. Get them for me. Please,” she added, as if suddenly remembering to be polite.
He retrieved them. Anja slid the gloves on, considered the envelope for several seconds, then slit it along the top edge with the blade. She spread the sides to look inside first, then drew out the contents and laid them on the marble in a row.
Photographs. Four of them, printed on standard photo stock, shot with a long lens from a distance. The quality wasn’t amateur, and the framing wasn’t random.
The first photo showed a woman walking out of a coffee shop in bright sunlight, laughing at something on her phone, a water bottle in one hand and a canvas tote in the other.
The second caught her crossing a parking lot, head down, keys in hand.
In the third, she was sitting in the passenger seat of an SUV, talking to someone off-frame.
The fourth was a candid shot in a grocery store, where she was reaching for something on a shelf and not looking up.
He knew the woman in every one of them.
“Chloe.” His voice came out flat and strange.
“Yeah. I know where all of these were taken. That’s a café on Kirkwood and a shop at College Mall.”
Anja took a photo of each image with her phone. Her expression was controlled, meaning she’d moved past the point where the information was alarming and into the part where it became a problem to solve.
Leo was firmly in the alarming stage. His lungs suddenly forgot how to work, and he didn’t know how to encourage them to inflate.
Chloe had been going about her life in Bloomington with her canvas tote and her water bottle, and someone with a telephoto lens was making a file on her.
“They know about Chloe.” His voice was a croak.
“Yes.”
“Why?” he managed. “She’s not connected to Vic. She’s not connected to any of this.”