Chapter Twelve
The first thing Anja did after Remi hung up was call Leo’s building security, because surveillance footage would be the fastest way to find out who had walked into that office.
The man who answered at the management company was polite and apologetic and completely useless. She identified herself as part of Mr. De Luca’s private security, gave the suite number, and asked to review the weekend access logs and camera footage for the thirty-ninth floor.
“I’d love to help you, I really would,” he replied, and she could tell he meant it, “but you picked the one weekend I’ve got nothing to show you.
We had a power event on Sunday. It took out the cameras and the badge readers in the tower for the better part of the afternoon, upper floors included.
The building engineer’s writing it up. The system rebooted around seven, but anything before that, there’s just nothing. It’s a gap.”
Anja’s grip tightened on the phone. “A blackout. Sunday afternoon.”
“I mean, yeah. With these old conversions, the electrical’s always a project. Happens two, three times a year.”
“I’m sure it does.” She kept her voice pleasant while getting the engineer’s name and the incident report number anyway out of habit, knowing what they’d tell her, which was nothing. She thanked him and hung up.
How convenient that a power failure took down the surveillance that would have caught whoever went through Leo’s files. No one would think to question it, because old buildings lost power and everybody knew it.
It was, she thought, one more thing that was far too clean. She added it to the growing list.
Anja went back to what she’d been working on before Remi’s call.
She’d started investigating Pinnacle, since it was the firm Leo knew best and the one she could cross-reference against his own read of his colleagues.
She reviewed public records first, the boring foundational layer most people skipped and most secrets hid inside.
Items like property filings, business registrations, corporate board memberships, and the little side ventures and shell LLCs that respectable professionals collected like lint.
She wasn’t searching for a smoking gun. She was looking for the discrepancy: the agent whose lifestyle outran his commission checks, or the assistant with a sudden, unexplained windfall.
She had two legal pads filled with notes before she moved to the second agency, then the third, building the same profile for the athletes outside Pinnacle and the agents who repped them.
Anja noted the overlapping vendors Tyler had flagged, the shared medical group, the boutique PR firm three of the eight had used, and the wealth-management outfit whose client list read like a draft board.
In the fourth hour, scrolling through a corporate filing she’d nearly skimmed past, a name surfaced somewhere it had no business appearing.
Anja set her coffee down and sat up straight.
“Well,” she murmured to the empty room. “Hello, Danica Webb.”
Her name was not in a place Anja would have expected to find it.
Webb sat on the registration of a consulting LLC that listed, two filings deeper, the same boutique PR firm three of the eight targeted athletes had used.
The connection was tenuous: a shared address suite and an overlapping registered agent.
It was the sort of paper coincidence that meant nothing ninety times out of a hundred.
But Danica Webb had pried Miles Ashworth loose from Leo under circumstances Leo still couldn’t explain, and a thin string attached to a name that didn’t sit right was worth pulling on.
Remi’s phone call was on her mind, the words rearranging the whole shape of her day.
Somebody had tossed Leo’s office over the weekend.
An insider had walked in as if they belonged, photographed a client’s private papers, and squared the drawer back up.
It made the thin connection to Danica Webb suddenly feel worth her afternoon.
Remi’s parting words came back to her, and she grimaced.
There was no way he’d heard them having sex unless he was patrolling the house, which, now that she thought about it, he probably was.
Maybe sleeping with the client wasn’t professional—okay, it wasn’t—but her relationship with Leo had been on a collision course from the second she walked back into his life, and she’d been powerless to stop it.
In the heat of the moment, she couldn’t care less who had heard them. She’d been that far gone.
Remi hadn’t yet been with CObrA Securities when Anja had assisted Kayne in protecting Chloe, so he had no idea there was an intriguing yet explosive history between them.
She refused to feel guilty. If homicide had taught her one thing, it was that life was short. You grabbed happiness when you could.
Anja texted Remi.
Eyes on Leo all day. I’m taking a field trip. Will check in.
His reply landed in seconds.
They are. Keep me posted.
Kellerman Gates kept its offices in a renovated brick building in the nearby town of Clayton, four blocks from where someone had once tried to put a bullet through Leo’s head, a detail Anja noted and filed away and did not let herself feel anything about.
She set up across the street and a half-block down, with the parking lot in view.
Danica Webb came out at 11:30.
Anja recognized her from the headshot on the firm’s website, but the photo had undersold her. Webb wore a dark suit and sunglasses, with a leather portfolio tucked under one arm. She slid into a black Mercedes and blended into traffic. Anja gave her three car lengths and followed.
She tailed her from a distance, switching lanes and letting a vehicle drift between them whenever possible.
Webb wasn’t watching for a tail. People rarely were, in Anja’s experience, unless they’d been given a reason.
Webb turned into the valet lane of a downtown hotel with a glass atrium and a steakhouse that catered to expense accounts.
Anja parked herself in the lobby with a coffee she didn’t want and a sightline to the restaurant entrance she very much did.
Webb wasn’t dining alone.
The man at the table stood when she approached, and Anja got a clear look at him while she pretended to read her phone.
Mid-forties. An expensive suit worn slightly wrong, as if the money was newer than the manners.
A heavy watch. A salesperson’s smile that didn’t reach anywhere near his eyes.
He kissed Webb’s cheek and the two of them sat.
Anja lifted her phone and took eleven photographs in quick succession under the cover of a woman texting.
She sent the clearest three to Tyler with two words: Run him.
The answer took eighteen minutes, which for Tyler was practically an apology for the delay.
Anthony Reyes was VP of Strategic Partnerships at ApexPlay, a Vegas-based sports-betting platform expanding aggressively into newly legal markets.
Anja glanced up to see Reyes laugh at something across the table. Webb did not laugh back. Why was a betting executive having lunch with the agent who had poached Leo’s client?
#
Remi pegged the sedan in his mirror three blocks after leaving Pinnacle’s garage. It was a nondescript, white four-door riding two cars back.
“You good?” Leo asked, obviously catching something in Remi’s posture that hadn’t been there thirty seconds ago.
“Might be nothing.” Remi eased off the accelerator, letting the gap between the Escalade and the traffic ahead widen. He watched the mirror instead of the road for one long moment. “Just want to check something.”
He crossed the Escalade into the left lane without signaling in advance. The sedan followed, two full seconds behind, close enough that the move couldn’t be coincidence a second time.
“It’s obviously not nothing.” Leo’s hand found the door handle out of pure instinct.
“No. It’s not.” Remi’s pulse settled into the calculated rhythm his training had carved into him years ago, every extra thought stripped away except the ones that mattered. “Seatbelt tight. Hands braced. Whatever happens, stay vigilant.”
The sedan surged as soon as Remi entered the next intersection, closing the gap fast, aiming not for a lane change but for the driver’s side quarter panel.
There was no misreading their intent. Remi threw the wheel hard right and stomped on the accelerator instead of the brake.
The Escalade leaped forward out of the sedan’s path with a lurch that snapped Leo’s head against the headrest.
The sedan missed them by inches and kept going, unable to correct in time.
It plowed into the rear of a Jeep idling at the crosswalk, metal screaming against metal, glass scattering brightly across the asphalt.
For one suspended second, nobody moved. Then the sedan’s engine roared again.
The driver reversed hard, fishtailed around the wreckage, and sped down a side street before Remi had even stopped the Escalade.
“You see plates?” Leo’s voice came out ragged.
“Nothing. Front and back both missing.” Remi was out of the car, moving fast toward the Jeep, which had flipped onto its roof during the impact and now sat crumpled and smoking at the curb. One wheel spun uselessly in the air. “Call it in. Get an ambulance rolling.”
Leo had his phone out before Remi finished the sentence, reciting the intersection to a dispatcher. Remi dropped to his knees beside the overturned vehicle, peering in through the shattered driver’s window.
A woman with dark hair hung upside down against her seatbelt, a thin line of blood tracking from a cut above her eyebrow into her hairline.
She was moaning softly, one hand pressed instinctively against her ribs.
Then she focused on him, and her turquoise eyes were so startling that he lost half a second just registering the color before his training caught back up with him.