Chapter Fourteen
Bremen’s occupied a converted mansion on Lindell Boulevard, its courtyard framed by wrought iron and a canopy of pin oaks just starting to leaf out.
Anja counted exits on her way in. There was the main entrance, a side gate near the parking court, and a service door tucked behind a boxwood hedge, which she mentally noted.
The staff moved among the guests in black suits with brass name badges, refilling drinks and clearing plates before anyone noticed a glass or dish needed attention. Six employees circulated through the courtyard in the first ten minutes.
“You’re doing it again,” Leo murmured, his hand at the small of her back as they crossed the flagstones.
“What?”
“The thing where you inventory a space instead of looking like you’re at a wake.”
“I can do both.” She accepted a glass of white wine from a passing tray and didn’t drink it. “Multitasking is a skill.”
He smiled, and then Jasmine Ortega spotted them from across the courtyard.
“Leo.” She kissed his cheek, then turned to Anja with genuine warmth. “It’s good to see you again, Anja.”
“You too, though I wish the circumstances were different.”
Jasmine pressed her lips together before answering. “This is a hard one. Tim onboarded half of us. He was a good man.”
“I’m sorry.” Anja meant it, even while she watched Jasmine’s eyes for anything that didn’t match the grief in her voice. She found nothing.
They moved through the gathering in loose orbit after that, Leo introducing her to people she hadn’t met at the gala.
Names blurred together after the fifth handshake.
There was a younger associate named Priya who worked contracts and kept glancing at the buffet as if she hadn’t eaten since Sunday.
She met an HR director named Wallace, who spoke at length about Tim’s kindness during his own divorce three years ago.
Brad Hatton arrived with Renee on his arm, his tie loosened and voice pitched for an area twice the size of the courtyard.
“Leo De Luca.” Brad clapped him on the shoulder hard enough to rock him forward. “And lovely Anja.” He gave her an appreciative once-over. “You look magnificent.”
“Brad.” Leo’s smile tightened at the edges. “It’s a wake.”
“I’m aware of that. I’m allowed to compliment a woman, aren’t I?” Brad’s arrogant confidence suggested no one had ever told him he might be wrong about anything. Or if they did, he ignored them. “Terrible business, all of it. Tim and Vic before him. Makes you wonder who’s next.”
“Brad,” Renee warned, low and pointed.
“What? I’m saying what everyone’s thinking.” He lowered his voice as though it made it more appropriate rather than less. “Vic’s death doesn’t sit right with me. He worked hard to build a career, and we’re supposed to believe he drove to Kansas City to end it? Doesn’t track.”
Anja kept her expression neutral. Brad’s remarks weren’t suspicious on their own. Grief made people voice thoughts they’d otherwise keep to themselves.
Marv and Christine Collins drifted over next, subdued and soft-spoken. Marv offered a story about Tim’s golf game that had everyone chuckling.
Anja excused herself under the pretense of finding the restroom and instead worked her way along the courtyard’s perimeter, logging every detail that felt wrong.
The side door near the hedge, the one she’d marked as locked when they arrived, now stood open three inches. She nudged it with two fingers. No draft, no obvious explanation, just open. She pushed it shut.
Near the drink station, a man in the same black suit as the other staff adjusted his cufflinks and scanned the guests, but she got the distinct impression he wasn’t concerned with refilling glasses.
His badge read David in brass letters. She’d counted six staff members earlier. He wasn’t one of them.
Overhead, mounted under the eave of the main house, an exterior camera she’d noted earlier had swiveled ten degrees off its original angle, no longer covering the courtyard’s center, focusing on the tree line instead.
None of it screamed danger. Together, the details hummed like a live wire plugged into her spinal cord.
She was still working the angle when a woman in a fitted black dress detached from a cluster near the bar and strode toward her.
“You’re Leo’s plus-one.” The woman offered a hand, rings catching the light. “Danica Webb. Kellerman Gates. Leo and I go way back.”
“Anja.”
“I heard about the break-in.” Danica’s tone stayed light and conversational. “Terrible timing, on top of everything else. Did they take anything from your apartment?”
Anja’s pulse didn’t change. Neither did her expression. “I don’t have an apartment here. I’m not local.”
“Leo’s apartment, I meant.” An easy, unbothered laugh. “Sorry. It’s been a strange week for everyone.”
“How’d you hear about it?”
“Uh, Marcy mentioned he was dealing with a security issue.” Danica’s smile remained fixed in place. “You know how it is in this business. Secrets have a remarkably short shelf life.”
Marcy didn’t know. She thought Leo was working from home to keep his head down before the wake, full stop. Leo had told her that himself, in the safe house office, with Anja standing three feet away.
“It’s a small world,” Anja remarked.
“The smallest.” Danica’s attention shifted past her shoulder toward someone else. “Excuse me. I need to pay my respects to Curtis before I head out.”
She walked off unhurriedly, and Anja watched her go as a sharp, specific warning began to build. Two priorities collapsed into one thought: find Leo and don’t lose track of the woman who knew something she shouldn’t.
She was three steps into the mourners, angling toward the spot where she’d last seen him, when a glass shattered near the dais and someone screamed.
#
Curtis Lennox was on the ground.
Leo moved before he consciously decided to.
One second he was laughing at some story Marv had told and the next, he was on his knees on the flagstones with Curtis’s head in his hands. The older man’s face had gone white, his breath coming in short, ragged pulls.
“Curtis, look at me.”
Curtis’s eyes rolled toward him, unfocused, his mouth working around words that didn’t form. Lydia was screaming his name from behind Leo, and someone shouted for a doctor. The crowd pressed around them, a tight wall of nervous twittering and horror.
“Give him room,” Leo barked.
A man in a black suit and a badge that read “David” dropped to his knees on Curtis’s other side, his medical bag open. “I’ve got him. Step back, sir, give me space to work.”
Leo didn’t move. He watched the man’s hands pass over Curtis’s chest, checking his pulse, and something in the motion struck him as wrong. There wasn’t time to chase the thought because a loud peal split the air.
The fire alarms were going off.
The shriek of sound hit like a physical blow, scattering the crowd in every direction at once.
Smoke curled from the service corridor at the rear of the courtyard, thin and gray, and the wall of mourners became a stampede within two seconds.
People shoved toward the main gate, women’s heels catching on the flagstones, someone’s champagne flute shattering underfoot.
“Leo!” Anja’s voice vanished beneath the noise.
He turned toward it and lost her instantly, the crowd closing between them like water filling a gap.
“Mr. De Luca.” David was on his feet now, his bag abandoned on the ground, his hand closing around Leo’s arm with a grip that didn’t match the surrounding panic. “Mr. Lennox is asking for you. This way, sir. Quickly, before the smoke gets worse.”
Leo spun around and glanced at the empty ground. “Where’s Curtis?”
“They’ve got him on oxygen in the service corridor, away from the crowd crush. He wants you there.”
It should have felt wrong. Later, Leo would replay the scene a hundred times and find the seam in it, the place where the story didn’t quite hold.
But with Curtis’s deathly pale face on his mind and Lydia’s screams still ringing in his ears, it felt like the only true thing in a courtyard full of chaos.
He let the man tug him through the boxwood hedge.
The passage beyond was narrow, lit by a single bare bulb and smelling of bleach and cold concrete. No Curtis. No oxygen tank. Just the imposter reaching into his jacket. Leo’s instincts screamed a full second before his mind caught up to why.
He threw an elbow into the man’s forearm as the syringe cleared the fabric.
The needle veered wide, clattering against the concrete instead of finding his neck.
His attacker recovered fast, driving a shoulder into Leo’s chest and slamming him hard against the wall, forcing all the air from his lungs.
“Should’ve gone easy,” the man muttered before charging him again.
Leo caught the second strike on his forearm and drove a fist into the man’s ribs.
He used the half-second of distraction to grab the arm holding another syringe he’d produced from his pocket and wrench it sideways.
The needle skittered across the ground. The man cursed and threw a knee that Leo barely deflected, pain lancing up his thigh.
Then they were grappling in the narrow space, with no room to swing, just weight and advantage and Leo’s hands finding the man’s throat.
“Stop.”
Anja’s voice cut through the passage like a blade.
A second later, she was there, one hand locking around the man’s wrist and twisting until he grunted and dropped whatever was in his hand.
She drove her knee into the back of his leg, and he buckled.
Between the two of them, they had him facedown on the concrete in less than four seconds.
“You good?” she asked, breathing hard, one knee planted on the base of the man’s spine as she cinched a set of flex cuffs on his wrists.
“Yeah.” Leo’s chest heaved. His hands were shaking. “He had a needle—two.”