Chapter Sixteen
The new house sat at the end of a gravel lane in Wildwood, screened by fifty yards of hardwoods on every side and a locked gate that required a code.
Morning light filtered through the trees as Remi eased the Escalade to a stop in front of a stone and wood ranch house that looked more like a glamping hunting lodge than a CObrA Securities safe house.
“No neighbors for half a mile.” Remi killed the engine and scanned the tree line. “One road in, one out.”
“Defensible.” Anja climbed out, taking in the sightlines, even with exhaustion dragging at every muscle in her body.
Dense woods surrounded the property, broken only by the lane, limiting the angles of approach.
A single gravel driveway meant anyone coming for them would have to commit to it early, with no cover once they hit the open yard. “I like it better than the last one.”
“The last one had a wine cellar,” Leo remarked, wincing as he shifted his bandaged arm. “This one has bears, probably.”
“This one has trees a sniper can’t shoot through.” Anja turned to help Leo. She placed her hand under his good elbow, even though he didn’t need it, because some part of her that had nothing to do with tactics wanted the contact. “I’ll take bears over what we left behind.”
Inside, the house smelled of wood smoke. Leo eased himself onto a barstool while Remi rummaged through a bag he’d grabbed from the back of the Escalade, pulling gear from a suture kit. His movements suggested he’d done this more times than he’d probably admit.
They’d forgone the hospital since gunshot wounds had to be reported, and right now, it was imperative to keep Leo off the grid. Whoever was after them could have people anywhere.
Remi snapped on a pair of latex gloves and nodded toward the bandage. “Let’s see it.”
Leo peeled back the dressing, and Remi turned his arm gently toward the light. “Clean channel. You got lucky. Muscle only and no fragments.”
“I don’t feel lucky. Mostly, I feel like I got shot.”
“You did, so don’t make a habit of it,” Anja told him.
Remi threaded a needle without ceremony. “This is going to hurt worse than if you’d gone to the ER. They have the good drugs. I’ve got lidocaine and whiskey.”
“I’ll take the whiskey.”
“I lied. You’re getting lidocaine.” Remi worked with quick, economical stitches. Leo’s teeth clenched through most of it. Anja stood close with a hand on his good shoulder, not because he needed assurance but because she did.
“You’ve done this before,” she observed.
“Ranger medic training, plus a couple of field patch jobs that never made it into any official report.” He tied off the last stitch and taped fresh gauze into place. “You’re good to go. It shouldn’t leave too disfiguring a scar.”
“Comforting,” Leo muttered.
“That’s my jam.” Remi peeled off his gloves and tossed them into the trash. “Now that you’re no longer leaking, I’m making a supply run.”
Anja glanced over. “For what?”
Remi waved a hand at his smoke-stained clothes, then at hers and Leo’s.
“Unless the three of us plan to spend the foreseeable future dressed as survivors of a structure fire, pretty much everything. We passed one of those twenty-four-hour places where you can buy underwear, motor oil, and a rotisserie chicken under the same roof.”
Leo checked his shirt. “I was starting to think this was working for me.”
“It’s not.”
“Good to know.”
“The safe house has toothbrushes and basic toiletries, so I’ll grab clothes, socks, chargers, and whatever else the fire ate.” Remi pulled out his phone. “Text me sizes and whatever you absolutely can’t live without for the next forty-eight hours.”
“Coffee,” Leo answered.
“That’s not clothing.”
“I heard “absolutely can’t live without.’”
Remi weighed that. “Fair.”
Anja reached for her phone. “Keep it quick. Cash if you have enough, and make sure you’re not followed back.”
He gave her a look that managed to convey both seriously? and I thought we were friends.
“Sorry. I know you’re better than that. I’m paranoid.”
Remi headed for the door. “And suddenly I understand why everyone calls you Valkyrie.”
#
Remi returned an hour later carrying enough bags to suggest he’d either followed their lists exactly or panicked somewhere near men’s basics. He distributed clothes, chargers, and a handful of necessities across the kitchen island before tossing Leo a package.
“No fashion show. Options were limited.”
Leo inspected the sweatpants. “Orange. Bold choice.”
“I considered sequins, but they didn’t have your size.”
Anja’s cell buzzed before Leo could answer. “It’s Tyler.” She put him on speaker, apologizing for bothering him again so early.
“No problem. As for how they got through security at the old house, I pulled utility logs the second Remi called it in. It’s the same signature as Leo’s apartment and Pinnacle.
A service interruption request routed through a hijacked contractor account, this time targeting the transformer feeding that entire block.
Killed power to the alarm system, the cameras, everything, right around 3:40 in the morning. ”
“And the fire?” Remi asked.
“Accelerant at two points, probably tossed through ground-floor windows once the cameras went dark. They had maybe a ninety-second window between the power dying and your system’s battery backup kicking in, and they used every second of it. They’re good.”
“We know,” Anja replied. “We’ve known that since the first break-in.”
“Yeah, well, now we’ve got bullet holes and a burned-down house to remind us.”
“The house was a total loss?” she asked.
“Pretty much. Luke and Logan dealt with the police to keep Leo’s name out of the investigation. Also, we’ve arranged for your Escalade and Leo’s vehicle to be moved into safekeeping.”
“Good. Thank you.”
“I’ll keep working the utility angle. There’s a paper trail behind that contractor account, and paper trails don’t disappear no matter how careful someone is. By the way, I ran the plate from the brown sedan outside the boutique yesterday.”
Anja had almost forgotten about it. Almost. “And?”
“Registered to a sixty-four-year-old dentist from St. Louis Hills. No criminal history or connection to Pinnacle, Shaw, or anyone else on our list. His credit card puts him at the wine bar while you were shopping.”
Remi glanced over. “Lunch meeting?”
“Apparently a very long one. He bought two bottles of cabernet and something called a truffle flatbread.”
Anja nodded. “Good.”
Leo looked between them. “You memorized the license plate of a random dentist while buying a dress?”
“Of course.”
Remi shrugged. “You get used to her.”
Tyler signed off. Anja had been turning something over since the drive out, a loose end from the wake that the fire and Leo’s injury had shoved to the back of her mind until now.
“There’s something I should’ve mentioned last night. Danica Webb cornered me at the wake before Curtis went down.”
Leo’s brow furrowed. “Danica? I saw her across the courtyard for about ten seconds.”
“She introduced herself, made small talk, and then asked if they’d taken anything from the break-in.” Leo’s face changed from confusion to anger. “She wasn’t the least bit vague. She used the word apartment specifically.”
“I told no one at Pinnacle about it. Not even Curtis. How would Danica know?”
“She told me that Marcy mentioned you were dealing with a security issue.” Anja held his gaze. “You told her you were working from home to keep your head down before the wake, and that’s all she thinks this is.”
“So Danica lied to cover how she actually knew.”
Anja hated to do this to Leo. “Or Marcy did say that, and she knows more than she’s admitted.”
Leo winced. “Not Marcy.”
“Until we clear her, she’s a suspect. Either way, it means Danica Webb had specific knowledge about a break-in that only a handful of people knew about, and she readily volunteered it to me at a funeral.”
Remi crossed his arms. “Kellerman Gates is one of the three agencies repping athletes on that drive.”
“Which means she’s not just a rival agent making conversation.” Anja pushed off the counter. “She’s either directly involved, or in contact with someone who is.”
“Do we confront her?” Leo asked.
“I want to sit across a table from her and watch her explain herself in real time. People slip when they’re not expecting the question.
” Anja reached for her phone, mentally mapping the drive back into Clayton in the morning and the best approach to the Kellerman Gates offices that would allow them to walk in without announcing themselves.
“I’ll call Tyler back, have him pull her schedule for today, find out where—”
Her phone buzzed with Tyler’s ringtone before she could dial. She activated the speakerphone.
“What’s up?”
“I’ve set up alerts for some of the people we’ve talked about, and I just got a ping.”
“Who is it?”
“Danica Webb.”
Anja’s gaze snapped to Leo. “I was just getting ready to call you about her schedule for today.”
“Yeah, that’s not going to happen. There was an accident last night around one in the morning, not long after the wake broke up. Her car went off Highway 40, hit a retaining wall, and burst into flames.” His pause told her what was coming next. “She was pronounced dead at the scene.”
Leo’s jaw dropped, and Remi’s arms uncrossed slowly.
“The initial police report says there are no skid marks or any indication she braked before impact.” Tyler let that sit. “I know how that sounds.”
It sounded like Danica Webb had known something she shouldn’t have, revealed too much to the wrong person, and within hours had been erased from the equation entirely. “She wasn’t just talking to someone inside this. She was a loose end.”
“And somebody just proved how efficiently they clean those up,” Remi murmured, his expression grim.
Anja thanked Tyler and set her phone down on the counter, her mind racing ahead to what this meant. Another person was gone before she could get answers. Another door had slammed shut before Anja finished knocking.
Whoever was running this had heard about Danica’s conversation at the wake fast enough to act on it within hours. Somebody in that courtyard reported straight back to the person giving the orders.
#
Leo woke to an arm that throbbed in time with his pulse. He lay still for a minute, cataloging the ache and the unfamiliar room. He’d managed four hours of sleep, maybe five, thanks to the drugs Remi gave him for the pain.
Leo sat up slowly, favoring the bandaged arm, and eased on one of the shirts Remi had purchased. His shoulder complained the whole way down the hall.
Anja wasn’t in the bedroom she’d claimed. He found her in the kitchen instead, hunched over her laptop at the island. Morning light came through the window behind her, catching the side of her face, and for a second he just stood in the doorway and watched her work.
Then he noticed the tension in her shoulders. That couldn’t be good.
“You look like you’re about to tell me something I don’t want to hear.”
Her head came up. Whatever she’d been reading, she didn’t close it, but her hand hovered near the trackpad as though she was considering it. “You should be asleep.”
“So should you.” He crossed the kitchen and lowered himself onto the stool across from her, wincing when the movement pulled at the stitches. “What did you find?”
“It can wait until you’ve had coffee.”
“Anja.”
She turned the laptop so he could see it. “I pulled financial records on Marcy. I wasn’t expecting to find anything.” She tapped the trackpad, and a spreadsheet of transaction dates filled the screen.
A cold unease moved through him. “You went through Marcy’s finances?”
She didn’t flinch from his stare. “There’s an account registered in the Caymans under a false name. There was no sophistication to it, so it wasn’t difficult to find.”
“How much are we talking about?”
“Eleven deposits over the last fourteen months. Twenty to thirty thousand each, divided into smaller transfers and routed through different originating accounts to avoid drawing attention.” She let that sit for a second.
“Unless you’re extraordinarily generous with your bonuses, Leo, this looks like someone being extremely careful to hide money. ”
He pushed a hand through his hair, wincing again when the motion tugged at his arm. “Marcy’s been my assistant for six years. She remembers my clients’ kids’ birthdays.”
“I know.”
“She’s not selling me out to whoever’s doing this.”
“I didn’t say she was. But there is an offshore account with a quarter-million dollars in it that she’s gone to a lot of trouble to keep invisible.
I don’t get to ignore that because I like her.
” Anja closed the laptop halfway, as if she needed the screen out of the conversation for a second.
“That doesn’t change what the numbers say. ”
Leo sat with it, turning the timeline over. “Fourteen months ago.” He looked up. “That’s before Vic.”
“I noticed that too.”
“Whatever this is started before she had any reason to be involved in what’s happening now.”
“She might be involved in something else entirely. Or this only looks unrelated because we don’t know what it is yet.
” Anja rubbed a thumb along the edge of a coffee mug without lifting it.
“I want to be wrong about this. I’m hoping there’s some boring explanation that has nothing to do with you or Pinnacle or any of it. ”
“But you don’t think there is.”
“I think we won’t know until we ask her, and that conversation will feel like an accusation no matter how delicate we are about it.” She met his gaze, and the exhaustion under her eyes had nothing to do with the last twelve hours. “I didn’t want to tell you before you’d even had coffee.”
Leo exhaled slowly, the ache in his arm suddenly the least of it. “When do we confront her?”
“We wait until she leaves work.”
“And if it’s not nothing?”
She didn’t answer that. She didn’t have to.