Chapter Seventeen
Anja stood in front of a bare wall in the Wildwood house’s office, arms crossed, taking stock of everything the fire had taken from her.
Four days of connections and photographs reduced to ash some firefighter had probably kicked aside in the rubble. She’d rebuilt worse from nothing before, but it still stung to start over. Especially now, with a body count that had jumped by one overnight.
“Tyler’s overnighting a new computer.” The office had one and a printer, but it lacked Tyler’s particular brand of digital paranoia.
Remi placed a fresh corkboard against the wall and leveled it.
“We’re not starting from zero.” He set a box of pushpins on the table in front of her. “I found these in a kitchen drawer.”
“Thanks.” Anja removed a pin and tacked the first sheet to the board, Danica Webb’s photo from the website, now with a date and a cause of death scrawled beneath it in black marker. “It sure feels like we’re starting over.”
An hour later, Leo came in, bracing one hand against the doorframe.
“Making progress?” He nodded at the half-rebuilt board.
“Getting there.”
He lowered himself into the nearest chair, favoring his good side. “I’ve been thinking about Marcy. I don’t want to confront her over the phone. I want to watch her face when we ask her about the account.”
“A phone call is faster and lower risk.” Anja took a pin from the box and secured Vic’s photo to the board. “If she’s involved, showing up at her house tips her off that we know more than we’re supposed to.”
“I’ve trusted this woman with my life. I want to see it face-to-face.
Besides, she’d hear something in my voice on the phone and know how much to feed me.
” He ran a hand through his hair, leaving strands sticking up in places.
“In person, she can’t control what her face does.
Neither can I, for that matter, but at least I’ll be looking at her when it happens. ”
Anja considered arguing further but let it go. He wasn’t wrong, and some decisions weren’t hers to overrule just because they carried risk.
“She gets home around six.” Leo checked his wrist out of habit, though his watch had probably been destroyed in the fire. “She’s lived in Kirkwood, in a brick house near the train station since before I started at Pinnacle.”
“We’ll give her time to get inside and relax. Remi drives. You’re not cleared for steering wheel duty with that arm, and I want eyes on the street the whole way there.”
#
Marcy’s motion-triggered porch light clicked on before they’d even reached the steps, and the door opened before they could knock.
She took one look at the three of them standing on her welcome mat, and her face went lax with relief. “Leo. Thank goodness. I’ve been calling since last night and getting nothing but voicemail.” She pulled him into a hug before he could stop her, both arms wrapping around his shoulders.
Anja watched him fail to swallow a hiss.
Marcy jerked back as if she’d been burned herself, hands hovering near his arm without touching it. “What was that? What’s wrong with your arm?”
“I got shot.”
“You got—” Her mouth dropped open. She glanced from Anja to Remi, then back at Leo, clearly expecting one of them to tell her it was a joke. “What do you mean you were shot? With a gun?”
“It’s a graze. I’m fine.”
“You are not fine. You were shot.” She pressed a hand flat to her chest, and her eyes went bright and wet in a way that no amount of professional discipline could have faked. “Get inside. All of you. Right now.”
Anja followed her into a tidy living room crowded with framed photographs and a recliner that had clearly molded itself to one specific person over a couple of decades.
Marcy fussed over Leo with unrehearsed panic.
She hadn’t seen this coming from any direction.
Whatever else Marcy Bell might be hiding, this reaction wasn’t manufactured.
Anja had spent a career reading people who lied for a living, and there was nothing in Marcy’s face but genuine shock.
“Sit.” Marcy pointed at the couch. “Somebody better start talking. Who shot you, Leo, and why do you all look like you’ve been awake for three days?”
Leo lowered himself onto the couch, and Anja took the chair across from him, close enough to watch Marcy’s reaction to what came next.
Leo inhaled deeply. “We need to ask you something, and I need you to know upfront that I hate asking it.”
Marcy’s expression shifted, wariness sliding in beneath the worry as she glanced between them. “Okay. Ask me what?”
“There’s an offshore account,” Anja kept her voice level, without accusation, just facts, “that traces back to you. Eleven deposits over the last fourteen months, all under reporting thresholds. We need to understand what that money is.”
The color drained out of Marcy’s face so fast Anja almost reached for her, worried she might go down.
“You looked into my finances?” Her voice cracked on the word finances, and it wasn’t outrage, not entirely. It was closer to betrayal. “Leo? You dug through my bank accounts? Why?”
“I had to.” Leo’s jaw tightened, and Anja could see how much the sentence cost him. “People are dying, Marcy. Somebody at Pinnacle knows things they shouldn’t, and I have to rule out everyone close to me, including you.”
“Including me.” She sank onto the arm of the recliner as if her legs had stopped fully cooperating. “You think I’d sell you out? That I could do something so heinous?”
“I didn’t want to think it.”
“But you did.”
Nobody responded because there wasn’t an answer that didn’t sound worse out loud.
“Leo, what’s going on?”
Anja told her, “It’s better that you don’t know the details right now.”
Headlights swept across the front window, and then a car door shut outside. Marcy’s head came up, some of the fight draining out of her posture. “That’s my sister. She stops by most evenings after her shift.”
The front door opened, and a woman close to Marcy’s age stepped inside, pausing when she registered the room full of strangers. “Oh, I didn’t realize you had company.” She retreated toward the door. “I’ll come back later, Marce.”
“Denise, wait.” Marcy pushed up from the recliner and caught her sister’s arm. “It’s fine. Come in. I need to talk to you.”
“Oh, Leo. Hi.” Denise walked over to him. “It’s so good to see you.”
Leo stood and hugged her, favoring his injured side. “Hey, Denise. It’s good to see you too.”
“Be careful of his arm,” Marcy warned.
Denise jumped back, her eyes shooting around the room, uncertainty tightening every line of her face. “What’s going on?”
“They found the account.” Marcy spoke gently. “The one in the Caymans.”
All the color that had drained from Marcy’s face rushed into her sister’s, before draining out at twice the speed. “They found it? What? How? Who else knows?” Denise’s gaze snapped from Leo to Remi standing near the doorway. “Marcy, who are these other people?”
“They’re helping Leo with something dangerous.” Marcy kept her voice gentle, as if she were talking a spooked animal back from a ledge. “My finances got swept up in it by accident. That’s all. Nobody here cares about your money, Denise. I promise you that.”
Denise teetered on the edge of hysteria. “You can’t promise that if you don’t know these people.”
“You know Leo.” Marcy’s hand tightened on her sister’s arm. “I trust him with things I wouldn’t trust most people with. If he needs to know why I’ve been holding your money, then we’ll tell him, and it stops there. Nobody outside this room hears about you or Roy or any of it.”
Denise’s eyes filled, and she looked at the floor instead of meeting any of their gazes. “I didn’t want anyone to know.”
“I know.” Marcy pulled her sister into the space beside her on the recliner’s arm, an old, practiced gesture of sisterly affection. “But it’s out now, and the only thing left to do is tell the story and trust that these are good people.”
#
The forty-minute drive back to Wildwood was mostly silent. Leo spent the entire trip replaying the look on Marcy’s face when she had realized what he’d done.
He hated it. Hated that he’d had to sit on her couch and watch a woman he cared about come apart because he’d investigated her bank accounts behind her back.
He loathed that her sister’s marriage had gotten dragged into a conversation about murder and blackmail because a Pinnacle client had been threatened.
Mostly, he hated that none of it had been unfair to do.
They had needed the answer, and now they had it.
Unfortunately, the having of it didn’t make the getting of it hurt any less.
They’d stayed another twenty minutes after Denise calmed down enough to explain the fourteen months of cash she’d hidden away so she could leave her controlling, verbally abusive husband.
Marcy had set up an account with a name she’d found in a legal thriller because she liked how official it sounded.
Marcy had finally stopped scowling at Leo as if he were a monster, but something in the room hadn’t fully repaired itself yet.
Before they left, he’d pulled her aside in the kitchen, out of earshot of the others.
“You could’ve told me about Denise. About all of it.”
“I could’ve.” Marcy folded a dish towel with more precision than the task required, not meeting his eyes. “It wasn’t my secret to hand out, Leo. It was hers. I’ve kept plenty of things off my desk over the years that weren’t mine to file.”
“If I’d known, I could’ve helped.”
“I know you would have.” She looked up, and a closer version of herself that ran his calendar and remembered his clients’ birthdays returned to her face.
“That’s rather the problem with you, isn’t it?
You’d have tried to fix it, and some things aren’t yours to fix.
My sister needed someone she could trust. She didn’t need another man deciding how to handle her marriage. ”
The words weren’t delivered harshly, but they landed like a physical slap nonetheless. He didn’t have a response for that, so he let it sit.