Chapter Eighteen
Anja woke before sunrise, tangled in sheets that weren’t hers, with Leo’s good arm curled loosely around her shoulders. For a few seconds she let herself breathe him in.
Leo stirred beneath her, his hand trailing down her spine. “Morning.”
She propped herself up on an elbow to look at him, and he smiled sleepily.
“You’re staring.”
“I’m cataloging. There’s a difference.” She traced a slow finger along his jaw. “Making sure all the pieces are still where I left them.”
“They are.” He caught her hand and pressed a kiss to her palm, his eyes darkening in a way she recognized. Then he shifted closer and drew her against him with his good arm. “Come here.”
“Leo.” She planted a hand flat against his chest before he could close the last inch of distance between them. “Your arm—”
“Is fine,” he interrupted.
“You have stitches from a gunshot wound.” She held her ground even as his mouth found the curve of her neck, his stubble scraping deliciously against her skin.
It took more discipline than she wanted to admit not to give in.
“If you tear those open because you couldn’t control your sex drive, Remi is going to sew you back up with considerably less sympathy than he showed you the first time. ”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“I won’t.” Her voice cracked despite her best efforts to keep it level.
“I keep seeing it. The second before you went down behind that wall, when I didn’t know yet if it was your arm or worse.
I need a minute where I’m not asking you to move fast or bleed carefully.
Just this.” She rested her head back against his chest, over the reassuring drum of his heart, and felt his good arm tighten around her.
“Let me hold you. That’s all I want this morning. ”
He didn’t argue. His hand found her hair instead, fingers combing slowly through it. The early light gathered at the edges of the curtains while the house held its breath around them.
It was Anja who reluctantly spoke first. “We should get up before Remi decides we’ve overslept and starts pounding on doors.”
“Five more minutes.”
She pressed a kiss to his sternum and made herself sit up and reach for the shirt draped over the footboard.
By the time they made it downstairs, something electronic was humming in the office down the hall. Remi stood in the doorway, a mug in one hand and an expression that stopped Anja halfway across the kitchen.
“There you are.” He set the mug down. “I was about to come drag you both out of bed. You need to see this.”
“See what?” Leo asked.
“Tyler’s overnight delivery showed up around five. I signed for it so neither of you had to peel yourselves out of bed.” Remi fought a grin, letting her know he knew they’d slept together. Again. “After I set it up, I was doing some research and stumbled onto something.”
“You did?” Anja moved down the hallway, coffee forgotten.
“I think I found our guy.” Remi followed her in, Leo close behind, and dropped into the chair in front of the monitor.
“For the heck of it, I culled every red-light and speed camera within a two-mile radius of the hotel in Kansas City where Vic Shaw supposedly committed suicide. Most municipalities archive that footage for citations, and it sits in a database somewhere, waiting for somebody patient enough to go looking.”
Remi’s fingers moved across the keyboard, and a grainy image filled the screen, timestamped in the corner.
“This one’s from an intersection four blocks from the hotel.
It caught a car running the light at 11:40 that night.
The system flags it automatically and snaps a photo of the driver for the citation. ”
Anja leaned in to study the image. The photo caught a man behind the wheel, mid-glance toward the rearview mirror.
He was dressed in black, his face lit harshly and unflatteringly by the flash.
His eyes were wide, his mouth firm, an expression that had nothing to do with getting caught running a light and everything to do with something far worse.
“Same night Vic died.” Remi let that sit for a beat. “Same four-block radius as the hotel where they found him. He looks pretty damn guilty to me.”
Leo stiffened beside her.
“That’s Brad.” The words emerged as a croak, so he cleared his throat and tried again. “That’s Brad Hatton.”
“You’re sure? It’s not a great photo.”
“I’d recognize that face anywhere.” Leo’s hands curled into fists at his sides, the color draining slowly from his face as the implication hit him.
“Son of a bitch. He told everyone at the wake that Vic’s death didn’t sit right with him.
He stood right there in that courtyard talking about how it made little sense. ”
“Misdirection,” Anja murmured. “Or guilt dressed up as concern so nobody would look twice.”
“He was in Kansas City the night Vic died.” Leo dragged a hand down his face. “Dressed to avoid recognition. Running a light because he couldn’t get out of there fast enough.”
“It’s not proof he killed him,” Anja warned, though her pulse had picked up the second the photo appeared, “but it’s the first hard evidence we’ve got.
It puts someone we know in the same city on the same night.
Everything else has been financial trails and suspicious timing.
This is a face on a camera, four blocks from a dead man’s hotel. ”
“He sat at my table.” Leo’s jaw worked. “He toasted Devonte’s contracts and laughed with Curtis for twenty years. And the whole time—”
“We have nothing solid yet.” Anja touched his arm gently. “All we know is that he was there. We don’t know why or what he did once he arrived. That’s the next thing we find out.”
Remi sat back from the keyboard, arms crossed, studying the frozen image of Brad Hatton’s frightened face. “Question is whether we pull everything we can on him under the radar, or we go bang on his door and watch what happens to that expression when he realizes we’ve seen it.”
“Under the radar.” Anja didn’t hesitate. “The last person who knew too much ended up smashed against a retaining wall. I’m not handing Brad Hatton a reason to panic until we understand what had him scared.”
Leo looked back at the screen, at the man he’d known for years frozen mid-flinch beneath a traffic camera’s flash, and said nothing at all.
#
Leo stood in the kitchen, working through years of memories with a magnifying glass he wished he didn’t need.
Brad Hatton had been at his draft party.
He’d bought him a bourbon the night Leo’s first big contract closed and told him, with genuine warmth in his voice, that he’d known Leo would make it from the day Curtis brought him into the office.
Brad had laughed too loudly at every dinner table Leo had ever shared with him, and repeated the same Tampa story dozens of times.
He complained about his golf handicap and his daughter’s tuition and Renee’s spending habits as if he had nothing worse to hide than a mediocre short game.
“You’ve gone quiet.” Anja appeared at his elbow with two bottles of water and handed him one. “That’s usually a bad sign with you.”
“I keep replaying every conversation I’ve ever had with him, looking for the seam.” Leo took a drink without really tasting it. “There isn’t one. He’s good. He’s really good.”
“People who are adept at lying get that way because it doesn’t cost them anything. That’s not a reflection on your judgment, Leo. That’s how a sociopath looks.”
“I liked him.” The words came out rough.
“That’s the part that’s eating at me. Not that he might be dangerous.
He could be a braggart and obnoxious enough to make you roll your eyes so hard you’d get a headache, but I liked him.
I toasted his birthday and his achievements and never once felt the thing I am right now. ”
“You’ll see it next time.” She spoke gently, but there was no sugar-coating the truth underneath it. “You need to trust your gut a little less and the evidence a little more.”
Remi’s voice carried from the office. “If you two are done processing feelings, you might want to see what Tyler just sent.”
They found Remi hunched over the monitor, a fresh window open, rows of numbers scrolling past too fast to read. Tyler’s face filled a box in the corner, and even compressed through a webcam feed, he looked wired.
“I’ve been combing through Brad Hatton’s finances,” Tyler began.
“I want to be upfront that this took me longer than it should have, and that’s not something I admit often.
For most people, I’m in and out of an offshore trail in under an hour.
Not to brag, but it’s usually under ten minutes.
I see the same standard shell companies, layering, and mistakes, because most people who launder money aren’t professionals.
They’re greedy bastards and bastardesses .
. . is that a word?” He shook his head. “Anyway, I should’ve closed this out by lunch, but whoever set it up knew exactly how people like me look for money.
I almost missed it. I want you to sit with that for a second.
This job is my life. I do this for a living, and I just about walked away thinking Brad Hatton was clean, because whoever set up his accounts nested them so deep behind four different jurisdictions, rotated the holding entities every eighteen months, and used a private banking relationship that doesn’t show up in any database I have legal access to.
I only found it because one of the shell names reused a registered agent from a case I worked two years ago in Belize.
That’s a coincidence I got lucky enough to catch. It shouldn’t have been detectable.”
“So somebody helped him hide it,” Anja concluded.