Chapter Twenty-One #3
The parking garage air hit sharp and cold after the hospital’s climate-controlled warmth, and Anja boosted him into the Escalade’s passenger seat, tucking the seatbelt carefully across his bandaged side before he could yank it tight himself.
“You’re worse than my mother,” Remi muttered.
“Your mother sounds like a woman of excellent judgment.”
Remi glanced into the back seat and winced. “I’ve got to get that cleaned.”
They exited the garage a little past 6:30, the sky mellowing at the edges with the promise of dawn.
Anja kept the radio off and her eyes on the road, running through a mental list of everything they needed to do.
Quietly persistent underneath all of it were three words she still hadn’t found a way to answer.
They were fifteen minutes from the safe house, deep into a stretch of county road that wound through Wildwood’s tree cover, when her phone rang through the SUV’s speakers. Tyler’s name lit up the dashboard display.
“Tyler.” She kept her eyes on the road. “You’re up early even for you.”
“I never went to sleep.” Tyler’s voice came through with a wired, exhausted edge that told her how many hours he’d logged since Brad Hatton’s photo first hit his screen.
“I kept thinking about how long it took me to find his accounts. Nine hours, Anja. I told you that bothered me, and it’s been sitting wrong ever since, so I kept digging after we hung up. ”
“You didn’t sleep at all?”
“Sleep felt optional once I found the second layer. Here’s the thing.
Brad’s concealment was good. Professional-grade.
But there’s always a signature, a fingerprint the person doing it doesn’t even know they’re leaving behind, because everybody who builds something builds it a little bit like themselves whether they mean to or not. ”
“Tyler.”
“I’m getting there. I promise. I started backtracking the registered agents, the shell structures, and the rotation schedule on the holding entities, looking for anywhere the same fingerprint showed up on money that wasn’t Brad’s.
It took me more hours than I care to admit, but I found it.
The exact same concealment architecture and rotation pattern was moving a completely separate stream of money that’s been running for years longer than Brad’s ever did. ”
In the passenger seat, Remi sat up straight, the drugs burning off fast under the weight of Tyler’s tone.
“Whose money?” Anja asked, though something cold had invaded her limbs before she’d even finished asking it.
“That’s what took the last two hours. Untangling whose name sits at the top of it.” Tyler exhaled, and even through the speakers, she could hear him bracing for what came next. “I found the ringleader, Anja. The person running this whole thing. Not the middle management. The head of it.”
Anja’s grip tightened on the wheel. Beside her, Remi shifted, his eyes fixed on the dashboard display, willing Tyler to spit the name out faster.
“It’s not Brad,” she said slowly, testing the ground before she let herself step onto it.
“Oh, no. Much bigger. It’s Curtis Lennox.”
The world tilted completely off its axis. The wheel jerked hard under Anja’s grip as the Escalade swerved toward the shoulder, gravel spraying up under the tires.
“Anja!” Remi’s grunt cut through the ringing in her ears as he slammed into the door, his hand shooting out to brace against the dash.
She wrenched the wheel back, overcorrecting, the SUV fishtailing once before she forced it straight, her pulse hammering so hard she could feel it behind her eyes.
Beside her, Remi had gone pale beneath his hospital pallor, one hand pressed hard against his bandaged side where the seatbelt had cinched tight against the wound.
“Sorry.” The word tried to come and died in her throat, because “sorry” belonged to a world where the ground hadn’t just dropped out from under both of them. She couldn’t force air past the horror crashing through her fast enough to manage even that much.
Leo.
He’d left the hospital over an hour ago with a rideshare and a hopeful heart, walking straight into that man’s house to deliver devastating news in person because he loved him like a father.
Leo was alone, unarmed, and sitting across a desk from the actual architect of everything that had happened.
He would break the news that his fixer was dead and the operation was unraveling, with absolutely no idea that the monster in the room was the one behind the desk and not the one they’d already caught.
“Anja? You still there? I know it’s a lot, but honestly, it’s a good thing I caught this while he’s in the hospital. If we’d waited even another day—”
“He’s out.” The words scraped out of her raw and shaking, the only two she could manage.
A beat of silence crackled through the line. “What?”
“Curtis isn’t in the hospital anymore.” Anja’s voice climbed, cracking around the edges as the full weight of it consumed her. “Leo is with him. Right now.”
“Oh my God. Anja, get him out of there. Get him out of there right now.”