Chapter Eleven
Inferno
Knight’s office was quiet as I walked inside. Four screens cast pale blue light across the desk where Knight sat, his black-sclera eyes tracking lines of code or whatever the fuck it was he did in here.
I dropped the receipt on the desk in front of him, the one with Triad Holdings Nashville written in Juniper’s tight, angry script, the broker’s number underneath.
“You get anywhere with this?” I asked.
Knight picked up the receipt without looking away from his center screen, where a spreadsheet was scrolling too fast for me to track.
“Been on it since you texted the number this morning.” His fingers moved across the keyboard, quick and precise.
“Triad Holdings LLC. Registered in Tennessee, filed three months ago. The registered agent is a filing service out of Delaware that fronts for about four hundred shell companies at any given time. No property holdings. No financing on record. No lender. No acquisitions in the Charlotte Avenue corridor or anywhere else in Davidson County.”
“Empty shell.”
“Completely.” He swiveled in his chair to face me.
The glacial blue of his eyes looked almost silver against the black of his tattooed scleras, and the effect was still unsettling no matter how many times I saw it.
“The broker’s legitimate, though. David Mercer.
Been in commercial real estate for twelve years.
Clean record. He was hired by a client he’s never met in person.
Communicates by email and phone. Pays his retainer by wire transfer from a business account that, coincidentally, also traces back to another shell. ”
I leaned against the wall beside his desk. The cool of the cinder block seeped through my shirt. “So Brett’s covered his tracks.”
“Brett’s smarter than I gave him credit for.
” Knight tapped a key and a new window opened on his right-hand screen.
A list of transactions, dates, amounts. “The shell does leave something behind, though. Filing fees. State fees. The credit card that paid them.” He highlighted a line.
“A prepaid Visa ending in 4419 was used to pay the initial filing for Triad Holdings three months ago,” Knight continued.
“Bought with cash at a gas station in Brentwood. The clerk remembers the sale because it was a five-hundred-dollar card and the guy paid in twenties. Young guy, the clerk said. I don’t think this is our man. ”
I stared at the numbers on the screen. “So we’ve got nothing.”
“I didn’t say that.” Knight pulled up another window.
A different list. Different transactions.
“Same card. Three months and four days ago. Paid a data broker called UrbanMetrics for property records, tax assessments, and ownership history on…” He squinted as he counted.
“Eight buildings on Charlotte Avenue. Your girl’s bakery is number three on the list.”
Three months put him squarely in her apartment. Sleeping in her bed. Eating at her table. Watching her get up at three-thirty in the morning and come home covered in flour. The man had been casing her building while he was still fucking her.
I’d seen a lot of ugly in my life. Fire doesn’t discriminate. It burns the innocent and the guilty with the same indifference. But this, planning the demolition of someone’s life while pretending to love them, this was a special kind of cruelty I hadn’t been prepared for.
“Three months,” I said. My voice sounded flat even to my own ears. “He was still there three months ago.”
Knight didn’t answer, but the dates on the screen said everything.
The doorframe darkened. Tiny stood in the opening, his massive shoulders nearly spanning the width. The mohawk was freshly buzzed, the braided beard hanging to the middle of his chest. “You got something,” he said. Not a question.
“Maybe.” I straightened and crossed my arms. “The storage fire two years ago. The ex-girlfriend’s unit.” Tiny nodded slowly. “Who sells accelerant off the books in this town?” I asked. “Where does someone go when they don’t want anything on paper or a camera?”
Knight gave me a grin. “I think I know just the place.”
Tiny nodded, then looked at me. “You ready?” I nodded. “Then let’s go have a conversation with the bastard,” he said.
Before I left with Tiny, I stopped and turned back to Knight. “Will you see if Darby will stay with Juniper? She was asleep when I left, but I don’t want her to wake up alone.”
Knight gave me a nod. “Yeah, man. I’ll get Lavender to go with her.” He grinned. “Besides, you know how the old ladies are. They form en masse at the first sign one of their own needs backup.”
“Yeah.” I grinned when I didn’t feel like it. Not because of the women circling the wagons, but at the thought of them considering Juniper my old lady. “They definitely do that.”
Tiny and I took an older model Bronco to the storage yard south of the river where the city stopped and the industrial parks took over.
It sat at the other end of the city away from our warehouses, thank God, with a fenced lot between a defunct machine shop and a rail spur that hadn’t seen a train in a decade.
Gravel crunched under the tires as we rolled through the gate.
The chain-link was topped with razor wire that had rusted to the color of old blood.
Someone had hung a NO TRESPASSING sign with a bullet hole through the O.
Tiny killed the engine, and we sat for a moment in the silence.
The yard was laid out in rows of shipping containers and conex boxes, some stacked two high, forming narrow alleys between them.
A single light pole at the far end threw a weak yellow glow over everything, turning the shadows between the containers into pools of absolute dark.
“There,” Tiny said, nodding toward the back row. A conex box with its door rolled halfway up. Light spilled from inside, and the faint sound of a radio playing classic rock filtered through the evening air.
We got out of the truck together and took a slow pace, careful to keep our footsteps on the gravel as quiet as we could.
The man inside the conex heard us coming.
The radio cut off mid-chorus. He was waiting in the doorway when we reached him, a thin guy in his fifties with a salt-and-pepper beard and the wary eyes of someone who’d survived certain death.
He knew who we were. More importantly, he knew what we were, and what that meant for men in his position.
“Gentlemen,” he said. His voice was steady. His Adam’s apple bobbed when he swallowed.
Tiny stepped forward and put one hand on the man’s shoulder.
The gesture looked almost friendly unless you were standing where I was standing, where you could see the way Tiny’s fingers dug into the trapezius muscle just enough to communicate that the friendly part was optional.
“We need to know about your cash sales,” Tiny said.
His voice was low and measured, the way he always talked.
No threat in it, but with his size, there wasn’t really a need for threats.
“Over the past three weeks. One customer in particular. Well-spoken. Paid extra not to be asked questions.”
The man looked at Tiny’s hand on his shoulder, then at Tiny’s face, then at me.
“It was you guys. Wasn’t it. At éclipse.
You know. That night.” He didn’t elaborate, but the way his face had gone pale and he broke out into a sweat said he was more afraid of the bloodbath before the bonfire than the destruction of the building itself.
“I’m not asking again.”
He swallowed, nodding rapidly. “Three transactions,” he said.
“Same guy each time. Dark hair, in his thirties, and dressed like he had money.
He never gave a name, paid in cash, and always paid more than the asking.
The first time, he wanted accelerant. Five gallons of the good stuff so it burned hot and fast and completely.
He knew what he wanted. Knew the terminology.
“Second time he wanted a stack of burner phones,” he continued.
“He paid triple the going rate.” The man’s eyes flicked between us as I spoke.
“Last time was Tuesday. Came in just after dark. Bought more accelerant. And…” He paused.
Swallowed again. “And he asked for trackers. GPS units. The small, magnetic kind. I had two in stock, and he took both.”
“Did he say what they were for?” I asked.
The man shook his head. “Paid not to ask, remember? That was the arrangement. I don’t ask, he pays premium. Clean and simple.”
“Not so clean,” Tiny said. His hand was still on the man’s shoulder. His voice hadn’t changed. “Not so simple either.”
The man held Tiny’s gaze for a long moment, then looked down at the ground between his boots. “I’m out of the game, man. Whatever this is, I don’t want any part of it. You can have the rest of my stock if you want it. On the house. Just let me walk away from this.”
Tiny took his hand off the man’s shoulder. Stepped back. “Keep your shit. We’re not here for that.”
We turned and walked back to the truck in silence.
The gravel underfoot sounded louder than it had on the way in.
Everything I’d just learned ran through my mind, trying to fit into some kind of puzzle in my head I couldn’t quite see.
Five gallons of accelerant, twice. Burner phones.
Trackers. A man confident in what he was doing because he’d done it before.
Two years ago. In a storage unit that belonged to an ex-girlfriend. Fuck.
Tiny pulled the door handle and paused with one foot on the running board. He looked at me over the roof of the cab, his face half in shadow from the weak yard light.
“What does a real estate agent need with trackers, Inferno?”
I didn’t have an answer. The question hung heavy with implication between us in the cooling air. Brett had bought trackers. Two of them. Which meant somewhere, on Juniper’s car or on her person, there might already be a magnetic disc the size of a quarter telling him exactly where she was.