Chapter 16
Sixteen
Ella
An hour after Kingston helped me blow off steam by blowing him , Sebastian comes home. His hazel eyes are guarded, and he holds himself stiffly.
“Was Helena Tran that bad?” I ask.
He jerks out of his brooding focus, then shakes his head with a sheepish expression. “No, she was great, actually. She’s my new agent. I have to text Pat to say thanks for the rec, later.”
“That’s great, congrats,” I say.
A part of me should be jealous, right? That it’s so easy for him to see his music dreams come true.
But as I examine the feelings of my heart, all I find is happiness for him.
This dear man has been through so much shit because of Trina, and then he got stabbed because of me. It’s about time he had some luck.
Kingston says, “Congrats.”
“Thanks.” Sebastian disappears into the kitchen and I hear the sounds of the sink.
A minute later, he comes into the living room with a glass of water and sits down opposite Kingston and me.
Twisting the glass around in his hands, he says, “So…I talked to Lin after my meeting with Helena. And she dropped quite a bombshell in my lap.”
I don’t know that I can handle another bombshell, and I tense up against Kingston. He rubs my arm, soothing, reminding me of his guarding presence.
“What did she say?” I whisper.
Leaning forward, Sebastian puts his hand on my knee. “She learned that your former building manager didn’t die by his own hand.”
“Bryan didn’t kill himself?” I ask.
Sebastian shakes his head, and I try to process the news.
“Tell me it was just a random, horrible fight in jail,” I say.
Sebastian shakes his head. “Whoever killed him put in some effort to make it look like a suicide. And then the guards who were on duty that night all resigned, then disappeared.”
His words flow like muted bass notes, so low it’s hard for me to pull out the meaning and melody.
Put in effort. Made it look like suicide. Guards resigned. Disappeared.
“So it’s a cover-up,” I say.
It sounds so dramatic, so surreal, especially when I’ve been sitting here in Kingston’s arms, trying to enjoy a quiet evening.
And while I’m thinking of conspiracy theories, the idea it’s a cover-up leads me to consider what it could be a cover-up for . That Bryan wasn’t watching me simply for his own creepy reasons—although that could’ve been part of it, too—but someone put him up to it.
Who could have put him up to it? I have one guess.
“Joel knew about my keyboard,” I say. “He knew where it was, and he shouldn’t have known, because he never came into my apartment.”
Kingston nods. “That equipment Crowley was using was pretty fucking expensive. Nobody ever said how he could afford it.”
“So he was working for Joel,” Sebastian says, looking disgusted.
“Or possibly his mom and stepdad,” Kingston adds. “But Joel was involved if he knew about Ella’s keyboard. We have to talk to Detective Baldwin about this.”
I nod. “Yeah.”
Kingston grabs his phone and dials the detective, but hangs up after a few moments. “No answer. I’ll try again later.”
The three of us just look at each other. Everything is so fucked up—Bryan’s death, Kristin’s kidnapping. When did my life become a murder mystery, with corporate espionage?
Not only that, physical shivers take me as I think about Joel watching whatever footage was gathered from my apartment. My apartment was my home, the refuge where I could let down my guard. It was where I allowed myself to be comfortable.
I’m glad I moved in with Kingston. I’m glad I don’t have to go back to that place after knowing Joel set up cameras to watch me there.
“You’re shaking, baby girl,” Kingston says.
I shrug. I don’t know how to explain it to them.
But I don’t have to. Kingston lifts me up and over to his lap, where he cradles me. I breathe in his warm, comforting scent, reminding myself that we’re safe here, that no one could get in and put up cameras, and these men would never let anything happen to me.
“Wait a minute,” I say, remembering how Joel barged in here one night—that first night I slept with Kingston and Sebastian. “Is this place safe from cameras? Joel had access.”
Kingston holds me tighter. “I had the entire penthouse and elevator professionally searched after what happened to your apartment. Not because I thought Joel had anything to do with it, but because I wanted to reassure you, if it ever came up, that the place is clean. I revoked Joel’s access back in January. ”
Sighing, I snuggle against him. We remain like that, with Sebastian on the other couch, just quietly being together. None of us is comfortable with everything that has gone down, but there’s something comforting about sitting with these men, even though none of us is talking.
After a few minutes, Kingston’s phone buzzes with a call.
“It’s Baldwin,” Kingston says, swiping his phone screen to answer. “Kingston Tyler here.”
A brief pause while Baldwin talks on the other end of the line.
Kingston responds, “No, I was calling about something else—Bryan Crowley, the apartment manager—wait—what?”
The shock is evident in his voice, and alarm travels through me, potent as tequila.
“What is it?” I ask, squeezing his hand. “What happened?”
“Kristin is back,” he says. “She’s alive. Baldwin wants me to come into the station and go over a few things.”
“They…don’t think you did this, do they?” Sebastian asks.
“No. At least, I don’t think so. He wants to talk about my ex-wife and her husband.”
He puts on a pair of dark jeans and a button-up shirt. I go with him to the bedroom as he dresses and stand on my tiptoes to run my fingers through his hair, which is a little mussed from his swim.
“Are you going to be okay, Daddy?” I ask. “Do you want us to go with you? We will.”
“I’m going to be fine, little one.” He bends and kisses my cheek, then leaves.
I curl up with Sebastian, watching the elevator for a long time and hoping that everything goes all right for Kingston. Kristin has been found, and I can only hope this is the first step to resolving all of this drama.
Kingston
The night air cools my face as I walk from my car to the station. Lin is standing out front, and I wave her down so we go in together.
“What are you doing here?” I ask her.
“Baldwin and I have been sharing notes on the investigations,” she says. “He called and said he has an update.”
When we get inside, Baldwin greets us and takes us into a conference room.
Several large whiteboards on wheels are shoved along the far wall.
Two of them are facing the room, and I recognize photos of Kristin, me, our office building, as well as images of some of my other employees…
and then, Rayanne, Steve, and Joel. Illegible notes are scrawled all over the boards, words squeezed together to fit, some crossed out, some circled.
“Where’s Kristin?” I ask.
“She’s okay,” Baldwin says. “She’s at the hospital for an evaluation, but she seems, on the surface, perfectly healthy.”
“Does she know who took her?” I ask.
“We found them at the same time as Kristin. Steve and Rayanne Hackler. We have them both in custody.”
“Rayanne? Steve?” I shake my head, because even though I had suspicions after learning Joel had been surveilling Ella’s apartment, this is a bit much. What in the actual fuck are they doing? “Kidnapping?”
Baldwin looks directly at me and says, “I need to know if you’re helping to hide your son.”
My mouth falls open. I don’t know how to respond. As soon as I gather my wits, I say, “Fuck, no. No . If he’s responsible for this, he can face the consequences. I don’t know where he is, and I certainly am not helping him evade the police.”
“Okay.” Baldwin nods. “Just making sure.”
I’m a little annoyed he would have to ask, but I can understand it’s his job.
“Did you find them after the voice recording I sent you?” I ask him.
Baldwin says, “We were already investigating the Hacklers, at that point. There were too many incidents, too much happening with your company at the center of it. While you didn’t think your ex-wife and her husband had much motive because of her own successful company, Perdure Pharma, we started looking into them at the urging of your private investigator. ”
“Perdure is worth hundreds of billions,” I say. “Tyler Analytics is insignificant compared to Perdure.”
He shakes his head at the same time Lin does, and he gestures for her to go ahead and speak.
“Perdure is getting dragged through the justice system, but so far they’ve managed to keep their problems out of the media,” Lin says.
“Their development of that ‘diet’ drug—Ruffexone—has led to fatal addictions and it’s alleged that the Hacklers were aware of and even encouraged its use despite Ruffexone’s highly addictive properties. ”
“The more we dug, and with the help of the Ironwood team,” Baldwin says, “the more we found for motives. Not only that, we were starting to put together that these incidents you’ve seen lately, aren’t isolated at all.
The only ones we can’t piece together are the bomb threat, and the stabbing of Sebastian Crown. ”
He gestures at the whiteboard and I go over to it, looking at it more carefully. In green boxes are the words BOMB THREAT, STABBING, KIDNAPPING, HACKING. I grab a marker and add CROWLEY’S MURDER and VIDEO SURVEILLANCE.
“What’s this for?” Baldwin says.
“Crowley was watching Ella’s apartment…for Joel—and probably for the Hacklers,” I say. “They knew she was connected to me, and were likely trying to get some dirt on us. They went through Ella because her apartment was low-security and easily accessed, unlike my penthouse.”
Baldwin says, “We’ll ask about that in interviews, and have our team do sweeps for electronic files and other receipts.”
I nod. Good. I want everything they’re responsible for to be pinned on them.
“The stabbing might not be them at all,” I add, “but you can ask about it. Ella thinks it’s related to her brother’s issues.”
Baldwin makes some notes on the whiteboard. “That still leaves the bomb threat. Other than being disruptive, what can it gain them? Kristin’s kidnapping threw a major wrench into your daily operations, and the attempted hack would have, as well. The fake bomb, though?”
“I want to show you something I noticed in video footage the day of,” Lin says, holding up her phone. “I just found it this afternoon and I’ve been puzzling over it.”
She types in a long-ass passcode and uses her thumbprint to open her phone. She doesn’t take any risks with her tech, it appears. A moment later, she’s typing in more codes and then accessing what I’m assuming is Ironwood’s files.
“Here it is,” she says, clicking on one.
A video pops up and begins playing. I see Kristin and me, as well as that other couple who worked in the building, coming down the stairs. The screen pans out because our cameras move from time to time, and a second later, we pass the bomb technicians who we spoke to on the stairway.
“Those two people here, in the gear.” She points at the male and female bomb techs who went past me and Kristin on the stairs to check the building. “They shouldn’t have been in there, and their uniforms don’t match anyone else’s.”
“Could you see where they went afterward?” I ask, but then I shake my head. “Never mind, I can guess. They went to the servers, didn’t they? The bomb threat was their way to access our servers, so they had a way to hack our system a few days later.”
“Yep,” Lin says. “Unfortunately, there’s no super clear shot of their faces, but we might be able to track them down with street cam footage, if it exists and if they didn’t evade it when they left the building later.”
“When you do find them, I bet you’ll learn the Hacklers hired them,” I say.
Baldwin nods. “This is helpful stuff, thank you both. Kingston, I’d like a list of places you think Joel might hide out, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course. Happy to help.”
I write down the different properties that I’m aware of. The home in Tahoe where he frequently stays. Another vacation home in Malibu, which he usually avoids. There’s a boat house in Tahoe, as well.
“I own a house in Mirarosa,” I add, “and Joel has come to stay with me there before. I don’t know if he still has access, but…
actually, here.” I pull up the security app on my phone and access the house’s system.
The alarm hasn’t been disengaged since Sebastian left, and I show the app to Baldwin and Lin. “Looks like he isn’t there.”
“Let me know if that changes,” Baldwin says. “In the meantime, we’ll look into the other properties.”
“There are probably more that I don’t even know about,” I say.
Baldwin grimaces. “We’ll check their property tax records and other financials. As far as vehicles, what we have on file for him is a silver Porsche Spyder.”
“Yes, as far as I know, that’s his only car,” I say. It’s the same as mine, because I got it for him as a gift when he liked mine so much.
There’s nothing more I can do, and Baldwin tells me so. I look at my phone. Only about an hour has passed, but it feels like days. All I want to do is go home and cuddle with Ella.
I knew Rayanne was slimy and conniving, but I wouldn’t have pegged her for a kidnapper.
She wanted to mess with my company, put Joel back in so she could have access.
My ex-wife, our son, and her husband are all seriously fucked up.