Chapter 32
Troy
I ACTUALLY WENT TO my office for something more than mail. My computer here had access to the police database, and I really needed it right now.
Lucius Blackwood might not be The Shade, but his was the only name Kiora and Eirlys could recall being dropped. If Kiora was a target because she knew too much, then this would be the guy she’d know too much about.
As I waited for the system to find me all the information on Lucius, I also started a search on Billy’s early life. I had checked all the connections I could while searching for Kiora, but I hadn’t considered going through the entirety of his childhood, only his teenage years.
Unsurprisingly, I found thousands of people with the name Blackwood, but only seven of them were Luciuses. Still, that was six too many. I needed to eliminate them.
I put Billy’s file and the seven Blackwoods into the program designed to compare backgrounds for commonalities. Two of the Blackwoods lived in the wrong country and got eliminated with the first scan. Then the search went deeper, looking at jobs, hobbies, even conferences they had attended. That’s when I hit the jackpot.
Billy had gone to preschool with Lucius Blackwood. I never would’ve even considered that a valid connection, considering Lucius moved to another state at the ripe old age of six. But then the two rented a car on the same day in the same dealership when they were in their forties. That would be a few months before Billy had tried to sell Kiora.
The reason for Lucius needing a car? He was in the US on vacation. His permanent residence was in Cancun.
I forwarded the information to Falls. He already knew that was the person Kiora and Eirlys remembered, so he would be looking into him on his end as well.
My office door swung open, and Dylan walked in with a tense smile and a, “You’re a hard man to find.”
“I’m literally in my office where I’m supposed to be during my work hours,” I pointed out.
“Exactly. You’re hard to find.”
“Needed to get away from the intensity at home?” I guessed.
He let out a breath. “Just needed to clear my head. I don’t know how to act around her. She’s my daughter, but she’s also twenty-two. It’s not like I can jump in and do my part in changing her diapers.”
I chuckled at that, imagining Dylan, the tall, ex-navy merman changing diapers. The fucker would probably be good at that, too.
Maybe, if he raised her here, with all of us around to watch her grow, like it always should’ve been, then I would’ve seen her as my best friend's baby girl and not as a smoking hot mermaid I wanted to do dirty things to.
“Try being her friend instead of her father,” I suggested. “Like you said, she’s a grown woman. She doesn’t need parenting.”
Dylan thought it over for a moment. “What if she doesn’t like me?”
That was not a sentiment I had ever heard coming from Dylan. He never cared what people thought about him. For a while there, he had been going through life, stuck in his own broody head, not even noticing people existed. Until he found Eirlys again. She brought him back to his normal self.
“Did she tell you to curl up in the corner and die yet?” I asked.
“No.”
“Then you’re good. If she doesn’t like you, she’ll tell you. That girl doesn’t hold back.” I loved that about her.
Loved. Seaweed on sticks, had I really fallen for her this fast? Yes. Yes, I had. But did she feel the same way? Even if she did, would she ever forgive me for keeping such monumental secrets from her?
My email dinged, and I opened it to find the very thing I had been hoping to—information on Lucius Blackwood. I sent it all to the printer, so I’d have an easier time organizing it, then gestured for Dylan to take a look.
“That’s our guy?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
Since Lucius was born in this country, he had been able to come and go whenever he wanted, and it looked like he took advantage of it, creating a predictable schedule. Every two months, he’d come here for one week, then go back to Mexico.
“Business dealings?” Dylan asked about the travel records.
“Has to be. It’s too regular to be anything else.” I pulled up the records I had been gathering while I searched for Kiora. “The last visit was to California, and they had an abnormal number of supes disappearing right before he came.”
I looked at the visit before that. Boston. Same thing. Supes had never gone missing in such large numbers except for the two weeks right before Lucius came for a visit.
Each time he came to the states, he went to a major city, and each time there was a spike right before his visit. He never went to the same city twice, and there were never any disappearances during his visits. Crafty bastard.
“That’s definitely our guy,” Dylan echoed my own thoughts.
Attaching my own records from each city, I emailed my findings back to Officer Falls. He was a smart guy. He’d find a way to use it.
“Kiora might not be satisfied just sitting around until someone else catches him,” I warned.
“You got to know her pretty well.” Dylan gave me a suspicious look.
Maybe bringing his daughter flowers hadn’t been my brightest idea, but I had seen them at the flower shop, and I hadn’t had the strength to resist buying them for her.
“We had a lot of time to talk about our likes and dislikes while we were in that cave,” I fibbed because while we had technically had enough time, we spent most of it in bed.
“Like what she would’ve ordered at the Magic Bean?” Dylan pushed.
“Funny story. Love Bites set her up on a blind date with Frank Keller. I was at the Magic Bean working when they met there. It didn’t go well.”
“And you just happened to remember what she ordered?”
Why was it so hard to bullshit my friend? Oh, right, because he knew me too well. My own guilty consciousness wasn’t helping, either.
“Only because Frank ordered her something she didn’t want, and she told him to kick rocks.” I wanted to wait a moment for Dylan’s reaction, but the guilty conscious made me add, “She went out on a dinner date with Olaf. He stormed out in a huff.”
Dylan cracked a smile at that. No one liked Olaf. He didn’t just give werewolves a bad name but also ruined the name of a beloved cartoon character. That was an unforgivable sin.
And then his smile slipped, and his eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute, didn’t you start using Love Bites? How exactly did you meet Kiora?”
Ah, shit. “On Main.” I wasn’t really lying. “She looked like she needed help, so I offered to help.”
The suspicious glint didn’t leave Dylan’s eyes. “So, she’s not the girl you met on Love Bites who likes Hello Kitty?”
Fuuuuck.
“Love Bites never set us up on a date.” Still not lying, but I wasn’t all that honest either, and I really hated that. “They tried to, but I told them she was too young for me.”
“She is.”
Damn. I was treading dangerous waters here, and I didn’t even know if Kiora wanted that. I really needed to know where I stood with Kiora, but she needed more time. I couldn’t just push for an answer while she was dealing with everything. That would be wrong on so many levels.