She nods, an acknowledgement that it’s a lot to connect and the kind of connection one finds with true police work, not sniffing around databases.

  “What’re you thinking?”

  “I’m honestly not sure. I mean, Phillip Sterling doesn’t come across as trustworthy, but in a ‘yeah, I’ll sell you a bridge that doesn’t exist’ kind of way, not in a ‘I’m a serial killer kind of way.’ He’s too polished.”

  “Guys like that hire,” I say, pushing up and leaning back against the kitchen table to face her.

  “Maybe,” she says.

  Yeah, no. That’s what happens, but I won’t argue with her.

  “Did I mention Phillip Sterling’s brother?”

  “No. He works there too?”

  “No. He doesn’t. He’s a half-brother. Same father. Founded an investment fund like fifty years ago that’s done gangbusters. Stocks, bonds, and commodities—not crypto. His name’s being floated on the short list for a seat on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Bennett Sterling.”

  “Is his fund associated with Sterling Financial?”

  “His fund, no, but he’s on the board. But that doesn’t mean anything. He’s on a ton of boards and it’s his brother’s company. Well, half-brother. They share the Sterling last name. There’s no evidence he knows a thing about crypto. He’s not listed as an investor. He’s widely respected, but none of the articles about him mention his half-brother. His net worth is reportedly in the forty to fifty billion range.”

  “Well, wealth’s not a crime. Interesting, though.”

  “Maybe he joined the board to make sure Sterling Financial plays it straight. He’s a recent addition.”

  My blood sugar’s dropping and I’m on the verge of slipping into hangry territory, so I hold my mug up to flag her attention. “I’m gonna go across the street and grab breakfast. What do you want?”

  “Egg and cheese biscuit.”

  “I imagine they have that.”

  “Oh, they do. I stop by there every morning on the way to work.”

  “Alright then. You get dressed. I’ll be back and we can eat on the balcony and go through whatever else you got.”

  “The balcony?”

  “Sure. Fresh air.” I grin. “I’m a Southern boy. Don’t wanna spend the day inside. Plus, when there’s commotion outside, we’ll naturally hear it and have a reason for heading over.”

  We end up eating not only breakfast but also lunch outside on that balcony. A storm rolls in while we’re sitting out there, but the front brings a steady rain… so we sit through it until the showers pass and the sun peeks through the clouds.

  Twenty questions turn into fifty. We play Spades. I consider suggesting poker, but then I’d want to play strip poker, and that’s just asking my brain to take a deep dive into the gutter, so I keep it at family-friendly Spades. Six hours pass. Nothing.

  The sun glints off the glass, signaling the end of the day. Before long, dusk will fall.

  “Did you notice in your search on…” I struggle to remember the woman’s name.

  “Jocelyn,” Daisy supplies.

  “Did she have a family? Was she married?” I think back to her lying on the floor. No ring that I recall.

  “Found her on LinkedIn but we aren’t connected. When the ARGUS query is done, we’ll have those details.”

  She looks wistfully in the direction across the street. “I’m feeling this need to go across the street. Is that stupid?”

  “I doubt anything you ever do is stupid,” I answer honestly.

  She half-laughs. “Oh, if you only knew.”

  If we weren’t talking about a dead person across the street, I’d probe. But I shouldn’t. I should stop with the nonsense. Letting my baser desires take over with my roommate and also the woman I’ve been charged with protecting, would be like walking into an ambush with my eyes wide open.

  As for her idea to head over there now, it would give us something to do and give us some much-needed space. “If we go over, isn’t there an electronic record?”

  “Yes. There would be,” she confirms. “I use my badge to access the building after hours. We didn’t yesterday because technically the building was still open. But if someone checks the lobby surveillance footage they’ll see we entered.”

  “It’s not worth it, then. If there’s nothing through tonight, and into tomorrow, maybe we’ll go over together. You can bring some photos. Maybe take a piece of art or something to hang on your office wall. We’ll use that as our excuse for being there. You can snoop then.”

  “Why not do that now?”

  Well, she has a point.

  “I’m not good at waiting. If I want something, I tend to just go for it.”

  Is that right?

  I swear to god my dick jumps to attention, excited at the prospect.

  Lock it down, Ryder.

  “Copy that. Let me hunt around this condo. See if I can find a hammer and nails. You want to just nab something from the condo to hang? We can replace it later.”

  She pushes up, determination vibrating off her. “We don’t need the props. If someone asks, I’ll say that’s what we were going to do, but you forgot the nails.”

  “They have video in the lobby,” I remind her.

  “Fine. We’ll bring props. But we won’t hang anything because we’ll say the nail wasn’t right or something.”

  “Sitting around all day is sticking in your craw isn’t it?”

  “What?” She scrunches her face and before I can explain, she’s waving her hand dismissively, back turned to me, headed for the stairs.

  It takes us all of five minutes for her to select a framed photo of a flower vase—an image Daisy Jonas would probably never in a million years hang in her office—and for me to find a hammer.

  We cross the street and enter the lobby. Once again, there’s no one at reception. My gaze scans the black glass domes in the corners and in the middle of the ceiling in front of the elevators.

  But when she presses the elevator button, she presses the fourth floor, and her office is on the third.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “There could be a camera in the stairwell too. Does it matter how we access it?”

  I scan the elevator ceiling. There could be one in here, but I don’t see any dead giveaways. But she’s right. Either way if there’s surveillance I haven’t detected we could end up needing to explain our presence on the fourth floor. Still, she’s throwing our prior precautions to the wind.

  The elevator dings, the doors slide open, and she bolts down the hall. Too fast. I catch her arm. “Picture-hanging pace, remember?”

  My eyes automatically sweep the corridor—emergency exits, blind corners, sight lines. It’s a weekend, Saturday evening, so it’s quiet, as one would expect. No keyboard clicks, no phone conversations bleeding through office doors. Just the hum of fluorescent lights and our footsteps on industrial carpet.

  Once again that something’s off feeling surfaces. A faint chemical smell lingers.

  We round the corner and I’m busy cataloging escape routes when Daisy stops dead. I nearly slam into her back.

  “What—” I start, then see it.

  The door. Jocelyn’s door.

  It’s closed.

  CHAPTER 9

  DAISY

  The tremors winding their way through my fingers coincide with a distinct drop in temperature that tightens my muscles and cinches my rib cage.

  Did we miss the commotion across the street? No. We wouldn’t have. Would we? Maybe we didn’t wake up?

  It’s conceivable the body is still in the office. Perhaps the office cleaning service came by and closed the door without entering? A sloppy cleaning job, perhaps?

  Jake’s at my side, crowding me at the door, probably because I’m standing here staring at a stainless-steel door knob. He unzips his bag, the sound of the zipper insanely loud, as if that one sound could carry through the entire floor.

  “I’ve got it.”

  He slips on black latex gloves and crouches before the door, a silver tool in his hand. He inserts the pointed end in the lock, jiggles, and the lock clicks. With a twist of his wrist, the door magically opens.

  It feels like we’re in a video game. Like this time around, we purchased the tools we needed and now we can get to the next level. Only this isn’t a game. This is real. There’s no music, no flashing lights or movement in the background, and as the door opens, I blink to process. There’s also no body.

  The dead woman is gone.

  Jocelyn Faribault is gone.

  My stomach drops. Cold air seeps over my skin.

  Jake pulls out his phone and dials.

  I step into the office, listening to hear what he says into his phone while scanning every inch of the office.

  Translucent shades are drawn behind her desk. They’re the kind of shades that allow one to see out but not in. I don’t have those in my office, and I know I didn’t see them in use in Sterling’s office. I haven’t spent enough time on the executive floor to know how common they are, but I notice this office is significantly smaller than Sterling’s. It’s also smaller than Ms. Weaver’s.

  “Quinn,” Jake says. “Hiya. You got a minute?”

  Jake taps me and shakes a rubber glove at me. I take it and slip it on my right hand, understanding what he’s saying. No finger prints.

  “Can you run a search for me? Let me know if any emergency calls were made from this vicinity? We’re in Sterling Financial’s offices. Remember when I said we found that body and didn’t suspect foul play? Yeah, well…the body’s gone.”

  I pull open a file cabinet. It’s empty.

  “Yes, I’m positive she was dead.”

  I almost smile at his exasperation. Almost.

  Another file drawer is empty. And another.

  Are we in the right office?

  I loop back to the hall and check the nameplate. It’s still there, the nameplate drilled into the wall.

  I’ve been here a week and my nameplate doesn’t yet bear my name. Is there an office handyman or someone like that who updates nameplates? Stepping closer, I see it’s not stickers in the glass, but etched lettering with a white coat of lacquer or paint. They must order these from somewhere. If someone really wanted to disappear her, they would have just unscrewed the nameplate, but she probably has direct reports. They can’t just pretend she didn’t exist.

  “Hey,” Jake says, his voice no longer muted. “Anything in the cabinets?”

  I shake my head in the negative.

  Dammit. I should’ve checked everything when I found her. I should’ve taken photos, the same way I took photos of everything in Uncle Alvin’s apartment when I packed up his things. The same way the police took photos. I wasn’t there when Mom found Reed, but I saw the photos in the police report—when I asked for it a month after he died.

  “Right. Okay. Keep searching. Thanks, Quinn.” He hangs up the phone and slips it in his back pocket. “She’s going to do a deeper dive, but nothing came up.”

  “Someone removed her body and everything in her office,” I say, stating what’s obvious, but I’m still having trouble believing.

  “It’s looking like a clean-up job,” Jake says, stepping out of the small office. “You’re not going to find anything. We might as well clear out.”

  “If it’s a clean-up job, then that means she was murdered.” The suspicion that the three deaths are somehow related doesn’t seem as wild as it did an hour ago.

  “We didn’t check for needle marks.” He sucks in his bottom lip thoughtfully.

  We didn’t do anything we should’ve done. And everyone assumed Uncle Alvin died of natural causes, but what if he didn’t? What if the police didn’t look hard enough? I thought I was coming here to uncover a scam targeting veterans or retirees, but these could be murders. This can’t be a coincidence.

  Or is it? I’m drawing connections between an old veteran in Los Angeles and a spreadsheet queen in the suburbs of DC. And I found basically nothing of value on the CFO in Singapore.

  “There’s nothing we can do. Let’s head back,” Jake says.

  I snap photos of every angle. Open drawers, file cabinets. The photos might not be useful, but it’s one thing I can do. One thing I should’ve done earlier.

  As Jake closes the office door and double-checks the lock, I ask, as much to myself as to the man Rhodes sent to protect me, “I wonder if they search for people with no tight family connections when they hire. I’ll need to ask around, find out more about employees’ personal situations.”

  Or maybe you’re spiraling. They didn’t hire hundreds of employees with no tight family connections.

  When I call Rhodes and update him, he’s going to be so freaking righteous. I told you it wasn’t safe.

  “It’d probably be impossible to hire only people without connections,” Jake says, taking my rambling seriously. “In criminal organizations or authoritarian regimes, people with someone close to them are sometimes deemed good to have on the team. Parents especially are fantastic. You can threaten a loved one’s livelihood and ensure someone will do exactly as you want with very little effort. One big scare and they’ll perform as told.”

  I side-eye him, thinking about that mangled angry scar on his shoulder, the light scars across his knuckles, the absence of tattoos.

  “You’ve seen a lot, huh?”

  The elevator dings and we both step in. He presses the third floor, presumably to hang the flower vase picture that he’s holding.

  I press the lobby floor button and say, “We’ve seen enough.”

  “Fine,” he says.

  The elevator doors open on the third floor and a darkened hallway, but neither of us move.

  “If they ask, just tell them you came in to hang a painting and I forgot the nail. And if they ask, then that’s the sign there’s surveillance we didn’t catch and we shift to Plan B.”

  The elevator door closes and we descend again.

  “What’s Plan B?”

  “You and I disappear, and we find a different way to figure out what’s happening here.”

  “Watch it. You’re beginning to sound like Rhodes.”

  “If you’re trying to say I’m paranoid⁠—”

  The doors open and we step into the lobby, also eerily silent.

  Our footsteps echo through the empty space, as we walk in silence and exit onto the street. The weight of what we just discovered settles over me like a heavy blanket. Someone didn’t just clean up Jocelyn’s body—they cleared all the evidence from her office. The level of organization, the resources required, the casual efficiency of it all—none of it’s accidental.

  My hands tremble, and I shove them deep into my pockets. This isn’t some small-time cryptocurrency scam targeting vulnerable elderly people. This is something much bigger, something someone’s willing to kill to protect. And I’m right in the middle of it, pretending to be just another employee while someone with enough power to make bodies disappear is watching.

  “You okay?” Jake asks, his voice gentler than usual. I realize I’ve stopped walking and am just standing there, staring at the pavement. “I keep thinking about Alvin Reed,” I say quietly. “Everyone said he was eighty-three and he died of natural causes, but what if—” I can’t finish the sentence.

  What if his class-action suit held merit and was deemed a threat? What if his death wasn’t natural at all? Jake stops too, turning to face me. I never found his laptop. It was an old Chromebook and Mom promised me she didn’t sell it, and I halfway believed her because I’m not sure you could get more than ten bucks for it on the open market, but what if they took it? I assumed maybe it quit working and he threw it away or that maybe one of the EMT’s snagged it. What if he was murdered and the murderer took it? What if the reason I found his notes and papers is because that desk drawer was stuck and they didn’t know how to jiggle it open?

  “Hey.” His hand hovers near my shoulder, not quite touching. “We’re going to figure this out. But right now, let’s keep moving.”

  I nod and force my feet to start walking again. But the questions won’t stop circling in my head.

  “You know, my sister, when she gets upset, she goes for ice cream. There anything like that you want?”

  “Better watch it, Ryder,” I say, stepping away from him, feeling walled in. “If you’re not careful, you’ll start sounding like you care.”

  “Not many people in your life care, Jonas?”

  That’s a pointed personal question and I hate how accurate he is. What have I said to make my shitty childhood obvious?

  I’m teasing, making light of an uncomfortable situation because I’m reeling, although maybe I shouldn’t be minimizing what’s happened. Maybe some part of me suspected this and that’s why I insisted on coming over to check on the body we found. Maybe I’ve suspected the worst for a while and that’s why I insisted on investigating.

  He sniffs, scans the street, and steps off the curb. “That’s okay Jonas. Hang with me and I’ll show you what it’s like to be surrounded by folks who care.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet you’re a real teddy bear.”

  He barks out a laugh. “You know Jonas, gotta hand it to you. You play it straight. It’s impressive. But I’m not buying it. Spent years with the tough bark types.”

  “Tough bark? That’s an expression for too much that I’ve never heard before.”

  “No, it’s not.” As a car passes, he studies it, like he’s memorizing the occupants. Once it’s gone, he turns those assessing eyes on me. “Did some jackass tell you you’re too much?”

  I don’t get along with many people. My mom, the series of bosses in my twenties. My little sister basically puts up with me because I’m footing her bills. But if he wants to believe I let some guy walk over me… I quicken my pace all the same. This isn’t a conversation I want. It’s also personal and Jake’s here because Rhodes hired him.

  “Darling, you’re not too much. Any guy who says that isn’t enough. For the record, you’re the kind of woman who could make a man rethink his whole no-attachments policy.”

  “What’re you saying?” I’ve stopped in the middle of the sidewalk because no one has ever said anything like that to me.

 

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