Текст книги "Tangled Bond"

Автор книги: Emma Hart

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

This is fucked up.

The level of corruption the mayor has been working at is far higher than anyone ever suspected. The amount of money he’s paid to sex clubs to remove his details from their system and keep quiet about his attendance and sexual appetite is way into the millions. I think the last count was hovering around two million, and that’s in two years.

How often does this man travel to have something different? How far is he willing to go to escape the confines of D.O.M.? Is he traveling so he can practice erotic asphyxiation in other places? It’s obvious now that he was Natalie’s partner in that particular area of their desires. As well as Vince, of course. And the person who killed both of them had to be aware of that.

Was the mayor attracted to men, too?

Ah—but that wouldn’t make sense, would it? Surely he wouldn’t have time to get down to his briefing with his campaign team if he’d killed Natalie. Besides, the figure on the tape doesn’t match his.

I think we’re looking at a guy—someone who could have overpowered Vince. Devin did see a figure on the D.O.M. tapes enter Vince’s room and stay for approximately two hours. To be that level of intimate, the guy would have had to be bisexual. Unless, of course, it was more about pleasure through pain than penetration.

Which brings me right back to Nick. Paid by the mayor to keep quiet. Paid by the mayor’s wife to essentially do what he wants. Nick still has the best motives to kill them both as far as I’m concerned. He hated Natalie because she’d betrayed him and he hated Vince because Vince was the reason she’d done it. And he wanted to be with Madison but not have her relationship with Natalie affected, so this killed two birds with one stone.

Uh... I probably shouldn’t use that phrase again while discussing this case.

The only flaw in the Nick plan is that the guy despises their lifestyle. The last time I saw a disgust like that was...well, never. I also can’t imagine him as a guy who’s attracted to guys. There is the saying that it’s always the hot ones, I know, but I don’t think anyone can fake his distaste of BDSM.

Which basically means that, even with the discovery of the tapes, I still have nothing, and I’m not counting on the mayor’s bank statements to give us much of anything.

I press the heels of my hands into my eyes. This is Lena and Daniel’s case all over again. Twist after twist that all throw each other off course.

For the first time, I’m doubting my ability to solve this case. I was so certain that the discovery of the pictures and tapes would make everything fall into place. I mean, a little DNA would be helpful, too. Even just from the car. It’s the one time when sharing a lab with the Austin PD really fucking sucks. They’re right there, bugging the hell out of their forensics team so everything is done first and we’re their afterthought.

“You’re allowed to look somewhere other than at this case file, you know.”

I rest my cheek on my hand and meet Drake’s eyes. “It’s really, really pissing me off. And so is the fact that you won’t let me go and investigate tonight.”

“Sweetheart, you’ll likely shoot them both to get your information. I can’t deal with any more dead bodies right now.”

“You say that like I’m trigger happy,” I grumble. “I’m enthusiastic, okay? I haven’t shot anyone for weeks now, and that was only because he was going to shoot me first.”

Drake leans forward, his shirt stretching over his muscles. “I don’t think Marshall would have shot you.”

“Really? Because he poisoned and tortured two people and tried to do it a third time, and one of them was his own stepmother,” I remind him, the memory making me shudder. “You didn’t see him. He looked absolutely feral. I think he would have shot me without a second thought.”

“You know, it always bothered me that he tried to shoot you.”

“Well, funnily enough, I find myself somewhat bothered by that, too.”

He snorts. “No, not that kind of bothered. Well, that kind of bothered, too, but it always bugged me that he poisoned the others but tried to shoot you. Why would he do that?”

I frown. “Because he poisoned them with salads and everyone knows I don’t eat salad.”

The curve of his lips is slow. “Is that your new life advice? Stay alive, don’t eat salad!”

“Uh, yeah. I’m actually considering writing a book and the first piece of advice will be: Eat pizza. We’re going to die anyway. Why risk a salad?”

“It occurs to me that, if you didn’t have tits and a vagina and a ridiculous shoe obsession, you could be a man.”

I press my lips together and look side to side for a moment. “I’m not sure if I should be offended by that. I think I should. Maybe. Where are you goin’ with that, huh?”

“Nowhere!” Drake leans back in his chair, laughing, and holds his hands up. “I’m just sayin’.”

“Hey—we haven’t fought once today. Don’t ruin it now.”

Wow. We’ve almost gone a whole day without fighting. Go us.

“Maybe this is what happens when we work together instead of against each other.” His eyes glitter.

“And when your ex-fiancée isn’t in town.”

“That sure helps, too.”

I bite the inside of my lip. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought her up.”

“Apologizing again? Twice in one week? Are you sick?”

I open my mouth and close it again when I see the teasing smirk of his lips. “Shut up,” I mutter. “Can we get back to work now? Please?”

Drake stands, nudging the chair as he does, and walks around my desk. My heart stutters as he stalks toward me, a devilish glint that matches the sexy upturn of his lips in his eye.

“Sure,” he murmurs. “In a minute.”

He spins me until I’m facing him then leans down, grasping the arms of my chair. My eyelids drop as he moves in so close that is mouth is barely hovering above mine, so close that the slightest twitch from either of us will have our lips touching.

I wait, my breathing speeding up, my stomach erupting in butterflies, for that touch. For that one little brush of his mouth across mine.

It doesn’t come.

“You’re right,” he whispers, instead sweeping his mouth across my cheek as he turns his head toward my ear. “We should work right now.”

I tightly set my jaw as annoyance over his sly move flits through me.

“Uh, Noelle?” Carlton appears in the doorway a second after Drake straightens.

“Yes.” I hurriedly turn to him, swallowing my frustration at Drake’s antics. “What’s up?”

He holds a USB stick up. “I found the videos.”

“I think I’m scarred for life.”

“Huh? It’s just kinky porn. And not sexy at all.”

I frown at Drake. “I’m so glad you added that last part. If you were turned on right now, we’d be breaking up.”

“Oh, we can break up?”

I kick him. “Inappropriate,” I mutter. “In all seriousness, I can see why this would be deterimental to the mayor’s image.”

“Aside from the fact that he’s fucking someone who ain’t his wife?”

“You’re Captain fucking Obvious, aren’t you?”

“Just saying.” He grins.

I roll my eyes and bite my thumbnail. The video is actually seven videos linked together in a compliation, but when I texted Carlton and asked him, he said that anyone who knew what they were doing would be able to split them at the end of each. Thus giving the beholder seven instances of potential blackmail, I guess.

Each video had a different form of erotic asphyxiation in them, leaving me with absolutely no doubt that that was Natalie and the mayor’s thing. Since all the videos have been taped outside D.O.M., seemingly in hotels, you don’t need a brain to figure out how Vince got them.

“You look confused, cupcake.”

“Not...confused.” I stand and grab my whiteboard pen before going over to it. I wipe everything off it and scribble my thoughts as I say them out loud. Sometimes, retracing your steps until your feet are blistered and painful is the only way to find what you’ve lost. “Natalie sleeps with Vince but stops when she dates Nick. A year or so in, she revisits the club and her sexual relationship with Vince, still dating Nick. Nick starts sleeping around.”

“Where are you going with this?”

“Shh.” I draw a line under that on the board. “Natalie breaks the agreement she has with Nick—”

“According to him.”

“And that’s all I have,” I reply. “Natalie breaks the agreement she has with Nick, which, thanks to the files Carlton found, corresponds approximately with the beginning of her relationship with the mayor. She’s still sleeping with Vince. But around this time, Nick sleeps with Madison McDougall for the first time. Then, somewhere around here, Mayor Randy McDougall stops telling his wife about his trysts, which leads to her peeking. Alyssa McDougall pays Vince to get evidence of Natalie and Randy together, which, luckily for her, leads in with Natalie’s obscure plan of gathering evidence to blackmail the mayor with, especially when she finds out she’s pregnant and the baby is his.”

Drake opens his mouth, but I hold my finger up, on a roll.

“Vince agrees with Natalie to video, which works doubly well for Alyssa. In the middle of this, unbeknownst to everyone, Madison and Nick spend a weekend together when both the mayor and Natalie are out of town. Together, they make plans to be in a real relationship. When Natalie comes back, Nick breaks up with Natalie.” I draw another line under that. “Almost immediately after, Natalie is stalked. Two weeks later, she hires me. Twenty-four hours after that, her home is almost broken into. And not even twelve hours later, she’s dead.”

“Her stalker and killer are two different people.”

I point my pen at him. “Possibly. In fact, I’d say it’s likely. Her stalker didn’t want to hurt her. They wanted to scare her. Shake her up. Make her think she was in danger. The mayor knew she was pregnant. I’d bet anything he was behind the stalking.”

“With what purpose?” Drake’s eyes follow me as I walk to the window. “Make her leave town? Scare her into keeping quiet?”

“Either. Both.” I perch on the windowsill and bite the end of my pen. “He wouldn’t have wanted to pay her off. She was different than the other people he messed with. She was his daughter’s best friend, although paying her a large sum probably would have avoided this mess. Then again...”

“Say you’re right. Say we are looking at two different people—now what? Who attempted to break into her house? Her stalker or her killer?”

“Her stalker,” I say certainly. “Think about it, Drake. If you’re breaking into someone’s house to kill them, would you really try to break a window? In a quiet neighborhood? No. You’d pick their lock or knock out the whole pane. You wouldn’t throw a brick at their house.”

“Let’s work of the assumption that the mayor did hire someone to shake her up.” He stands, but then he paces back and forth. “They wanted her to think they were trying to break in. That makes me think he was trying to get her to leave town. Face it—she wouldn’t have known that he was behind it. What if it was both? What if he was trying to get her to leave town then give her the financial aid to do it? He could have promised to pay her a monthly child support fee under the guise of her working for him and his whole problem—the baby—would have been eliminated.”

“Yes!” I cry a little too excitedly. “That makes perfect sense. I asked Bek to get Carlton to look into his bank accounts more in depth, and it turns out that more payments have been made to Nick since the first one. I thought it was simply part of the initial agreement to be paid in installments the longer he stayed quiet, but what if Nick agreed to do it? And those payments were what he was owed for stalking her?”

“How much were they?”

“Ten to fifteen thousand a time.”

“That has to be it.” Drake stops, looks at me, and grins. “He paid him to stalk her and wired money as soon as Nick reported back with each threat. He was never to hurt her, only scare her so badly she left Holly Woods. And it worked in two ways, because the longer and more Nick was paid, the more likely he was to stay quiet. You!” He crosses my office in seconds, frames my face with his hands, and plants a huge kiss on me. “You’re fuckin’ brilliant, Noelle.”

A flame rises in my cheeks. “Well, it’s simple logic, really.”

“Let’s go.” He grabs my hand and pulls his phone out of his pocket.

“Where to?” I barely have time to grab my phone and purse before he pulls me out of the room and toward the staircase.

“I’m calling in backup. Then we’re going to pick him up.”

Oh, well. Okay, then.

The more I think about it, the more I’m glad that I’m not still a cop. I’m essentially acting as a cop now, and I’m realizing more and more that I like the freedom that owning my own investigative company brings me. For example, I don’t have to sit suspects in a ten-by-ten room with nothing more than a table, four chairs, and a voice recorder inside it.

Interviews are suffocating. I hate the stiff, formal way they need to be conducted. I hate the way questions are twisted and manipulated to catch the other person up. I hate how my eyes skim the suspect’s body like they’re a puzzle that has one piece you can’t locate out of place. I hate how every part of their reaction to every single question is an open book to me.

Like right now—Nick is sitting in his chair next to his lawyer, stone-faced. His shoulders are pulled back in defiance, and his eyes are dead set on Drake, his jaw tight. Yet this isn’t because he’s hiding something. He’s angry, pure and simple. He’s angry that, after the conversations he and I have had, he’s been brought in for questioning.

And that’s something that needs to be stressed. He hasn’t be arrested.

Yet.

Although it’s only a matter of time with the way Drake is tearing him apart.

“Where were you on the night of the eighth?”

“I already told you,” Nick snaps, “I was tattooing a client.”

“Yet you can’t provide me with anything that’ll prove it.”

“Because I don’t have security cameras. I don’t need them.”

“Every business needs security cameras, Mr. Lucas.” Drake taps his pen against his papers. “Were you stalking Ms. Owens? She seemed very insistent to Ms. Bond that you were the person behind her plight. The messages, the phone calls...”

“Believe me, Detective Nash”—Nick all but spits his name—“I’d rather go to fuckin’ hell than stalk that crazy bitch. I wanted nothin’ to do with her freaky ass when she was alive, and I sure as shit don’t want it now.”

I run my tongue over my lips. “Tell me again where you were the night Natalie’s house was almost broken into.”

He slides his eyes from Drake to me. “My studio. With a client.” Sweat beads on his upper lip.

“What were you tattooing?”

“A back piece. A pheonix.”

“Not a dragon, then?”

“What are you insinuating?”

I walk across the small room from where I’ve been leaning against the wall and clasp the back of both Drake’s and Trent’s chairs. “I’m insinuating that, when you told me this information only a couple of days ago, you were tattooing a back piece, except it was a dragon. Now, it’s a pheonix. Not creatures you can mix up. So, while I fully believe you were at your studio, I’m insinuating, Mr. Lucas, that you weren’t tattooing at all. So, who were you with?”

His eyes narrow until they’re barely slits. “I thought you weren’t a cop?”

“I’m not. But as long as the mayor’s signature is on my contract, I can interrogate you until you lose your voice. And believe me when I say I will. So, who were you with? Why won’t you tell me? What’s the big issue with honesty?”

“You don’t have to answer anything,” his lawyer instructs.

“Correct. He doesn’t,” Trent adds. “But there’s more than enough circumstancial evidence against him that, if he doesn’t tell us the truth, we’re going to arrest him on stalking charges and he’ll be in the dock tomorrow morning, explaining himself to Judge Barnes.”

“Circumstancial evidence?” Nick looks at both of the guys in front of me before his eyes rest on me. “What do you mean circumstancial evidence?”

“There are several payments to an account in your name from Randy McDougall’s private account,” I explain. “We have reason to believe that he hired you to harrass Natalie Owens and issued you a payment every time you reported back to him. Unless you tell us the truth, we’re assuming that’s the case.”

“He didn’t pay me a damn penny. You can check my bank details with his right now.”

“That’d be great, thanks,” Drake says. “Here. Write down your bank details and turn over your card for photocopying and I’ll get someone on that right now.”

He does it.

Because he isn’t lying about being paid. He’s lying about what he was doing the night before Natalie called me out about the attempted break in, but this? No. He never saw a penny from Randy McDougall except for the initial payment.

“The eighth,” Trent continues after Nick’s card has been handed to Drake, despite his lawyer motioning for him not to. Ugh, what a dick. “That night. Was it a pheonix or a dragon? A tiger? A fairy, Mr. Lucas?”

He doesn’t say a word.

“Perhaps you had an adult coloring book and don’t want everyone to know you have a penchant for coloring in pretty pictures,” my brother continues. “Or you really were at Natalie Owens’s house, a brick in your hand, ready to smash her window in.”

“I was with Madison!” Nick snarls. “Okay? I was with her. We went for dinner in Austin then came back to my apartment. We spent the night together, and she left the next morning.”

Bingo.

Drake fights his smile as he slides his chair back. “Thank you, Mr. Lucas. I’ll get these bank details checked out and inform you of our next move as soon as possible. Someone will be in soon to escort you and Mr. Jenkins to a more comfortable waiting area.”

Trent calls the end of the interview and hits the button on the recorder before pulling the tape out. He slips it into his pocket, and I open the door and slip out first.

“Well?” Drake asks me. “What was he lyin’ about?”

“Apart from the tattoo? Nothing. I’d bet my next purchase of Louboutins that those account numbers won’t match up with the ones on the payment records.” I shrug a shoulder. “Do y’all have coffee in this place? My brain is about to give up.”

“Hey.” Drake grabs Dev as he walks into the station. “I need you to check something for me.”

When Dev replies in the affirmitive, Drake hands him the card and scribbled details.

“Check these against the payments that were made to Nick Lucas. He swears he didn’t see a cent after the first one.”

“Got it.”

“Oh, and get your sister some damn coffee before she kills me,” he adds, pushing his office door open.

I punch his arm.

Yeah. I might have just validated his statement. Fuck it.

“Like coffee will stop me.” I follow him into the room.

“I know,” he replies, “but it’ll buy me some time at least, and I’ll use that time to convince you why you shouldn’t kill me.”

I shut the door behind me. “Seriously? Two of my brothers are right out there. They don’t need to hear that.”

“I was talking about cooking you dinner...” Drake pauses, his eyes belying his innocent answer. “What were you thinking about?”

“Shut up.” I drop onto a chair in front of his desk, and he laughs.

“You’re cute when you pout.”

“I don’t pout.”

“I beg to differ.” He flicks his thumb over my bottom lip. “Pouty lips.”

“You’re really not doing well with your time-buying. In case you were wondering.” I fold my arms. “Hey, isn’t it almost time for the mayor to get his tapes? Who’s there?”

“You’re still not going,” he insists, stepping back as the door opens. “Sheriff Bates is there with a few other guys. They’re not looking to arrest him, before you get excited. Just to see if it’s true.”

Dev hands me coffee before I can protest. “I got a message that they’re all in place and a black Range Rover is parked up outside the old gas station.”

“Please, can I go? Please?”

“No,” Drake repeats. “That’s the end of it.”

“You’re not my boss,” I argue.

“I can be.” His eyes spark.

Devin gags, leaving the room.

“I’d like to see you try,” I counter, ignoring my brother’s childishness. “What would you do if I walked out that door right now?”

“I’d sling you over my fucking shoulder and carry you down to the cells.”

Well, that wasn’t nearly as sexy as I thought it would be. So much for that train of thought.

“And here I thought you’d bring out the handcuffs.”

“You want me to cuff you?” Drake quirks an eyebrow. “That can be arranged. Within seconds.”

“Uh, are you gonna take me home before you cuff me?” I scoot out of the chair and skirt around it to the door. “’Cause, if not, I’d prefer to keep my hands free.”

His lips match the amusement in his eyes. “Well, my work is done here, and I do think you need supervisin’ tonight to make sure you don’t run off down to the sheriff’s stakeout.”

“I didn’t mean right now. And don’t you have to tell Nick what happens with his card?”

Drake slowly approaches me, and I walk backward until I’m against the wall, my hands flattened on either side of me.

“No,” he says quietly. “My shift ended thirty minutes ago. Trent’s here until one. He’ll deal with him.”

“So, you’re taking me home?” I ask, tilting my head to the side. “To my house.”

“Yep.” He takes one step closer to me then cups my chin. “Except I ain’t leavin’ after.”