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She was a kindergarten teacher, and he had his mechanic shop. No children, married for the past fifteen years.
Even the crime scene wasn’t typical for him. It was just in between two buildings with surveillance cameras all over. It was in the better part of the city. He was a lot of things, but stupid wasn’t one of them. It made no sense for him to kill these two people, let alone in a place like that. And yet, the cameras were not working that specific night.
How convenient.
With a sigh, I went across the street to a small bar. It was midday, and I was craving a cold beer. Los Angeles was hot, despite it being fall. Perhaps, it was because I wasn’t used to the warmer seasons, but it was getting unbearable.
I sat on a high stool at the bar. No one else was there aside from the bartender. He placed a glass of beer in front of me, and I gulped it down quicker than I usually did.
“This one is on the house.” He slid another glass towards me and then winked. “You look like you could use it.”
I chuckled. “Thank you. I do need it.”
“Want to talk about it?”
I paused and honestly thought about his offer.
My eyes scanned the interior of the bar. The building looked to be extremely old, but it was in relatively good shape on the inside. All across the walls were framed pictures, all of them done in black and white. Some were definitely taken in the nineties, whereas some were newer but done in the same design.
Even behind the counter, where all of the glasses and expensive drinks were held, there were pictures. Happy people—drunk people—having a blast. It was a happy place, and a lot of the people were in many of the pictures, always with a wide grin.
Then, I caught a glimpse of a picture. My brows knitted together.
“Can I see that picture?”
The bartender looked between my confused gaze and the picture before taking it off the wall and handing it to me.
Three men were in the photo. The one in the middle was the spitting image of the bartender, only significantly older. I glanced back at the man behind the bar, whose attention was on me. He noticed the look on my face and simply smiled.
“The man in the middle is my late father. I took over this place after his death.”
“You wouldn’t happen to know who these other two people are, would you?”
He shook his head. “You can see the two of them in a lot of pictures all around the walls, but neither of them came around after my father’s passing two years ago.”
I brought the framed picture closer to my face.
Undoubtedly, it was taken over a decade ago. The man on the right was someone that I’d completely forgotten even existed. Isaiah Sterling, one of the biggest drug traffickers in the United States. His hair was longer, which was why I struggled to remember his face.
But him with Davorin was what caught me by surprise.
He looked so young, almost carefree. He had a wild grin on his face, no tattoos, and he seemed joyful. Something stirred in my chest at the sight of him. The man in the middle had his arms wrapped around both Isaiah and Davorin, as if they’d known each other for ages.
There were rumors that Davorin was loyal to the Sterling family and that it was Isaiah who trained him to be an assassin, but there was no evidence to back up the claims. Hell, this was the first solid piece of evidence I’d found that the two men even knew each other.
Not once did they cross paths from the day I started researching Adrik Ivanov, even going five years back. Either it was all a coincidence and they’d met in this bar, or both of them had made sure all the evidence of them ever being acquainted was destroyed.
Why?
They were the same age; however, they didn’t go to school together. Hell, they didn’t even live in the same part of the city. It had been bothering me that I was unable to find a solid connection between the two, and this picture was the icing on the cake.
It was getting on my nerves.
“Can I keep this?”
“Sure.” The man shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t even know those people.”
I was on the first flight back to New York. Instead of going to my apartment, I headed towards the small condo I owned across the city. To make sure no one could come inside, I’d had two security cameras and three different locks installed. It was as secure as possible.
