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He nodded miserably, tightening his grip on her hand. “If she’s with Corey she either knows what he’s doing or he took her like he took me.”
Antoine hesitated. “Would he hurt her?”
Jace shook his head. “No. He loves her. He loved Liam. Not us. Not me and Rick. But he loves them. He wouldn’t hurt her.” But his tone was uncertain.
Val sighed. “There isn’t much we can do from here just yet. Elijah, can you put away the leftovers? Your dad and Burke will be hungry when they come back. Captain Holmes, too, if he’s with them.”
“What are you going to do?” Elijah asked, not rebelliously. Just curiously.
“I’m going to keep digging into Corey Gates.” They still needed to find out if Corey was involved with Sixth Day and if that note he’d taped to Rick’s chest was a real threat.
The next body we’ll leave you will be that of your son.
At this point, they had no choice but to believe that the note was real. Which meant both Corey and Sixth Day posed possible threats to Elijah. And even if Corey didn’t pose a continued threat to Elijah, he did to Jace. She’d claimed that keeping Jace safe wasn’t her responsibility, but she knew down deep that she couldn’t leave him at risk. Her gut was telling her that the times Corey had left town were important to figuring out exactly what the man was up to. She needed to get those dates from Rick. “Let’s finish up. We all have work to do.”
“Not me,” Jace said sadly.
Phin, who’d been silently listening the entire time, patted Jace’s shoulder. “When Burke gives the okay, I could use another pair of hands up there.”
Jace’s smile was brighter this time, and Val mouthed “Thank you” to Phin. She’d known Phin for a few years now but rarely saw him like this, laid-back and talking. At the office, he was usually abrupt and brusque. She knew Lucien and Antoine well, but Phin kept to himself. The man was haunted by memories he never shared, and his PTSD manifested in ways more aggressive than her own. He’d always seemed to have himself on a very short leash. This would be a nice chance to get to know Phin away from the office.
Everyone scattered from the table except for Antoine, who appeared to be setting up shop, arranging his three laptops in a semicircle in front of him. Elijah cleared the table, Lucien and Jace returned to the sofa, and Phin headed back upstairs to work on the safe room.
When it was quiet, Val typed a text to Kaj. All is well here. But we need to talk to Rick asap. He might have information about Corey but won’t talk until he knows Jace is safe. Please advise.
Bayou des Allemands, Louisiana
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 26, 12:30 P.M.
Kaj lifted his hand in a muted wave as the NOPD boat drove away, leaving him and Burke on the dock where they’d found the abandoned vehicles. The vehicles remained parked under the trees, the flatbed truck not yet having arrived to pick them up. Officer Nolan was still here, waiting with his backup in an NOPD cruiser, which sat on the gravel road that led to the launch.
Kaj wiped at the sweat pooling on the back of his neck. He wouldn’t admit to anyone that he was glad to have left the crime scene, but hell, he was so glad. The longer they’d stayed, the more body parts the divers had pulled up. Combined with the growing heat of the day and the toxic odors coming off the buildings’ rubble, it had become too much.
Burke pulled a bottle of water from the backpack he’d brought with them. “Drink something,” he said. “You look a little green.”
“Thanks.” Kaj took the water, draining half the bottle in one gulp. “I’ve seen dead bodies, more times than I want to remember.” But it had mostly been in photos. The real thing was much more intense, the evidence of what Burke had called “gator snacking” undeniable. “But not like what we just saw. We don’t have a lot of gators in New York. Except for the ones living in the sewers,” he added lightly. “But I’m almost certain that’s an urban myth.”
Burke snorted. “Almost certain?”
Kaj shrugged. “I’m not going down into the sewers to check it out. At least we got what we came for. André gave us a lot more access than I was expecting, honestly.”
“True enough. We got to view the camp and see remains, and you got to craft his strategy of saying that Jace was in a safe house. I thought he’d send us away as soon as we spied the camp. I actually didn’t think he’d let you come at all, so anything we got this morning was bonus.”
Kaj turned toward the trees, squinting for a look at the vehicles that had been hidden there before. He saw a glint of metal that told him they were still there. “That Hyundai. It makes sense that it belonged to the second body.”
“Yes,” Burke said, waiting for him to go on.
“Corey’s got two old friends as his partners in his construction business—Bobby Landry the ex-cop and Ed Bartholomew, who’s their accountant.” Kaj paced the length of the dock, trying to organize his thoughts. “Jace said that Bobby and Ed brought back two people who were wearing blindfolds. Corey didn’t trust them if he blindfolded them.”
“With you so far. Especially since they killed one of those people.”
“True.” Kaj grimaced, remembering the destroyed remains. “Corey made a big show of denying that he’d seen Rick yesterday in that statement to the media. He made an effort to put Sixth Day back in the headlines. I don’t know why he’d do that if he’s part of Sixth Day, but he is planning something, and I think it’s something big. Big enough that he was willing to risk turning Rick over to me. He’d tortured Rick and yet didn’t think Rick would tell us. Unless he thought Rick would die from the heroin overdose. We need to find out if Rick shot himself up or if Corey helped him.”
“If he thought Rick had OD’d, he wasn’t risking anything.”
“And that’s probably the more likely scenario,” Kaj admitted. “But Rick didn’t talk, even when André straight up asked him.”
“Corey has something on Rick.”
