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I nod. “Perfectly fair.”
“Oh, and when you leave, if you ever want to speak again, pick up the damn phone first. I still consider you a friend, Captain. I’m glad you manned up and got engaged. It should do you some good.”
“Time wears everybody down, I guess,” I say with a snort. “You’d better not quit kicking ass on me. I read about your part in the human trafficking bust with the attorney general’s office last year. Awesome work.”
“Yeah, yeah, stop flattering me so I can get out of your hair and grab those files. You wait here.”
As soon as she leaves the room, I lean back in the chair and let myself relax for the first time today.
There’s no guarantee she’ll find anything—if Haute is dirty, he’s a beast at covering his tracks—but if the cops have been involved at any stage, I’ll know. There’s a reason they keep records.
And if hehasbeen involved in any shit, any whiff of the underhand and suppressed, we can figure out how to move on from there.
Gillian returns several minutes later with a chunky brown file.
“Here you are. Every incident ever at Haute properties. I skimmed through them, but there’s a lot of petty crap. I decided to be generous and let you knock yourself out with the boring stuff.” She tosses it on the table with athump.“You’ve got one hour, Dexter. Anything you don’t find in that time goes unfound.”
“I appreciate you, Batista.”
“Yeah…” She pauses on her way to the door. “I wish her luck, you know. Any girl who decides to deal with your grumpy ass forever must be part saint.”
“Thanks again.”
She smiles at that—a tight, hard smile that slides from her face as she leaves.
Finally, I’m alone with the cases that could make or break everything.
I can feel the clock ticking as I page through them.
Most of the incident reports are petty crimes, one-off fistfights and boozing like I expected—nothing ever involving Forrest Haute himself, of course.
A few freak medical incidents. Fire calls requiring police presence. More drunken brawls over football and hockey.
Even in Haute’s high-end properties, people are the same at heart.
They love getting drunk, getting into fights, getting high, and falling off balconies. There are a couple auto accidents over the years as well. A memorable one features a man who stole his girlfriend’s convertible and crashed it into the golf course’s lake.
Something about insurance fraud which turned out to be an admin filling out some forms wrong.
But nothing showing any hint of big, organized crime.
Nothing trulyshady.
Fuck.
When I glance at the clock, I’ve already burned forty minutes.
Time is running out, and I brush the reports aside, barely skimming them. As soon as I see the wordintoxicatedormedical, I move on to the next.
Until finally, I stop on a report with a few more pages.
Something about police recovering roughly two million dollars in counterfeit bills on the golf course. The file says a manager found it stuffed into bags and abandoned by an unknown guest before it was reported to the police. The trail went cold.
My brows go up.
It could be nothing. Only, the clincher is the date—five years ago, a time I remember from when we started looking into him—about the time Haute’s casino started going bust.
I make a note on my phone, marking the case number for any public record documents I can pull, plus relevant points and dates. When we’ve got more time, we can cross-check everything.
