Page 104 of Velvet Vaughn

Chapter Twenty-Three

“Send me the address, Tyler.” Anja floored the accelerator hard enough that Remi grabbed the door handle for the second time in ten minutes. “Plug it into my GPS. And do not call the police. Not yet.”

“Anja, if Curtis really did what I think he did—”

“If Curtis has Leo, and a cruiser rolls up that driveway with sirens screaming, we don’t get a rescue. We get a body.” The words came out of her flat and fast, the trained part of her brain running the same calculations she’d made a hundred times as a detective. It was the part that used to keep her up at night long before any of this. “Curtis Lennox has spent two decades making problems go away without leaving a trace. He is not going to hesitate to disappear Leo the second he thinks the walls are closing in. We go in quietly and smartly, and we call the police the second we have eyes on him. Not before.”

“Address is pinging to your dash now. I’m looping in Luke and Logan. They need to know regardless, but I’ll tell them to hold units back until you give the word.”

“Good. Do that.” Anja’s eyes flicked to the dashboard where a new pin had bloomed onto the map, a house in Frontenac eleven minutes out by the fastest route. “Anything else? Anything at all?”

“I’m pulling his financials in real time now that I know where to look. It’s staggering, Anja. I’ll have a full breakdown by the time you get there, but I wanted you moving before I wasted another second explaining it.” A pause, keys clattering. “Be careful. Please.”

The line went dead. Anja glanced sideways at Remi, who had gone from lax and philosophical about ceiling tiles to coiled and dangerous in the space of about ninety seconds, all the drugs burned clean out of him.

“You good?” she asked.

“I’m furious, which cures most things.” Remi had his own phone out. “I’ll ping his phone if it’s powered on.”

A minute crept by, then another, the Escalade eating up the county roads at a speed that should have earned her a ticket.

“Got something. The signal’s live from a fixed location.” Remi read off the coordinates, and they matched the pin already glowing on the dashboard.

“He’s there?” she whispered, the words carrying equal parts question and prayer.

“His phone is,” Remi corrected. “That doesn’t mean he still has it on him.”

She didn’t let herself follow that thought any further. She couldn’t afford to, not at eighty miles an hour on a road built for half that, not with her hands white-knuckled on the wheel and her chest so tight she could barely draw a full breath around it.

When a farm tractor towing a trailer loaded with hay bales crawled out of a side road directly in her path, Anja almost went airborne. She managed to swerve around it, two wheels lifting off the pavement for a few terrifying seconds before she gained purchase again and continued. To Remi’s credit, he didn’t utter a sound.

The Lennox house appeared seven minutes later. Anja pulled up hard against the curve of the drive.

“Stay sharp,” she told Remi as she reached for the door. “If this goes bad, I need you functional, not heroic. You’ve already got one hole in your side. I don’t want you getting another.”

“I wasn’t planning on doing anything heroic except getting Leo back.”

The front door swung open before Anja had even reached the top step. Curtis’s wife, Lydia, stood with her hands clasped, her cardigan buttoned neatly, and her face arranged into an expression of polite confusion that didn’t fool Anja for a second.

“Anja.” Lydia’s voice carried effortless warmth. “It’s good to see you again, dear. Is everything all right?”

“Where’s Leo?” Anja didn’t sugarcoat it.

“Leo?” Lydia’s eyebrows lifted, a passable imitation of genuine surprise. “I haven’t seen Leo in days, dear. Curtis and I have both been so wrapped up in his recovery, we’ve barely—”

“His phone is here.” Anja stepped forward, occupying space Lydia had clearly hoped to keep between them. She didn’t shove, not yet. “The signal’s coming from inside this house right now. So let’s not waste the next thirty seconds pretending otherwise.”

A flash of panic crossed Lydia’s eyes, gone before she could smooth it back over. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Anja shoved past her into the foyer without waiting for permission. Lydia’s hand shot out to catch her arm, a reflex more than a plan. Anja turned on her fast enough that the older woman stumbled backward several paces, her bright cardigan-and-pearls polish cracking around the edges for just a second.

“Get out of my way, Lydia,” Anja growled, “or I will move you myself, and I promise you won’t enjoy that nearly as much as you’re enjoying this little performance.”

Lydia backed into the living room without another word, her hands twisting together in front of her. Anja let her go.

“Search the house,” she instructed Remi. “Fast. Office first.”

Remi vanished down the hallway lined with framed photographs, moving quickly despite his injury. Anja stood in the foyer with Lydia, watching the older woman’s composed face struggle and ultimately fail to hold its shape.