Page 52 of Velvet Vaughn

“I never said that.” Anja started gathering her things.

“All right, maybe you didn’t. I did, however, get a pretty stern lecture from Kayne and a serious threat from Chloe that if you came back damaged, Kayne won’t be the person I need to worry about. She smiled when she said it. I found that unsettling.”

Leo laughed.

“Anja, Tank packed everything on your list plus a couple of extras, including the portable signal detector and a backup laptop loaded with Tyler’s secure client. I’ve also got a few things I figured we might want, given the circumstances.”

Leo gave him a dubious look. “Dare I ask what a few things are?”

“Better you don’t.” Remi delivered it without any weight, and somehow that was more reassuring than if he’d made a joke of it. “We should move. Sunday traffic isn’t bad, but I’d rather get settled before the neighborhood wakes up and starts walking dogs down the street.”

Leo grabbed his suitcase and his laptop case. He took one last look around his condo before he locked it, an instinct he didn’t examine too closely, and followed the other two down to the garage.

They left Leo’s Range Rover and took the two bulletproof COBRA Securities Escalades instead. And wasn’t that a fun reminder of what was happening in his life right now? Not to mention the fact that Anja made him wear a Kevlar vest under his sweatshirt.

Leo rode with Anja while Remi followed several minutes behind so they wouldn’t draw unwanted attention with two black vehicles with darkened windows arriving together.

The trip took less than ten minutes as they traveled north and west into a part of the Central West End Leo rarely had reason to drive through, even though it sat practically in his backyard. The condo towers and trendy restaurants gave way to older blocks of massive brick mansions built a century ago by families who’d made fortunes in beer, railroads, and shoes and had wanted the entire city to know it. Deep lawns. Mature oaks. Houses set back far enough from the street that they had their own weather.

Anja slowed in front of one of them, a two-story Georgian Revival in dark-red brick, and Leo took in the ten-foot wrought-iron fence running the length of the property, mounted on squared limestone pillars that matched the house’s trim down to the color. A motorized gate sat between two of the columns. Anja rolled down the window and typed a code into the reader bolted to the brick before the gate rolled smoothly back on its track.

“COBRA Securities owns this?” Leo asked, twisting to look at the place as they pulled up the cobblestone drive.

“They own a lot of things,” Anja said, as if that explained everything, which, honestly, it kind of did.

“Nice place for a safe house.”

“That’s the point.” Anja pulled the Escalade around to a side drive that ended at a detached garage-slash-carriage-house and killed the engine. “Nobody questions who comes and goes from a property like this, with its own perimeter wall and gate. Half the houses on this block have private security contracts. We blend right in.”

They waited for Remi to arrive, then unloaded supplies. Leo grabbed his cases and followed Anja toward a side entrance tucked behind a hedge. She keyed in the code BeBe had texted her, and the lock disengaged with a mechanical click. She pushed the door open into a mudroom that smelled of fresh paint and lemon cleaner, hallmarks of a recently prepped safe house.

“After you.” She motioned him inside.

#

The kitchen assured Anja that BeBe had been thorough, which had never been in doubt.

She did a slow circuit while Remi hauled the gear in behind her, taking inventory of the new space, mapping exits first, sightlines second, the human details last. In contrast to Leo’s sad bachelor pickings, this refrigerator was stocked with actual food, fresh produce, vegetables, and a carton of the half-and-half she preferred over milk. BeBe had pulled her preferences from a file and acted on them without being asked. A binder sat on the entry table with the property layout and alarm codes.

“She thinks of everything,” Leo remarked over her shoulder.

“She does.” Anja set the binder down. “She arranged all of it from Bloomington. The woman runs an entire logistics operation from a desk four hundred miles away and makes it look effortless.”

Remi came in carrying two silver hardshell containers. “Where do you want to set up?”

“A house this big has to have an office.”

They found it on the first floor past a library and laundry room.

Anja nodded with approval at the space. “Tyler’s expecting us, and I want a case board on a wall before the day gets away from us.”

By eleven, the office was set up. Anja had claimed the wall across from the desk, pinning up a six-foot piece of butcher paper from the roll she’d found in the room’s closet. BeBe had apparently anticipated her needs again. Leo watched from the doorway with a mug of BeBe’s excellent coffee in his hand and an expression that suggested he was trying to decide whether to offer help or stay out of the way.

“You’re about to build a murder board,” he realized.

“I’m about to build a case board.” She uncapped a marker. “Murder boards are for after someone’s been killed. We’re trying to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

“Vic was murdered.”