Page 88 of Velvet Vaughn

“He was in Kansas City the night Vic died.” Leo dragged a hand down his face. “Dressed to avoid recognition. Running a light because he couldn’t get out of there fast enough.”

“It’s not proof he killed him,” Anja warned, though her pulse had picked up the second the photo appeared, “but it’s the first hard evidence we’ve got. It puts someone we know in the same city on the same night. Everything else has been financial trails and suspicious timing. This is a face on a camera, four blocks from a dead man’s hotel.”

“He sat at my table.” Leo’s jaw worked. “He toasted Devonte’s contracts and laughed with Curtis for twenty years. And the whole time—”

“We have nothing solid yet.” Anja touched his arm gently. “All we know is that he was there. We don’t know why or what he did once he arrived. That’s the next thing we find out.”

Remi sat back from the keyboard, arms crossed, studying the frozen image of Brad Hatton’s frightened face. “Question is whether we pull everything we can on him under the radar, or we go bang on his door and watch what happens to that expression when he realizes we’ve seen it.”

“Under the radar.” Anja didn’t hesitate. “The last person who knew too much ended up smashed against a retaining wall. I’m not handing Brad Hatton a reason to panic until we understand what had him scared.”

Leo looked back at the screen, at the man he’d known for years frozen mid-flinch beneath a traffic camera’s flash, and said nothing at all.

#

Leo stood in the kitchen, working through years of memories with a magnifying glass he wished he didn’t need.

Brad Hatton had been at his draft party. He’d bought him a bourbon the night Leo’s first big contract closed and told him, with genuine warmth in his voice, that he’d known Leo would make it from the day Curtis brought him into the office. Brad had laughed too loudly at every dinner table Leo had ever shared with him, and repeated the same Tampa story dozens of times. He complained about his golf handicap and his daughter’s tuition and Renee’s spending habits as if he had nothing worse to hide than a mediocre short game.

“You’ve gone quiet.” Anja appeared at his elbow with two bottles of water and handed him one. “That’s usually a bad sign with you.”

“I keep replaying every conversation I’ve ever had with him, looking for the seam.” Leo took a drink without really tasting it. “There isn’t one. He’s good. He’s really good.”

“People who are adept at lying get that way because it doesn’t cost them anything. That’s not a reflection on your judgment, Leo. That’s how a sociopath looks.”

“I liked him.” The words came out rough. “That’s the part that’s eating at me. Not that he might be dangerous. He could be a braggart and obnoxious enough to make you roll your eyes so hard you’d get a headache, but I liked him. I toasted his birthday and his achievements and never once felt the thing I am right now.”

“You’ll see it next time.” She spoke gently, but there was no sugar-coating the truth underneath it. “You need to trust your gut a little less and the evidence a little more.”

Remi’s voice carried from the office. “If you two are done processing feelings, you might want to see what Tyler just sent.”

They found Remi hunched over the monitor, a fresh window open, rows of numbers scrolling past too fast to read. Tyler’s face filled a box in the corner, and even compressed through a webcam feed, he looked wired.

“I’ve been combing through Brad Hatton’s finances,” Tyler began. “I want to be upfront that this took me longer than it should have, and that’s not something I admit often. For most people, I’m in and out of an offshore trail in under an hour. Not to brag, but it’s usually under ten minutes. I see the same standard shell companies, layering, and mistakes, because most people who launder money aren’t professionals. They’re greedy bastards and bastardesses . . . is that a word?” He shook his head. “Anyway, I should’ve closed this out by lunch, but whoever set it up knew exactly how people like me look for money. I almost missed it. I want you to sit with that for a second. This job is my life. I do this for a living, and I just about walked away thinking Brad Hatton was clean, because whoever set up his accounts nested them so deep behind four different jurisdictions, rotated the holding entities every eighteen months, and used a private banking relationship that doesn’t show up in any database I have legal access to. I only found it because one of the shell names reused a registered agent from a case I worked two years ago in Belize. That’s a coincidence I got lucky enough to catch. It shouldn’t have been detectable.”

“So somebody helped him hide it,” Anja concluded.

“Yeah, someone with mad skills close to mine.” Tyler’s flattened mouth wasn’t quite a smile. “That should worry you as much as the money does. This isn’t some random guy Brad found on a forum. This is uber professional-grade concealment that you pay real money for, from someone who does this for people who genuinely cannot afford to get caught.”

“How much money are we talking about?” Leo asked, though some part of him didn’t want the answer.

Tyler pulled up a document and shared his screen until the numbers filled the frame. “A little over twenty million dollars, spread across three accounts in a jurisdiction with no extradition treaty with the United States. Deposits go back around ten years, escalating over time. Small at first, then considerably less small over the last two.”

The number dropped into the room like a fifteen-thousand-pound elephant.

“Twenty million.” Leo repeated it because hearing it once hadn’t made it feel real. “On a commission structure that tops out at a significant fraction of that in a good year. He’s driving a sleek European sports car, and his house in Ladue has always seemed richer than his paycheck should support.”

Remi crossed his arms. “I noticed it the first time I checked his background after you mentioned his name. I thought little of it, figuring it came from his wife’s family money.”

“Renee’s family did well,” Leo confirmed, “but nothing like this. Her father ran a regional grocery chain that sold out a decade ago. Comfortable, but not twenty-million-dollars comfortable.”

Anja studied the screen. “Everything he spouted at that wake about Vic’s death not sitting right with him wasn’t concern. It was theater, and he was good enough at it that none of us clocked it.”

“What do we do with this?” Leo wanted to know.

Anja’s answer came fast. “A man moving twenty mill through a country that won’t hand him back to us has an exit strategy. If he thinks we’re closing in, he disappears tonight, and we never see him again.”

“So we watch him and wait for an opening.” Remi’s voice carried a note of grim satisfaction. “See what he does when he thinks nobody’s looking.”