“Right now? I don’t know. I keep coming back to the logistics—how did she find us? She only lived on the estate for a month, and she’s a refugee. She’s got no network. No contacts. We gave her almost nothing to go on, and yet somehow, there she was.”
“You’re worried.” He had lines on his forehead, and I ran a fingertip along one furrow. “Is there anything I can do?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I’ll speak to Judd later, but I think Hevrin Moradi’s got her own secrets. And I doubt she’ll share them before she’s ready.”
CHAPTER 19 - EMMY
“SO, WHERE ARE we?” I asked.
Black wanted to have a recap before we left for Norfolk because this case had more tentacles than a genetically modified octopus. Nothing was bloody simple at the moment—apparently, there’d been a training accident at Riverley and Alex had broken ribs, but Rafael sent a message to Black saying he was handling it. Thank fuck. I didn’t have time to fix any more problems today, not with Dan, Alaric, and Bethany sitting at the kitchen table in the rental house, waiting to start. At least there were Danishes. Bethany had picked them up from somewhere.
“Damn dog,” Black muttered as he uncapped his fountain pen. I looked under the table. Barkley was sitting on his feet, her chin resting on his knees as she waited hopefully for any stray flakes of pastry to drop. Black might have complained, but he still put down his pen to scratch her head as Dan started speaking.
“Let’s start with the problem that brought us here—the painting. We’ve got two possible leads—the two men who visited Irvine here at the house. Stephané and the nurse have both worked with us to produce sketches. The man Stephané saw bears a vague resemblance to Dyson. See?”
Dan turned her laptop, where the screen showed the newest sketch lined up beside the drawing produced eight years ago when Alaric and I worked with an artist after our Atlantic gun-fest. Irvine’s visitor had been wearing glasses, and his hair was thinner, and his jaw was different. The same man? Possibly.
“It looks more like Nicolas Cage,” Black said.
“Stephané admits he’s terrible with faces. If this is Dyson, we’re chasing a shadow. Which leaves the second guy.” Dan clicked to another sketch, a much younger guy with a goatee. “Neither Harriet nor Stephané recognises him. Working on the assumption that he recorded the endorsement video, we called every professional videographer in a hundred-mile radius to see if they were involved, but so far, nobody’s admitting to it.”
“So far?” Black asked.
“Six of them didn’t answer the phone, and one man I spoke to sounded evasive. We’re following up, and I’ve got two interns from the Lexington office expanding the search radius to two hundred miles and also checking websites to see if anyone in the industry matches the sketch.”
“Leave that ticking along. Priority goes to Devane right now, and by extension, Eric Ridley.”
“Guilt by association?” Alaric asked.
“You could say that. Nobody hires a man like Ridley unless they’re strapped for cash or shady, and Devane claims to be worth two hundred million bucks. My sources say it’s more like fifty million, but that’s still not an insignificant amount.”
Her wealth came from family money—her father had been big in the aviation industry before his death nine years ago, ironically in a plane crash. By all accounts, Kyla had never done a proper day’s work in her life, although she did have a thriving Instagram account and got paid big bucks to flog make-up and turn up to parties. Oh, and she’d presented a short-lived reality show where rich people and poor people swapped houses for a week. Rumour said she’d disinfected her shoes every time she set foot in the projects and once squirted a Black man with Purell before she allowed him to shake her hand.
Alaric tilted his head from one side to the other. “Plenty to hire decent security.”
He ought to know—his parents were worth as much as Kyla, and they often had a bodyguard or two around.
“Precisely my point. Anyhow, I’ve had a word in the ear of a friendly reporter, and the American public will shortly be getting a reminder that Ridley was suspected of involvement in the murder of three little girls and their parents in Kandahar. Logan’s on his way there to see if he can dig up any further information.”
Alaric raised an eyebrow. “He’s going to Afghanistan?”
“I don’t believe Kyla Devane has an appropriate temperament to represent Kentucky in the senate, so it seemed worth the airfare.”
Black might have framed his motives as altruistic, but I suspected there was a teeny bit of self-interest involved. His genuine dislike of Ridley had come through loud and clear in our conversations over the last two days. But Alaric seemed to swallow the explanation.
“I find myself in unexpected agreement.”
Black ignored the jab. “I’ve also got our people in Syria taking another look at the incident off the coast of Latakia, but since Ridley was officially exonerated, I’m not sure it’ll help our cause to draw attention to it at this time.”
“Which brings us back to Kyla herself.”
“Yes. Assuming she is shady, it appears she’s also careful. We can’t find concrete evidence of any recent wrongdoing, just a whole lot of suspicious smears and rumours. It appears her ex-staff all signed NDAs, and she has a hair trigger when it comes to sending her lawyer after them. You mentioned you’d found something interesting, though?”
“It was Beth and Harriet rather than me, but yes. Kyla might not have been quite so discreet as a teenager.”
Alaric told us about two incidents—one where Kyla’s sense of entitlement was compounded by a boyfriend dumb enough to take the rap for her, fairly cut and dried, and another that sounded far more interesting. Black leaned forward an inch. He thought so too.
“Doesn’t sound hopeful for Piper.”
“No,
