Chapter Seventeen
Logan
After the night when we’d bared ourselves, it felt like the world changed. For years I’d been so focused on my job and little details, now it was like I was seeing the world with new eyes. I hated that I had to sound so cliché about it, but when I discussed it with DB, Raul, and Garrett, they’d all agreed and said, “Love will do that to ya.”
So far, after a lot of man hours invested in the case, we hadn’t found Lord Kirkwood. King had lawyered up before we’d even been to see him, and Dirk was doing his best to act like a concerned parent, even going so far as to get his young wife to join him in front of camera crews while they stuck missing posters around the town.
Lying scum!
Interestingly, Judge Ingleston had taken some vacation time from his job and had then given a press conference on behalf of the Kirkwood family, asking for people with information and security camera footage to come forward.
Do you want to know what we saw when we watched them during it? Lies. Ingleston was agitated, jerky, it was like he was reciting something they’d scribbled out minutes before it.
Dirk was behind him, scanning the area like he was looking for something, but his expression was vacant and bored, while his wife just stared at her feet.
And King, the smarmy fuck, was tapping the screen of his phone next to her, not interested in what was going on around him.
Cinder was alive but still in the ICU. They’d managed to release the pressure in her skull, and the initial tests for brain function were looking promising. She might never lead a life, walking, talking, living like I did, but she’d at least survived.
When Bexley had found out about her, she’d rallied some of the ladies around to help look after Cinder, making sure she had stuff that women apparently couldn’t live without and visiting so that she knew she wasn’t on her own.
Yesterday, we’d walked into the ICU to update Alejandro, whose turn it was to guard her, and Ava had been reading her a romance book.
Alejandro was quite a quiet guy who listened more than he talked, but the look he’d given us when we’d entered was like he was begging us to swap with him so he could get away from it all.
When we’d made to leave, he’d grabbed my arm and hissed, “If you don’t make this shit stop, I’m going to move her to my house and breathe down the fucking tube for her.”
As funny as it was, and I had zero doubts that he was serious about it, we still left him there for the rest of the shift.
“Dirk is hiding him,” DB sighed as he looked at the board with all of the photos and notes on it.
“Maybe you guys could get the blueprints of the Kirkwood mansion,” Naomi suggested, walking in with a file in her hand. “One that old has to have hidey holes in it, and with Ingleston on vacation, you have Judge Ramsey, who’ll definitely give you a warrant.”
All of us turned from the board to look at her, making her stop in place with the file in her hand.
DB took it from her, dropping it on the table and then crossing his arms in front of him. “What if there have been additions that aren’t on any of the plans we get?”
“Uh, well, I was studying architecture at school when—” she stopped, not needing to rehash what’d happened to her.
Her brother and sister-in-law had died shortly after her niece was born, and then her parents had tried to sell the baby via a company that excelled in thinking only of their pockets and not of the children. It wasn’t sex trafficking from what the case file outlined, but it was selling kids for adoption.
“Go on,” Alex urged, taking a seat and waving at her to take one.
Slowly, she lowered herself into one next to Carter. “I was studying architecture at school when I got custody of Shanti. One of the houses I had to look at for a case study was an old mansion that’d been updated. They had the original plans for the house and ones from about ten years later, but during the prohibition period, they’d updated it again to hide stuff.”
“They sold moonshine?” Carter guessed, and she nodded back at him.
“And homemade whiskey. Because they were making both in the house, they built new walls in some of the rooms, making them narrower but giving them a space behind it to put the stuff in so they could make the hooch. With some clever decorating, no one was any the wiser.”
Raising his eyebrows, DB nodded slowly. “Makes sense, and the Kirkwood mansion has gone through a lot of work over the years. It started about the same size as Bexley’s house,”—he nodded at me, then turned back to the others—“and is about four times that now.”
“Plenty of space to hide stuff or make hooch,” Carter confirmed, smiling at Naomi and making her blush as she hung her head.
“Wouldn’t they just use the basement?” I asked, intrigued by the story but also confused. Most people hid shit in the basement, so why not use that?
Naomi’s head lifted so quickly it cracked. “Oh, well, the machinery used to make moonshine and whiskey created a smell as it worked from the alcohol and the machine itself. There was also some steam that would’ve ruined the barrels and booze. It was easier to explain away a smell and steam if there was, say, a bathroom in the room or it was next to the kitchen, so that’s where they’d put it. There were some false rooms and false flooring in the basement, but that was where they’d stored the alcohol. Something about it being the perfect temperature for it, so it never went bad.”
“How do you tell if a room’s been worked on? We’d have to
