“For him or for you?”
“Both.”
Nicole went back to working on the computer, but after a couple of minutes, stopped typing and turned back to her boyfriend. “What’s your gut say on this?”
Bridge thought for a few seconds, taking a few deep breaths before answering. “Honestly, my gut says that I don’t think the agency is involved in his killing. I just… if he’s a natural salesman who goes overseas a lot, if the agency wanted to do him in, they probably could have done it a lot easier, without so many questions, and without anyone really looking into it in a foreign country. It would have been easier to explain. You know, he got mugged, went to a wrong part of town, car accident, whatever. And nobody probably would’ve thought twice about it. But if you kill him here, people like PIs, or us, start looking into things, and you’ve got a mess on your hands.”
Nicole agreed. “It would be easier to kill him over there.”
“Yeah, so, it doesn’t make sense to do it here if that’s what their intentions were.”
“Maybe they were caught off guard by his murder as much as everyone else was, and whatever they were working on, they had to distance themselves from it for whatever reason.”
“That would make sense. At least as much as anything else at this point.”
“And that’s not even taking Bevell into account yet,” Nicole said. “Where’s he?”
“I can tell you where he probably is, but you wouldn’t like it.”
“At the bottom of a hole?”
“Question is, whose hole? The agency’s or whoever killed Abbott?”
“Assuming it’s not one and the same.”
“Yeah.” Bridge let out a few more sighs, hating the case with each second that passed. Even still, he was involved now. He wasn’t giving up on it.
“I guess it could be worse.”
“No, it couldn’t.”
“Could be in Mexico.”
“To be honest, and I know this is gonna shock you, but I think I’d rather be there right now.”
Nicole pulled her head back like she was shocked. “No, you didn’t.”
“Oh, I did.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I did.”
“You know, I’m gonna remind you of that the next time we have to go back there.”
“Hopefully there won’t be a next time.”
“There’s always a next time.”
“No, there’s not.”
“Always is a next time. For everything.”
“I disagree.”
“Name something,” Nicole said.
“If you’re already dead, there’s no next time. Unless, of course, they dig up your body and start shooting you again. Though I guess technically you’re still dead from the first time, so you still can’t be killed again. Right?”
“Funny.”
“Well, I was just saying.”
“How ‘bout if you say something intelligent about this case?”
“Eh, can’t help you with that one. You talk to Eric?”
“Yeah, he’s gonna look into it and get back to us. What do you wanna do next?”
“Well, we already know that Abbott was working with the agency, right? So I don’t think it’d do much good to retrace his steps from the first time that happened up to now, would it?” Bridge said.
“I dunno. Maybe.”
“It’d probably be better to work backwards, wouldn’t it? Figure out what he’d been doing recently and go from there. Because whatever happened to him, I think it’s safe to say it’s because of whatever he was doing recently and not something he was working on three years ago. If that was the case, he would have been killed then.”
“Makes sense. Should we try to simultaneously work on finding the PI too?”
Bridge got up and went over to the table, picking up Bevell’s planner. There were a few leads in there he wanted to check out. There were a couple of names, dates, and times in the couple of days leading up to his disappearance that Bridge wanted to look into.
“I’ll look into this stuff,” Bridge said, holding up the planner. “You keep on Abbott.”
“You gonna check that stuff out alone?”
Bridge shrugged. “What could possibly happen?”
“You really need an answer to that?”
“Uh, no.”
They spent two more hours working, with Nicole trying to piece together every little detail of Abbott’s life in the months leading up to his death. Bridge tried to figure out who the names were in Bevell’s planner. There were two names on it, but he didn’t think they went together. They could have been first or last names, though one sounded more like a nickname. One was Kenny. The other was Stash. Bridge’s concentration was broken when his phone started ringing again. He wasn’t sure if he should have been happy or not to see Happ’s name on his screen.
“Hey, Happy, what’s up?”
“Nicole told me about the case you guys are on.”
“Yeah?”
“She mentioned something about a PI that went missing.”
“Yeah?”
“A guy named Bevell? Is that right?”
“Right so far.”
“Darren Bevell?”
“That’s him.”
“Well, he’s not missing anymore.”
“Oh. He turned up?”
“Um, well, sort of. He’s dead.”
“What are the details?”
“Uh, really aren’t any that I can tell so far. Just got word that he was found by the police roughly an hour or two ago.”
“Can’t say that I’m surprised,” Bridge said. “I was figuring this call would come sooner or later.”
“Nicole gave me the details on everything earlier and uh… it’s a little strange.”
“In what way?”
“The police believe that Bevell’s body was moved from wherever he was originally killed to the place where he was dumped.”
“They pretty sure of that?”
“Seem to be,” Happ replied. “There was no blood at the scene. And there’s something else.”
“What’s that?”
“His body was discovered in the same alley that Gary Abbott’s was.”
“Seriously?”
“How’s that for coincidences?”
“Heavy.”
“There’s one more thing,” Happ said.
“What?”
“I don’t know if it’s just a coincidence or not, but…”
“When someone starts a sentence with those words, it’s usually not.”
“Yeah, well, he was killed with two bullets to the chest.”
“And?”
“So was Gary Abbott.”
Bridge let out a loud sigh. “OK.”
“I can already hear the frustration mounting, Luke.”
“Not because of what it is. More like because of what it might be.”
“It’s got agency ties written all over it.”
“Yeah.”
“You think they know what’s going on?” Happ asked.
“That’s my hunch. I’m not sure they’re behind it, but I
