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My mind raced with possibilities, but I decided I needed to clear the room.
“Is Father Torin ready for tomorrow?” I asked Cian.
He blinked stupidly and pushed a hand through his bright ginger hair.
Cian was my father’s youngest brother’s only kid. We lost his father to a heart attack, and we both lost our other uncle to one of Stefanov’s men. With my father dead, Cian was the closest blood relative in my organisation, which was littered with distant cousins and non-family men. He wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, and the recent feud with Loch hadn’t helped his attitude. I mostly had him overseeing the local gambling ring to keep him out of trouble.
“Yeah, I guess. Shit himself when I called him.” He smirked like making a priest sweat was something to be proud of.
“Check in with him and get the cars ready for tomorrow.”
Cian’s smirk slipped off his face, and he headed for the door.
“Shite for brains,” Loch muttered as the door clicked closed.
“Did Rada recognise Niko?”
Loch nodded jerkily.
“Better get a hook ready for him in the warehouse.”
“That would kick off a war with Boyan coming out of prison.”
I shrugged; my patience for avoiding all-out war had run thin.
“We could send Boyan Niko’s head as a welcome home present. Maybe war is the only way. They tried to squirm out of the blame for Uncle Declan’s murder, blaming that piece of shite Kolev for going rogue. What excuse do they have for stalking my woman?”
They said their man Ivan Kolev had acted alone when he killed Uncle Declan in a dispute over drug suppliers, but I knew differently. Ivan was once in Boyan Stefanov’s inner circle, along with Niko. We proved Ivan was still actively involved in their fucking trafficking when we caught him attacking Loch’s woman. That hadn’t been part of the plan, but still. We tortured Ivan, and he never admitted to killing Uncle Declan outright, maintaining it was a gunfight gone wrong. Even claiming someone had set the whole thing up. I let the Bulgarian gang believe I bought their story about Ivan and that our arguments were settled when Loch cut him into small pieces, but it just cemented in my mind that there was a bigger plan afoot. Now it was spilling over to my hummingbird.
“I’ve brought them right to her door.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Loch muttered. “Come and see Thomas.”
What the fuck did that mean? We’d left Thomas, our tech guy, researching Amy’s real name, and I’d been too busy getting the best lap dance of my life to check in with him yet. Not sorry.
We headed over to Thomas’s control room. Loch shouldered the door open with a scowl. The room was a mess, and while I was confident there weren’t any rodents in here because Thomas knew I’d shoot him in the fecking leg if there were, it was far from sanitary. Every time we visited, it set off Lochs’ need to clean.
Thomas was stooped over, tapping on his keypad. The light from five screens illuminated his bespectacled face. He didn’t look up or acknowledge us.
“I’ve printed it all out.” He inclined his head to a file perched on a stack of papers. Loch grabbed it and passed it to me. I scanned the document and the passages that Thomas had highlighted.
Rosa Cortes was filed as a missing person by her school when she was fifteen. No father was listed on her birth certificate. Mother, Lucia Cortez, a Mexican immigrant, moved here with her mother. She worked as an exotic dancer, age thirty-six, at the time of death. Her body was found brutally mutilated and partially decomposed, washed up on the banks of a river down south. Appearances suggested the body was weighted down at some point. Death was caused by blunt force trauma to the head. Her body was submerged after death. I flicked through the post-mortem images, and despite the bloating and waterlogging, it was clear Amy’s mother had suffered before her death. More disturbing still was the likeness to her daughter.
Loch stood behind me, saying nothing; he’d already seen these.
“What information do you have on Lucia’s workplace?” I asked Thomas.
He didn’t answer but started typing so it would appear in a minute or two.
I recognised the name of the strip club Amy’s mother had worked at. I made it my business to know about strip clubs and their owners. I knew Bulgarians with ties to the Stefanov gang once owned it.
“Crooked copper,” Loch muttered.
Any half-decent police inspector would have identified a connection to gang involvement. The police report was significantly light for a brutally murdered woman and her missing teenage daughter. The report concluded Rosa’s absent father was likely responsible for her mother’s death and had taken Rosa back to Mexico. Case closed. Big payday.
Thomas handed me the printouts, and I took them wordlessly, motioning Loch back to my study. I poured us both a drink and sat heavily in my chair.
“Jesus wept,” I said, swirling my drink and thinking about those autopsy pictures.
