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“The slip-up being that you followed my sister instead of me and almost killed the wrong person? Poor Vince. How angry is your boss that you fucked it all up?”
Vince frowned. He’d started out very confident, but seemed to ease back with her accusations. “Don’t know what you’re talking about, Oink. Don’t have a boss. I work for myself. Like I said.”
“Oink? Yeah, that’s a good one.” Ari bent at the waist, putting her face closer to him. “Here’s what I think. You fucked this up months ago, by following my sister from Chicago to Montana. You’ve been on the wrong trail practically since the get-go.
“Then you compounded your stupidity by not realizing this humongous mistake, keeping tabs on the wrong person, racking up huge expenses that ultimately didn’t even yield you a usable target let alone the correct one. Am I right?”
“No. You’re wrong.” But his furious expression gave away the lie he told. Warrick had seen plenty of criminals seated in that chair and this guy was guilty from the word go. They already had the surveillance on him from the hotel stairwell complete with audio.
Confession or not, Vince was going down.
“If I were your boss, I’d have you taken out before you talked. Or maybe once you’re convicted, sentenced, and incarcerated then he’ll strike, seeking the retribution you denied him for failing to take me out after following the wrong person for months.” She looked around the walls of the room. “Either way, you’re done. Pretty soon you’ll be transferred to federal custody.”
Vince made an inarticulate grunt, but his body language said he was worried about the same thing. “But I can be of use to you.”
Ari uncrossed her arms, lifting one to tap a finger against her cheek as if in contemplation. “Let me think. How many federal prisoners do you figure your boss has on his payroll on the inside?” She shrugged her shoulders with exaggeration. “How long do you figure to last once you start your sentence, huh, Vince?”
Vince looked around like he’d become paranoid she might be right. Warrick admired her skills. He loved nothing more than to scare a criminal into confessing more than what they already had on him. Watching Vince squirm in his seat was very satisfying.
“Listen, you little—” Vince’s tone bordered on fury. He lifted up in his seat, but was held down by the manacles. He was about to get an additional charge on his record if he didn’t settle down.
The uniformed officer in the room with Ari stepped forward menacingly.
“Watch it, Vince.” Ari interrupted his coming wrath. “You don’t want to get kicked back to your cell before you explain what you want to tell me.”
Vince took a deep breath and let it out. A grimacing smile shaped his cracked lips. “Okay. Here it is. Your case against me is for shit. I wasn’t going to kill anyone. That wasn’t what I planned to do.”
“Oh? And what was your job?”
“It was to watch at first.” He grinned that evil, crooked grin again.
“And then?” Ari prompted.
“Fetch.”
Ari rolled her eyes this time. “Oh? Fetch to where?”
At this point, Vince had apparently said all he intended to. Ari tried to engage him several more times, but he only smiled to himself and remained silent.
She returned to the room where Warrick and Duke waited, watching the show.
“What a douche!” she said the moment she entered the room.
Duke chuckled under his breath. Warrick smiled as he agreed with her assessment.
“Fetch, my ass. He was here to take her out, thinking it was me. He’s been watching her movements since he got here. He followed her around. I saw the tapes from the hotel. He even knew she was late to the stairwell that night, because he’d been stalking her so carefully.”
“If he is telling the truth—that he was an errand boy sent to fetch—who sent him? Where was Vince, the errand boy, taking you, or rather Isabelle?”
Ari shrugged. “I don’t know. He was a lap dog runner for another thug higher on the ladder of criminal success, operating out of quite a few places along the Northeastern coast and into New York City.”
“But you think he’s lying. Working on his own?”
“I do. The singular case I worked on in conjunction with Vince was less than a year ago. A drug bust at a rave. I was sent in as a supplier. I was supposedly putting myself thought college by working as a maid selling a little on the side to get ahead. His boss was the major supplier selling in that venue.”
“What happened?”
Her gaze zeroed sharply his way. “I can’t say.”
