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“Shit, are you sure?” I asked, pissed that the one lead I had was now slipping through my fingers.
“I’ll put it this way. With the money he owes to various bookies in and out of town, he wouldn’t be able to get ahold of enough money to have someone burn a place down. Just looking at all the pieces, it doesn’t seem to fit.”
I sighed heavily and then thanked him for the call. Hanging up, I looked up at Mason’s house, dreading going inside. I had to deliver the news and tell my brothers that we were back to square one.
When I got inside, I called them all into the living room, and we sat down in our usual places. When we were all sitting, I took a deep breath.
“I just talked to the PI,” I said. “He doesn’t think it was Danny.”
“What?” Jordan nearly screamed. “Of course it was. You heard what he said when he walked past you!”
“I’m not ruling out that he could just be a major asshole, Jordan. He just might not be a criminal asshole,” I said.
“What made the PI think that?” Tyler asked, rubbing his jaw. It was a habit he’d had since childhood when he was confused about something.
“Apparently, Danny owes a couple of bookies in town a lot of money. What we saw was more than likely him paying his bookie off, not paying for a service. My PI thinks he wouldn’t be able to get ahold of the kind of money a professional hit would take.”
“Bullshit,” Jordan said, steaming. He was shaking his head slowly and staring at his cup of coffee. “Where there is a will there is a way, and that rat bastard had the will, Tom. I can feel it.”
“Well, maybe it was—I am not ruling it out completely. But I am saying we need to go about this carefully. He is just as likely to be innocent,” I said.
There was a murmur of agreement among the brothers, but it took a moment for Jordan to join in. When he did, the reluctance was palpable.
“So,” Mason said, “now what?”10AmandaBy that night, I felt like I had pretty much gotten into the groove of working from the hotel.
Much like Tom said, it wasn’t too much different than working at the home office. Just more comfortable and without a bunch of other coworkers wandering around all day. The room also didn’t have a full-service coffee room within just a few steps, which was a downside. But there was a perfectly good coffee maker I was getting used to. I had put in an online order for some of my favorite coffee to be delivered the next day, and that would definitely help.
Not having Tom there in the room helped me focus more. When we were at the headquarters, he spent most of his time in his office. While I went in and out throughout the day and accompanied him to meetings and conferences, we weren’t usually in such close contact so much of the time.
Not only was having him that close to me so much a bit of a distraction from the work I was supposed to be doing, but it was stirring up thoughts I really shouldn’t be having.
It was a relief to have him leave so I could concentrate completely on the work I needed to be doing. Right then it was sending off what felt like a never-ending list of emails. I had to keep up with the correspondence for a wide variety of clients, vendors, and others within the industry. I also had invoices to send out and payment acknowledgments to make.
In addition to all the emails, I had to go over the initial plans the marketing department had submitted for the upcoming holiday season. A couple of years ago, Tom had started entrusting the first look at these plans and proposals to me. He had the final say, but I looked them over first, made comments and offered suggestions, then passed them along to him when I felt they were ready for him to see.
I had to admit, the marketing department seemed to be in good form already this year. We were gearing up to have a very busy and hopefully very successful holiday season, so their marketing had to be on point. I was already pretty impressed by what I was seeing, but there were a few things I thought could be tweaked.
I looked over at the time and was shocked to see how late it had gotten. Most of the day I was on conference calls with Landon making sure I stayed on top of everything that was going on at the office so I could relay it to Tom. The conference calls pushed back getting my actual work done, so now it was several hours after the usual end of my day.
