"Trail. About half a day old, which fits the timeline." Harold pointed in the direction of Amani's apartment. "Lion scent heading north, strong and clean. Then here—" He took three steps and stopped again. "Sharks. Minimum three. They all smell so similar it's hard to separate individuals, but the concentration says at least three bodies, probably coming from that alley there." He pointed to a gap between two warehouses. "Cut him off. The lion scent spikes, adrenaline, fear, and then it drops to ground level. He went down right here."
Nero looked at the sidewalk. Clean concrete. Almost no visible evidence. But Harold's nose was reading a story that eyes couldn't see, a twenty-year-old walking home, the ambush, the tackle, the needle.
Then he saw it. Three feet from where Harold had stopped, near the base of the wall, a phone. Face down, screen shattered, the case cracked clean through. Nero crouched and turned it over with a pen. The lock screen was dead. He bagged it.
"His phone," Nero said. "Broke in the fall. Lady Leo has location sharing on it. It would have stopped pinging right here."
"So she'll know where he went down but not where they took him."
"Exactly."
"Vehicle?"
Harold walked a few more yards and nodded toward the curb. "Van. Diesel. Parked here for at least an hour before the grab, the exhaust residue is heavy. They were waiting for him. This wasn't improvised."
Planned. Staked out. They knew his route and his schedule and they waited. Nero looked up at the intersection ahead and spotted what he was looking for: a traffic camera on the light pole, and two security cameras mounted on the warehouse across the street. "Cameras. Traffic cam should be easy to pull. The warehouse footage might take a warrant."
Harold nodded. "The traffic camera should give us the van. Make, model, plates if we're lucky. Warehouse cams might have caught the actual grab."
Nero was already on the phone. "I'll get the traffic footage expedited. You keep working the scent trail, see if you can pick up anything from the alley where they staged. I want to know if they left anything behind."
Harold headed for the alley. Nero made three calls in five minutes: traffic division for the camera footage, his supervisor for case authorization, and the analyst on duty to start pulling files on every shark associated with the Playground network who was currently unaccounted for. The machinery of an investigation, grinding into motion. Slow but inevitable. The work that didn't make for exciting television but that found people, consistently, relentlessly, one piece of evidence at a time.
He looked down at his phone. The photo of Amani was still on the screen, amber eyes, sharp grin, shirtless behind the bar with a cocktail umbrella and the unshakable confidence ofsomeone who had never once considered the possibility that the world might not be safe.
Nero put his phone away and went to work.
Chapter Six
Grainger wanted eggs for lunch.
He said it the way a man might say it to a partner he'd been living with for years, casually, with the assumption that the request would be understood and fulfilled without further instruction. He settled himself at the breakfast bar with a glass of water and a folded newspaper and watched Amani with the patient, expectant look of someone who had complete faith that the person in front of him would figure it out.
Amani stood in the kitchen and stared at a carton of eggs and tried to remember if he had ever successfully cooked one. The answer, he was fairly certain, was no. There had been an attempt in his apartment once, six months earlier, that had ended with the smoke detector going off and Bethany texting him a link to a cooking class with a note that saidplease, for the love of god.
He cracked an egg into a pan that he'd found under the counter. It sizzled. That seemed right. He cracked another one. Also sizzled. So far so good.
"My first mate was a wonderful cook," Grainger said from behind his newspaper. "He could make anything. Soufflés, roasts, the most beautiful pastries. I miss his cooking almost as much as I miss him. Almost." He chuckled softly, as if he'd made a joke.
Amani's stomach turned.
The eggs were doing something. Amani wasn't sure what. The edges were getting brown and lacy but the middles were still translucent and the yolks were looking increasingly hostile. He poked at one with a spatula and it broke, sending yellow running across the pan in a way that seemed wrong.
"His name was Edward," Grainger continued. He'd set the newspaper down and was watching Amani now, his chin resting on his interlaced fingers. "A heron. Beautiful man. Taller than you and thinner.. More delicate. He had hands like a pianist, long fingers, very graceful. We were together for thirty-two years."
Thirty-two years. Amani filed the number away. Thirty-two years and then eleven alone. Grainger wasn't a monster who'd always been a monster. He was a man who'd had a life and a partner and a home and then lost all of it except the home, and the loss had broken something in him so fundamentally that buying a person seemed like a reasonable solution to loneliness.
That didn't make it okay. Amani reminded himself of that as he scraped the eggs, mangled, half-burnt, barely recognizable as food, onto a plate. Understanding why someone did a terrible thing was not the same as forgiving them for it.
He set the plate in front of Grainger and stepped back. Grainger looked at the eggs with an expression that was carefully, diplomatically neutral.
"It's time to learn," Grainger echoed what he'd said before, but with a weariness that suggested the learning curve was going to be longer than he'd hoped. He ate the eggs without complaint. Amani stood at the counter and watched him and did not eat, because his stomach was a fist and the thought of food made him want to be sick.
"You need to eat too, little cub." Grainger didn't look up from his plate.
"I'm not hungry."
The newspaper lowered. Grainger's eyes found his. "You need to eat." It wasn't a suggestion the second time.
