Reece was right; she rarely felt fear and she wasn’t a fan of it now. But she could appreciate the way it put the world in knife-sharp focus. She’d need that focus if even half the rumors about Evan Grayson were true.
If he really was the Dead Man.
Half the force would argue the Dead Man was fake, nothing more than another empathy conspiracy theory. Jamey couldn’t blame them. Who believed in shadow agents, rumored to appear anytime crimes involved empaths? It sounded ridiculous.
Except Jamey had followed the rumors since their first whispers, a couple years ago. And now the senator behind the toughest anti-empathy bill ever drafted was dead, and who was on Reece’s phone within hours? It didn’t matter that Jamey had kept her suspicions out of tonight’s reports and run distractions. Grayson was real and Grayson knew about Senator Hathaway’s murder and Grayson hadcalled her brother.
Ten to one he was already on his way to Seattle, and she had to get Reece out of here.
The yacht with the bodies,The Bulwark,loomed up ahead but a man she didn’t recognize was coming straight toward her, in his late thirties, perhaps, with brown hair, pale skin, and narrowed eyes. “Detective! A word.”
His voice was obnoxiously loud in the thin, cold air. She reluctantly stopped on the dock. “What kind of word, Officer...”
“Agent,”he snapped. “Special Agent Nolan. We have a crisis.”
“Triple homicide, yes,” she agreed. “It’s terrible.”
“Terribledoesn’t cover it, St. James. This isn’t some random hobo. This is Senator Hannah Hathaway, dead from fuck knows what, on Cedrick Stone’s yacht, in the town where American Minds Intact is headquartered. And not one single hippie at this crime scene seems able to put down the weed long enough to grasp what that means.”
Random hobo?She’d definitely found Taylor’s FBI prick. “What does weed have to do with anything?”
“I have to assume you and everyone else is smoking it. Why else would you take an officer off the highest-profile murder investigation in years to compile a list of pulp mills?”
The mud caked into the Ford Transit’s tires had reeked of sulfur and wet wood, and she didn’t have time to waste before following that lead. “I have a sensitive nose. I thought I smelled something.”
“What, are you fucking pregnant or something? We have IDs on the two thugs murdered with the senator. They were obviously hired to kill Hathaway and they weren’t from any pulp mills. It’s a hit, we should be looking for the money trail.”
Two bodies had been found with Hathaway. One of them had been a former wrestler and notorious muscle-for-hire with a long rap sheet. His neck had strangulation marks, deep enough to be made by an offensive lineman—but narrow and small, the right size to match a petite sixty-five-year-old senator who would have struggled to carry a full bag of groceries.
Jamey had a hard time believing the answers were going to be as straightforward as a hired hit.
“Who’swe?” she said, instead of voicing her other thoughts. “Thehighest-profilemurder investigation in years should mean FBI agents swarming this yacht like flies, ready for a big jurisdiction fight. Where are the rest of you?”
A muscle in Nolan’s jaw twitched. “I don’t know.”
“You don’tknow?”
“I’m here from DC for a cruise. I know Lieutenant Parson, I got suckered into this because he called me personally. The FBI has a Seattle office; I was told more agents were on their way, but...” He gestured around the yacht.
Rare unease shivered down Jamey’s spine. “But they’re not here.”
“That’s not the only problem,” Nolan said, his lip curling. “Now there’s the security footage.”
The marina itself normally ran security cameras throughout the parking lot. Those cameras had been shut off just after midnight, and the marina’s staff were clueless as to how it had happened.
But the gas station across the street had a camera that caught the edge of the marina’s exit. She’d watched the night’s footage twice herself: a partial view, the edges of the bumper and body molding as a red car with wide tires came barreling out of the exit so fast it had fishtailed.
Then, twenty minutes later, thin and bald tires under a green bumper, driving out of the marina at a leisurely pace.
They’d already put out an APB on the second car, which was thought to be Vincent Braker’s green Hyundai—although obviously their catatonic witness wasn’t the one behind the wheel.
Forensics was still working to identify the make and model of the red car as soon as possible. The driver could be another witness—or in serious trouble.
“What happened to the security footage?”
“You tell me, Detective,” he said, lip still curled. “Because all of a sudden, every file we got from the gas station is gone.”
“Gone?”
