Shepherd honked. They moved out of the way.
His hands were shaking on the steering wheel, because in case things weren’t bad enough, he hadn’t even gotten to eat yet. “I’m driving through somewhere,” he said. “I’m getting a breakfast burrito and a frozen coffee. And I am not buying anything for you! I don’t care if that makes me a bad boss.”
“You are not a bad boss,” Ginny reassured him. “You’re just passive and permissive.”
“You think I don’t know those are fancy words for bad?” He blew out a hard breath, his shaking hand running through his hair. “So much blood. Mr. Martin wasn’t a bad guy.”
Ginny’s phone was beeping every few seconds. She was pointedly ignoring it. “I know.” She touched his arm and gave a soft squeeze. “He was decent, for a landlord. It was my mom they were after.”
Over the bridge out of the exclusive part of Laguna Key, Golden Arches appeared ahead. Shepherd switched lanes to get closer to the promised land. “How can you be so sure?”
“Why kill him and take her? Unless he was a witness and she was who they were after. My family is well connected. We are known for having money. My mother married into the family; she isn’t a Kent by birth, but my grandfather still respects her, even after she divorced my dad twice. She’s the older, beloved matriarch. Well, if you believe the society pages. The perfect target.” Ginny rubbed her eyes. “She’ll be fine. The kidnappers will ask for money. My father will pay the money. And my mom will be back before morning tomorrow.”
But Shepherd heard the tremor in her voice that suggested Ginny wasn’t as certain as she was trying to portray.
He placed an order at the drive-thru window, and when Ginny shouted hers over his shoulder, he didn’t bother stopping her. He even paid for it and waved off her thanks. He was a good boss, thank you very much. How many other bosses would pretend to be an employee’s boyfriend?
Not many, just based on the possibility of a sexual harassment lawsuit.
He parked in the closest spot and dug into his burrito as if he’d find enlightenment at the end of it. “So,” he said with his mouth full, “who was this Cardello guy, anyway?”
TEN
“Charlie Cardello,” Ginny said, pulling the passenger’s shade down to shield her eyes—the morning light reflected off the still ocean on the other side of the parking lot right into their faces—“was the owner of Cardello Industries, the largest distributor of ketamine in the Eastern States. He also owned a number of other businesses that were definitely not mob-related in any way.”
“Gotcha.”
She took the plastic lid off her paper cup to blow on the steaming coffee. “They were completely legal businesses.”
“Right. I heard you the first time. Why did your family represent him?”
She rolled her eyes. “He was sued by this old guy who said Charlie bought his family company out from under him, but all it took was a financial audit to prove that Charlie had purchased the shares and equipment all legally and above board. It was just sellers’ remorse.”
Shepherd crinkled the empty burrito wrapper in his hand and tossed it in the backseat. “You call a lot of mob bosses by their first name?”
“Only the handsome ones,” she said, before she stuck her tongue out at him. His attention zeroed in on it before he shook himself. It was just a tongue, and it was just a mob boss, and neither of those things was important. Not really.
Mr. Martin was dead, and Shepherd had stepped in his blood. That was important.
“Anyway, I don’t know why he’d go after my mother. She wasn’t a part of his case at all—andit worked out in his favor.”
Her phone buzzed. The home screen had at least ten unread messages from people labeledDadandVincentandGrandpa. Ginny clicked that tongue of hers and powered off the phone.
Shepherd pressed a button on his navigation display to turnon the maps, finger poised to type in her address. “You ready for me to take you home?”
She shook her head. “I need to talk to Charlie first.”
“But the cops said Charlie was dead?”
Ginny pushed his hand out of the way and typed out the address of a home not too far from where they were. “As a general rule of thumb,” she said, “I try not to take whatever cops say seriously.”
The nav system told him to turn right onto the road, but it might as well have been speaking Japanese for all the sense it was making. “You are out of your mind. I’m not taking you to some gangster’s house! Especially a Schrödinger’s Cat Gangster who also, if alive, is behind the death of Mr. Martin and your mother’s kidnapping.”
“No way.” Ginny scoffed. “He wouldn’t have kidnapped my mom. But I bet he knows something about it. He knows who took her or why. I have to talk to him.”
“Why would Mr. Martin’s last word be ‘Cardello’ if it was only a helpful clue and not a deathbed accusation?”
“I don’t know, Shepherd! Why would a man’s last word be ‘rosebud’?”
