Page 70 of Velvet Vaughn

He looked toward the hallway. “The suit.”

She’d forgotten that was why they’d come. “You’ll probably have to have it dry-cleaned or at least steamed.”

He came back two minutes later with a garment bag over his shoulder. Anja ran her hands over the outside, checked the pockets and zipper seam, then nodded. Nothing obvious.

Leo surveyed his living room one more time. “Someone broke into my apartment.”

“Yes.”

“And went through my belongings.”

“Yes.”

The easy social warmth she associated with him was entirely absent. What remained underneath was controlled and considerably less comfortable to be on the wrong side of. “They’ve been in my office and now my apartment. They’re not just watching anymore.”

“No, they’re not.”

Anja put Leo between them as they walked to the elevator and boarded. She watched the numbers drop on the panel above the doors. Remi stood with his hands loose at his sides, alert without showing it. Leo held his garment bag and said nothing.

“Thank you, Oscar,” Leo called out as they crossed toward the exit, because he thanked people regardless of what was happening, and even now it was automatic.

Outside, the morning was overcast. Anja scanned the block out of reflex: cars at the curb, a pedestrian half a block east, a delivery van idling near the corner. Nothing tapped at her instincts.

She recalled Vic’s voicemail. He said he’d put something together and was sorry it had gotten this far. That there was more than what was on the drive and he’d handled it wrong from the beginning. That he’d needed Leo to know.

Terrified and apologizing, Vic had called Leo before he’d driven to Kansas City and died. And someone had found that transcript, which meant they knew Leo was knee-deep in this now.

She got into the Escalade and kept the last thought to herself.

#

Anja shed her jacket onto the hook by the door and headed for the office. She dropped into a chair and called Tyler, and soon his face filled half the computer screen from his lair in Bloomington.

“Tell me you’ve got something.”

“I’ve got lots.” Tyler’s voice carried that brightness he got when data gave him a foothold. “Power company confirms the outage at Leo’s building was localized to two transformers feeding that block. Somebody requested a service interruption through the utility’s own system using credentials traced back to a contractor account that hasn’t done legitimate work in that grid sector in fourteen months.”

“I’m guessing a hijacked account.”

“You’d be right. Same signature as the outage at Pinnacle. Whoever’s running this has had utility-level access sitting in their back pocket for months, just waiting for a reason to use it.”

Leo came in behind her and angled himself so he could see the screen too. “That’s not cheap.”

“Nor is it amateur,” Tyler replied. “It’s planning, money, and patience. Three things I’d rather our problem not have.”

“Building footage?” she asked Tyler.

“Partial. The elevator camera backup picked up two figures before it died, but the angle’s bad, and they knew where the blind spot was.” He pulled up a frame showing two grainy shapes with their faces angled deliberately away from the lens. “I’m running enhancements, but don’t get your hopes up. These people don’t make rookie mistakes.”

“No.” Anja studied the image. “They don’t.”

Leo rubbed a hand across his jaw. “So we’re no closer to knowing who?”

“We’re closer to knowing what they’re capable of,” Tyler corrected. “Which, honestly, might matter more right now.”

It did. Anja had spent the drive back turning the apartment breach over in her mind, hunting for the detail that didn’t fit, and what kept surfacing wasn’t a face or a name. It was the patience and the precision. Whoever orchestrated this had resources that didn’t belong to a jealous rival agent or a disgruntled client. This was institutional. Someone had spent enough time inside the right rooms to know which ones mattered.

“Anything on the three agencies?” she asked.