Page 10 of Plain Sight

Mason pulls the car over to the curb, startling the hell out of me. My body is ten steps ahead of my brain. I’m out on the sidewalk before he stops. At the building in a few steps.

This isn’t where she is. This is a storefront with a boarded-up front window with a SOLD sign. The door isn’t locked. It pops open with one half-assed pull on the handle.

The building is nothing to me. I don’t want to think about fucking property values when Lily’s been taken. And I still have a ballpark figure in the back of my mind. It’s the most ridiculous reflex I have. It’s pointless. It was worth something when I worked for Mason’s company. I guess I still do, since he hasn’t fired me, but now it isn’t worth anything, and it’s still there.

Numbers switch over to lower ones when I cross the threshold. Any property that’s left open halfway through renovations—there’s drywall dust and a bucket of drywall mud and some sawhorses—is going to be screwed. Most of the value comes from the fact that it’s Manhattan real estate, but the rest is going to be a pain in the ass to get back if the wrong person walks in off the street.

I don’t want to think about this.

For fuck’s sake.

I shove all of it into the background of my thoughts. Building has three floors. Renovation bullshit on the ground floor. Empty rooms on the second. Abandoned file cabinets on the third.

She’s not here.

Everybody’s waiting outside the car when I come back. Mason’s holding the door open for me like he knew she wouldn’t be here, too.

Once I’m inside, I take off my jacket and throw it at the opposite side of the car.

“We’ll find her,” Mason says, catching my eye in the rearview. He pulls back into traffic.

“I know.”

I say it like I don’t know that finding somebody can fuck you up forever. I say it like I didn’t go looking for those crime scene photos and get turned into one myself. I say it like I haven’t been running from those pictures ever since.

I’m never going to outrun them.

I can’t have another thought about the photos or property values. I don’t have any room in my body for anything but my heart. I let my eyes skim over the sidewalk and drag thoughts out of my useless brain.

Who took Lily?

It had to have something to do with her grandfather. He’s the only one left. Bettencourt is dead. Van Kempt is dead. My parents are dead. The remaining members of the consortium are mega-fucked.

Judge Beaufort Hayes is the last person with a vendetta against us. He tried to keep Lily at his house. He sent a bunch of rogue cops after me. The judge wants a word with his granddaughter. He came to Mason’s building.

And that’s as far as he’s going to go. Beaufort isn’t the kind of man who gets his hands dirty. He’ll say a few stern words to a doorman, but he’s not going to sully himself by walking in the woods or shooting someone or burning down a building.

So it wasn’t the judge who came to the cathedral. Somebody would’ve noticed him.

And the guy Hades brought back wasn’t the kidnapper. He was still close enough to the building to get caught.

There are layers to this. It’s an onion of assholes, and I’d bet anything that Judge Beaufort Hayes is at the center.

But the person who’s doing all the dirty work is somebody else.

The name of the person who killed my parents—the person who actually lit the fire in the building—wasn’t in any of the paperwork I went through. Gabriel didn’t find it, either. He would have said. We might be able to find it if we went through all the paperwork from every company in the consortium and tracked every invoice they ever paid, but there’s no time for that.

Another way might be faster.

I lean up toward Hades’s seat. He looks at me, his expression calm.

“The guy at the cathedral,” I start.

Mason takes a breath, but doesn’t say anything.

“We still have him, right? We haven’t given him to the cops?”

Hades shakes his head. “That seemed premature, given your previous experience with the police.”