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Then they’d keep the antidote, sell the tracer, and make a fortune.
Lila sipped her chocolate and broke into Bullstow’s database, peeking into Natalie’s murder investigation. She and Tristan had been right. Natalie and her people had died around eight o’clock that morning. The ballistics team confirmed that the bullets lodged in the bodies were German-made and fired from German guns.
Not German hands, though. Bullstow believed that the Holguíns had killed Natalie for the shame she’d brought upon the family, knowing that more of her crimes would be revealed if her case went to court. They, like many highborn families, simply decided to spare their family the embarrassment of a trial and regain their family’s honor and protect themselves from Natalie’s wrath after exile.
They just hadn’t done it legally. The family’s blood squad should have taken Natalie while she tarried on the Holg
uín estate. She should have gone missing, never to be seen or heard from again. Instead, they’d surrounded Natalie off-compound, killing nearly a dozen workborn criminals in the process. Even worse, they’d left the bodies for Bullstow to clean up.
That rankled Bullstow. They could not ignore it, not that they believed they were meant to. The Holguíns had left Natalie there for a reason. Indeed, Bullstow thought they had the key to the elaborate death scene. Acquiring German guns might have been difficult but not impossible, certainly not when one had the resources of the entire Holguín family at their disposal. The Bullstow teddy bear at the scene had been an easy prop, for Oskar had taken it with him from the auction house. Both pointed to German mercs. With Natalie and the Germans as patsies and a believable cover story, Chairwoman Holguín would be free to make a deal for Oskar with anyone she liked, selling him without the stern eyes of Bullstow focused on her compound.
Indeed, Bullstow would be too busy chasing kidnappers who did not exist.
The plan was so thoroughly highborn and brilliant that Lila had to applaud Bullstow for coming up with it. It was certainly much more plausible than German mercenaries stealing into New Bristol, something Chief Shaw thought rather unlikely, given the number who would have to be hidden in the city to pull off the murders. Besides, he probably believed that Natalie was too clever to lead mercs back to her hideout.
Shaw didn’t know about the tracers, though. He also didn’t have the most discreet militia. Now that Bullstow knew Oskar was missing, the press and the matrons would know as soon as the first spies got hold of the information.
So would the empire.
Lila dug into the files submitted by Shaw’s tech department next. The group hadn’t been able to break into Natalie’s star drive. They’d only managed to break the encryption on the palms, but they only found a few naughty photos and silly games.
Lila closed her connection to Bullstow and brought up the contents of Natalie’s star drive once more. After an hour of digging, all she found that pertained to Oskar was a few incriminating messages. It appeared that Natalie had been contacted by a friend of a friend. For a small fee, that friend offered to connect Natalie with someone who would pay good money for the boy, so long as she didn’t mind who might be buying him.
Natalie had replied that she didn’t care who bought him or where he ended up, so long as she got paid on delivery. She just needed to know the amount and who was buying.
The messages made it easy to guess the buyers would be German. It also made it easier for Lila to deal with the image of Natalie and her thugs dead on the concrete.
Shaking her head, she delved into the palm data, looking for any clues about who might have brokered the deal. There were no blinking arrows, no flashing neon lights. All she found were naughty pictures and silly games, just like Bullstow. She even ran the pictures through a few programs that might extract codes or secret messages from the pixels, but found nothing.
In the end, she even looked at the games. Two appeared on all three palms. In the first, the player navigated a swiftly swimming fish through more and more precarious surroundings by turning the palm. Since Fast Fish had broken many sales records throughout the Allied Lands in the previous month, she wasn’t that surprised. The second game confused her, though, for she’d never seen it and it seemed to be broken. Nearly a dozen cartoon aliens clumped in the center of the screen, which flickered every few seconds. The score didn’t budge from three thousand no matter how many buttons she pushed, no matter how many times she turned her palm.
“Stupid game.”
She poured out her chocolate in the bathroom sink, too full of sugar to drink the rest. Instead, she poured herself a glass of water and checked the results for Natalie’s brothels. She found twelve probable locations, though by her estimates, there should only have been seven or eight.
Yawning, Lila considered pulling up Max’s data and looking for Xavier, but she still had two days to dig into it. Instead, she began the search for Natalie’s friend. The message Natalie had received had come from somewhere. Someone would be on the other end of the chain. She just had to dig deeply enough.
Lila was so engrossed in her task that she almost didn’t hear the knock on her bedroom window. Startling, she shot up and grabbed her tranq gun in one fluid movement, aiming at the drapes.
Tristan waved behind the glass.
Lila looked down at her attire. He’d never seen her dressed down so completely, and she was dressed down. Way down. All the way to the basement down. Even her hair was a mess. At some point she had wound it into a messy bun with a pen.
Putting down her Colt, she opened the window and quickly herded him into her room, worried someone would see him before he hopped inside. He’d dressed in black trousers with a dark hoodie over a dark gray t-shirt, probably so he wouldn’t be seen. But if anyone did see him, he’d look so suspicious they’d have to chase after him. “How did you get in here, you idiot?” she whispered, closing the window behind him.
“I walked. You seem to forget sometimes that I’m quite capable—”
“Of doing really stupid things? The first thing militias do is a DNA stick.”
“They’d have to catch me first. You’re never afraid of your identity being exposed when you come into my shop. Why should it stop me from waltzing into your compound?”
“Your people can’t arrest me and throw me into slavery,” she said, glad her sister had run off for the night with Senator Dubois. Pax and her mother slept like logs and the walls weren’t thin, so it wasn’t likely they’d hear Tristan’s voice.
Not likely, but not impossible. Pax sometimes came into her room for a chat when he couldn’t sleep. After her mother’s words at dinner, Lila couldn’t help but think he might.
“Any one of my people could ruin your career, and yet you still come.”
Lila frowned and closed the drapes, carefully settling the cloth around the window.
