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“Mav, get me everything you can on a psychologist named Barry Fields,” I said.
“Is he a mark?” Mav asked in confusion as I heard him typing in the background.
“No,” I said but didn’t offer any further explanation. Mav had been one of the first guys I’d hired when I’d started my pet project, and while he did his best work with a gun or knife in his hand, I’d relegated him to an information gathering role since I’d had to get rid of Benny, the analyst who’d been working for me for nearly just as long, but had sold me and all my men out for money to pay off years’ worth of gambling debts. Benny had begged and pleaded with me to show him mercy, but I’d saved that for the young man whose life Benny had nearly taken when he’d accepted a contract to kill him and tried to use one of my own men to do it.
Luckily, Mace Calhoun had been smart enough to realize something was off with the assignment and hadn’t taken Jonas Davenport’s life, despite all the concrete evidence Benny had faked to prove the young artist had committed unspeakable crimes against several children. I’d taken care of Benny, as well as the men who’d put the contract out on Jonas, and then I’d spent weeks combing through all of Benny’s information to see if Jonas and Mace were his first victims or if he’d used my group for his own financial gain before. I’d been more than relieved to find out it was the former because I doubted I would have been able to live with the guilt of knowing an innocent life had been taken because I’d trusted the wrong man.
“I’m on it,” Mav said.
I was tempted to ask Mav to run Seth’s name too, but didn’t and not only because he would have figured out my connection to Seth and learned more about me, but because I didn’t want to find out everything I’d missed – no, ignored – from a computer; I wanted Seth to be the one to tell me. Because I needed more than just what was on paper.
“Thanks,” I said before hanging up on Mav. I grabbed my shoulder holster and dragged it on before tugging on my suit jacket. I gave Bullet, who was lying outside my bedroom door, a quick pat before I went downstairs and swallowed down a quick cup of coffee that I’d had to microwave since Seth hadn’t left the machine on to keep the coffee that remained in the pot warm.
I ended up stuck in morning rush hour traffic, so it was late by the time I made it to the city. I searched out Seth’s building and discovered that the parking garage where he’d been mugged was open to the public, which wouldn’t help in terms of improving the security. I found Seth’s car easily since it was in a reserved spot near the elevator and parked a few aisles over. It was only ten o’clock in the morning and since I didn’t know what time he took lunch, I knew I could have a potentially long wait and that was assuming he even left the office for lunch today. But an hour later, I saw him step off the elevator. He hesitated as he cleared the bank of elevators and looked all around him. I was oddly proud of him when I saw him straighten himself, despite the look of abject fear in his gaze. He walked quickly to his car and kept scanning his surroundings but he remained calm. I kept my distance as I followed him out of the garage and east out of the city, but it wasn’t until he began crossing the bridge over Lake Washington that I realized where he was going.
I didn’t need GPS after that but I had to keep my distance as the traffic grew lighter as he made his way to a quiet community on the eastern side of the island. Just like the Whidbey Island house, the house Seth pulled into sat on lush acreage right up against the water. I’d only been to the Nichols’s main residence a couple of times since the family had been vacationing at the Whidbey Island house the majority of the times I’d visited with Trace. Their vacation home was much larger and more remote, but that wasn’t to say the Mercer Island house wasn’t beautiful because it was; it just had a more sedate look to it and actually looked small and quaint compared to the mansions on either side of it. Which was why it seemed less likely that the men who’d burglarized the home had chosen it at random when there’d been much more secluded and well-off homes to choose from in the area.
