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Dexter pushed his chair away from the desk and spun it around to face us. “Another indication of how powerful the people we’re up against must be—there’ve been no reports at all of dead bodies at the warehouse. Not in the local news outlets or any of the larger regional and national ones. If the owners were expecting a shipment that day, there’s no way the bodies weren’t found.”
I froze. “Wait, bodies? How many are we talking about? What happened to the guy you two were interrogating?”
“He broke out of the ropes and came at us,” Slade said quickly, grabbing my hand with a reassuring squeeze. His voice became strained as he went on. “He almost killed me. I managed to stop him—not in a way I liked doing. The people guarding that place were brutal.”
When I gazed into his eyes, the anguished look there made my throat clench up. These men had been through so much I couldn’t comprehend. I couldn’t tell him he shouldn’t have done whatever it took to save his life.
And they’d gotten into all this danger to solve a mystery that didn’t even involve any of them. It was only personal to me.
I wrenched my attention away from Slade and back to Dexter. “So, what does it mean that the murders weren’t on the news?”
Logan answered for his friend. “It basically confirms that whatever was going down at that warehouse, it was highly illegal. The owners hate the thought of police poking around there so much they covered up the deaths of their own people to avoid an investigation. Which fits with how aggressively their guards reacted to intruders in the first place.”
“Yeah.” I shuddered at the memory of how the big guy had grabbed me.
“But I still have no idea what kind of illegal activities they’re wrapped up in.” Logan let out a growl of frustration and tossed his laptop on the table. “Just knowing the name Kenneth and the address isn’t enough to narrow down what the shipment might have been. It obviously wasn’t anything published publicly in any detail, and there are a gazillion Kenneths and Kens in the city, plenty of them connected to businesses that could get deliveries.”
He rubbed his forehead and then wheeled his chair over to the side drawer on the desk. He pulled out a box I’d seen briefly before—the deck of Tarot cards he’d been holding one time when I’d come into the office days ago.
Logan shuffled the cards quickly with a deftness that showed he’d handled them a lot and then dealt three out onto the top of the desk.
I knit my brow, watching. “What are you doing?”
He peered down at the cards, studying them with total focus. “This was my mom’s deck. She taught me the basics of the associations. Sometimes doing a quick reading helps me get out of a mental rut—suggests ideas that hadn’t occurred to me on my own.”
It wasn’t something I’d have expected from Logan, but with the connection to his mom, it made sense. She’d died when he was ten, just a couple of years older than I’d been when I lost my dad. Our shared sense of grief was one of the reasons we’d seemed to understand each other so well when we’d first gotten to know each other in school.
I couldn’t help wondering if her death factored into his obsession with uncovering my dad’s supposed murder. Mrs. Brooks definitelyhadn’tbeen murdered—there was nothing mysterious about her death at all. A gas main had exploded in the middle of town, killing a few different people who’d been particularly close to the site and injuring several others. The kind of accident you wanted to think could never affect anyone you cared about but that happened all over the place all the time.
I yanked my attention back to the phone in my hand. I didn’t think prodding Logan about his exact motivations was going to do me any good. He might be feeling less antagonistic toward me, but I couldn’t imagine him reacting well to being psychoanalyzed at the best of times. Psychiatry wasn’t my area of medical expertise anyway.
I flipped through a few more photos and then paused. The shot I’d stopped on showed the interior of the smaller room where the guys had fought with the first man they’d killed in self-defense. I didn’t see anything in the room itself that caught my eye, but there was a shape just visible beyond the uncovered window to the left—the corner of a large, oddly shaped box of some sort, sitting in what I assumed was the shipping yard outside.
“Hey,” I said. “Did you get the chance to look around out back of the warehouse?”
Dexter shook his head. “Our time became much more limited after the guards caught us. We got in a few quick glances beforehand, though, and I don’t remember anything standing out. Why?”
I handed his phone back to him, the photo enlarged to show the window. “I think that might be a shipping container you can see the edge of outside. It’s kind of an unusual-looking one, not just a standard crate. Maybe there’s something specific shipped in that kind of box?”
Dexter squinted at the image and then swiveled his chair back toward the computer. He tapped away for several seconds, and then a small smile crossed his lips. “I’d say that was a reefer container—the kind of box they use for shipping refrigerated goods.” He glanced at Logan. “That could narrow down what kinds of items this Kenneth guy is dealing in quite a bit, if it’s all the same kinds of shipments coming through the warehouse.”
Logan’s expression brightened. “Might as well follow that lead.” He swiped up his cards, tucked them away, and grabbed his computer. “Let’s see… Medications? That would fit with the Evan Silver angle.”
“It has to be something illegal, right?” I said.
Slade shook his head, leaning back in his chair as he watched his friends work. “Usually illicit merch gets shipped hidden with legit stuff. Passed through a front business to avoid notice. It could also be food products. Dairy, meat, that kind of thing.”
“Yeah, I’m not finding anything when it comes to medical-related businesses. Let’s look into groceries.” Logan’s fingers darted across the keys. He might be built like a quarterback, but his main area of study was computer science, and it was easy to see how comfortable he was delving into the internet when he got into the work like this.
A flutter of relief passed through my chest. I’d accomplished something to move along the investigation after all. Icouldbe an equal partner with the guys… even if I wasn’t totally convinced of their theories yet.
We all waited in silent anticipation as Logan ran through his searches, his expression avid. Then he let out a triumphant laugh, and my heart leapt.
“I think I’ve got him,” he declared, grinning at the rest of us. “There’s a Kenneth Dunn who manages a seafood market downtown. It’s a big place. He’ll need to be bringing in a lot of fish—and who knows what else.”
CHAPTERSIX
Logan
