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And here was the mission’s end. Evan had dispatched plenty of assholes, but being an asshole wasn’t grounds enough for the Nowhere Man. Presidential pardon aside, Naomi Templeton and Victoria Donahue-Carr would have to find someone else to take Luke Devine off the chessboard for them.
“I don’t know,” Evan said, standing up. “I just can’t.”
“For what it’s worth? I agree with you. I was just curious.”
He’d given Naomi his word that he’d make a good-faith effort, and he had. He owed her nothing beyond that. He was eager to get home, burn his clothes, take a long shower, meditate, sip vodka, and then sleep for a week. Until this moment he didn’t realize the relief he felt at this mission’s not materializing. Whatever mess Luke represented and whatever mess Echo had brought to the party was no longer his concern.
As he turned to leave, Echo fished a phone out of the folds of the blanket. “Do you have a phone number?”
He gave her the digits, not the letters. “1-855-266-9437.”
“A toll-free number?”
“A work line.”
She screwed her mouth to one side. “Okay, I just texted you a thing.”
“What is it?”
“Maybe nothing related. A murder. Double murder, actually. A guy and a woman. Mid-twenties. Their deaths got a bit of attention, and a friend forwarded it along to me. You’ll see why. The woman was a wannabe influencer, wrote poetry on driftwood, shot it in sepia filters, that sort of stuff. They stuck in my mind because … well, because they were beautiful.”
“And you think Luke Devine had something to do with their deaths?”
“You can judge for yourself.”
“Do you think he could do something like that?”
Echo regarded him. “You have no instrument in your voice. You flew out here to get information on Luke, not to save my life. You have a kind manner about you, but that’s all it is: amanner.” She sloughed off the blanket and rose to show him out. “I think that you have done terrible, violent things, Mr. No Name. I think I know what you’re capable of. But I don’t have any idea what Luke’s capable of now, and that terrifies me more than you do.”
22
Fucking Complicated
A TikTok video in selfie mode. Lens jerking, terrible lighting, sound muffled as the phone camera shifted about.
The first thing that struck Evan about the young woman recording herself was how evident her grief was, resting right there on the surface of her face.
The account handle was @rubyanne, and the bio read: 19, she/her/hers, don’t DM me unless u’ve got mad Mr. Darcy skillz.
Evan sheltered in a porte cochere across the street from Echo’s place. The building was grand, sandstone uplit to a golden glow, cobblestone drive, doorman in full regalia who’d sized Evan up, deemed him sufficiently well-heeled, and let him be. The rain had picked up, annoying flecks that pelted him sideways. He had to use a hand to shield the RoamZone’s screen.
Aragón’s jet waited for him at Teterboro Airport, and he was eager to board, sip on something clean, and arrow back toward Los Angeles.
But first he had to watch this year-old TikTok of a random nineteen-year-old.
“I’m coming on here because there’s nowhere else to go. My brother, Johnny Seabrook, was murdered last week, and his”—a hitch in her breath—“body was dumped with someone else’s, a woman named Angela Buford, who I don’t think he even knew.” Ruby was sorrow-stricken, but there was no shortage of anger behind her words. “And he literally wrote a clue on his shoe.Tartarus. You know what that is? I mean beyond the fucking Milton look-how-clever shit. It’s the name of a mansion in the Hamptons for this big asshole hedge-funder who has crazy Jeffrey Epstein parties and stuff. And guess what happens when you talk to the cops, the FBI—anyone—about looking into it?Nothing. It goes up the chain and then just … disappears.”
She swiped a forearm across her nose, index-fingered the pale pink lower rims of her eyes. “Because if you’re super rich, you don’t have to answer for anything. I guess I was privileged enough not to ever have to know that. Before now. But when you see it, I mean really get it, it’sterrifying. To be shown you’re not important enough, your brother’s not important enough to matter? That there’s this other class of people who can do whatever the fuck they want? And to them my brother was nothing. I’m nothing. And no one—” Her features seized, a paroxysm of bone-deep pain—lips tugged in an upside-down U, forehead contorted, chin turned to a walnut. She jerked in a breath, forced out the words. “No one will help us. I hope this never happens to any of you, because the way it hurts …” Her face tensed and reddened further, trembling.
The TikTok ended abruptly.
He reviewed it several times more, trying to convince himself that it was not something worth looking into further.
It was the last post that Ruby Anne Seabrook had made, a year ago almost to the day. He scrolled through her preceding videos, struck by how seismic her transformation had been after her brother’s murder. He’d seen it time and again, grief snatching someone up in its jaws, shaking them like prey.
Before, Ruby had been pert with an evident excess of intelligence. No makeup, rare for her age, but she’d known how to approach the camera as well as her contemporaries, dishwater-blond hair to one side, dipped chin, lens angled slightly downward.
He watched a clip of her with her brother, a mindless loop of him sitting next to her and then suddenly lunging to snort in her neck. She feigned annoyance, but her smile was bright as she pushed him away and gave a little shriek of delight. In contrast to her flanneled brother, she wore a yellow cable-knit sweater, fitted tightly to her torso, flared sleeves adding a touch of flourish. She looked expensive.
