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I stood up and walked back to the front door, noticing Mays crouched down half a block away, pointing down at what must have been the boot print while talking to the CSI photographer.
Then I remembered the boot print from outside Whitehead’s house, and started flipping back through the gallery on my phone until I found the picture I’d taken of the printed photo Mays had shown me a few weeks back.
I wasn’t a forensic shoe specialist, but it sure as shit looked like the same boot to me.
Whitehead, Bazan, probably Oldham, and now this guy. Landa. Who worked for Vidal, like Bazan had worked for Vidal.
The OldhamsandVidal had been clients of Bazan. Landa also worked for Vidal. Whitehead had a separate link to the Ordo, as well as to Benavente, and I was willing to bet a considerable amount of money that Benavente also had ties to Vidal or Bazan or both.
It was a messy fucking rat’s nest of threads, but they were starting to weave together to form a tapestry. A really shitty one that nobody would ever want, but a tapestry nonetheless.
I cornered Dan.
He looked up at me, his dark eyes clearly exhausted. “Tell me something good, Hart.”
“I—I’m not sure if this isgoodor not, but it all connects,” I replied.
“Define all,” he demanded.
“Oldham,” I answered. “Whitehead, Bazan. And now Landa. But,” I continued, “it’s also looking like this has links to the dog bones out in Hampton.”
“The federal case?” Dan asked, and, for the first time in a while, I heard something in his voice that might have been hope.
I nodded. “Whitehead’s family has a tie to the Benaventes, who owned the house that is now the museum. And I’m ninety-three percent sure that the Benaventes also have a tie to the Ordo. And if they have a tie to the Ordo—”
“And then I can pass this off to the feds, which means that somebody might actually fucking look at it,” Dan finished.
I frowned, because that hadn’t been where I was going to go with it.
“You don’t want me to give this to the feds?” he asked, noticing the expression.
I crossed my arms over my chest. “Raj is weirdly giving me the goddamn cold shoulder right now,” I grumbled. “And he won’t tell me why. Just that it’s fucking classified.”
“But they’re moving on it, yeah?” There was an edge to Dan’s voice that seemed almost desperate.
“Ithinkso,” I answered honestly. Because I did think so, I just didn’t have a clue where the fuck they were going.
Dan ran a hand over his face. “Fucking hell, Hart. Somebody has to be doing something with this. They can’t just—” He cut himself off, and I got it. They shouldn’t just be able to drop a case and let someone run around putting disappearing magical bullets into people’s skulls, but it seemed like they were, in fact, just doing exactly that.
“We’ll figure it out,” I promised.
“I hope you’re right.” He nodded once. “I need this one put to bed, Hart.”
“I know,” I told him. “Me, too.”
I cared for selfish reasons—I didn’t know and didn’t care about Oldham or Whitehead or Bazan, all of whom seemed neutral rather than beneficial to society at best, and exploitative assholes at worst. But I did care about the fact that these people had some sort of connection to the Culhua, and the existence of the Culhua was a very personal and real threat to someone I cared very much about.
Yeah, okay, the justice thing was part of it. I was a cop, for fuck’s sake. I’d gone into that line of work because fairness and justice actually mattered to me, even if they didn’t to a sadly high proportion of my former coworkers.
I got the feeling they still mattered to Dan. It’s why I liked him. I wanted more cops to be like him—there just hadn’t been enough like him to make me stay.
I wondered how long Dan would last.
His phone let out a sharp trill, and he grimaced, holding it up to his ear. “Yeah. Maza.” I saw his jaw clench, the pulse of anger at his temple, the glaze that slid over his brown eyes. “Yessir, I hear you. Right away. Yeah.” A long pause. “No, sir. I understand.”
He didn’t look at me as he thumbed the screen to end the call.
“We’re gone,” I told him.
