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But she kills the call and leaves me hanging, my knuckles turning white as I grip my phone and bring it down to study the now-black screen. “Fuck.”
“How the hell did you tell your phone to have someone call you, and then they just…” Fletch throws his hand in the air. “Did! Archer?!” He grabs my arm when I turn to walk. To think. To sort out the thoughts galloping through my mind. “What was that?”
“Detective Asa is someone who knows Minka. And my family,” I admit. “And, uh…” I bring a hand up and scrub my fingers through the stubble on my chin. “She knows about the vigilante,” I murmur. “She knows everything there is to know about anyone. She’s like God, if you’re a believer. But she has tits, a dancer’s body, and a mouth on her that cuts down even the most seasoned sailor.”
“Asa?” he growls. “That cop I talked to last month? The one who helped us with the bank heist?That’swho you were talking to just now?”
“Yeah.” I turn on my heels and start back toward our car. “But she’s not actually a cop.”
“She’s not?” Following me, he stops by the passenger door and smacks the top of the cruiser to pull my attention up. “Hey! She’snota cop? But I was talking to her on a police op a fucking month ago!”
“Like I said.”
I open the driver’s side door and slide in, then waiting for him to do the same on his side, I close my door and check that all the windows are up.
“Sophia Solomon,” I tell him the second he’s in and we’re secure. “She’s mafia, but, like… the anti-mafia. Or some bullshit I can’t figure out. She’s cool with the mob existing, and she doesn’t seem to have qualms about assholes trading guns and shit. But the second anyone touches a woman or a kid, she comes down on them like a brick shithouse.”
“‘Comes down’ how?” he demands. “Specifically.”
“Like, there was this family…” I drop my legs wide and rest my hands on the steering wheel as I watch my CSI team search every nook and cranny of seven separate jets. “The Mancinos. New York is basically run by Cordoza, right? He’s the kingpin motherfucker who holds the axe over everyone else’s necks. Then there are a few families who hold a little turf. Malones are one of them.”
“And Mancinos are another?”
“Yeah—er, well,” I amend, “they used to be.”
He glances across and watches me with a lifted brow. “Explain.”
“The Mancinos were wiped off the map, Fletch. Obliterated. They fucked over the wrong people, so Solomon took them out.”
“The wrong people, as in women and kids?” he verifies. “She’s the protector of innocents?”
“Not just any women and kids,” I murmur. “Mancino fucked with her sister. Which was, like, the holy mother of fucking screwups. But she followed the trail to her sister, and to Mancino, by tracking the women and kids… and saving them.”
“So she’s the vigilante?”
Stunned, I meet his eyes. “What? No, Minka’s—”
“She’sanothervigilante,” he huffs, exasperated. “Same fucking MO. Same mission. Different women and different cities, but… they’re the fucking same. You ever wonder why that chick and Mayet bonded? Look no further than their triggers. Jesus.” He knocks his hat back so it sits high on the crown of his head, and he scratches his hair. “Are you serious right now?”
“I’m just picking up the pieces of a puzzle I had no clue existed last year. Asa’s not a cop, but she has the papers to say she is if she’s ever questioned. And she’s a genius when it comes to computers, which is why I was ninety-nine percent sure she bugged my phone a while back.”
“Bugged your phone?” he challenges. “And you’re okay with it?”
I shrug. “Hasn’t hurt anything. And it helped just now. Asa gave us another name for our vic: Benedict McArthur,” I announce, finally bringing us back around. “Forty-one years old. Works for Prestige Programming. He’s an IT nerd, and his wife is the same.”
“Working in IT?” He takes out his phone and starts a search with our new name. “Could be how he manufactures these identities.”
I make a noise in the back of my throat and tap my steering wheel when the impatience pulsing in my blood gets to be too much.
I’m ready to go follow up on Roberta McArthur, but if I leave this airport before CSI is done, Bower is gonna hang me out to dry.
So we wait. We plot. We plan.
“Asa says each identity was like…” I look to him. “Separate. Real. Like, they knew each other in high school. Not just paperwork.”
“How is that fucking possible? He can’t be four dudes at once. It’s not doable.”
“It’s almost like we have a set of quadruplets.” I continue totap, tap, tapthe steering wheel while CSIs move in and out of jets. “Identical fucking siblings—but, ya know, spanning in age from thirty-seven to forty-five years old. And according to their high school yearbooks, they’re not identical at all. Similar,” I allow, “but not the same. Then they grew up to have four different careers. Four different marriages. Four different families. So what connects them all, besides the man in Minka’s morgue?”
