The Dangerous Edge of Things - By Tina Whittle Page 0,77
through his desk—this time with no ulterior motive—was fascinating. He’d managed to get his gun put away—that drawer was locked up tight, as usual. The tarot deck was still in the desk drawer, as were the usual prescription meds and emergency folders, plus the GQ magazine. Only now I noticed that it was over two years old, and that it featured a black Armani suit on the front cover.
So that was where he got his fashion sense.
I put it back in the drawer—interesting, but not pertinent. What I needed to do was get a handle on Trey’s notes before Landon absconded with them.
The biggest part of the jumbled paperwork was mostly familiar, but I occasionally ran into new material, like the meeting notes from the night before. Eliza’s file now had a sticky note on the cover in Trey’s handwriting: Blackmailable? I smiled, but he had a vital point. All this time, we’d been looking at Eliza as a blackmailer, but what if she’d been the one whose secrets were on the line?
Of course, that didn’t explain why she’d been hiding so much cash in a shoebox. Trey hadn’t speculated further. He had, however, taken a yellow highlighter to the forensic analysis of the murder weapon. Another sticky note: why not disposed of?
Another excellent point. How stupid was it for Bulldog to stash the murder weapon and her purse in his truck? Why not toss it all in the Hooch? And why hadn’t he used any of her credit cards? Admittedly, that would have made him easier to trace, but he hadn’t impressed me as a big-picture kind of felon.
It was all damn confusing. I didn’t have a criminal mind; how was I supposed to comprehend the whacked-out functions of such a thing? I couldn’t even figure out Trey’s head, and I had brain scans on that one.
Okay, I thought, what if Eliza had been taking hush money. And if the money alone hadn’t convinced her, what if someone had dropped hints that her own secrets would be exposed to the Beaumonts?
And what if she’d decided that, finally, she’d had enough? That would explain why she’d come to Eric, asking questions about client confidentiality. It would explain her nervousness, her frantic pull between speaking out and safety. I remembered the bruises that had been inflicted on her two days before her death, long before Bulldog admitted to getting rough with her on Thursday night. Apparently, she’d been right to be afraid, but it hadn’t been Bulldog alone who inspired that fear.
As for Bulldog, he claimed to know nothing about Dylan Flint. I was betting Dylan had known nothing about Bulldog. And the Beaumonts knew nothing about anything. They occupied their own rarefied penthouse far above such sordid goings-on, and yet everywhere I looked, the Beaumont name ran though the mess like a fault line.
I paged through the rest of Trey’s notes and found another police report, the one on the discovery of Dylan’s body. It gave me goosebumps. He’d been yelling at me on the sidewalk and dripping-wet-dead less than ten hours later. He hadn’t made it in to talk to the cops.
Which made another fact even more alarming—Nikki had disappeared. When police went to question her about Dylan, her apartment was empty, with evidence of a hasty packing job. I felt a cold splotch of dread. Would they be pulling her from the river next?
The rest of Trey’s stuff was mostly security data for the Senator’s reception—floor plans, security rolls, perimeter breakdowns, plus lots of promotional material, all of which featured a smiling Mark and Charley. I paged through the guest list, discovering a veritable Who’s Who of Atlanta’s monied elite. A separate roster catalogued Beaumont Enterprise employees who would be attending. I noticed Jake Whitaker’s name—nothing surprising there, considering his penchant for sucking up. Still, I doubted he’d show, not after getting fired.
I also found a hefty file on Senator Adams, another knot in the incestuous tangle of Beaumont World. Everyone connected to everyone else by less than six degrees of separation—more like two and three-quarters. This wasn’t the usual political fluff ’n’ stuff, however. This was a well-researched dossier with a lot of background data, most of it irrelevant to the current situation.
Except.
And it was one hell of an except. I took up the highlighter and marked the name, then I underlined it. Then I drew an asterisk beside it. And then another.