the Comments section of the Winter website’s online ordering page. To Ryan’s surprise, though, they weren’t successful enough to keep the restaurant afloat. Kayla said that Joe and Ryan wanted to keep things going after Winter had to close its doors. They managed things with the website for a while, but when that became too problematic, Joe had someone create a simple smartphone app that would do the same thing the online ordering system had done for them. That’s where the aliases came from. Ryan got the burners so they’d have a way to communicate independently if they needed to.
Kayla didn’t stay with them for long, though, because delivering a little pot on the side was one thing, and being a full-time drug dealer was something else. So she went back to serving, while Ryan and the others kept at it with the deliveries.
She had still been hooking up with Ryan pretty regularly, until he disappeared. Not long after that, she saw Novak for the first time. She spotted him at the gym. Then at the supermarket. Then on Second Street after one of her shifts. Then in a BMW that passed by while she was riding her bike along Ocean Boulevard. Ryan stopped returning her calls and text messages, so she went to his house and talked to his neighbor, found out he hadn’t been there for days. She tried not to worry. Chalk it up to paranoia. Long Beach wasn’t that big a city, right? You see people you know all the time. But when he showed up at Viento y Agua and it was clear he wasn’t leaving until she did, it got to be too much. She thought about calling 911, but she wasn’t sure it was an emergency. As she sat there longer and longer, she got more and more afraid. So she fished out the business card and made the call.
Jen kept speaking. Maybe it was because it was getting late, or because I was keeping my mouth shut and letting her talk, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that she would rather not be telling me all this, at least not now, and that it was coming more from her sense of obligation than from a desire to address any need on my part. Even so, I didn’t say anything and let her go on.
“You remember the guy Lucinda mentioned? Goran?” she asked me.
“Yeah, Joe’s other investor.”
“Well, his last name’s Novak, too.”
She told me the Organized Crime Detail had a file on him. He was medium fish in the big pond of Orange County, drugs and prostitution, mostly, and he was known to use a number of restaurants in which he invested to launder the income from operations. Patrick was now looking for support for a new theory—that the failure of Winter left Joe so indebted that he was desperate enough to not only try to continue the drug-delivery business but also, eventually, to kill Bill for the inheritance in order to get out from under Novak.
“Novak,” I said. “Is that Serbian?”
Jen shook her head. “Croatian.”
My eastern European geography was rusty. “That’s close, though, right? Could there be a connection to the Serbian crew in the valley?”
“Patrick’s looking into it,” she said.
“Sounds like he’s got a full plate.”
“He does, but he’s getting help from Organized Crime and the ATF guys. He’s on top of it.”
“When is he planning on putting Joe in the box?”
“Not until he knows more. Kayla’s helping us find the other two from the contact list. And Dave’s on board too because we know Kobe’s murder is connected. We’ve got it covered.”
I tried not to read too much into that, but the subtext was clear enough. They were doing fine without me.
She asked about my head and I told her it was fine.
“That’s not what Lauren thinks. Go to the doctor tomorrow.”
I didn’t argue with her. “About Joe, when Patrick interrogates—”
“I already asked Ruiz. You can watch the video feed.”
She got up and headed toward the hall. She wasn’t looking at me when she said, “Good night.”
I hadn’t gotten a decent night’s sleep—unless I counted my twelve hours of unconsciousness in the hospital—since the explosion, and I was feeling the dull weight of insomniac exhaustion pressing down on me. Sleep wouldn’t come for hours, though. My mind was racing with all of the new information Jen had shared with me. There’s a rush that comes with a big break in a case, and, even though I was not technically a