Red After Dark (Blackwood Security #13) - Elise Noble Page 0,47

water from the pitcher on the table. Me? I couldn’t stop thinking about the body parts. If we hadn’t found Gemma when we did, would that have been her remains in the drain? Despite the warmth, I shuddered.

“Don’t think about it,” Alaric said. “We did what we could. Gemma’s safe, and that sick freak’s dead.”

“But somebody else didn’t make it.”

“Don’t dwell on the past. It only ruins your future.” He sighed. “I know, I know. Do as I say, not as I do.”

Don’t dwell on the past. Those were words to live by. Logically, I knew that, but still…

“At least Hevrin seems to be keeping the secret about that night.” I tried to think positive.

“Seems to be.”

Alaric’s tone sent another chill through me.

“You don’t think she will?”

“Right now? I don’t know. I keep coming back to the logistics—how did she find us? She only lived on the estate for a month, and she’s a refugee. She’s got no network. No contacts. We gave her almost nothing to go on, and yet somehow, there she was.”

“You’re worried.” He had lines on his forehead, and I ran a fingertip along one furrow. “Is there anything I can do?”

“No.” He shook his head. “I’ll speak to Judd later, but I think Hevrin Moradi’s got her own secrets. And I doubt she’ll share them before she’s ready.”

CHAPTER 19 - EMMY

“SO, WHERE ARE we?” I asked.

Black wanted to have a recap before we left for Norfolk because this case had more tentacles than a genetically modified octopus. Nothing was bloody simple at the moment—apparently, there’d been a training accident at Riverley and Alex had broken ribs, but Rafael sent a message to Black saying he was handling it. Thank fuck. I didn’t have time to fix any more problems today, not with Dan, Alaric, and Bethany sitting at the kitchen table in the rental house, waiting to start. At least there were Danishes. Bethany had picked them up from somewhere.

“Damn dog,” Black muttered as he uncapped his fountain pen. I looked under the table. Barkley was sitting on his feet, her chin resting on his knees as she waited hopefully for any stray flakes of pastry to drop. Black might have complained, but he still put down his pen to scratch her head as Dan started speaking.

“Let’s start with the problem that brought us here—the painting. We’ve got two possible leads—the two men who visited Irvine here at the house. Stephané and the nurse have both worked with us to produce sketches. The man Stephané saw bears a vague resemblance to Dyson. See?”

Dan turned her laptop, where the screen showed the newest sketch lined up beside the drawing produced eight years ago when Alaric and I worked with an artist after our Atlantic gun-fest. Irvine’s visitor had been wearing glasses, and his hair was thinner, and his jaw was different. The same man? Possibly.

“It looks more like Nicolas Cage,” Black said.

“Stephané admits he’s terrible with faces. If this is Dyson, we’re chasing a shadow. Which leaves the second guy.” Dan clicked to another sketch, a much younger guy with a goatee. “Neither Harriet nor Stephané recognises him. Working on the assumption that he recorded the endorsement video, we called every professional videographer in a hundred-mile radius to see if they were involved, but so far, nobody’s admitting to it.”

“So far?” Black asked.

“Six of them didn’t answer the phone, and one man I spoke to sounded evasive. We’re following up, and I’ve got two interns from the Lexington office expanding the search radius to two hundred miles and also checking websites to see if anyone in the industry matches the sketch.”

“Leave that ticking along. Priority goes to Devane right now, and by extension, Eric Ridley.”

“Guilt by association?” Alaric asked.

“You could say that. Nobody hires a man like Ridley unless they’re strapped for cash or shady, and Devane claims to be worth two hundred million bucks. My sources say it’s more like fifty million, but that’s still not an insignificant amount.”

Her wealth came from family money—her father had been big in the aviation industry before his death nine years ago, ironically in a plane crash. By all accounts, Kyla had never done a proper day’s work in her life, although she did have a thriving Instagram account and got paid big bucks to flog make-up and turn up to parties. Oh, and she’d presented a short-lived reality show where rich people and poor people swapped houses for a week. Rumour said she’d disinfected her shoes every time