Snared (Elemental Assassin #16)(62)

“May I see that, please?” Ryan asked.

I handed him the tube, and he uncapped it, rolled up the lipstick, and held it up where everyone could see it.

After a few seconds, he nodded. “Oh, yeah. That’s the same color that was on the latest victim’s hands.”

“I thought so too.”

“And you’re sure that someone was creeping around the nightclub?” Bria asked. “That he deliberately left the lipstick there for you to find?”

“I’m sure.”

“But how did he even know that you would go back there?” she asked. “That you would search the area where Lacey Lawrence’s body was found again?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. But it’s the best clue that we have besides the dead guys out back, so let’s follow it and see if we can finally put a name to the Dollmaker.”

Everyone took a different assignment. Bria called Xavier and asked him to discreetly run the dead dwarves’ photos and IDs through the police databases to see if any of them had a rap sheet and who their known associates might be. Their SUV was registered to a shell company, so Silvio got to work figuring out who the car actually belonged to. Finn grabbed the men’s phones to see if he could get any information off them, while Jade, Ryan, Owen, and I sorted through the files on the floor, trying to match everything back up together and seeing if there was anything else that we might have missed or overlooked.

Finn’s phone chimed, and he pulled it out and looked at the message. “Hey, Gin. The manager at Posh finally sent me that info on the lipstick sales. I’ll forward it to you.”

A few seconds later, my phone chimed. I grabbed a pen and a piece of paper from the debris, sat down on a relatively blood-free patch of floor, and started going through the names, concentrating on all the men who had bought tubes of Heartbreaker lipstick.

To my surprise and disappointment, there were a lot of them. Dozens of men—or people with access to their credit cards—had purchased the lipstick, not to mention all the folks who’d paid cash, leaving behind no names at all. And there was no real pattern to the sales. Sometimes the boutique only sold one tube a week. Sometimes it sold ten.

However, I did find it extremely odd that the most recent tube of lipstick had been sold the very same day I found the dead girl at Northern Aggression. -Whoever bought that particular tube had paid cash for it just after ten o’clock yesterday morning, right after the store opened, so there was no name or credit-card info. I doubted it was the killer, though. By that point, he would have had Lacey Lawrence for at least a few days, and he would have already had all of his supplies on hand, especially the lipstick, since it seemed like such a big part of his ritual. Still, I made a note of that purchase, reminding myself to come back to it later.

We worked in silence for about thirty minutes. Well, except for Bria, who murmured to Xavier about the dead dwarves, and Silvio and Finn, who typed and texted like their lives depended on it. Ryan and Owen sat on the floor in the middle of the office, putting papers and photos back into the correct case files and boxes. Jade helped them for a while, but she couldn’t really concentrate. Eventually, she got to her feet and started pacing through the office, down the hallway to the kitchen, and back again.

I finished scanning through the last three months of purchases. I’d written down the names of all the men who’d bought tubes of Heartbreaker lipstick, but none of them jumped out at me. I sighed and scrolled down to the next section of information. Maybe the lipstick wasn’t as big a clue as I’d thought—

Silvio’s hands froze on his keyboard. The sudden silence startled me, and I looked over at him. My assistant leaned forward until his nose was almost pressed up against his tablet, and he kept peering at the screen, as if he wasn’t sure that he was reading the information right.

“What?” I asked. “What is it?”

He kept staring at the screen, his lips puckered in thought. “The SUV that the dwarves were driving. It’s registered to a shell company that’s registered to another shell company . . . You get the idea.”

“Yeah. So what?”

“Well, I finally found the owner of all those companies, and it’s someone we’re all familiar with.”

“Who?” Finn asked in an eager voice.

Silvio looked over at me. “Damian Rivera.”

This time, I blinked, wondering if I’d heard him right. “Damian Rivera? My Damian Rivera? Are you sure?”

He nodded. “I’m sure. He owns the company that car is registered to, which means that those are his dead dwarves lying under the tarp in the backyard.”

“Dwarves . . .” I murmured, a memory swimming around in my mind, slowly coming into focus. “A dwarf with a bad mustache and a cell phone . . .”

“Damian Rivera?” Owen frowned, trying to place the name. His eyes widened when he realized exactly who we were talking about. “Isn’t that the guy you spied on the other night, Gin? The one who’s a member of the Circle?”

Finn shot his finger and thumb at Owen. “Got it in one, Grayson.”

Jade stopped her pacing. “Who is Damian Rivera? And what is the Circle?”

The memory finally sharpened in my mind. I got to my feet, jogged down the hallway, and went out into the backyard. I pulled the black tarp off the dead men, bent down, and studied the face of Henry, the dwarf with the thin, scraggly black mustache, the one who had looked so familiar.