Snared (Elemental Assassin #16)(63)

It was dark the last time I’d seen him, but I still recognized him as the guard who’d been patrolling Damian Rivera’s estate two nights ago. The one who’d been too focused on his video game to notice me. I’d let him live that night, but here he was, dead at my hands after all.

Oh, the irony.

Hope and adrenaline lifted my heart. I let the tarp drop back into place and jogged into the house and to the office. By this point, all my friends were on their feet.

“Gin?” Ryan asked. “What are you doing? What’s going on?”

Instead of answering, I grabbed my phone and scrolled through the rest of the purchase information from the Posh boutique. My fingers twitched with anticipation, but I forced myself to go slowly, carefully looking at every single line in turn. Not on this screen . . . or the next one . . . or the next one . . .

Finally, on the very last screen, I found his name, three from the bottom of the list.

I let out a tense breath and held my phone out so the others could see it. “According to this, Damian Rivera bought half a dozen tubes of Heartbreaker lipstick from the Posh boutique almost six months ago.”

Ryan looked at me, picking up on my train of thought. “That would be more than enough lipstick to account for all the traces that I’ve found on the victims since then. He must be using a new tube of lipstick each time.”

Finn snapped his fingers as another thought occurred to him. “And we already know that Rivera likes to beat people. Silvio and I did tons of background on him. We both saw the police reports of all those girlfriends and servants he put into the hospital. Murder wouldn’t be too much of a stretch from that.”

I thought back to when I’d spied on Damian Rivera at his mansion. Hugh Tucker had shown up and told Rivera to take care of some problem before the Circle took action against him. What if that problem was Rivera being the Dollmaker?

According to what Tucker had told me, the Circle had eyes and ears everywhere, and I had no doubt that some of those spies were in the police department. Maybe someone had tipped off Tucker about Ryan, Bria, and Xavier’s investigation. Brutally beating and strangling a dozen women—and probably more that we didn’t know about—and leaving their bodies strewn all over Ashland was sure to attract unwanted attention sooner or later. And the members of the Circle prided themselves on their anonymity, on the fact that very few people knew that the group even existed. The hunt for a serial killer—especially one of their own members—could potentially shine all sorts of light on their shadowy operations, something that they would want to avoid at all costs, even if it meant getting rid of Rivera themselves.

Something about that last thought nagged at me, something about Rivera, Tucker, and the Circle. Something about Rivera taunting Tucker about his low status within the group. Something about Tucker’s mysterious boss and how he gave all of them their marching orders. But I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was . . .

“It’s Rivera,” Owen said. “It has to be. There are just too many things that add up and point right to him.”

My thought, whatever it had been, vanished back down into the bottom of my brain. Besides, it wasn’t important right now. Finding Elissa was the only thing that mattered. After she was safe, then I would properly deal with Damien Rivera and ask him all my many, many questions about the Circle.

Jade’s hands balled into fists, and rage sparked in her eyes. “Where does he live? Where is he holding Elissa?”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’re going to pay him a visit and find out.”





21


As much as we all wanted to immediately drive over to Damian Rivera’s mansion, storm inside, and confront him, we all knew that we had to be smart about this.

For Elissa’s sake.

If Rivera realized that we were onto him, if he thought that we had any clue as to what he’d done to all those women, he could easily kill Elissa, hightail it out of Ashland, and vanish. He had more than enough money and connections to disappear and live out his days on some remote tropical island, never to be seen or heard from again. None of us wanted that to happen, but we all realized that we were up against a ticking clock. All of his men were dead, and when they didn’t report back to him in an hour or two, Rivera would probably realize that they weren’t coming back at all, and he would act accordingly. We needed to be in position to rescue Elissa before that happened.

We trooped into the kitchen and gathered around the table there so that we could all have a seat and brainstorm together. Finn and Silvio called up all the information that they’d compiled on Rivera, swiping through screen after screen on their phones, trying to pinpoint exactly where he might be holding Elissa.

“He has properties all over the city, thanks to his dead mama’s real-estate business,” Finn said. “And these are just the ones that are officially on file. He could have more buildings off the books or under another name or company that we don’t even know about.”

“Finn’s right.” Silvio shook his head. “Elissa could be in any one of a dozen locations.”

I stood up and started pacing around the kitchen, much the same way Jade had done earlier, trying to remember every little detail of Rivera and Tucker’s conversation the other night. One of them had said something about a guest . . . a woman . . .