All He Has Left(47)
“I have no choice but to suspend you, Dani,” he said. “You know that, right?”
“Jake Slater is innocent. How do you expect me to shoot a man who’d just saved my life?”
“You can’t say that for sure. How do you know the other guy shot Steve Kingston? It could’ve been Slater. Or they could’ve been working together. We don’t have that part on camera. You’ve gotten yourself too emotionally invested. You’re not thinking clearly.”
“If they were working together, why would Jake have tackled that guy?”
“I don’t know. But I have a real mess on my hands now. I can’t keep you on this case anymore. The media is already going to crucify me. Mitchell will take over from here.”
Dani wanted to argue. She was getting close. She could feel it. But she knew fighting with Simon about this right now would get her nowhere fast.
“Do what you have to do, Simon.”
“Look, just take the afternoon off, and go clear your head.”
Dani left without another word. But she had no intention of taking the afternoon off. Jake had saved her life, and she wasn’t going to leave him hanging out there on his own. Even if it jeopardized her job. Dani’s phone buzzed as she was getting into her car. It was the old FBI friend she’d reached out to earlier who had retired to the Bahamas. Jester Bannon. He was a veteran agent who had taken her under his wing her first few years in DC.
“I got him,” Jester said.
“The pilot?”
“Yep. Name’s Marcus Jett. You believe that? A pilot with the last name Jett. Anyway, I tracked him down at a beach bar while he waited for his next client’s flight.”
“What did he say?”
“Said he had no idea who his passenger from New Jersey was this morning. His paperwork listed him as Jerry Tupoli. The passenger didn’t say much and didn’t want any help with his items. So the pilot just left him alone. But he did have the client who chartered the plane on his paperwork. Wyatt, Banks, and McKenzie. I already looked it up for you. A large corporate law firm in Austin.”
A law firm? That could mean a lot of things. “Anything else?”
“Nah, that’s it. I bought the pilot a couple of beers, and he happily shared.”
“I really appreciate this, Jester. I owe you. How’s the fishing down there?”
“Glorious. You should come visit.”
“I will. Soon.”
Dani hung up and immediately started searching the law firm on her phone. She pulled up the firm’s fancy website and began scrolling through attorney profile pages. She didn’t have to look very far to find a match for the gray-haired man who had been in the airport hangar with Logan Gervais earlier. Nelson Wyatt. He was a name partner. She did an individual search for Nelson Wyatt. He was clearly a hotshot attorney. There were dozens of stories and photos of Wyatt involved with big cases for high-profile corporate clients. She doubted Wyatt had hired a professional hit man for his own personal reasons. He had to have done it for a client. So which one? And why? She wondered if she could get her hands on a client list. Unlikely. She’d have to go straight to the source and see what, if anything, she could stir up.
Dani called up FBI headquarters and got patched through to a member on her team.
“I need you to get me an address ASAP. Nelson Wyatt.”
Minutes later, she had it. The pin on her map app told her Nelson Wyatt lived only two miles away from Steve’s house. All the rich people lived around this part of town. Dani started her Mazda and took off. She was pulling up to a massive house sitting along Lake Austin about five minutes later. Before she had a chance to knock on the front door and introduce herself, she spotted the same white Range Rover she’d seen parked in the airport hangar security video earlier pulling out of the driveway. Nelson Wyatt was behind the steering wheel. And he was in a hurry.
Dani did a quick U-turn and followed. She tried to strategize how to approach the man to get the necessary information out of him. Threats would likely get her nowhere. Men like Wyatt made careers out of legally keeping secrets for wealthy clients.
She followed the Range Rover into Zilker Park and trailed at a distance until he finally came to a stop in a small empty parking lot near the sand volleyball courts. Dani pulled off the park road and watched from a distance for a moment. Was he going for a run on the nearby trails? The lawyer just sat in his car and waited. She got her answer two minutes later when a sleek black Bentley pulled into the same parking lot and parked right next to the Range Rover. Wyatt climbed out of his vehicle. Dani cursed when the driver of the other vehicle also got out. Lars Kingston.
She watched as the two men huddled closely together and began engaging in an animated conversation. Dani’s mind began racing. Could Lars have hired Logan Gervais? He had to be involved. It was too much of a coincidence for these two men to be meeting privately today unless it was connected to Gervais. But why? While Lars clearly disliked his former son-in-law, why would he hire a hit man to kill him under these crazy circumstances? Was he convinced Jake had killed his granddaughter last night and simply taking matters into his own hands? Powerful and wealthy people often played by their own rules.
THIRTY-FIVE
Jake sat in his truck and tried to regroup somehow from his encounter with both Eddie Cowens and Dani after finding his brother-in-law Steve shot dead in his office. Eddie must have been the one who’d shot him. Why? Jake had been working under the presumption that Steve was behind everything that had happened to Sarah and Piper. Was he wrong? Or was he right, and things had somehow gone sideways between Steve and Eddie?