A Chip and a Chair (Seven of Spades, #5)(24)
“Okay, that’s weird,” Martine said. “Again, the only person the Seven of Spades has ever physically tortured was Sheppard, and that was only to get a confession out of him. Even when they mutilated those human traffickers from the Collective, the damage was all done post-mortem.”
“The first tortured victim was from the beginning of the timeline, the one with the plates in his arm,” Levi muttered. “The other from the middle. So this can’t be a case of growth or evolution. The Seven of Spades tortured Sheppard to obtain something specific from him-they must have tortured these other two men for the same reason. There was something the killer wanted from these particular individuals that they couldn’t get from their other victims.” He met Martine’s gaze across their desks, his stomach clenching with a sudden thrill. “If we find out who these victims were, that could be the key to everything.”
Her eyes were wide and excited. “Shit.”
He reached for his desk phone. “I’ll tell Dr. Paquin that she needs to prioritize identifying those two J. Does right away.”
“Uh . . .” Martine rose to her feet. “Actually, why don’t I go down to the coroner’s office and speak to her in person? I can pick her brain while I’m there.”
Levi knew exactly why she was suggesting that, and he scowled. “I wasn’t going to be rude.”
“Dr. Paquin hasn’t had time to get used to your personality yet. Let’s not push her into the deep end right off the bat.”
Annoyingly, Martine had a point. Like Dominic, her charisma was a force to be reckoned with, and having her handle their requests for Dr. Paquin would be more productive. He backed down, and Martine hurried off.
Once she left, however, he was too restless to settle. A few minutes of unproductive fidgeting later, he gave up, walking all the way to the nearest coffee shop and back to burn off his nervous energy. By the time he returned to the substation, he was able to focus on his ketamine investigation again.
After the intrigue of his discussion with Martine, this research was even more dull than before. His eyes were all but bleeding as he processed page after page of the same dry minutiae, to the point where the words started blurring together on his computer screen.
When they’d suspected Leila, he’d shifted the investigation to controlled substances licenses in and around St. Louis, but once she’d been ruled out, he’d returned to Nevada. After a year of sorting through DEA licenses in geographic circles expanding from the heart of Las Vegas, he’d gotten as far as Mesquite. He finished vetting the person he’d been working on when Martine arrived-Dr. Erica Flores-and moved on to the next license on the list, a veterinarian named Seth Fowler.
He felt a brief spark of interest when he learned that Dr. Fowler had been charged with suspected negligence with two animals who had died under his care, but both of those charges had been dropped without prosecution. In every other respect, Dr. Fowler lived a boring, ordinary life, just like almost every person Levi had investigated this way.
God, this was a waste of time. He’d been so sure when he’d started that he was on the right track, and he’d never been wrong to trust his gut before. But now he could only regret all the dozens if not hundreds of hours he’d spent on this wild goose chase—
Levi blinked and then frowned at his computer. He’d been operating on autopilot, running Fowler through every local, regional, and national database he had access to-which was a long list these days, thanks to the Seven of Spades’s notoriety-and he’d been about to call it quits. All of Fowler’s licenses and registrations were in proper order, there’d been no recent criminal activity, and he had no ties to anyone in the suspect pool.
But this year, he’d been flagged for an audit by the IRS.
Levi chewed his lip for a moment before deciding he might as well look deeper. He’d already invested his time and energy into this. If it didn’t pan out, he’d consider wrapping up the ketamine investigation altogether, or at least surrendering it to the uniforms so he could concentrate on more relevant aspects of the case.
Dr. Fowler owned a small, private practice that he ran out of his suburban home. Levi wasn’t well-versed in finance or accounting, but from what he could gather from the IRS, Fowler filed an appropriate tax return every year; he scrupulously reported his income and paid every dollar owed on time, never claiming any business losses or even deductions.
Accordingly, it had taken the IRS a while to catch on to the fact that they couldn’t account for the source of said income for the past several years-unless all of Fowler’s patients were paying in cash, which was suspicious in and of itself. Even fishier, Fowler hadn’t paid payroll taxes for the same period of time, because apparently his practice didn’t have any employees.
There was no way a vet could run a practice without at least a vet tech, even if that person did double duty as a receptionist. So either Fowler was paying his employees under the table . . . or his practice was a front.
Pulse pounding, Levi reached for his phone.
After three hours of long, frustrating conversations, chasing paper trails, and arguing with the officials of various institutions until he stubbornly got his way, Levi hung up and stared at the papers he’d covered with notes. His heart was lodged firmly in his throat.
Several years ago, Fowler had owned a home and a veterinary practice in Summerlin. Then he’d sold both without warning, moved to Mesquite, and opened his current practice.