A Chip and a Chair (Seven of Spades, #5)(54)

There was absolutely no fucking way he could do that.

“Oh, what am I gonna say, you should ignore those?” Martine made a beckoning gesture with one hand. “Gimme.”

He handed her the folders of the two fingerprinted victims, keeping the tortured victim himself. As Paquin had expected, she’d managed to ID the guy from the fixation plates in his arm. Levi scanned the thin sheet of demographic information she’d included.

Theodore Hollis. The name rang a bell, albeit distantly. Levi frowned and kept reading.

Date of birth indicated that Hollis had been in his mid-forties when he was murdered. Former occupation as a vice president in a wealth management firm. Last known address in Santa Monica-

“Theodore Hollis!” Levi exclaimed, as he remembered where he’d heard that before. “Motherfucking Ted Hollis.”

Martine looked puzzled, obviously trying to place the name the same way he had, and then her eyes widened. “That rich asshole who got off a few years ago for beating that sex worker?”

“Yeah.”

Levi recalled the scandal clearly now; the story had been all over the local news for weeks. On one of Hollis’s many weekend trips to Vegas, he’d physically and sexually assaulted an escort he’d hired. There’d been a divisive, controversial trial, and things had only gotten worse when he’d been acquitted. But the story hadn’t ended there-he’d disappeared shortly after the trial, by all reports unable to handle the social and professional fallout.

“Everyone thought Hollis took off because he couldn’t stand the heat,” Levi said. “There was never any suspicion of foul play, because-”

“Because he liquidated all of his assets and drained his bank accounts before chartering a plane to the Maldives,” Martine finished.

They stared at each other. The kind of information someone would need to get their hands on all of Hollis’s money and book a plane in his name was exactly the kind of information Hollis would surrender if, say, he was being tortured by a psychotic serial killer.

Levi felt faint. “Well, I guess we know how the Seven of Spades funds all of their elaborate set-ups. What’ve you got?”

“Nothing that interesting. Two local guys with criminal records, pretty standard Seven of Spades victim profile.”

They dove deeper into their respective research, branching out from the basics Paquin’s team had provided. Levi pulled up a bunch of old stories about Hollis’s arrest, trial, and acquittal, needing to refresh his memory on the details and hoping something would strike a spark.

He found what he needed within five minutes. “Whoa. The judge on Hollis’s trial was Cameron Harding.” The Seven of Spades had killed Harding only a couple of months ago-no way was that a coincidence.

Martine’s head popped up. “Seriously? Who else was involved?”

Levi clicked through the news stories, his mouth hanging open. “Prosecuting attorney, DDA Loretta Kane.” Another of the Seven of Spades’s victims, one who’d been posthumously revealed as corrupt. “Lead attorney for the defense, Maria Dekovic. Second chair for the defense . . .”

He blinked. Closed his eyes, opened them again. The name was still there. He swallowed hard.

“Jay Sawyer.”

Martine went still. For a long, breathless moment, neither of them spoke.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. That’s weird, but not too weird. Hollis’s case was a huge one for Sawyer’s firm. This would have been before he’d made a real name for himself. It makes sense that he would angle to get himself assigned to such a prominent trial.”

“Uh-huh.” Levi folded his hands together, suppressing the small tremor that had started up. “Out of curiosity, who represented the other two victims in their court cases?”

“Not Sawyer. I would have noticed that right away.”

“The firms?”

“Um . . .” Martine fussed with her laptop. “Kerry Milner, Emily Park of Hatfield, Park, and McKenzie. Rodrigo Cortez, Erik Johansen of . . . Hatfield, Park, and McKenzie.”

“What about Seth Fowler? Do we have a record of who his attorney was before his charges were dropped?”

They did. Both times that Fowler had been accused of criminal negligence, he’d run straight to Hatfield, Park, and McKenzie, and the charges had been dismissed within days.

“This has to be a fluke,” Levi said through numb lips. “We checked all of this information for every single one of the Seven of Spades’s victims who’d had contact with the criminal justice system, right from the beginning with Billy Campbell. There were no patterns. Not even in the bailiffs or court stenographers. We checked.”

“The Seven of Spades intended for those bodies to be found. They would have made sure there was no connection to their own identity.” She glanced around the busy substation, and although no one was close enough to hear them, she lowered her voice. “But these bodies? They were buried in the desert. They were never supposed to be found and identified, so it wouldn’t have mattered if there was a connection. That might even be why the Seven of Spades buried them in the first place.”

“We’ve discussed the possibility of the Seven of Spades being a defense attorney before, and we decided it was unlikely. Rohan himself said the killer’s black-and-white concept of justice would prevent the kind of compartmentalization and moral flexibility defense attorneys need to do their jobs.”