A Chip and a Chair (Seven of Spades, #5)(56)
He coughed once more, spat into the bowl, and flushed. Then he grabbed a wad of toilet paper to wipe his mouth and slumped against the metal partition, shaking and drenched in sweat. “I’m okay.”
She tentatively peeked into the stall and grimaced. “Jesus, no, you’re not. Hang on.” She walked away, returning with a handful of damp paper towels for him to sponge his face. “What the hell was that? I know it was kind of a shock, but isn’t it better for it to be Sawyer than someone else? You don’t even like him.”
Levi tipped his head back against the stall divider. His whole upper body ached abominably, and his stomach was still cramping. “I had sex with him.”
For a few long moments, Martine was utterly silent. “When?” she finally asked, in a high-pitched squeak he’d never heard from her before.
“The night before Stanton was kidnapped.”
“Oh.” Comprehension dawned on her face. “The night after you outed Dom’s addiction and then punched Gibbs in the face?”
“Yeah. Not my finest hour.” Levi paused, reconsidering. “Not my finest weekend, really.”
“Does Dominic know?”
“Of course!”
“Okay. Shit. I . . . I don’t even know what to say.”
“I do,” Levi said bitterly. “I had sex with a serial killer. Sawyer’s murdered dozens of people and has been torturing me for months, and I let him fuck me.”
He retched again, doubling over the toilet, but he had nothing else to bring up. Martine crouched by his side and put a hand on his shoulder.
“We don’t know it’s Sawyer. All of our conclusions are based on circumstantial evidence.”
“It’s him. It’s him, Martine. God, I’m so stupid-”
“All right.” She rubbed his back soothingly, like he was one of her kids. “We’ll turn this over to Leila, okay? We don’t have enough to arrest Sawyer, but she can bring him in for questioning, hold him as long as she can, and put a police detail on him after he’s released. We’ll get to the bottom of this. Everything’s going to be fine.”
No, Levi thought. Nothing was ever going to be fine again.
Dominic didn’t like the word bitch. He rarely used it in reference to a woman, especially one as young as Bianca Olsen.
But after a morning immersed in her various social media feeds, there was no getting around it: Bianca was a spoiled, racist little bitch.
The rising ubiquity of social media was a blessing to bounty hunters and PIs everywhere; it was truly astonishing how much personal information people were willing to reveal on the internet. Dominic could credit more than one collar to an ill-advised Facebook check-in, Snapchat geofilter, or nostalgic Instagram post.
Bianca had a presence on every social media platform known to mankind, each updated with such regularity and thoroughness that managing them must have been a full-time job. That made Dominic’s task much easier, and as a PI, he was grateful for the wealth of open-source intelligence.
As a human being, it made him want to drink bleach. There were only so many xenophobic rants about immigrants and breathtakingly ignorant comments on poverty that a guy could be expected to endure.
Bianca and her entire family, sans her missing grandfather, were on vacation in Lake Tahoe-they’d left the day before the explosion at the Mirage, which wasn’t suspicious at all. Assured by her comprehensive documentation of the trip that nobody was home in Las Vegas, Dominic broke into the Olsens’ Summerlin house and turned it over room by room. With no need to rush, his search was meticulous, and would leave no evidence of his passing.
He continued monitoring Bianca’s social media while he worked. Isaiah, McBride’s tech guru, had whipped up a cool app for the firm that collated and tracked an individual’s social media activity with minimum effort on the investigator’s part. Dominic had never appreciated it more, even if he was interrupted every few minutes by a notification about a new Instagram post of Bianca’s latte or whatever.
So far, his search hadn’t been as productive as he’d hoped. The house was spotless, not to mention organized in a near-obsessive way he’d only seen in magazines before, so he was pretty confident that he wasn’t missing anything. There simply weren’t any indications of where Hatfield had gone.
He’d reached the home office of Vanessa Olsen, née Hatfield, and was investigating the contents of her desk when his phone dinged.
Bianca had updated her Facebook with a selfie of her in a bikini, relaxing by the pool at the family’s rented house in Lake Tahoe. In the mere seconds it took Dominic to absorb the picture, likes were already pouring in from her literal thousands of followers. Then a comment popped up from a woman named Hailey, whom Dominic knew from his background work was one of Bianca’s closest friends.
Can’t believe that slut Roxy came with you!!
Bianca responded a moment later. I kno rite?!? Grandpa should have sent her somewhere else. Look at her rolls in that bikini!!! That was followed by the barfing-face emoji.
Frowning, Dominic studied the picture more closely. There was another woman in the background of the shot, a stunning redhead partially out of frame. She was so beautiful that Dominic had no trouble remembering that he’d seen her in multiple pictures while researching Bianca this morning. She was about Bianca’s age, maybe a little older, so he’d assumed they were friends.