Into the Fire(82)

Their role was simply to stay out of her way and reap the benefits.

But tonight she required something more. That was the reason for the late-night confabulation.

She cleared her throat.

The boys fell silent.

She rested her elbows on the walnut slab of the conference table, the chill rising through the Armani featherweight virgin wool of her thin sleeves. The air conditioner, pegged at a steady sixty-five, kept the room pleasingly refrigerated. She found that the cold generally clarified her thinking.

“Whoever this man is,” she said, “it’s clear by now that he’s a friend to Grant Merriweather’s cousin. Which makes him an enemy to us.”

“Grant didn’t have everything,” one of the men said.

“No,” Stella said. “But what he did have could lead to everything.”

Another chimed in, “From what we know, it seems highly unlikely anything can be traced to us.”

“I’m rarely content with what I know,” she said. “I prefer to know what I don’t know.”

She let them grapple with that for a moment.

“We’ve insulated ourselves rather magnificently,” she said. Even though she’d been the one to arrange all the insulating, she flattered them with the first-person plural because: men. “But our buffer is growing thinner.”

The first speaker waved her off. “Hiccups,” he said. “Nothing more than a few hiccups.”

“The good thing about working with low-level scumbags,” another weighed in, “is how replaceable they are.”

Several chuckles picked up steam, confidence growing.

Stella spread a smile across her face. “And the two LAPD detectives?” she said. “Are they readily replaceable as well?”

This was greeted by silence and throat clearing as they waited for the heavyset gentleman on the left side of the table to chime in.

“Well, yes,” Fitz said carefully. “But it’ll take some time.”

“And in that time, as we function without the benefit of their assistance, would you consider us stronger or weaker?” she asked.

She preferred not to dominate the committee members but to wear them out. They were strong. But they were men. They didn’t have a woman’s endurance. They’d rehash their arguments again and again and finally fold.

Fitz mumbled the appropriate response.

“But we have Bedrosov,” another said. “As long as we have Bedrosov, everything stays intact. And there’s no way in hell anyone’s getting to him.”

“One thing you’ve all been masterful at,” she told the circle of men, “has been arranging for the unexpected.”

A soothing current circled the table, the faces changing from sheepish to proud.

Until now she’d resisted making any arrangements of a muscular nature from inside the conference room of the climate-controlled seventh floor. However, circumstances had changed, and it was time to take a more active role in the steering.

Desperate times and whatnot.

“As long as we have inconvenient material floating around out there…” She waved a manicured hand to the glass wall, the city beyond. “We need to continue to arrange for the unexpected. Since the unexpected seems to keep coming for us, we require contingency plans—”

“Those are in place,” Fitz said.

She pressed her crimson lips together in something like a grin. “And contingency plans to our contingency plans.”

The man beside her folded his hands on the table and frowned ponderously. “What—” His voice went dry, and he coughed into a fist and started again. “What did you have in mind?”

She told them.

The silence afterward hummed with discomfort. The men had blanched. Their gazes remained on the table, on their hangnails, on the seam where the wall met ceiling. Eye contact was too threatening. Too human.

“But, Stella.” Fitz fiddled with his wedding ring. “That’s a whole other thing.”

The Steel Woman smiled. “So are we, dear.”





44



Mantrap





The Inmate Reception Center smelled overwhelmingly of industrial disinfectant and body odor. The ducts were working overtime, doing their best to diffuse a lingering trace of spent pepper spray. Beneath a splotch of blood where someone had tried to put a fist through the cold concrete, Evan sat on a bright orange chair seemingly molded for maximum discomfort. The aftermath of the booze, soaking into his addled brain, made his head feel as though it had been molded for maximum discomfort, too. He’d been waiting for nearly forty-five minutes while sheriff’s deputies shuffled other arrestees through the system.

Happy hour was crowded at Twin Towers Booking.

In fact, every hour was crowded at Twin Towers, the world’s largest jail.

There were forty-five hundred inmates jammed into a space running at 150-percent capacity.

Evan closed his eyes, breathed the stale scent of riled men, felt the heat from countless trapped bodies. Someone was sobbing and someone was screaming and someone was singing. Singing badly.

He’d already been processed by the baggy-eyed civilian employee with caked-on foundation. He’d stood at the counter hiccupping while she reviewed the probable-cause statement. It had been sent through the bulletproof glass in a transaction drawer along with a time-delay, self-destroying license with his face and Paytsar Hovsepian’s information, ingeniously engineered by Melinda Truong. “Open container, drunk in public.” She glanced up at the young cop by Evan’s side, chewed the inside of her cheek. “Barfed on your boots?”