Crash Morph: Gate Shifter Book Two (28 page)

“Nik,” I murmured, softer. “I’m working.”

“I know,” he said. “Can I help?”

Sighing again, I fought to brush off my reaction to his touch, forcing my mind back on the job. I bent down over the laptop I’d dragged down from the table to the floor. Positioning it in my lap, I flipped it open to the screen where I’d been sharing research with Irene for the past hour or so.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “...If you can help, that is.”

“Have you found anything new?” he asked again, his voice still softer, more cajoling than usual. “Anything you didn’t tell Gantry when he checked in yesterday?”

I shook my head, fighting to ignore the look in his eyes. “Not really,” I said, only hesitating on his actual words for a heartbeat. “But this is kind of weird.”

I twisted the screen around to show him.

I’d already given Gantry the basics on the case the day before, including what Jo, Ravi and P.J. said to me in the police station. From Nik’s words, Gantry had shared that information with him, which didn’t bother me at all, but maybe surprised me a little. Either way, I got the feeling that Nik knew roughly what I’d been looking into in terms of detective work.

Which meant he also probably knew what a dead end most of the interviews had been.

He also probably knew I’d gone to talk to the police.

“So I’m looking for who might have been a contact inside here, right?” I explained, pointing at the list of names I’d given to Irene. “Meaning the modeling school itself...for those girls who are missing? Well, we ran pretty much all of the employees and I got nothing. No weird bank deposits, not suspicious side work that might be a cover. We also got nothing when I looked into Misty’s Boom-Boom Room,” I added, looking up at him.
 

Seeing the recognition in Nik’s eyes at the name, I could tell Gantry told him about that, too, so I nodded, going on without bothering to repeat any of that.

“...So I was thinking the tip Jo gave me was bogus,” I sighed. “A dead end.” Shrugging, I avoided his stare when I felt the heat behind it, even as he caressed my neck again. “They didn’t do any of the shows there, none of the people working there had any connection we could find to Culare’s, I couldn’t find any connection at all...not at first.”

I pointed to one of Irene’s emails then, showing him what she’d just sent me.

“...So then I had Irene run a deeper scan on some of these ‘talent show’ type events that Culare’s puts on, as well as the groups sponsoring them...and I traced more than half of the actual
money
back to this place.”

I pointed at the screen, glancing up at Nik, who was looking at my mouth.

I could tell he was still listening, though, because when he glanced up, I saw understanding in his eyes.
 

“Your friend was right then,” he prompted. “They are involved.”

“...Irene said they buried it pretty good,” I said, nodding. “They didn’t have any of the shows there, like I said...and I couldn’t find any direct connection with the place through the actual people on the paperwork.” Glancing at Nik again, I explained, “The real Culare shows happen in big hotels mostly, sometimes convention centers or rented theaters. But the
owners
of this place have more than a small financial interest in the show circuit, as it turns out. They’ve sponsored a number of big events via different talent agencies in the northwest. The money trail was faint at first, since they used a number of holding companies and whatnot, but Irene’s confirmed it. The fact that they did it through multiple names and through different companies is probably why Culare herself didn’t notice how many requests she was getting off these guys.”

Turning the screen back towards my own lap, I squinted down at the address.
 

“I’m beginning to think they’ve been using Culare’s
actual
talent searches to find people,” I added. “That fake one with the flyer I showed you might have been some kind of side gig...one of their people branching out, trying to make extra cash by using the Culare name. If so, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d already been discovered and shut down.”

Shrugging a little, I said,

“...I haven’t been able to find any more shows by that group, in any case. I’m thinking the head honchos found out about the side scam, worried it would expose their real operation and put an end to it. Whatever the case, that appears to have been a one-off.”

Nik frowned with me, sliding behind me more and wrapping an arm around my waist before he rested his chin on my shoulder, staring down at the same screen.

That was distracting, too.
 

I managed to keep my head on the work, however. Sort of.

It occurred to me that the words on the screen likely meant nothing to Nik, in any case. Even so, he seemed to be following along in terms of the basics.
 

“Misty’s Boom-Boom Room?” he said. “This is the same place, yes? The one your friend, the law enforcement officer, told you to investigate?”

I nodded. “The one and only.”

Neither of us took our eyes off the web page as we spoke.

I found myself melting back into Nik, even as his fingers slowly caressed my waist. He was thinking, though, too, I could tell, and when I glanced up, I saw him looking down at the laptop screen with more than feigned interest.

The website was meant to make me want to party, I guess.

Or maybe, more to the point, it was supposed to make Nik want to party...meaning men. Or maybe it was just supposed to make men want to hang out in a place where a bunch of girls in minimal amounts of clothing doing jello shots wanted to party.

I couldn’t help wondering what kind of effect it had on Nik.

Especially now. Especially after that morning.

To me, the website was just a wash of erratic, jarring images and colors, all of them evoking the quasi-underground, too-hip-to-live, psuedo-rave vibe for rich people who were too out of touch to realize that this stuff wasn’t actually hip.

Women in low-cut tops and short skirts holding up martini glasses and fruit-laden drinks held facial expressions somewhere between a laugh and a scream. Crowded around them stood a cluster of grinning, hopeful-looking men, most of them wearing dress shirts and khakis and gripping beers. A chrome and black leather bar with a buffed-looking bartender stood behind them. Decorated with the requisite mirror which stretched most of the way up to a fifteen-foot ceiling, the bar itself displayed rows of bottles three- or four-deep and what looked like cheesy eighties paintings of half-naked women on either side.

The image in the middle of the website’s front page formed the centerpiece of a larger, more chaotic collage, where fancy appetizer plates were juxtaposed with dance floor lights covered in more girls in mini-dresses.
 

Another image showed a long-haired diva-type in
Alice in Wonderland
tights and a leather outfit, obviously drunk, leering at the camera from her spot in the lap of a suit-wearing guy with a smug expression on his face.

Clearly, the club’s ads were made with the goal of enticing guys through the doors with their wallets in hand.
 

I glanced again at the bright red text splashed across the top of the screen, did a double-take on the address and grimaced, realizing suddenly why the place looked so danged familiar, despite the obvious facelift it had gone through since I’d last seen it.

Well, that cleared up one aspect of Jo’s cryptic comments to me at the station.

Hell. How had I forgotten this place?

Maybe I’d blocked it from my memory. Or maybe I’d forgotten a lot of things when I got pulled out of Seattle into Nik’s world.

Either way, I remembered now.

I’d been in Misty’s Boom-Boom Room before, although it had a different name back then. Jake’s Sports Bar, or maybe Charlie’s Pub and Grill...Chauncey’s Last Chance...something like that. Something vaguely New York and vaguely Irish and vaguely sports-like. It had the dance floor back then, too, and I recognized other aspects of the layout and bare bones of the bar itself, despite the shiny new chrome and leather seats that now ringed its edges.

Under new ownership? Or maybe just an upgrade, some attempt to go with the times into new levels of sleazy nostalgia for the cocaine-fueled Reagan years.

Either way, I definitely remembered the place now.

It was the same club where I’d been sent to scope out Michael Evers.

The first time, that is.

My client at the time, an ex-sorority chick turned lawyer that Evers had raped and strangled before leaving her for dead, told me it was one of Evers’ favorite haunts. The crime against my client had occurred about six months earlier by the time she hired me, but his habits hadn’t changed any in the time since.
 

I found him there, the first night I looked.

My client, whose name was Christy McDonald, I now remembered, had come to me after she’d exhausted pretty much every other avenue she could find for redress around what Evers had done to her. She’d come to me
after
Evers got off at the trial, where he’d managed to produce not only a fake alibi (corroborated by something like twenty douche-bag friends of his), but also to make her look like a hysterical lunatic who hurt herself on purpose, all to get back at Evers for breaking up with her.

Christy told me she hadn’t even known him before that day, though.

Of course, Evers had people testify that Christy was lying on that front.

Apparently, he’d been stalking her long enough to make their connection appear pretty convincing, because Christy claimed he’d even had text messages put on her phone somehow, things she hadn’t written and didn’t remember receiving.

And yeah, maybe I’m a sucker, but I believed her, pretty much from the beginning.

Well, I believed her enough to check out her story.

After I’d been monitoring Evers for a while, I believed her even more.

Guy was a total reptile, that much was clear after doing surveillance on him for just a few days. He was smart, too. Smooth as glass...and charismatic, in his way. He was one of those people who collected a lot of big-shot friends, which increasingly struck me as calculated, and not only because he was a power-obsessed egomaniac.
 

Meaning, he used his powerful friends not only as stepping stones for his career and status and financial perks and whatever else...but as insurance. Presumably so he could pull whatever shit he wanted and get away with it.

I still didn’t know for sure how he’d managed the text-messaging trick, but Gantry told me it was possible. He said it was something his people could have done.

Fairly easily, in fact.

Which, given everything else I’d seen, was enough to convince me that the text messages alone weren’t strong enough to prove Evers’ innocence...or that Christy was a liar. Evers could be some kind of hacker savant himself, or simply have access to someone––either a group like Gantry’s or someone else––who could pull off that text messaging trick for him. Given Evers’ tendency to cultivate friendships with people he could use in various ways, I strongly came down in favor of the latter scenario.

In interviewing people who’d been burned by Evers in the past, a pattern emerged.
 

Evers would target people he wanted something from, even going so far as to arrange “accidental” meetings and so on to insert himself into their lives. He then proceeded to use flattery, favors and any manner of bullshit to win them over. Once he had them reeled in, he turned into a pretty terrifying bully, using his connections to other, more powerful people to threaten their careers, their financial stability, their family and whatever else.

So yeah, he was a dick. And not only to women.

He never pulled that shit on the
truly
powerful, of course; those people he bent over backwards for, plying them with favors and fancy dinners and golf weekends and hookers and stock tips and whatever else, making sure they were always willing and available to grant his favors when Evers came calling. Which he did.

Regularly, from what I could tell.

Based on what I found, the picture that emerged was a lot closer to that of a serial offender than a one-off, “I-was-too-drunk” kind of situation. There was too much intent behind what he did for me to buy that it didn’t happen a lot. There was also too much enjoyment of the whole thing, and too much of that “smartest guy in the room” vibe in how he smirked about it later.