The Guardian
Chapter 5

That was twice that Delia Sutton had surprised the f**k out of him tonight. To be fair, the first time wasn’t by design. But she’d barely been out of college the last time he’d seen her. The four years that had stretched out since then had taken her from gawky to gorgeous, and even with her rumpled hair and her faded hospital gown, he’d barely recognized the definitely-a-woman in front of him when he’d entered the exam room, to the point that it had nearly thrown him.

The fact that she’d just capped off the statement he’d taken by making his bullshit detector explode? That made him sit up and pay a whole different kind of attention, especially since the thing had been utterly dormant ever since he’d put eyes on her. But beneath Delia’s newly cultivated beauty was a hint of the brutally honest younger woman he’d known. She was a dismal liar—for Chrissake, she’d dropped her gaze and wrung her hands as she’d told him she’d shared everything about her mugging. Which begged the question.

What was she holding back?

“Do you know if anyone found my bag?” Delia asked. No less than a half dozen emotions hung in her words, with hope, anxiety, and concern headlining, and Garza’s intuition perked.

“Dispatch sent a patrol unit out to the scene. It’s SOP for assault cases. They canvass the area, ask people if they saw anything strange or anyone fitting the description of the assailant.” Not that they had a scrap to go on in this case, but… “I can check in with them, but I’ll be honest. This guy was clearly after your valuables and nothing more. Your things are probably long gone.”

“It’s okay, Deels,” Camila said soothingly while somehow managing to skewer him with her stare at the same time. But come on, he couldn’t change the truth. “Her cell phone was in her purse. Can’t you track that?”

Delia brightened, and shit, he hated to do this. “We could try, but this guy sounds like a pro.” Turning to Delia, he explained, “He never let you see him, and he never spoke, so you can’t give a good description, let alone ID him in a lineup. He pulled you into an alley to avoid witnesses. He hit you just hard enough to get away clean, but not enough to do permanent damage.”

Garza’s gaze traveled to the bruises mottling her neck and the part of her slim shoulder that wasn’t covered by her platinum-blond hair or her light blue hospital gown, and the stab of some emotion he wasn’t quite familiar with settled sharply between his ribs.

He smothered it before it had even fully formed. He had a job to do. Feelings would have to wait. Even weird ones.

“Guys like that have muggings down to a science.” Garza focused on Delia’s stare. Man, how had he forgotten how green her eyes were? “They know cell phones can be easily tracked by GPS as long as they’re on, so they either power them down or ditch them quick. Sometimes both. Stolen phones are pretty hard to sell, so thieves don’t usually bother.”

“What about my laptop? I didn’t power it down before I put it in my bag. Can you track that?”

It would’ve been a legitimate question if she hadn’t tried so hard to make it nonchalant, and there. There was the source of the lie she’d told.

“Laptops are harder to locate, but not impossible.” Garza watched her carefully, cataloguing the hope that had just flashed through her eyes. “Do you have any tracking software on it?”

“Yes.” More hope, and Christ, she was killing him. “My boss, Kent, insists on it. As soon as the machine is connected to Wi-Fi, we can track its location. But”—she frowned, then winced—“I’m the VP of Finance, so my laptop isn’t like most others’ in the company. It’s not just password protected. I need to insert my keycard to log in.”

“That’s good, right?” Camila asked. “It means all the stuff on your laptop is safe because your keycard wasn’t in your bag.”

“Yeah, that is good,” Delia said without smiling, and Garza filled in the blanks for his sister.

“Except with laptops, just on isn’t good enough. There’s no standalone GPS, like in cell phones. Which means, we can’t track it via the software unless whoever took it connects to Wi-Fi, and they’d have to log in to do that.” The thing was as good as spare parts, which was probably the intent of the as*sh0le who’d stolen it, anyway.

Moving to the next logical step, Garza said, “I’m assuming your boss has insurance on all company-issued machines.”

Delia’s brows creased. “Of course, but…I mean, aren’t there any street cameras you can check?”

“For a one-on-one robbery? No way.”

He heard the rough edges of the words at the same time he registered the shock and irritation on her face, and damn it, this was why Sinclair normally paired him up with sugar-sweet Hale, or even Hollister, who was so laid back, Garza suspected the dude might be pulseless half the time. “The department doesn’t have the resources for that. Plus, this mugging was well-planned. The chances that there are any cameras that reach that alley are slim, at best, and even if you beat those odds, they won’t have caught anything useful.”

“Okay,” she tried again. “What about alerts or—what do you call them? BOLOs! Can’t you put out one of those?”

F*****g Dateline. “On what? The only description we have of the man who did this is that he’s roughly six-two and muscular. It’s not enough to go on,” Garza said.

Delia made a noise of frustration. “I had some really important things in my bag.”

“Aside from your laptop and cell phone?” Garza asked, and before he could call her out on her flimsy attempt at hiding the truth, Camila’s eyes went wide.

“Oh, my God! You don’t think this mugging has anything to do with the thing you told me about at lunch, do you?”

Delia blinked in surprise, and at least that made two of them. “What thing?” Garza asked, at the same time she said, “No!”

“What thing?” Garza repeated, swiveling his best detective stare at Delia. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

He crossed his arms to wait out her hesitation. She broke after less than five seconds.

“Okay, fine, but you’re going to think this is crazy.”

Without uncrossing his arms, he said, “Humor me.”

Delia rolled her eyes—apparently, she’d grown a sassy streak since he’d last seen her, too—but she didn’t argue. “For the record, I don’t think the two are related. But over the past few days, I’ve uncovered some strange things going on at my job.”

“Define strange.”

Again, she hesitated. “The financials on a few of our accounts looked…off.”

“I’m going to need more to go on than that,” Garza said, but it looked like her sass was on repeat, too.

“Well, I can’t give it to you. Our account information is extremely sensitive. Especially the financials.”

Fair. Unfortunately. “But you saw some things that didn’t look right to you?” At her nod, he added, “Did you talk to anyone about it?”

“Yes. I went to the CFO, Peyton Willoughby.”

“She’s a bitch,” Camila muttered, and both he and Delia gave her equal amounts of side-eye.

“What?” Camila’s hands found her h!ps. “She is.”

Funny, Delia didn’t argue. “She’s also my immediate superior. She said she’d look into the discrepancies. Which I guess she sort of did, but it ended up looking more like she just deleted things rather than actually fixing them.”

The way Delia stared at her hands again made it all too easy to fill in the blanks. “So, you weren’t satisfied with the action she took,” Garza supplied. “Do you think she might be up to something dishonest?”

“I don’t know,” Delia insisted, then added a much more watered down, “it’s possible. But that’s just one of several plausible scenarios, and the numbers are a bit unclear. Which is not like numbers, I know. Usually, they’re quite resolute, and to be honest, it’s unsettling that…anyway.” She clamped down on the bow of her bottom l*p in a move that was oddly endearing. “Sorry. The data in the accounts still didn’t make sense to me after Peyton claimed to have fixed things, so I did a little more digging. I found a file with an account name I’d never heard of before.”

“Is that unusual?” Garza asked.

“Not necessarily, but this file was encrypted, and as the VP of Finance, I’m supposed to have access to everything.”

Garza let the information sink in for a second before asking, “Did you ask anyone about the file?”

“No. I didn’t know if I could trust Peyton, so I saved all the files to my laptop’s hard drive, then downloaded everything to a flash drive, just in case. Then, I emailed the CEO, Kent, to ask him if we could meet to talk about it on Monday.”

“And there’s no other record of these discrepancies other than what was on your laptop and that flash drive?” Garza asked.

Delia shook her head, and shit. That explained the depth of her concern over the laptop. Also, her reason for fracturing the truth with him. Without proof, she had nothing—a lesson Nicky Bianchi had been teaching him all f*****g night, thanks.

“This is all just a little too convenient, don’t you think?” Camila asked, looking at him expectantly. “Delia replaces proof that something strange is going on at her work, and less than eight hours after she tells her boss, who might be in on it, she’s mugged and her laptop is stolen—poof!”

Garza cursed every single police drama in the universe for delivering ideas like this to his sister’s overactive imagination. He was all for a good case (he really f*****g was), but… “It’s extremely unlikely that the two events are related.” Because Camila was stubborn as hell, he tacked on, “I’m not saying her boss—or someone else—isn’t making mistakes with those accounts or even skimming money from the company. But it’s a huge leap from there to someone mugging her to steal the evidence; plus, no one even knows she made the flash drive. All signs point to this being an unfortunate coincidence.”

Frustration streaked across Delia’s face. “Isn’t there anything you can do to replace this guy so I can get my things back and look into this further?”

Garza bit back some annoyance of his own. He was a cop, and a goddamn good one, but come on. He wasn’t f*****g clairvoyant. He already had one impossible case in front of him, and Nicky Bianchi was a way bigger fish than this Peyton What’s-Her-Bucket, who may or may not have her hand in the till.

“Like I said, I can have dispatch check in with the patrol cops at the scene to see if they turned anything up, and we’ll ping your phone just in case we get lucky, but I wouldn’t hold out hope. My best advice? If you really think there’s something going on, talk to your CEO. The RPD has a great fraud division. They can open an investigation if he wants to go that route.”

Delia opened her mouth, and by the flash of fierceness in her eyes, she was primed to argue. But the fire dimmed just as quickly as it had appeared, and she lowered her chin with a sigh.

“I understand,” she said quietly. “Thank you for coming.”

Garza got all the way to the door before turning back to give her one last look. “I’ll be sure to have the desk sergeant let you know if anything comes up,” he said.

But he knew in his bones that nothing would.

Nicky Bianchi tooka deep breath and regarded the cut crystal glass in his hand. The Biondi Saint Brunello filling it—just below halfway, because Chianti needed room to breathe in order to not be wasted—was the exact shade of b***d. The comparison would turn the stomachs of most people, he knew, but not him. No. Above all, Nicky knew that, like expensive wine, b***d was a symbol of status. Of family. Of power. A man who could draw it at will, without punishment or remorse, was to be respected.

And, right now, he wanted nothing more than to draw enough to kill someone.

“You made assurances you didn’t keep,” he said, sending a chilly stare across the lavishly appointed living room in his equally lavish mansion.

Peyton looked up from her glass of Cristal—her fourth, Nicky had noted. “How did I do that?” she asked, her blue eyes wide with innocence that was entirely manufactured. She knew better than to contradict him outright, he’d give her that. But nothing more.

“You assured me that our business transactions would be secure.”

Of course, here in the safety of his twelve-thousand-square-foot home that he ran like a compound, their conversations were protected. But even though his work was illegal in dozens of ways—not to mention immoral in dozens more—Nicky never fooled himself. His older brother, Dante, had gotten sloppy. Careless. Nicky wouldn’t let himself fall into the same trap. He had a family business to run, and unlike his brother, Nicky was going to make sure it became an empire.

Peyton, however, was too narcissistic for caution. “Do you mean that little thing with Delia?” She laughed. “I thought we settled that at lunch. She’s hardly anything to worry about.”

“I was worried when you told me she stumbled upon our work in the first place,” Nicky said. “But now that she’s not only taken notice of the accounts, but downloaded sensitive data and seen my face on top of it? I replace that cause for excessive concern.”

“I can’t help that she ran into us outside the Plaza,” Peyton replied gently. “Honestly, she’s probably never lunched there in her entire pathetic life. The chances had to be one in a million. But you handled it perfectly.”

“Really? Then why did I have to ask Little Anthony to pay her some attention this evening in order to retrieve her things?” Nicky asked, setting his wine down on the end table beside his chair, and ah, that made her pause.

“Okay, so she got a little nosier than I expected,” Peyton admitted. “But you saw her yourself! She’s absolutely harmless. Plus, I’ve been around long enough to know how to play the system like Wimbledon. The program we created is foolproof.”

Leaning toward him from her perch on the nearby sofa, she angled her body to give him the best view of her cleavage, and Christ, she was predictable. But since she also had a degree from Harvard Business School that was more than just a nice centerpiece for her office, unfortunately for him, he needed her. For now, anyway.

Still, he wasn’t about to let her grow indiscreet. “Nothing is foolproof,” Nicky said. His brother going to prison was Exhibit A. “And even the best plans can become dangerous when people discover them unexpectedly.”

Peyton’s sigh was so well executed, she should’ve thanked the Academy. “It’s not my fault Delia is such a freak that she noticed the temporary discrepancies. Kent always says she’s too smart for her own good. But it’s fine. She never had proof of anything to begin with. I made sure of it when I put that spyware on her laptop this afternoon. Changed everything back to normal, just like that.”

“Are you forgetting she downloaded the account information?” Nicky asked. For a smart woman, Peyton could be awfully f*****g stupid sometimes.

Or maybe that was just arrogance. “And are you forgetting I have a backup plan in case anyone gets too nosy? The Silhouette file was encrypted using NSA-level tech—we have our third party to thank for that, by the way—and as big as Delia’s freak brain is, she’s not a hacker. Also, she has zero backbone. F*****g Pollyanna.”

“That’s still not a risk I’m willing to take.”

Nicky bit every word to the quick so Peyton would hear him loud and clear.

To her credit, she did. “Nicky,” she purred, standing up to sidle over to the spot in front of his chair. “All of this aside, you took care of Delia’s laptop and the flash drive. Even if she still had them, which she doesn’t, she’d never do anything with them. She’s so afraid of speaking up that she doesn’t even know what her own voice sounds like. I’ve had a handle on her from day one. That isn’t going to change now.”

Oh, Peyton was a master at manipulation. Of that, there was no question. She had lied, cheated, and fvcked her way to every single thing her black little heart had desired, and it had desired a lot.

And yet.

“I cannot get caught, Peyton.”

Reaching behind her, Peyton lowered the zipper on her dress with practiced ease, the fabric falling to the floor in one fluid motion. “You won’t.” Straddling his lap to put her surgically perfect tits directly in his line of sight, she said, “Everything is fine, Nicky. Just like I promised.”

His c0ck j3rked to life beneath his Gucci trousers. Anchoring her h!ps into place with one hand, he used his other to trace a line with his fingertips all the way from the top of her arm to her cheek, cupping her chin with a rough yank at the very last minute.

“Be sure that it is. Because if that little mouse of a girl noses around in my business again, I’m going to have her butchered into so many pieces, no one will ever replace them all. Now”—he gripped her face harder, just until he saw the flash of pain that was more of a turn-on than her pvssy would ever be—“be a good girl and use that pretty mouth for more than just talk.”