Page 53 of A Hidden Past

“They didn’t handle Annie.”

Tears are welling in my eyes now, but I can’t stop them. Marco looks at me with compassion and says quietly, “You don’t know that either.”

I look away from him and angrily wipe tears from my eyes. “Screw you.”

“Shit happens, bro. It sucks. I get it. But shit happens. Sometimes people get hit by cars, and the cops do everything they can, but they don’t find the guy. I’m not saying for sure that’s what happened, but maybe it is. But you going to their house, stealing their daughter’s property? That’s not going to help anyone.”

I take a deep breath and release it glumly. “I know. I just fucking hate it.”

“Me too. But…” he lifts his hands and lets them drop.

We sit in silence for a long moment. It ends when Marco smiles and says. “Come on. I’ll drop you off at Venice.”

“Venice?”

“Yeah. That’s where you’re headed, right?” His smile disappears. “You’re going to leave it alone. Understand?”

I nod. “I understand.”

I hope that will be the last lie I ever tell him.

“Good. Wipe your eyes before you get in the truck, I don’t need you crying all over my leather seats.”

I chuckle and say, “Screw you,” affectionately this time.

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

Lena stepped back and reviewed the timeline she’d put together. She’d dug back seven months before Lila’s death and come up with an idea of Julian’s activities during the time period.

As nearly as she could tell, he’d approached Barry Feingold about investing in Scimitar around December. By February, Barry was into Scimitar for something like five or six hundred million. It was after this point that things began to look fishy.

Feingold’s firm, Arcturus Investments, had been implicated in a rather shocking number of fraud investigations. None of them exceptionally high dollar amounts—relative to the world of corporate finance, anyway—which was why there was no news coverage, but a shocking amount of medium dollar transactions.

Four of those investigations involved Scimitar. Most tellingly, the second most recent involved a firm called Breakaway Biotech. Breakaway Biotech’s founder, Derek Hill, had resisted three attempts at a hostile takeover by Scimitar. Then, just six weeks ago, at the beginning of May, Derek Hill had been found dead in his garage of an apparent suicide. Two weeks after that, Scimitar bought the company for forty percent under market value.

So Julian Kensington was a piece of shit. That wasn’t news, but why would he have felt a need to kill Lila? Did she know something and was about to go to the authorities with it? Or worse, the news?

That was the proof she needed. She needed to connect Lila, or at least Lila’s death, with Julian’s illegal activities with Arcturus and Scimitar.

And that brought her to the morning of Lila’s death. The Kensington said they had a pool party at Barry Feingold’s house, and Feingold confirmed that. Lena remembered thinking it was odd to have people show up at nine in the morning for a beach party, but she bought the line that it was hot and they wanted to take advantage.

She wasn’t sure she bought it anymore.

The door opened, and Harris walked in. “Coffee and donuts, not necessarily in that order,” he crooned. “I have a caramel latte for me and a black coffee for Lena’s dark and bitter soul. I have a maple bar for me, and an apple fritter for Lena’s old and bitter soul.”

“You said bitter already.”

"So right, I said it twice."

“That doesn’t rhyme.”

“Who said I was rhyming? You gonna eat it, or should I try to feed it to one of the K9s?”

She took the apple fritter and bit a sizable chunk out of the front. “Harris? How many people were in the photos Barry Feingold showed us of his beach party the day Lila Kensington died?”

Harris blinked and swallowed the bite of maple bar he was chewing. “Um… I don’t know. Four, I think?”

“Barry, his wife and the Kensingtons?”

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