Page 119 of Obsession

“What happened is not my fault; she’s a stupid bitch!“

“Parker,” I say calmly, cutting my captive off, and there’s a loud crack in the air as the man howls in agony.

I check my watch. The midnight shift has just started which means my favorite little manager is on duty. I need to wrap thisup if I’m going to spend any quality time watching her from afar like I do most nights.

“But it absolutely was your fault,” I say mildly, unconcerned about the man’s broken teeth and his bruised face. “She trusted you, and you stole the funds meant for her son’s treatment.”

It seems that Craig doesn’t have an ounce of remorse within him or a sense of self-preservation. He sneers at me and says, “If she’s so broke, then where did she get the money to hire a low life like you? She’s a lying bitch.“

“Oh, I have a soft spot for mothers and children. I usually take cases involving them pro bono. Even men in my line of work like giving back to the community every now and then.”

I tap my fingers patiently on my thigh as my mind wanders back to Megan. I’m wondering if she’s taking things easy as I instructed her to. She tends to jump in and “handle” things when the employees aren’t completing tasks at the high level she’d like.

She’s adorable like that.

These scenarios are all the same. Craig’s face tightens in anger as he struggles in his restraints, still refusing to admit his guilt.

“What you’re doing down here to me is fucking illegal!“

“Illegal?” I chuckle. “That’s funny, coming from you, considering what you did. Now, listen, I think we’ve fucked around down here enough tonight. Don’t you think so, Parker?”

“Yes, boss.” He grins.

Parker enjoys toying with these lowlife types as much as I do. Lars, on the other hand, isn’t into mind games as much as we are. If I left the interrogation in his hands, poor Craig would already be dead.

“Exactly, so you can either return that money you stole and leave LA alive, or we can take the money by force and arrangeto dispose of you in a very inconvenient car crash. The choice is yours.”

Craig mutters something obscene, and I sigh in disappointment. It’s always the same. Men are either blubbering idiots or super tough guys when they find themselves in the basement of the Blue Whiskey. It would be nice if one day someone would surprise me and be a man about it and admit their guilt.

“Go ahead, Parker.”

It’s a half hour later that I finally exit the basement. It seems that Craig chose to be a tough guy. As I’m leaving, I run into a grim-looking Vaughn.

“We found something. Six months after Johnathan disappeared, there was a murder of a high-end plastic surgeon in Chicago. His entire family was murdered. At the time, it was considered part of an ongoing serial home invasion. A few families in the area had faced similar fates. The surgeon, Tate Meyers, was the third victim.”

He hands me a file and I look at it. The picture staring back at me is of an ordinary-looking man. No one remarkable.

“Smart,” I say. “He probably got some work done on his face and then made the doctor his third target. The police would have focused on the first or the last one.”

“Explains why we haven’t been able to find him.”

“What do we know about this Doctor Meyer?”

Vaughn hands me another file out of his jacket. It contains the biodata of a rich brown-skinned woman with a pretty smile and kind eyes.

“There isn’t much to say about the poor doctor at this point, but this is one of the nurses at the clinic Meyer worked at. Her name is Rose Grant.”

“Young, probably easy to manipulate, especially if you have a handsome face.” I study her bright eyes. “Easy to garner sympathy from as well.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.” Vaughn agrees. “Interesting thing is that she quit her job a few months after the murders. Then, she landed in New York City and worked in a hospital. From what I managed to gather, she was dating somebody, although none of her ex-colleagues knew anything about her boyfriend except that they seemed to think he was well-off.”

”They never saw him?”

“No.”

“And you say they’re her ex-colleagues?” I keep staring at the picture of Rose. They’re two completely different-looking women, yet something about the look in her eyes reminds me of Megan. “Is she dead, too?”

“She went missing two years into her job. Just straight-up vanished. No communication, no credit card activity. The only thing I’ve managed to uncover is some security camera footage from a bank near her apartment. On her way to work, she stopped by the bank and withdrew a lot of cash. I corroborated it with her bank statement on that day. She emptied her account. She had a few thousand dollars in it.”

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