Page 51 of Dirty Liars

“I didn’t hear that,” Derby said.

“—and I found a match in the juvenile system.”

Derby groaned and dropped his head in his hand. “I’m still not hearing this since.”

“Probably best,” Doug said. “I was able to find a name. The print matched to a kid named Cory Maybury. He’d been picked up a few times for shoplifting, then he moved to grand theft auto. He ended up in the system.”

“Where is he now?” Jack asked.

“Dead,” Doug said. “At least that’s what the federal government says. He ended up in a boys’ home and ended up getting stabbed for stealing some kid’s cigarettes.”

“Except he’s not dead if his fingerprints are on our murder weapon,” Jack said.

“Exactly,” Doug said. “I’ll find the thread. There’s always a trail. People don’t just create new lives without adding a bump to the system.

I studied the board, the victims’ faces staring back at me. What connected them beyond the obvious? What were we missing?

“We should talk to Emmett Parker,” I added. “Put him on the board. Max Ortega mentioned him as the other person Chloe invited to her wedding besides Dickie. If he was close enough to Chloe to be one of only two guests she invited, he might know something about her past.”

“Good point,” Jack said, writing the name on the board. “Doug, see if you can get a phone number for Emmett Parker. Cole, see if you can make arrangements for both him and Vivica Vasilios to meet us at the station in the morning.”

“Sure thing,” Cole said, making a note.

“I’ve got something,” Doug announced suddenly, his fingers flying across the keyboard. “I cross-referenced the Slavic guy’s height, build, and the scar on his left ear with international intelligence databases?—”

“Technically off limits to civilians,” Derby muttered.

“—and got a hit,” Doug continued, ignoring the interruption. “His name is Josef Visek. Former Czech Special Forces, went mercenary around fifteen years ago. Known aliases include Miklos Petrov, Anton Dragovic, and Joe Winsome. And here’s the money trail. A series of payments from a Cayman Islands account to another account in Liechtenstein, then transferred to a cryptocurrency wallet. The initial account traces back to a shell corporation with ties to—would you like to guess?—our dearly departed Ambassador Vasilios.”

“How much?” Jack asked.

“Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” Doug said. “Transferred three days ago.”

“Right before the wedding,” I said. “So Nicholas hired this Visek guy for something, and I’m guessing it wasn’t just to stand around looking menacing.”

Martinez leaned forward. “Could he be our shooter? For Theo and Chloe?”

“Or for Max Ortega,” Lily said. “That was a professional hit if I’ve ever seen one. That shot from the bell tower required serious skill.”

“It still doesn’t explain the tattoos,” I said. “Or why Nicholas would want his own son dead.”

“Yeah, the money doesn’t make sense,” Jack said. “Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars is nothing. Most highly trained personal security easily make that, and that figure is on the low end. It’s not enough money for a professional kill for one of our victims, much less all three of them. It smells of a setup to me.”

Jack added Visek’s name to the board, drawing a line to connect him to Nicholas and adding a question mark next to the line connecting him to each murder.

“Ding, ding, dong,” Doug said. “You win the prize, Jack. The payments from Nicholas Vasilios to Josef Visek are staged. When I trace it backward, it’s bouncing from accounts all over the world and different names and shell corporations. Someone wants us to believe Nicholas hired Visek.”

Jack stepped back, studying the murder board with narrowed eyes. “So we’ve got four dead bodies, all connected to the Vasilios family. We’ve got mysterious tattoos. We’ve got a professional mercenary who may have been hired to commit these murders. And we’ve got a web of financial transactions designed to confuse investigators.”

He turned to face the team. “We’re missing something fundamental here. What’s the motive? Why kill Theo and Chloe on their wedding night? Why eliminate Max Ortega, who was just doing his job? Why make Nicholas’s death look like a suicide?”

“And where does Chloe fit into all this?” I asked. “We know she was hiding from something in her past, trying to establish a new identity. What was she running from?”

Jack’s phone buzzed on the counter. He glanced at it and his shoulders tensed. “Finally,” he said. “Judge Monroe just signed the warrant. We’ve got full access to all the information Nicholas was trying to hide from us—both his personal records and Theo’s State Department file. Dead men don’t get the luxury of covering their tracks from the grave.”

“That was fast,” Cole said.

“Monroe owes me,” Jack replied without elaborating. “Doug, can you?—”

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