Page 45 of Riggs
“Curtain stays open,” I tell him. “Lina at the doorway. One minute, not two. I’m ten feet away.”
“Copy,” Vanessa says, soft. I hear what she’s really saying:Trust me while I do my job; I’m trusting you to do yours.
They disappear down the short corridor. The boutique’s front is a cathedral to linen and lemon oil—sun through glass, silk on chrome. The back is a rabbit warren of velvet and mirrors. I position so I own both—the hallway mouth in my left eye, the front door and street reflection in my right. The security cam over the corridor is wearing a strip of opaque tape like a bandage.
“Why is that covered?” I ask the manager without looking at him.
“It… gets the wrong angle,” he stammers. “Privacy.”
“Not anymore.” I step on a footstool, peel the tape, and drop it in my pocket. It’s warm from the light. Fresh. My jaw ticks. “Rae,” I murmur into comms, “store cam was blinded. I’m hot on audio only.”
“Copy,”she says, voice a thread. “I’ve got lobby and street feeds. Back hall is a blind well thanks to Fashion Week here.”
Thirty seconds. Forty. Somewhere a steamer hisses. Somewhere metal clinks. I hear a sound you only learn if you’ve spent time in rooms where people are almost caught—fabric sucked in through the teeth.
Then:tic—tic—tic—like soft rain on tile. A scatter.
Turquoise beads roll out under the velvet curtain and ping the toe of my boot.
Everything in me goes clean and quiet.
“Move,” I tell Lina, already moving. The curtain gives under my hand; Brice is inside the stall, face too blank. “Where is she?”
He startles like a bad actor. “She—uh—the designer wanted?—”
I’m already past him—through the next slit of curtain I hadn’t clocked, into the tight back hall that staff use when they need to be invisible. An EXIT sign hums. The security dome over the back door has a smiley-face Post-it stuck over its lens. Someone’s cute. Someone’s dead.
I shoulder the bar. The alley heat slaps. To my left: dumpsters, the ghost of a white van’s exhaust hanging low, sliding door seam still shivering from motion, tire scuffs fresh on concrete—short wheelbase, left shock soft. To my right: the street we came from, a single glance from a barista on smoke break who sees everything and will swear later she saw nothing.
I’m late by twenty seconds.
“Lalo,” I say into comms, already taking photos, already tucking turquoise beads into a bag, already crouching to find a smear of blood at knee level on the rusted lip of the sliding door. “White van out your two blocks. Short wheelbase. Left rear’s tired. If you see it, don’t play hero; tail it soft and call Turner. Rae, I need every external cam between here and the nearest ramp. Jaxson, give me ALPR on white vans with damaged left shocks within a half-mile in the last four minutes. Hayes, prints off this smiley and a sniff on the tape glue for brand.”
“Copy copy copy,”rolls back like a wave.
I stand. Brice is behind me now, hands up like that will keep mine off his collar. “She’s—okay,” he blurts, voice thin. “I mean—he said—Kellan said he just wanted to talk.”
Every card in the deck flips at once. “You knew,” I say, very calm. It’s not a question.
He shakes his head hard enough to spin. “No—no—he DM’d—he said if we gave him two minutes he’d get us a beat—he wasn’t going to—he said he wasn’t going to take her?—”
“You taped the camera,” I say. “You scheduled the ‘private reveal.’ You argued her away from me because a ‘designer’ asked. And you talked to Kellan Stevens like the two of you were plotting stories.”
“He said—” Brice swallows. Sweat beads at his temple, bright under the boutique light. “He said it would be good for her. Stakes, Riggs. We needed stakes. He promised he’d let her go out the back and we’d pick her up at the corner. He promised. I swear to God I didn’t know he’d—” His voice breaks onkidnapbecause the word makes it real.
“Your God’s not in the alley,” I say. I step close enough that he smells the truth. “Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to hand me your phone, your laptop, your passwords, and the name of every contact who’s ever connected you to Kellan or his friends. You’re going to tell me exactly what you set up, when, and with whom, and you’re going to do it without lying once. If you lie, I’ll know. If you stall, I’ll know. And if you so much as think about ‘metrics’ out loud, I’ll put you on the curb for Turner with a bow.”
He wavers, then caves. Phones. Laptop. A flood of texts. Rae starts cloning before I can ask. Brice talks too fast. “He found me after the pop-up,” he says. “Said the algorithm was plateauing, said we needed an inciting incident. He wanted a ‘conversation.’ He said he could deliver her to the alley so you could ‘save’ her. He’d get clicks, you’d get hero points, we’d get virality. He swore. He swore.”
“You let a man who hurt her set the stakes,” I say, and the way Brice flinches tells me he knows exactly what he did.
“I didn’t think he’d—” He gestures helplessly at the alley’s empty air.
“Stop thinking,” I say. “Start remembering. What did you see?”
“White van,” he says immediately. “Sliding door. A rosary hanging from the mirror? I think. One of those pine tree air fresheners.” He swipes his face. “He gagged her. He—he had zip ties. He—” His breath stutters. “He looked at me like I was a lens and he was playing me.”
“Good. Keep talking while I work.” I follow the tire scuffs to the alley mouth, to a faint arc of rubber where the driver overcorrected heading left. Pine cleaner rides the heat, a ghost ofgasoline under it. I log it all. Turquoise bead, blood, pine, rosary—details become a trail.
