Page 73 of High Class

“And where is your camp?” Owen asks, pulling out a tablet and bringing up a map of the city.

“Why? Are you going to make us move?”

Owen shakes his head. “I don’t have that authority. I just want to see if I can find the man so he can keep helping you on your mission.”

She offers him a dirty smile. I told Zara I would try to get her sister into housing, but I’m not feeling like it’s such a good idea now. There is something seriously off about this woman.

“We move around. But right now, we’re under a bridge on Charleston.”

Owen taps the map and finds the street in question. Then I understand what he’s doing. I’m not sure how, but he’s mapped all surveillance cameras around the city. He taps an icon on the map and pulls it up. Then taps a few other things and video plays. I won’t ask if it’s legal.

“What time did he come to you?”

“Last night. I don’t know what the time was. My phone died, so I didn’t have a clock and none of the coffee shops around would let me charge it. It wasn’t dark yet, and I know it was after five because Kooky Darrel always goes to try to find a bed in a shelter at five and he was gone.”

“That’s helpful. Thank you. Would you like something to eat?”

She nods, and her stomach growls at the mere mention of food. This woman is Zara’s opposite in every way. Just like Owen, I’m having a hard time picturing them as siblings.

“I’ll have something sent up. Why don’t you enjoy the room for a little while longer before you go back out to your camp?”

“Can I spend the night? It’s supposed to rain.”

Owen nods. “Sure. But the security detail is staying outside your door for the night.”

“Hunter going to be OK with that?” Matteo asks as we head for the door.

“He gives his executive management a lot of leeway to do things as we see fit. He’ll be fine.”

I only have contracts with Hunter, and we rarely interact. I’m not an employee like the other two, so I won’t pretend to know what the tycoon would and wouldn’t be fine with.

When we get back to Owen’s command center, he pushes the tablet screen to one of the big monitors and begins scrolling footage.

“This is a busy area, considering that there’s a homeless camp nearby. This could take me fucking hours.”

He sends three more camera views to other monitors.

“I can take two at a time. The two of you should jump in and help.”

We both pull up chairs and start scrolling through footage between five and dusk. Luckily, it was just a two-hour window. It could be worse, and we could have to dig through hours of footage each day.

“Here’s a guy in a coat who looks like he belongs in an action movie as the villain,” Matteo says a few minutes later.

“Monica says he was bringing them food. Sounded like it was something that happened on the regular. That guy isn’t carrying anything.”

“Got him.”

Owen paused his screen with a time stamp twenty minutes earlier. Sure enough, it was the same man, and he was holding a box with non-perishable food in it.

“What are the odds of you getting a hit on some sort of fancy facial recognition software?” I ask.

Owen chuckles. “Hard to say. These angles aren’t great, so we might have to track him farther and find one where he actually looked at the camera. Something about him looks familiar, though.”

“How did he know the homeless woman was Zara’s sister? How did he know about me?” Matteo stands and paces in front of the long desk, rubbing a hand down his face. “It makes no sense.”

“Unless someone is orchestrating this to take us down,” Owen says. “It always felt a little odd that things went down with your father the way they did and as suddenly as they did. It seemed like it was out of nowhere.”

Owen wasn’t wrong. Ernesto Trentini getting gunned down came from out of nowhere. And now someone was after my family.

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