Page 71 of My Three Rivals

“This isn’t illegal… really,” I insisted. “Have him track your car and Tegan’s cell phone.”

“If her phone is off, no one can track it,” Maverick offered reasonably, hopping down from the railing of the porch where we’d congregated, silently willing Tegan to just come back.

The sun still blazed high in the sky, reminding me that the hours had been creeping by as we waited for word.

“Mav, call Bizzy again,” Wyatt suggested as I scrolled through my phone for Paul Guardino’s number in my contact list.

Maverick wasn’t wrong: Guardino had told us under no uncertain terms that he didn’t want to deal with us again after he had been investigated for police misconduct. It had nothing to do with us, but the man was trying to keep his nose clean and stay off the internal affairs radar.

But desperate times…

I shivered, wondering if we had wasted too much time already.

“Hi, Bizzy,” Maverick sang into his phone, but the tension in his tone was palpable. “Any word from Tegan yet?”

Wyatt snatched the phone from Maverick and put it on speaker as we leaned in to listen.

“You have to stop calling me,” Bizzy grumbled. “I told you; I haven’t spoken to her since last week.”

Maverick perked up. “You didn’t say you talked to her last week,” he said. “You said she hasn’t contacted you in a long time.”

“Yeah, before last week.”

“Okay…” Maverick urged. “And what did you talk about?”

Bizzy sniffed. “If Tegan wanted you to know—”

“Beatrice!” I barked, my patience expiring. “Tegan is probably in trouble. Emerson made a huge mess of things before he died and tangled us all up in it.”

Silence fell over the speaker, and I glanced at my partners.

“Bizzy?” Maverick called slowly. “Are you still there?”

“What did he do?”

“It doesn’t—” I started to say, but Wyatt bluntly cut me off.

“He let production lapse and got rid of all the distributors, lying about the reason for the hit… because he was using the vineyard to traffic women.”

“W-what?!” Bizzy choked. “No… what?”

I could hear her processing the words, but she wasn’t refuting it. She had known that her cousin was a sack of shit.

“Nick…” Bizzy breathed suddenly.

“What?” we chorused.

“Her other cousin, her dad’s brother’s kid,” she explained in a rush of breath. “She was asking about anyone who might have been coming around…”

“Nick Pickett?” Maverick demanded. “Is that his name?”

“Yeah…” Bizzy coughed nervously as Maverick scrolled through the phone, looking for information on this cousin of Tegan’s.

“I can’t find anything on him,” Maverick growled. “Where would we find him?”

“Oh,” Bizzy snorted. “You’re not going to find that one in a Google search… unless his arrest record’s on there.”

“Fuck,” Wyatt muttered.

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