Parquo crossed his mind, and he clicked on the keyboard again, pulling up the Transformation article, now shared far and wide, to read the full thing. It was brutal. She had wrecked him—not that he didn’t deserve it. Still, her article stood to put some powerful people behind bars. There was no doubt that one of them had killed Parquo to keep him from cutting a deal and exposing them.
Weren’t they a pair then? He had the Black Talons after him, and she might well have someone looking to get even for Parquo or for what her research might expose about them. He still wasn’t sure what was going on, but he needed answers, and he couldn’t help but feel that there was some connection between Parquo and the Black Talons. It was just a hunch, but he wasn’t often wrong.
According to their website, Transformation was located in the Kirkwood Center Building. He went there first to look for her but came up empty-handed. Security wouldn’t let him past the front lobby, and he wasn’t about to start a fight to get in. Even if he was willing to make that big a stink, he couldn’t shift in the small spaces there, and they were bound to have wolves and big cats on their security staff that would rip him to shreds in human form.
Instead, he went back to his penthouse and did what his money afforded him to do. He rang up a local private investigator to find him a home address for her. In the meantime, he set about finding out the truth about his construction company by making a few calls to members of his pack. One by one, they dropped by to see him in person, adding what they could to the mystery of why the construction company was so important to the Black Talon Clan, though it wasn’t enough to really tell him much.
He stood looking out the cold glass windows of his penthouse at the city below. For the first time in as long as he could remember, he didn’t feel at home here. He missed the warmth of his family home. He’d forgotten how nice it was out there this time of year with everything in bloom and days filled with just relaxing, something he rarely did. He’d enjoyed that. He’d enjoyed sharing it with her. His phone vibrating against the marble table nearby seemed louder than usual in the empty space.
“Hello?” he said, not recognizing the number.
“Hey. It’s Jerome. I’ve got that address you wanted.”
“Great. Go.” Jerome rattled off the address to him, and he wrote it down on a scrap of paper. “Thanks. Send me the bill.”
“I always do.”
“Yeah, you do. Later then.”
“Later.”
Dane ended the call and looked at the address. He knew the neighborhood. It was nice, much nicer than an administrative assistant could afford. Even most journalists would be hard-pressed to exist there. She was either very successful or the recipient of funds outside her job, maybe an inheritance or side gig. He wondered what she had been trying to find out from him. Was it related to her Parquo investigation? He certainly wasn’t buying that a high-caliber journalist was doing a piece on online dating. He needed answers and, if he were right, she might need protection, or at least a warning if she wouldn’t accept the former.
Making his way downstairs in the elevator, he walked out to the garage and approached his car. The squeal of tires behind him sent him ducking for cover between an SUV and a mini-van, but he quickly realized it was just an old car in need of an alignment. You wouldn’t find many people in this building driving an old Toyota Celica, but it could be a delivery or cleaning staff. As it passed, he grumbled at himself for being paranoid and climbed behind the wheel of his own car, pulling out of his parking space and pointing it toward the address Jerome had given him. Twenty minutes later, he was ringing the doorbell of her three-story Victorian home.
“Who is it?” her voice called out from the speaker box affixed to one side of the door.
“It’s Dane Jensen,” he replied.
“Oh, using our real name now, are we?”
“Yes, Miss Guerrero, I am,” he snapped back.
“I don’t have time for more bullshit,” she replied.
“Me either. I need to talk to you about Parquo. It’s important. This isn’t about whatever happened between us.”
“Parquo? Why?”
“Can we please not have a whole conversation over the intercom? I just need to sit down and talk to you face to face. Then, I’ll get out of your hair.”
There was silence for a minute. He was about to ring the buzzer again, thinking she’d cut him off or something, but then she came back on. No doubt, the journalist in her couldn’t resist maybe finding out something she hadn’t already learned in her own investigation of Parquo and the people he was in cahoots with before he died.