“He followed Sam to the spa, right?”
“Yes. Also yesterday.”
“And he got knocked out.”
“Right.”
“So you just went down there, looked at the exact same thing, and you got knocked out. Only this time, we were there to see who it was. Case mostly closed.”
“So why are we following him?”
He glanced back at his laptop and then looked at me. “Because it takes more than one to run prostitution out of the spa. Really not our area at all, but criminals will do anything to save their own skins. I could have turned a blind eye to prostitution, you know, as long as the girls are volunteers and not being forced, but now we’re going to have to shut them down. Who knows how many other people they’ve knocked out or tossed overboard?”
“But why knock Blake out and then later that night throw him over?”
“Who knows,” he said. “He could have wanted to wait until it was dark. They can only drag an unconscious body so far without too many questions being asked. Blake was just a little too nosy. So were you. They might look for ‘you’ and Brandon later to toss you over, just like before. We have to wait and see if they do.”
It made sense. “Do you think any of this money they make in the spa is connected with those secret funds? Old Mr. Murdock allows prostitution on his ship and gets a cut?”
“It might be part of it, but what he’d make would be chump change. You’d make more running legit cruises out of ports. Mr. Murdock might have allowed it just for people like Mr. Smith. Keeps guys like that happy.”
“So what’s left to do?”
He returned his gaze back to the laptop. “We’ll have to wait to see if that goon tries to toss Brandon over after dark. We’ll set it up so we can get to Brandon before he takes a swim. Now that we’re on to this guy, it’s just a matter of collecting the evidence to prosecute. Catch him in the act, collect a bit more evidence, and then we send it to a team that can take it from there. Not us. Not our thing.”
I gasped, staring at him with wild eyes. “We walk away? You’re telling me we do nothing?”
He raised an eyebrow. “What else did you want?”
“To kick his ass.”
The coy smile returned. “Love your attitude, but we become less credible to authorities if we go busting in on people. Best to collect the right info and present it to people who can stop them.”
“We can stop them.”
“We’ve done our job. Well, almost. It’s almost done.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said, watching as one of the video feeds changed and Doyle appeared. He’d gone up to the pool deck and was sipping a drink while openly watching girls in the pool. “I hadn’t been watching the spa before. There was no reason to throw me over.”
His eyes darkened. “I know.”
“And he snapped off my bands.”
“I know that, too.”
“Why take those?”
He frowned and reached to scratch his knee, where I knew his gnarly scar was. “I don’t know.”
I sat back, folding my arms over my chest. “I don’t think this is over.”
“No way to tell except watch this guy and see what he does,” Marc said, shaking his head. He reached up, combing some of the longer brown locks of hair away from his eyes. “Warning someone off with a Taser is different from trying to kill someone by throwing them overboard. That’s noticeable.”
“Throwing someone overboard is a weird way to try to kill someone,” I said. “There wasn’t any guarantee that we’d die.”
“Outright murder would attract too much attention.”
“Wouldn’t a report of a missing person attract attention? He had no idea who Blake was. A wealthy person disappearing at sea would be news.”
“If he’s working with security, they could cover up a missing person or death. But you and I have to back off and let proper police handle it after a point.”
It still didn’t make sense to me, and I still didn’t like the idea of handing everything over to someone else at the end.
“Don’t be bummed,” he said, reaching to pat me on the shoulder. “We’re narrowing the list—we’re doing important work. But if you’re looking for something to make sense, then we may never find that. Closure doesn’t always happen for us.” He put the laptop away and then picked up Brandon’s cell phone. “Is there more on here?”
“Just the schedule book. Pictures of the physical one on the desk.”
“I took pictures of that already,” Marc said and then flipped the phone over, turning on the screen. “But we can compare to see if…there’s…diff…” He paused.
His eyes glowed with the light from the phone, darting up to the monitors and then back to the phone.
“What?” I asked.
“It’s…nothing,” he said, scrolling through the phone with his thumb.
“The pictures?” I said, before I even consciously remembered Brandon had pictures of me on his phone.
“Hmm,” he said, staring down intently at the phone.
I didn’t want to skirt around any more issues. “Okay. Tell me.” I stretched my legs out, crossing them at the ankles.
He lifted his head, eyebrow arching as he looked at me. “Huh?”
“Ever since I’ve been back, you, Axel, and Brandon have been beyond nice to me.”
He smirked. “Uh…was I not supposed to be nic
e?”
“You could be honest,” I said. “I tell all of you how I don’t want to be exclusive. Then I get thrown overboard, and… no one wants to say anything about it? Like I can’t handle it or something. Here you are, looking at pictures Brandon took of me and…”
His mouth opened and surprise flooded his face as he glanced back down at the phone. “What pictures?”
Oops. Oh well. “Erm, the ones on his phone I thought you were looking at.”
He checked the phone again, finding the photos and then examining them. “Huh,” was all he said.
He kept looking, but said nothing.
I rolled my head back and then almost fell out of the chair as it made me a little dizzy. The medicine was doing something to my balance. I sat up and straightened, pulling myself close to the table to balance myself. “I don’t understand any of you.”
“You’ve never met anyone like us, Bambi.”
I shot him a look, assuming he was teasing.
But his lips were set, jaw firm. He was dead serious. “What did you think we’d do? Kill each other? Set you on fire?”
Something like that. “Yes.”
He twisted the chair around and then reached for mine, rolling me until our knees met and he faced me head-on.
“I have to watch the monitors,” I said, my arms across my chest, looking away from him.
“Fuck the monitors for a second, they’re being recorded.” He pulled my chair closer until his knees were on either side of mine. He leaned in. “Didn’t I promise you that you’d be okay? Didn’t I tell you that you were in with us for good?”
I tightened my arms around my body. I felt like a petulant child, but this was way beyond knocking over the cookie jar. And yet they were telling me it wasn’t a big deal.
“I kissed you,” I said, trying to be as blunt as possible. I wanted to shock him into being upset about it. “I kissed Brandon and Raven and Axel. I let it happen, and I didn’t say anything.”
“You can tell me anything you want,” he said, his voice getting louder over the hum of the computers. “Yeah, I was hoping for a relationship with you, and still am…” His face turned red, his hands clenching the arms of my chair. “Goddamn it.”