“Define properly.”
“Hers is tied up for years. Kasey was left the ranch but had no money to operate the business. Where’s Kurt’s fortune? And what kind of nasty people was he in bed with? Ana wants to believe this is all about one package on one dreaded day. I don’t think it’s that simple.”
“Which is why you have Blake looking into Kurt.”
“Exactly. She’s not even trying to see the truth. And there’s a truth there, a dirty one. I keep thinking Kasey, for all his shittiness, inherited whatever that dirt was from Kurt. Or maybe he dragged him into it. Whatever the case, I can’t end this by cutting off a tail. I have to cut off the head of the beast.”
“Agreed. So, what are you thinking?”
“I need a damn computer, which I don’t have, to do some digging.”
“Blake’s doing that for you. And he’s the best of the best. We both need to rest. We have five days until we meet up with the tail of the beast at Ana’s property. We won’t find the head if we are both sleepwalking.”
He’s right. I know he’s right. “I need to take a jog.” I run my hand through my hair. “And yes, I know that’s not possible. Is there a damn treadmill or something around here?”
“There’s a basement bedroom next to an exercise room.”
“That’s my spot. I’m going to call Blake and then I’ll just sleep down there.”
“You sure that’s what you want to do?”
“Me and Ana are like oil and fire right now and we’re either going to burn each other up or drown in the sludge of it all. She needs some space and so do I.”
“You had two years of space, Lucifer. Consider that might not be the answer.”
“I’ll consider when I have some sleep.” I push to my feet and head for the gym, trekking a path downstairs.
Once I’m down in the finished basement, I slip in my earbuds, step on the treadmill, and dial Blake. “Tell me you know something,” I say when he answers.
“Man, you gotta give me two fucking seconds. I’m working on it and I’ve got a couple of our guys working on it.”
“In other words, you can’t find shit.”
“I really can’t,” he says, “not yet, but I will.”
I stop the treadmill. “What does that mean?”
“It means someone made Kurt’s financial records disappear, and before you say anything, the man trained assassins for the government. I don’t see this as unusual.”
“But Kasey took that business over.”
“And everything to do with that business is wiped out. I can see Kasey’s personal accounts. They’re sparse.”
Which is why he was running side jobs, I think. “What does that mean in terms of answers?”
“The problem we have is that when someone like Kurt is wiped away, someone like me does the job. We aren’t going to find those records. I can’t even get to his tax returns.”
“Ana’s supposed to inherit at thirty-six. Jefferson McDonald holds the trust, or that’s what the will said.”
“Give me a minute or I can call you back.”
“I’ll wait.”
His fingers punch keys and I turn the treadmill back on. I’ve been running a good five minutes when he says, “There’s no trust. They managed the will, but there is no bank account attached. The firm’s records indicate an account held by a third party.”
I stop running and turn off the machine again. “There’s no money.”
“There’s no money, which obviously makes no sense. He was one of the most sought-after operations in the world, well-known and well-paid for what he did.”
Yes, I think, yes, he was, and he never seemed to hurt for money, but I wasn’t around a lot the last year he was alive. I was off trying to make the big bucks before I retired. Damn it, I hate how this is going to gut Ana.
She won’t care about the money and I have shit tons of money I’ll happily make hers, as well, not that she would want anything that’s mine. The problem here is that I’m not wrong about Kurt being in some kind of trouble. “Kurt died when he did something unusual and went with a team of guys on a mission himself. I don’t suppose you have a contact who can find out why he did that and for who?”
“I’ll dig. Do you know who the guys were?”
“It was a government mission. Jake was with him. We know little else. She wasn’t even informed of his death until a week later when Jake showed up.” Memories of Ana’s knees buckling with the news, my damn warrior princess falling apart, gut me all over again. “He didn’t want a funeral and he wanted to be cremated. It was months before we were sent his ashes.”
“Are you sure that was what he wanted? Or was he cremated to hide something?”