As I waited for the results, my phone chimed with the text.
DRAKE: She stopped in the bakery.
Hmm.
My office was on the wrong side of the building, so I couldn’t see her location from my window. I didn’t plan to be in Pelican Bay often, so I let our cousin Jerome give out the better spaces to his other clients. I regretted that decision at the moment. I didn’t care about the missing ocean view, but I wanted to see her now.
CORBIN: Did she talk to anyone?
Did she plan to meet her contact there? When would she check in with Jack and let him know his plan to woo me didn’t work?
DRAKE: No, she used the bathroom and now she’s headed to the bed-and-breakfast.
CORBIN: Stay on her.
Ah, finally, information I could use. In the new tab, I brought up the reservation system for the Pelican Bay bed-and-breakfast and located her room number in under thirty seconds.
Yes, I’m a damn good hacker, but also my cousin Pierce owned the historic home and always set shit passwords.
Ms. Hazel Webb reserved room six. She paid for two nights. Obviously, the woman underestimated my skill. No encryption took me two days to break.
My background check ran on the other tab, crawling through the last two years of Hazel’s financial data. I needed to see if she’d received any large payments recently. While I waited for the last checks, I opened another tab and did a simple Google search for her name. Let’s see if she’d taken any other casting calls recently. Been in a town play. Had a headshot on LinkedIn.
Nothing.
Next I checked the name of her boss she said they’d murdered.
Now I had hits.
Although they were spotty. Police found a man’s body in the suburbs of Bangor, but the cause of death and other details were lacking. Nothing to discern if her fears were real.
With the deep corruption at All American Bank, I couldn’t guarantee someone forged the articles. Jack Beamer had contacts everywhere in Bangor. Throughout Maine, actually.
Wanting to confirm Hazel’s story or prove my suspicions she was nothing but a paid actress, I logged into the Bangor Police Department website and searched through active case files. They weren’t as horrible at setting passwords as Pierce, but they also didn’t have a few million to hire someone like me to secure their system.
If they faked the murder, the corruption went deeper than even I realized because the police were still gathering information from the crime scene. The photos were continuing to come in, along with tagged pieces of evidence. I scanned the documents, making a note of where they ended so I could check back later.
In terms of murder, it had been a gruesome one. A man, who I presumed had to be the person Hazel called her boss, Sean Saxx, lay face down in the grass in front of his house with a bullet hole in the back of his head. That wasn’t the worrisome part.
People died every day. Spouses took out one another. Girlfriends and boyfriends fought. Gangs warred. The reasons people died were numerous and didn’t concern me.
Normally.
Most of them didn’t end up with a chess pawn casually tossed next to their heads. The classic calling card used by one of the worst Mafia organizations in the United States.
Why would the Chicago mafia syndicate be in Bangor, Maine? It was pretty far from home. The Grandmaster ran his organization with an iron fist and always claimed the group’s kills with a chess piece. I zipped through three more crime scene photos, staring at the white pawn piece. The Grandmaster hadn’t considered him a high-level kill, so why kill him?
Why come all the way to Maine to take out a pawn?
And why did I find myself curious? I had no ties to Pelican Bay. My twin brother and I did our best to maintain a playboy lifestyle. If everyone figured we did nothing but sail around the world, drink expensive liquor, and party, no one knew what really happened behind closed doors. It was the perfect façade, and I didn’t plan to give it up by staying in Pelican Bay and letting everyone see how hard we worked and at what.
But if the Grandmaster was looking for Hazel, she wouldn’t survive long. The thought of her pretty face shot caused a tremor to run through my body. For a second, I imagined her body in the place of Sean’s. She lay face down, surrounded by grass with a queen thrown at her side.
Fuck it.
I slammed the top of my laptop shut and hit my desk.
Even if she lied about this entire operation and was sent by All American Bank, I’d never forgive myself if she ended up dead because I refused to help. That’s not how my brother and I worked. I wasn’t in the business of turning away women who sincerely needed my services.