Total pages in book: 139
Estimated words: 128083 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 640(@200wpm)___ 512(@250wpm)___ 427(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 128083 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 640(@200wpm)___ 512(@250wpm)___ 427(@300wpm)
Then she was flying, wind whipping her face as she hurtled through space before she melded with the dark and finally became it.
Bright lights. Antiseptic. The buzz of voices. More darkness. Anton’s voice.
No. No. She floundered. Anton did this. She tried to swim from the darkness, but it was so thick, and she couldn’t move.
Then his voice, drifting through the black ether, everywhere around her so that she couldn’t escape it. Couldn’t escape him. Her eyes wouldn’t open. She tried to run, to move, but nothing seemed to work. Then his voice from somewhere beyond. “You’ll be fine, sister of mine. I’ll care for you out of the goodness of my heart. To see you so helpless . . .” A sigh. “I’m not a monster, Posey Pose. But I’ll be running things from here on.”
Chapter Forty-Nine
Rex stepped out of the shower and quickly wrapped a towel around his waist when he heard his cell ringing from the bedroom. He gave the rumpled bed a glance as he reached for his phone, a bolt of heat shooting through his chest when he remembered what Cami had looked like splayed across those sheets.
He glanced at the screen before he answered. “Erik.”
“Hey man, I got that geolocation data you requested.”
“Fantastic. Anything good?” Rex dropped the towel and pulled on his boxer briefs.
“Maybe. There wasn’t much activity recently. I figure most of it was from the device used by the dude splattered at the bottom of a cliff.” Rex winced but breathed out a chuckle as he pulled on his jeans. “But I went back. There was a visit a few years ago from a phone that also shows up at an interesting location later.”
Rex leaned against the dresser and crossed one arm over his stomach and held the phone out in front of him with the other.
“The Kiss family estate in Spring Valley, DC.”
“DC? Seriously?”
“Yeah, I thought that’d catch your attention.”
Yes, it did. It was the first thing that brought Cyrus’s kidnapping in California and Cami’s home state of Virginia close together. Geographically speaking anyway. “The Kiss family?” That didn’t ring a bell.
“Yeah. I did a little digging, and here’s the interesting thing about the Kiss family. They’re known as professional fixers. But it’s long been rumored that their crisis management operation extends far beyond lawfare and political dirty tricks. In fact, it seems to be something of a well-known secret that they employ methods that, shall we say, wouldn’t be categorized as on the up-and-up.”
“Murder for hire?” he guessed. “Convenient disappearances?”
“All of the above. I’ve only started digging, but I’ve already found some sloppy work that points to at least a few law enforcement payoffs. No legitimate investigation would have missed shit like this. And from what I can tell, things seem to have gotten especially sloppy since Anton Kiss took control of the empire.”
“When was that?”
“Mid-nineties, when his father died and left everything to him, including the business.”
Sloppy work. Botched jobs? It made him think about what Cami had told him about hearing her attackers lament things going afoul. Had this family—the Kisses—been hired by someone to torture and kill the Cortlandts? Was that who’d sent those two men? If so, who was behind it? And how did the call to Cami from the unknown female fit in? Cami had ruminated on whether that someone might have had an attack of conscience because, ultimately, the call had helped Cami get to Cyrus. If so, it’d have to be a person on the inside. “Any women in the Kiss family?” he asked.
“Yeah, actually. Josephine Kiss. Apparently, from the little I could find about her, she’s a bit of a savant, off-the-scale intelligent with numbers and computers but socially impaired. Yet she hasn’t been heard from in decades. She was in an accident where she was flung from the car when she was eighteen and became a quadriplegic.”
“That’s awful.”
“Yeah. Doesn’t get much worse.”
“And she hasn’t been seen since?”
“No public appearances anyway, whereas her brother, Anton, seems to be quite the man about town.”
Interesting. “Anything else?”
“That’s it for now. I’m leaving on a job in a few hours, so that’s all I’ll be able to dig up.”
“It’s very appreciated. I meant it when I said I’d like to—”
“Don’t even. I don’t take money from friends.”
“All right. Next time you need a favor—”
“I know just who to call.” Rex heard the smile in his buddy’s voice.
“Hey, be safe, man.”
“Always.”
Rex hung up and then grabbed a T-shirt from his duffel before heading for the kitchen, where he’d left his laptop on the table. He didn’t bother to look up more on the Kiss family. He knew very well Erik had just given him any and all pertinent information available, at least in a basic search. And he didn’t have time for more than that right now anyway. But he did take a moment to google their name, purely to get a visual.