The Guardian
Chapter 13

Garza’s desk was worthy of its own crime scene unit. To be fair, he’d spent the better part of the weekend anchored to the damned thing, poring over every last case detail in prep for his meeting with Sinclair and the rest of the unit this morning. The fact that he’d k!ssed Delia, then impulsively promised to fill her night with 0rgasms on top of her 0rgasms? 0rgasms he’d have given anything to coax from her with his hands, mouth, and c0ck?

He’d pored over that, too. In hot. Vivid. Highly erotic detail.

Sitting back in his creaky desk chair, Garza gave up the ghost and let his mind spin back to Friday night. K!ssing Delia had been reckless, and there were logical reasons why it had been a wildly sh!tastic idea. She was his little sister’s best friend, a.k.a. not a find-and-f**k from a hookup app. The likelihood he’d see her again, based on that alone, hovered at 100%—which was, incidentally, the same percent chance that Camila would murder him with a spoon for having a one-nighter with her BFF. Not only that, but he’d known the Bianchi case had all the makings of something big and nasty, and Delia was smack in the middle of it. Protocol dictated that the best thing—the smartest thing—would’ve been to stick to business.

But for the first time in his career, Garza hadn’t. He’d blown right past reason and protocol and everything else that made him a good cop, to the point that if Capelli hadn’t c0ck blocked him with that call, he’d have made good on every filthy, impulsive thing he’d promised to do to Delia. Twice.

And, as if that wasn’t dangerous enough, he hadn’t just wanted to have s3x with her. He’d wanted to open up to her. To tell her things nobody knew.

To think maybe she’d understand.

Rubbing his eyes with his index and middle fingers, he forced himself back to Planet Don’t Be a Dumbass. Sinclair had opened an official, albeit hush-hush, case to investigate what Delia had seen at Cromwell A&M, along with Nicky Bianchi’s potential involvement in any wrongdoing they uncovered. Garza needed to be one hundred and fifty percent focused on that. No matter how deep-down good he’d felt while listening to Delia talk about things that mattered to her. Or how tempted he’d been to return the favor.

“Hey, Garza.” Even though Hale spoke quietly from her spot in the office doorway, she sent his pulse knocking, and okay, he officially needed to leave his d!ck in his p*nts and focus. “The desk sergeant said Delia’s downstairs. Do you want me to walk her up?”

“No.” He was going to have to kill the awkward between him and Delia, anyway. Might as well do it before anyone in his unit caught wind of it. “I’ll go down and get her.”

“I take it you two figured things out,” Hale said, clearly fishing, and Garza locked a blank expression over his face, nice and tight.

“Yeah, we’re fine. Ready to work on the case.”

“Great. I’ll ping everyone else and let them know we’ll be ready to start in a few.”

With a nod, Garza pushed back from his desk and headed toward the main lobby. Typically, they didn’t bring in witnesses for case meetings, but having Delia log in to the found laptop and navigate the files it had taken Capelli the better part of the weekend to recover was far easier than asking him to burn even more valuable time hacking his way inside (much to the guy’s dismay). Plus, she was the perfect person to translate the financials into plain English, so Sinclair had made an exception. Delia was integral to the case. A subject matter expert. An advisor.

Also, absolutely beautiful.

Garza scolded his brain for allowing the rest of him to have such a visceral reaction to her standing in the precinct lobby. Her platinum-blond hair fell in tousled waves over the shoulders of her short-sleeved blouse, which was made of some delicate white material just sheer enough to give him Very Inappropriate Ideas even though it was buttoned up to her throat. Her turquoise skirt surrendered to her curves without being too tight, ending in an infuriatingly flirty ruffle just below her knees, and Christ, he needed to get his sh!t together. This was a case. She was a witness.

He had a job to do.

“Matteo, hi!” Delia’s bright, wide-open smile sent his resolve toward a slow death. “I had the last of your cake for breakfast this morning. A little indulgent, maybe, but I figure cake is at least as nutritionally sound as most Danishes. I have no regrets.”

Do not think of her sliding a fork past her lips and moaning in pleasure, you horny, horny bastard.

“Delia.” Garza stopped a good five feet from her, despite the dozen and a half people milling around them in the lobby, the gruff edges on his voice not lost on him. He gave up a curt nod for good measure. “Thanks for coming in this morning. The team really appreciates your time on this matter.”

She blinked once, then again before saying, “Oh. I, ah, sure. Of course. I’m happy to help. Obviously, since I’m, you know, right here.”

“Right. We can head up and get started, then.”

Garza turned on one work-booted heel and started for the open stairwell that would lead them up to the Intelligence office and, hopefully for him, more sanity.

But Delia didn’t budge. “Actually, can I talk to you for just a sec? Maybe a little”—she swiveled a gaze around the semi-crowded sergeant’s desk—“more privately?”

Yeah, no. Him + her + privacy was so not a good idea. “Whatever you need to say, you can do it right here.” Wincing at his graceless delivery, he added, “It’s perfectly safe for us to talk here.”

“Okay,” Delia said, although her expression was still a little wary. “I just thought maybe we should talk about the other night. Not in, like, a lengthy defend-your-dissertation kind of way,” she added quickly, probably at the way he’d frozen to the linoleum. “But just to clear the air?”

“That’s not necessary,” he said. Christ, why was this so hard? “What I mean is, everything is fine.”

“Clearly.”

It took him a beat to connect the wry twist of her lips to the sarcasm in her voice, and just like that, he folded. “I shouldn’t have”—k!ssed you like my life depended on it—“done what I did the other night. I should have stuck to business. You’re Camila’s best friend, and now there’s this case. It was wrong of me to overstep.”

“Even though I asked you to? I was right there, too, if you’ll remember, and I wasn’t saying no.”

Fair. He never would’ve k!ssed her if she hadn’t made it wildly clear she’d wanted him to. “Still. I came over to apologize. Not…you know.”

“K!ss me well enough to curl my toes?” Delia laughed, the sound so unexpected and sweet that it stopped Garza short at the same time it shattered the tension in his shoulders. “I’d say it was a very nice apology, actually. Look”—she stepped toward him until her voice wouldn’t carry to anyone farther than the two of them—“us k!ssing might not be what you planned or I expected, but I think—unless I’m wickedly misreading things—that we both enjoyed it. Right?”

“Yes.” Garza might be a miser with his emotions, but not even he could lock that one up. “I guess it’s just…my relationships are usually, ah, pretty brief. I don’t normally do this sort of thing with people like you.”

Delia’s spine found just enough steel for Garza to want to sew his own mouth shut. So, naturally, he spoke. “I mean, you’re great. It’s not you.” He closed his eyes and willed a meteor to hit him, finally defaulting to the raw truth. “I just don’t normally hook up with people I really like, is all.”

“Oh. Oh.” Delia let go of a soft laugh that he felt in his b***d. “Is that why you’re being all gruff and formal?” She waited out the silence that served as his answer for a few seconds before killing him with, “Well, I like you, too. Friends?”

She was so easy with it, so devoid of pretense and drama and every sh!tty thing he was used to when it came to women, that he said, “Friends,” without a second thought.

They were here for a reason, though, and since it was a bit of a whopper (also, because gabbing about his feelings gave him the goddamn shakes) Garza switched gears to, “We should probably head upstairs.”

“Of course.”

As they made their way to the open stairwell in the middle of the lobby, Garza said, “We really do appreciate you coming in to help out with this one. I know you’re missing work.” The last thing they needed was for Peyton, or even Kent, to get suspicious.

Delia shrugged. “Oh, that’s okay. I just told Kent I had a gynecologist’s appointment. Most men back up from that like it’s a time bomb. See?”

She gestured at the way he’d just let her get two steps ahead of him, and Garza had to laugh. “Smart thinking.”

They finished the trip to the Intelligence Unit’s office without fanfare. The entire team was in the main space, most of them at their respective desks, and all of them primed with the sort of quiet alertness that only went with opening a really big case.

F**k, Garza wouldn’t trade this for all the cash in the bank. “You all remember Delia Sutton from the other day,” he said, and was met by a chorus of polite hellos. Turning toward Sinclair, who was—not shockingly—standing by Capelli’s workstation—he waited for the man to jump in.

Sinclair didn’t waste a nanosecond. “Ms. Sutton, thanks for coming in. Since we’re all familiar with the case details as they stand right now, I’d like to get right to it with this laptop of yours.”

He gestured to the laptop sitting on the end of Capelli’s desk. The thing had seen better days, for sure—the case was scraped all down one side as if it had taken a slide over a rough surface, like pavement or gravel, and a closer look revealed that the screen was cracked in two places. But Capelli was damn good at his job, because when he flipped the laptop open, the busted screen lit right up.

“I did find spyware installed on the machine when I was recovering all the files,” he said, and even though Garza had known it for two days now, he winced as the information made a direct hit on Delia’s expression.

“Someone was watching me?”

“Someone was tracking the location of your laptop,” Capelli corrected gently. “This sort of software isn’t able to access your camera, so there’s no visual. But it does strongly suggest that your assault wasn’t a coincidence.”

“Won’t whoever put the spyware on here know the laptop’s sitting in the middle of a police station now?” she asked, and Capelli’s brows lifted.

“That’s an excellent question, actually. The short answer is no, because I disabled it. But, to go more in depth, it probably doesn’t matter. Once the laptop was stolen—presumably by the same person who installed the spyware—the chances are extremely high that they stopped tracking it. After all, there’s no logical reason to keep tabs on a device you believe you’ve disposed of.”

She processed that. Then, “Can I get some clarification on ‘extremely high’, please?”

Garza damn near smiled, but bit it back just in time. “Are you asking for actual numbers?”

“Yes, please.” She nodded, her relief as plain as daylight. “I mean, if they’re available. If not, I’d like to know if we’re talking about ‘extremely high’ from a probability standpoint or if we’re going on actual statistical data, here.”

Capelli looked like someone had just given him ten Christmas presents all at once. “Well, since I don’t have all the empirical data necessary for calculating a percentage based on statistics—namely, the knowledge of whether or not every person who has ever installed spyware onto a machine they subsequently stole, then thought they destroyed, has continued to track said machine despite their certainty they’d destroyed it—I’ll have to go with probability.” His pause lasted less than five seconds. “I’d clock that at about ninety-four percent. But given the fact that the person would also have to have been actively tracking the laptop in the ninety seconds from when I powered it up to when I found and disabled the spyware…I’m going to amend the safety probability to ninety-eight percent. Plus or minus point two.”

After a minute, Delia nodded. “I suppose that does match up with all logical paths of thought. Thank you.” She moved over to the desk to sit down in front of the laptop, but hesitated with her fingers just shy of contact. “It’s okay for me to touch this, right? I won’t be contaminating the evidence?”

Garza met Maxwell’s surprised stare. “She watches a lot of Dateline,” he said, by way of explanation.

“Ah,” Maxwell said. “My mom used to love that show. No, you won’t be contaminating anything. Our techs went over it for prints as soon as we recovered it. It was wiped clean.”

At Delia’s disappointed frown, Hale added, “We still have other ways to figure out who assaulted you, though. And who’s behind whatever we turn up here.”

She pointed to the laptop, which seemed to cement Delia’s resolve. “Right.” Taking her keycard from her purse, she slid it into the side of the laptop, quickly clicking her way to the login screen.

“Recovering the entire hard drive, along with the other components, was a bit of a process,” Capelli said. “There was some moderate water damage, but thankfully, no significant internal rust. We’re lucky we found it when we did, though. Another few days and it would’ve been a different story.”

Garza’s thoughts lasered back to the case notes he’d committed to memory over the weekend. “The laptop was found by the water’s edge. Looks like whoever ditched it was aiming for the river, but fell short with his or her throw”—he pointed to the scratches—“and it skidded over the rocks. That area is so overgrown with weeds that it would be hard to tell that the laptop never made it to the water if it was tossed from a distance. Whoever did it either assumed it was in the drink or figured the water would rise enough to do the job. But it was too dry last week for that to happen.”

“God, we really did get lucky,” Isabella murmured. “That thing should’ve been toast.”

“It’s not toast,” Delia said. Sure enough, the login prompt bearing the Cromwell A&M logo flashed over the screen, the cursor blinking away. “Are you ready?”

“Please.” Sinclair nodded, and Delia’s fingers flew over the screen, tapping out a long sequence of numbers that just kept going and going.

“That’s a hell of a password,” Garza said as she finally hit enter. “How on earth do you remember all that?”

Delia smiled. “Easy. It’s 1 3 6 10 15 21 28 36.”

“Well, that explains everything,” Hollister joked.

But, of course, Capelli laughed and said to Delia, “Nice.” At everyone else’s looks of sheer WTF, he said, “What? Haven’t any of you ever heard of Pascal’s Triangle Sequences?”

“Can you access the files you downloaded?” Garza asked Delia, changing the subject before Capelli launched into a math dissertation.

“Let’s see.” Tapping her way through directory after directory, she finally straightened against the desk chair. “Oh, my God. There. See? I didn’t imagine those discrepancies. Look!”

An odd sensation rang through Garza, but he corked it up in favor of the fizz of excitement in his veins. They had the numbers, which meant they had concrete proof that something illegal was happening at Cromwell A&M.

Delia gave a brief explanation of the odd path of money and assets through one of the accounts, all of it spinning and twisting from banks to corporations to third-party accounts like a Tilt-a-Whirl gone wild. At least three other accounts showed the same sort of activity, with money appearing, then disappearing without warning or cause, and finally, Delia sat back.

“It looks like all of these assets eventually end up in one place, but I can’t…oh, wait! I forgot about the other file.” Her fingers blurred over the keyboard. “Yes! There it is. Silhouette Corporation.”

“Is that one of Cromwell’s clients?” Garza asked.

Delia shook her head. “No. I’ve never heard of them.”

Capelli, who had been clacking away on his own computer ever since Delia had started talking, shared his screen to the center monitor in the array so they could all see it. “Silhouette is a privately-owned consulting firm registered as a corporation in South Carolina to a Taylor Anders. Business address is a P.O. Box in Charleston. But it looks like there’s not a lot there. The website’s pretty generic and there’s no solid description of services other than ‘consulting’, which could be almost anything.”

“So, it’s a shell,” Maxwell said, and Sinclair looked at Hollister and Isabella.

“You two, start digging. I want to know who this Taylor Anders is. Let’s see if we can connect him—or her—to Bianchi, Peyton, or Cromwell.” To Delia, he said, “Let’s take a look at this second file.”

“It’s encrypted,” Delia said. “I downloaded it, anyway, but it looks…well, like nothing I’ve ever seen at Cromwell, that’s for sure. I usually have access to everything. Plus, the file was buried in the system—I had to pretty much stumble on it to even find it.”

“Capelli,” Sinclair started, but the guy was practically salivating.

“I’m on it.” He gestured to Delia’s laptop in a non-verbal may I? and she nodded before handing it over.

Garza’s gut tightened a few seconds later as the guy’s eyes went wide.

“Whoa. This is…whoa.” Capelli’s stare was glued to the screen, his frown growing bigger by the second. “This file is encrypted with SHA-256.”

“Okay,” Garza said, waiting impatiently for him to translate.

“It’s a 256-bit encryption. Public access, so anyone can get their hands on it. But it’s…let’s just say we’re talking about NSA-level encryption, here.”

“Can you hack it?” Sinclair asked, and Capelli sat back in his chair.

“Can I? Yes. But this isn’t a question of ability as much as it is feasibility. In order to decrypt this, I’d need about a year. Not to mention a bank of supercomputers. There’s a reason the Feds like this stuff.”

Sh!t. “That’s got to be something huge,” Matteo said, half thinking out loud. “I could understand Cromwell wanting to keep a client’s information secure, but why would he hide them—and at this level—from his VP of Finance? And why just this one, and no others? There has to be something else in there.”

“Garza, you have point on this case,” Sinclair said. “Getting into this file is a no go. We need something solid to move on, here, so walk me through everything else we’ve got.”

Ah, the magic f*****g words. Garza opened his mouth to give Sinclair the bullet, but he caught sight of Delia sitting there, eyes wide, and realization smacked him silent. She’d been the one to make the find, and he’d been a sh!t listener. The least he could do was give her a voice now.

“Delia’s the one who uncovered this whole thing. Maybe she should start us off?”

Delia looked as shocked as the rest of his unit in response. But she didn’t shy away from the request, nor did Sinclair kill-switch the idea, so she said, “Okay, sure.”

She walked the unit through the initial find and her conversation with Peyton, describing first the suspicious way the woman had “taken care of everything”, then her run-in with Peyton and Nicky after lunch. Delia’s voice wavered a bit when she got to how she’d been assaulted later that evening—and, funny, that was right about when Garza started having anger management issues, his pulse striking a dark beat in his veins at the thought of those bruises on her neck and the fear that had filled her. He made himself meet her gaze with a steady nod, though, and the wobble in her voice smoothed out, allowing her to hand the conversation off to Garza with ease as she finished.

“We chased every lead we could grab on the man who assaulted Delia, but came up short. There are no street cams in that alley. The closest one is a block and a half away, by the parking garage.”

“Too much room for error, there,” Hale murmured, and the team echoed their agreement by way of nods. Even if they could pinpoint their guy for sure on video—which they couldn’t—any lawyer worth a penny could argue there was zero proof that he’d actually done the assault.

“And there’s no one on the feed carrying Delia’s bag. Same for the alley behind Sweetie Pies,” Garza continued. “There’s a security camera by the entrance to that one, but nothing that shows anything close to that dumpster.”

“So, we’re thin on who did the assault,” Sinclair said, making Garza hate the fact that he’d been right when he’d told Delia her attacker would be damn near impossible to find. “Talk to me about Peyton.”

Hollister piped up as Capelli pulled Peyton’s headshot from the Cromwell A&M website and splashed it on the monitor. “Peyton Willoughby, thirty-three. Chief Financial Officer at Cromwell A&M for the past five years, since the business’s inception. Address is listed as a three-bedroom in the Metropolitan.”

Maxwell let go of a low whistle. “That takes some pretty serious cabbage,” he said, and Hollister nodded.

“Records have her buying in at four point four million earlier this year, and that’s pretty much par for the course when it comes to her lifestyle. There’s a Bentley Continental GT worth about two hundred K registered in her name, and her credit cards get more of a workout than most Olympic athletes.”

“I am in the wrong business,” Isabella said.

Delia shook her head slowly. “That’s not feasible on her income. I mean”—she flushed slightly—“I’m estimating her salary based on industry norms and Cromwell A&M’s bonus structure, but unless she’s got another source of income or she started out wealthy, it’s mathematically impossible to sustain that kind of spend-to-income ratio.”

Hale’s brows shot upward, her surprise clear. “Did you just do that math in your head?”

“My head is kind of a weird place,” Delia qualified, and Garza bit down on his smile at her bold honesty. “But to answer your question, yes. I did.”

“A lifestyle that exceeds earnings is a damn good motive for money laundering,” Isabella said. “And she’s clearly connected to Bianchi, because Delia saw them together. There’s no record of a working relationship, so…”

“It’s personal.” A lightbulb went off in Garza’s head, bright and sure. “Bianchi’s smart. He doesn’t want to get pinched like his brother, but he’s not about to start living an honest life. Crime families are like gangs. That stuff is forever. So, he meets Peyton somehow and realizes she’s a perfect in for business. He lures her in with the easy payday, tells her which corporations to siphon all the money to, maybe even buys off a couple of guys at the IRS to ensure they look the other way. Easy. Done.”

“Oh, my God, of course.” Realization flashed over Delia’s face. “All of the dollar amounts in the transactions are just under what the IRS would flag as suspicious. They all fall right into the average for what would be considered normal for one of our accounts. None of this would probably ever trip an audit, and the larger transactions we have done recently are all in accounts that weren’t messed with.”

Damn, Peyton was no dummy. She’d clearly brought her expertise to the table. “What about the files we do have. Can’t we trace those transactions back to the account where they originated?”

“I tried that,” Delia said as Capelli maneuvered through a bunch of screens, also coming up empty a minute later. “It just says ‘unknown user’. But the only people who have access to those accounts are me, Peyton, and Kent.”

“Unless there’s a fourth user account,” Capelli said, “which is logical. It’s not like whoever’s laundering this money is going to do it from his or her work account.”

“Can you trace that?” Sinclair asked.

Capelli blew out a breath. “Not unless I can get access to the machine where the transactions originated from.”

“Great,” Garza grunted. “We have a theft with no leads, a file we can’t crack, and transactions we can’t trace. We can’t definitively tie any of this to Peyton or Kent, and definitely not to Bianchi. Without evidence, we’re swimming in about fifty feet of ice-cold reasonable doubt.”

Sinclair looked at the monitor, his face hard with thought. “We may not have all the pieces in place, but there’s clearly been some suspicious activity in these accounts. Add to that Peyton’s association with a known mob boss and the fact that Delia’s assault is starting to look anything but coincidental…I think it’s time we loop Tara in to see what our options are.”

“Tara Kingston is the A.D.A.,” Garza said quietly to Delia while Sinclair made the call and gave Tara a rundown of the basics.

Delia gave up a grateful smile. “Thanks. This is all pretty overwhelming,” she admitted, and Christ, he hated that she was stuck so firmly in the center of the case. Before he could take a stab at saying (and probably screwing up saying) something reassuring, Sinclair had Tara on speakerphone.

“I’m not going to lie to you, because bullsh!t isn’t my style,” Tara said, proving her point in spades. “You don’t have enough for a warrant to access the laptops at Cromwell.”

“Come on,” Garza argued. “Those accounts don’t add up. Delia’s an expert, and she said it herself.”

“And her boss has a rational explanation for those discrepancies; plus, the accounts add up now,” Tara argued back. “No judge in his right mind is going to grant a warrant for sensitive corporate information based on a maybe. For that, you’re going to need a smoking gun, and if Bianchi’s involved? You’re probably not going to find one, even with a warrant. He’s way too smart for that.”

“Oh, Bianchi’s involved, all right,” Garza said. Christ, he could feel it.

Tara didn’t skip a beat. “Show me, don’t tell me. This is Nicky Freaking Bianchi you’re talking about.”

“I hate to even bring this up,” Isabella said. “But what if we bring in the Feds?”

“I admire your grit, Detective,” Tara said, “but the FBI wants splash, not trickle. They aren’t going to look twice at this without way more evidence, and the only way you’re going to get that is with the aforementioned warrant. And around and around we go.”

Her voice softened, if by only a little. “I’m really sorry, Garza. I know it’s not what you wanted to hear, and believe me, if Bianchi is behind this, I would love nothing more than to take him down. But if you’re going to go after him, you need a lot more than what you have. You need concrete proof.”

Garza barely tamped down his frustration. “You just told me I can’t get proof without a warrant.”

A beat of silence passed, during which Garza started to realize that this case was caving in on all sides, before Delia broke it—and him—with four tiny words.

“No, but I can.”