Page 101 of Cruel Kiss

Todd, who stood on my steps three weeks ago with his hollow face and his wet eyes and told me he was a dead man.Don't let them hate me.

Todd, who tried to call me two nights ago from a number saved asDO NOT ANSWER.I sent it to voicemail without a second thought, and turned my phone off, and held Ronan's hand under the fluorescent lights, and haven't thought about him since.

"When…" I try to stammer out, "w-when did he?—"

"Coroner's putting it Tuesday night. Late." She keeps watching me. "He called you that night, didn't he?"

I don't answer. I don't have to. She can see it on me, clear as day.

"I checked his phone records before I came," she says. "Last outgoing call was to you. 11:21 P.M. You didn't pick up."

I think about the little envelope badge blooming in the corner of my screen. The voicemail I never listened to. There lie the last words Todd Bradshaw ever tried to say to anybody.

"I thought you were keeping him safe? The feds. You people. He was cooperating. You said—he said men came and asked him everything, and then he was talking to you, and— Didn't you have peopleonhim?"

Mercer's jaw tightens. "We did," she says.

"And?!"

"The detail was stood down late in the afternoon. Two agents. They got a call routing them to a different assignment. Verified codes, verified chain. The whole thing came through clean on their end." She grimaces. "Except it didn't come from us. It came from somebody who speaks our language well enough to sound like us. Somebody who knew the protocol."

They faked it. They hacked in. They knew, and they used that to kill.

"So somebody spoofed your codes to pull his guards," I say slowly. "And then?—"

"And then that person walked into that motel room and put two bullets in the back of his head while he was sitting on the end of the bed with the TV on." The detail is jarring, but she's not tryingto be cruel. She's trying to make me understand something, and she's decided the fastest way is to not soften it. "Professional. In and out."

In and out. A professional job.

"Why are you telling me this?" I say. "You didn't have to come here. You could've sent a—a person. A card. You keep coming to my house yourself."

"Because of what's in this folder," Mercer says, pulling out a sheaf of papers. "And because I wanted to watch your face when you saw it."

She opens it.

I don't want to look. But I have to.

She walks me through the contents. "A burner phone," she explains, tapping the printouts one by one with a short, unpainted nail. "A prepaid, activated three weeks ago, cash. It pinged towers in a pattern. Look at the map here and tell me what you see."

I know maps. I've built my whole life on maps like this. The burner is near a cigar bar in Midtown—on a night Ronan was at that cigar bar.

It's near the Brighton Beach waterfront the night of a wedding I stood at—next to him.

It's in Park Slope, near Methodist, the night Navi went under a surgeon's knife—with Ronan slumped in the waiting room.

It's near Ronan. Over and over. On the exact nights I could put him there myself.

"And this," Mercer says as she turns the page.

A payment. Routed. Through a shell, and then another shell, and then a third, six or seven deep, dirty money coming out the far end looking like a consulting fee to a firm in Delaware that doesn't exist.

I know this pattern. Payments routing through business after business until they came out clean.

The Akov pattern.

"Where'd you get this?" I whisper.

"Anonymous. Came into a tip line Wednesday morning, packaged up neat, exactly like this. Documents attached. Somebody wanted us to have it." She closes the folder halfway, then thinks better of it and leaves it open, spread out between us like a winning hand of cards. "So here's the story it tells, Ms. Meadows.Your husband used his firm to freeze your assets and gut you in a divorce. That same organization launders money for a criminal organization your husband has long been accused of running. Todd got scared. Todd started talking to me. And a cooperating witness is the single most dangerous thing there is to a man like Akov. So if two plus two must equal four…"