20
Despite continued protests from Jade and Silvio, I left the den and went back into the office in the front of the house. Ryan was there, sifting through the mess on the floor and trying to make some sense of the files and photos. He’d also been a recipient of Jo-Jo’s healing Air magic, since all of the cuts and bruises that the dwarves had inflicted on him had vanished from his features.
“The others aren’t here yet?” I asked. “How long was I out?”
Silvio checked his phone. “Only about thirty minutes. Don’t worry. Everyone’s on their way.”
Jo-Jo had to leave to get back to her clients at the salon, but sure enough, Finn, Bria, and Owen all arrived a couple of minutes later.
“Are you sure you’re okay, Gin?” Owen asked, his gaze dropping to the bloodstains on my clothes.
“I’m fine.” I grinned. “Most of it’s not even my blood.”
He shook his head. “Only you would look at it like that.”
Owen let out a tense breath, gathered me up in his arms, and held me tight. I hugged him back, listening to his strong, steady heartbeat. After a minute, he let me go, knowing that we all had work to do.
I walked to the next street over, retrieved my car, and parked it in Jade’s driveway. I grabbed the Heartbreaker lipstick out of my console, along with a fresh set of clothes and a large black tarp from the trunk, and headed back inside the house.
Jade, Ryan, and Silvio were all still in the office, trying to wipe the blood off the Dollmaker files and put them back in some semblance of order.
Calling the cops would lead to all sorts of awkward questions about where we’d gotten the files, as well as potentially tip off whoever had sent these men after Jade, so Bria was here in an unofficial capacity. She moved from dead guy to dead guy, snapping photos of their faces with her phone, as well as grabbing all their wallets and cell phones.
That left Finn and Owen the not-so-pleasant task of hauling the dead dwarves out of the office.
“Why did I get elected to move the dead guys?” Finn sniped, reluctantly stripping off his jacket and rolling up his shirtsleeves. “My suit is way more expensive than Silvio’s.”
“I heard that,” Silvio said, still sitting on the floor and going through loose papers.
“I meant you to,” Finn snarked back.
Owen rolled his eyes. “Less talking, more lifting.”
Finn and Owen picked up the dead dwarves one by one, hauled them through the house and out the broken kitchen door, and dumped them in the backyard. Once they were all outside, I unfolded the black tarp and covered up the dead men. Not the best way to hide multiple bodies, but it would have to do until later tonight, when Sophia could come over and properly dispose of them.
Once that was done, and Finn had finished grumbling about ruining yet another suit, I cleaned myself up and changed into my usual black assassin clothes, and we all gathered in the office again. Jade and Ryan told everyone about the attack. Then it was my turn. I showed the others the gold tube of lipstick and filled them in on the mysterious shadow and the clue that he’d left behind at Northern Aggression.
“May I see that, please?” Ryan asked.
I handed him the tube, and he uncapped it, rolled up the lipstick, and held it up where everyone could see it.
After a few seconds, he nodded. “Oh, yeah. That’s the same color that was on the latest victim’s hands.”
“I thought so too.”
“And you’re sure that someone was creeping around the nightclub?” Bria asked. “That he deliberately left the lipstick there for you to find?”
“I’m sure.”
“But how did he even know that you would go back there?” she asked. “That you would search the area where Lacey Lawrence’s body was found again?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. But it’s the best clue that we have besides the dead guys out back, so let’s follow it and see if we can finally put a name to the Dollmaker.”
Everyone took a different assignment. Bria called Xavier and asked him to discreetly run the dead dwarves’ photos and IDs through the police databases to see if any of them had a rap sheet and who their known associates might be. Their SUV was registered to a shell company, so Silvio got to work figuring out who the car actually belonged to. Finn grabbed the men’s phones to see if he could get any information off them, while Jade, Ryan, Owen, and I sorted through the files on the floor, trying to match everything back up together and seeing if there was anything else that we might have missed or overlooked.
Finn’s phone chimed, and he pulled it out and looked at the message. “Hey, Gin. The manager at Posh finally sent me that info on the lipstick sales. I’ll forward it to you.”
A few seconds later, my phone chimed. I grabbed a pen and a piece of paper from the debris, sat down on a relatively blood-free patch of floor, and started going through the names, concentrating on all the men who had bought tubes of Heartbreaker lipstick.
To my surprise and disappointment, there were a lot of them. Dozens of men—or people with access to their credit cards—had purchased the lipstick, not to mention all the folks who’d paid cash, leaving behind no names at all. And there was no real pattern to the sales. Sometimes the boutique only sold one tube a week. Sometimes it sold ten.
However, I did find it extremely odd that the most recent tube of lipstick had been sold the very same day I found the dead girl at Northern Aggression. Whoever bought that particular tube had paid cash for it just after ten o’clock yesterday morning, right after the store opened, so there was no name or credit-card info. I doubted it was the killer, though. By that point, he would have had Lacey Lawrence for at least a few days, and he would have already had all of his supplies on hand, especially the lipstick, since it seemed like such a big part of his ritual. Still, I made a note of that purchase, reminding myself to come back to it later.
We worked in silence for about thirty minutes. Well, except for Bria, who murmured to Xavier about the dead dwarves, and Silvio and Finn, who typed and texted like their lives depended on it. Ryan and Owen sat on the floor in the middle of the office, putting papers and photos back into the correct case files and boxes. Jade helped them for a while, but she couldn’t really concentrate. Eventually, she got to her feet and started pacing through the office, down the hallway to the kitchen, and back again.
I finished scanning through the last three months of purchases. I’d written down the names of all the men who’d bought tubes of Heartbreaker lipstick, but none of them jumped out at me. I sighed and scrolled down to the next section of information. Maybe the lipstick wasn’t as big a clue as I’d thought—
Silvio’s hands froze on his keyboard. The sudden silence startled me, and I looked over at him. My assistant leaned forward until his nose was almost pressed up against his tablet, and he kept peering at the screen, as if he wasn’t sure that he was reading the information right.
“What?” I asked. “What is it?”
He kept staring at the screen, his lips puckered in thought. “The SUV that the dwarves were driving. It’s registered to a shell company that’s registered to another shell company . . . You get the idea.”
“Yeah. So what?”
“Well, I finally found the owner of all those companies, and it’s someone we’re all familiar with.”
“Who?” Finn asked in an eager voice.
Silvio looked over at me. “Damian Rivera.”
This time, I blinked, wondering if I’d heard him right. “Damian Rivera? My Damian Rivera? Are you sure?”
He nodded. “I’m sure. He owns the company that car is registered to, which means that those are his dead dwarves lying under the tarp in the backyard.”
“Dwarves . . .” I murmured, a memory swimming around in my mind, slowly coming into focus. “A dwarf with a bad mustache and a cell phone . . .”
“Damian Rivera?” Owen frowned, trying to place the name. His eyes widened when he realized exactly who we were talking about. “Isn’t that the guy you spied on the other night, Gin? The one who’s a member of the Circle?”
Finn shot his finger and thumb at Owen. “Got it in one, Grayson.”
Jade stopped her pacing. “Who is Damian Rivera? And what is the Circle?”
The memory finally sharpened in my mind. I got to my feet, jogged down the hallway, and went out into the backyard. I pulled the black tarp off the dead men, bent down, and studied the face of Henry, the dwarf with the thin, scraggly black mustache, the one who had looked so familiar.
It was dark the last time I’d seen him, but I still recognized him as the guard who’d been patrolling Damian Rivera’s estate two nights ago. The one who’d been too focused on his video game to notice me. I’d let him live that night, but here he was, dead at my hands after all.
Oh, the irony.
Hope and adrenaline lifted my heart. I let the tarp drop back into place and jogged into the house and to the office. By this point, all my friends were on their feet.
“Gin?” Ryan asked. “What are you doing? What’s going on?”
Instead of answering, I grabbed my phone and scrolled through the rest of the purchase information from the Posh boutique. My fingers twitched with anticipation, but I forced myself to go slowly, carefully looking at every single line in turn. Not on this screen . . . or the next one . . . or the next one . . .
Finally, on the very last screen, I found his name, three from the bottom of the list.
I let out a tense breath and held my phone out so the others could see it. “According to this, Damian Rivera bought half a dozen tubes of Heartbreaker lipstick from the Posh boutique almost six months ago.”
Ryan looked at me, picking up on my train of thought. “That would be more than enough lipstick to account for all the traces that I’ve found on the victims since then. He must be using a new tube of lipstick each time.”
Finn snapped his fingers as another thought occurred to him. “And we already know that Rivera likes to beat people. Silvio and I did tons of background on him. We both saw the police reports of all those girlfriends and servants he put into the hospital. Murder wouldn’t be too much of a stretch from that.”
I thought back to when I’d spied on Damian Rivera at his mansion. Hugh Tucker had shown up and told Rivera to take care of some problem before the Circle took action against him. What if that problem was Rivera being the Dollmaker?
According to what Tucker had told me, the Circle had eyes and ears everywhere, and I had no doubt that some of those spies were in the police department. Maybe someone had tipped off Tucker about Ryan, Bria, and Xavier’s investigation. Brutally beating and strangling a dozen women—and probably more that we didn’t know about—and leaving their bodies strewn all over Ashland was sure to attract unwanted attention sooner or later. And the members of the Circle prided themselves on their anonymity, on the fact that very few people knew that the group even existed. The hunt for a serial killer—especially one of their own members—could potentially shine all sorts of light on their shadowy operations, something that they would want to avoid at all costs, even if it meant getting rid of Rivera themselves.
Something about that last thought nagged at me, something about Rivera, Tucker, and the Circle. Something about Rivera taunting Tucker about his low status within the group. Something about Tucker’s mysterious boss and how he gave all of them their marching orders. But I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was . . .
“It’s Rivera,” Owen said. “It has to be. There are just too many things that add up and point right to him.”
My thought, whatever it had been, vanished back down into the bottom of my brain. Besides, it wasn’t important right now. Finding Elissa was the only thing that mattered. After she was safe, then I would properly deal with Damien Rivera and ask him all my many, many questions about the Circle.
Jade’s hands balled into fists, and rage sparked in her eyes. “Where does he live? Where is he holding Elissa?”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’re going to pay him a visit and find out.”