CHAPTER FORTY

With the Thomas Paige investigation closed, and both T.J. Nelson and Luke Carlton headed for trial, John Winston had taken on a few new cases, digging into another complicated homicide that demanded his attention.

With a crack-of-dawn run behind him, he headed into the office before seven, ready to tackle the workload.

But as he studied the evidence folder at his desk and downed his cup of coffee, something nagged at the back of his mind. A little detail that he couldn’t quite fit into a neat box. Not from the new case, but from the old one.

Something didn’t entirely add up. As he hunted for his case file, his phone rang.

“Detective John Winston here,” he answered.

“Hey, Winston. This is Special Agent Laura K. Reiss with the FBI, Las Vegas division. We’ve got a case we’re working that might have hooks into one of yours.”

John returned to his chair, spun around, and said, “Tell me more.”

* * *

“I’m betting this place has amazing breakfast potatoes because the fries I had a few weeks ago were out of this world,” Michael said as he held open the door to the diner where he’d met Morris recently. It seemed almost a lifetime ago.

“Can’t wait. I’m famished,” Annalise said after she told the hostess they needed a table for two. The woman in the pink dress showed them to a booth, and Annalise ordered a coffee.

After the waitress vanished, Annalise flashed him a smile. She was radiant this morning—freshly showered, barely any makeup on, and her hair swept into a clip on her head. Then she yawned. “Jet lag.”

He nodded. “I think we’ll both be dealing with that a lot these days.”

“We definitely will.”

Even though he wished it were possible to see her more, he would take what he could get. He would live off the little morsels of time they were able to carve out. Maybe someday they could find a way to be in the same city more regularly. For now, he at least had faith in the two of them, and that was a beautiful thing.

“So what brought you here a few weeks ago?” she asked, after they ordered eggs and the waitress brought coffee. “This diner isn’t exactly down the block from your home.”

“The private detective I hired wanted to meet here to share some leads. The info about the piano shop that helped break the case open.”

“Ah,” she said with a nod, reaching for her mug.

He picked up the tea he’d ordered. “And you were amazing in helping us put the final pieces together.”

She shook her head, as if it were no big deal what she’d remembered. “It was nothing. Just a tiny bit of memory. But I want to hear more about how it all went down. We didn’t talk much about it in Paris. I sensed you didn’t want to get into the details then, but you know me. I’m always curious.”

He smiled. “I do know that about you.”

And so he started the story.

* * *

As Michael spoke about the night of the last arrest, a memory tugged at the back of her mind. It was of her last conversation with his father.

The morning before she left Las Vegas, she’d gone out to breakfast with Michael and his dad. They’d discussed plans for how the two of them could see each other again. She’d always loved that about his father. He was so supportive of their young love. They’d ordered eggs and toast—standard diner fare. She didn’t remember the name of the diner, but it wasn’t this one.

It was so odd that a little more than twenty-four hours later, he was gone.

She shook her head briefly, chasing away the memory.

“And one of the gang members they’d already nabbed had tipped off the cops about where T.J. had been seen,” Michael said, when a faint buzz sounded from his side of the booth.

“Is that your phone?”

He glanced downward, patting his back pocket. “Yeah. I’ll get back to whoever it is,” he said, then continued the tale, and she tried her best to focus on what he was saying, but her mind kept tripping back to that day in the past.

Conversation with Thomas had been easy, even when Michael went out to the car to grab an umbrella. Rain had started to fall, and he said he didn’t want her to get soaked when they left the restaurant after breakfast.

“He’s so chivalrous,” Annalise said to his father. “He takes after you.”

Thomas smiled. “He’s a gentleman. Makes me proud.”

“How is everything going at work? Were you ever able to sort out the missing details you were looking into?”

He scratched his chin and shifted his hand like a seesaw. “Sort of. It seemed I was getting closer, and I was really hoping it would help me get the job, especially since the company was worried about being audited.”

“What happened then?” she asked, catching sight of Michael yanking open the car door in the parking lot.

His phone buzzed again at the table.

Grabbing it from his back pocket, he hit ignore without looking at the screen. Worry prickled at the back of Annalise’s neck. “What if it’s important?”

He inhaled deeply and shot her a small smile. “I’m sure whatever it is can wait five more minutes,” he said as the waitress returned with their plates.

“Eggs, and our famous breakfast potatoes,” she said, depositing their meals as a bearded man in a black windbreaker passed behind her. When the waitress left, Michael finished his story. “So they set up a trap, basically, at the club. The gentlemen’s club we do the security for.”

She nodded, recalling this part of the tale.

She picked up her fork and dug into her eggs, taking a bite.

“And as soon as T.J. was there in the cigar lounge at White Box—”

She choked. Grabbing a napkin, she brought it to her mouth, coughing up the bit of egg she’d inhaled.

“Are you okay?” he asked, knitting his brow and thrusting a glass of water in her direction. She waved him off. Her blood had gone cold, and all her senses warned of danger. This was the same feeling she’d had as a photojournalist when situations in war zones became too dicey.

“What did you just say?” she whispered. The hair on her arms stood on end.

“About the cigar lounge?”

She nodded, fear racing over her skin. “The cigar lounge. Where was it?”

“White Box,” he said slowly, his brow furrowed. “Why are you asking?”

Her palms turned clammy. “That name,” she whispered, her voice sounding haunted even to her own ears. “Your father said something the last day I saw him, something about White Box.”

Michael blinked, confusion in his blue eyes. “What did he say?”

Like a diver rising up in the sea, the memory broke through to the surface. “We were talking about work. His company. The missing rides. When you’d gone to the car to get an umbrella, I asked him how everything was going, and if he’d learned anything.”

“And what did he say?” Michael asked, gripping the table, his jaw tight, his eyes wide with concern.

Something so simple. So offhand. So nothing. It had never seemed like more than a needle in the haystack. Until now.

Until it wasn’t.

She hurtled back in time to that last conversation.

“But it didn’t help you get the job?” she asked Michael’s father as they chatted at the diner, having finished their eggs.

Thomas Paige shook his head. “Nope. But there will be others, I’m sure. I’m thinking of maybe switching to another limo company. Once I tried to move up, it became like a white box of information.”

She arched an eyebrow. She’d never heard those words used that way. Perhaps it was an American saying she wasn’t familiar with. “What does that mean?”

“Stuff was just erased. Rides disappeared. That’s what I heard some of the guys there calling it. They called it a white box, and then one of them said it was the white box of information. I guess the guy who ran the place used that term. I was going to ask Sanders about it, since he drove him around, but I’ve decided it doesn’t matter in the end. I’m just going to let it go.”

“What a funny little saying,” she said with a small laugh.

Thomas chuckled too. “Yeah, don’t worry about that one. It’s not a common phrase you need to know.”

The check arrived, and so did Michael. “Got the umbrella,” he declared, joining them as the conversation shifted back to the future, to their plans.

* * *

The ground began to sway. The whole diner seemed unsteady. “Did he say who ran the company? I always thought it was a guy named Paul, but someone else owned it. West was his name,” Michael said in a barren voice, while his world seemed to spin off its axis.

Annalise shook her head.

He wanted to believe it was a coincidence. He wanted to reassure her that those were just two words. White box. But when his phone buzzed again in his pocket, and the name flashing across the screen registered, all he could think was that it wasn’t over.

He answered the call from Morris in a split second. “What’s going on?”

“Hey, Michael. Need to give you a heads up. I’ve been hacked, and some of the online research I did into Luke Carlton was accessed. Someone put two and two together and figured out I was working for you. I got an anonymous call last night to keep my nose out of the case. Which is weird, since the case is over.”

His blood chilled to sub-zero temperatures, and instinct kicked in. Get the hell out of here.

“Any idea who it was?” he asked as he fished in his wallet, tossed a twenty on the table, and reached for Annalise’s hand. He pulled her up and walked away as he talked to Morris, scanning the diner from the booths to the foyer to the exit as they left.

“No clue,” Morris said, as Michael raced with Annalise to his car. “But I think I was followed as I looked into the piano shop. I think that tipped someone off. I’m sorry.”

“I gotta go,” Michael said, ending the call as he put Annalise safely in his car. He ran to the driver’s side, slid inside, locked the doors, and reversed out of his parking spot. In his rearview mirror, he spotted a bearded man in a silver sedan pulling out, too.

“Michael, what’s going on?” Annalise asked, her voice quaking as he drove.

“Nothing good.”

He placed his phone in the holder, clicked on missed calls, and his heart sank when he saw John Winston had rung him twice.

As he turned onto the highway, he returned the call, but Winston didn’t answer.

“Shit, shit, shit.”

He gripped the steering wheel, trying to drive and connect the dots, but he couldn’t fucking figure out how they were all tied together. The thing that kept nagging at him was why Sanders had been so goddamn evasive, and what, if anything, that man had to do with White Box.

Whether White Box was the club or something else entirely.

As he neared the exit for his home, his phone buzzed, and Michael wanted to thank all the stars above that Winston was calling back. He answered on speaker.

“What the hell is going on with the case?” he bit out.

“Seems we’ve got some new information. I got a call from a federal agent this morning about some RICO charges that might be connected to your father’s case.”

Michael’s head swam with this news. “RICO? As in racketeering?” He glanced at Annalise, whose eyes were wide with shock and fear.

“Where are you?” John asked. “I’m leaving my colleague’s office. I’ll meet you.”

“Heading home,” he said, then rattled off the address.

“I’m heading down the elevator right now, so I should be there in twenty minutes.”

“Wait,” Michael said, as tension gripped him. “Who’s behind it? Who’s involved? I need to know. Is White Box part of this? How the hell could White Box be part of this?”

John started to answer as Michael reached his street, but the words came out choppy. His phone was cutting out. Fucking hell.

“What did you just say?”

John kept talking, but only words like informant, protection, guns, and drugs were clear enough to make out. The rest was garbled. Finally the line died, and a minute later, Michael pulled into the parking garage at his building.

His pulse pounded dangerously fast. As he cut the engine, he met the gaze of the woman he loved, and saw so much fear in her eyes, but a toughness, too.

“Let’s get inside and wait for John,” he said, and she nodded.

He slammed his door, walked to the passenger side, scanned the lot, and, when he was confident it was all clear, he opened her door. She stepped out and he tugged her close, wrapping an arm around his Annalise and scanning once more.

His breath fled his chest.

All the alarm bells in his head sounded. By the door to his building stood a man he was far too familiar with—waiting for him.

“It seems we have business to settle.”