Page 67 of Embrace the Darkness
I gave in. “Fine.” I squealed when he got up with me in his arms and carried me to bed.
That became our routine for the next three nights. Vincent and I would research all day and Jamie would come in late at night to make us stop.
It took some time to get Vincent to open up. It was literally like pulling teeth, but by day two things got a little easier. He was incredibly smart, especially for someone at the young age of nineteen. His parents had died in a car crash when he'd been a kid and we kind of bonded over it because my mother had passed the same way. He'd lived with his grandma until cancer took her life when he'd been sixteen. Refusing to go into foster care, he'd run away, making money by hacking for anyone who would hire him. Or if he was in a pinch, he’d illegally wire money into his account. Which was how he'd come to work for Stefan a little over a year ago. Vincent had wired money from one of Stefan’s accounts and it hadn't gone unnoticed. Stefan had found Vincent and instead of killing him, he'd offered him a job.
The poor kid had been through some major losses in his lifetime. No wonder he didn’t like to leave his home, which I most definitely asked about. Turned out, he lived past the border in De Luca territory. There wasn’t anything wrong with his home, just its location.
After three long days, my brain was ready to explode from everything I'd learned. The upside, we got a lead.
We'd begun our research by tearing through the books and electronic records on the flash drive. The books were the financial records of what we put out and brought in from selling cocaine and the ledgers were all dated back during my grandfather’s time as boss. The flash drive was the same thing, but dated from when Stefan had taken over.
We received the cocaine from a supplier in Columbia. We paid fifteen thousand per kilo to the Columbians, then turned around and sold it for forty thousand per kilo here in the States. After paying our courier slash smugglers to get the drugs from Columbia to here, the family profited twenty grand per kilo.
That had been the case until about two years ago.
Over the course of two years, our profits had slowly been decreasing down to a profit of ten grand per kilo. The drop of revenue had happened gradually in the first year, starting with us losing a thousand, then two, three,until we'd reached an even ten thousand lost per kilo. The ten thousand had been a consistent loss for the past eight months.
Stefan was right. And it was slightly insulting that Samuel thought he wouldn’t be caught. When we'd reached this point in our research, I'd had Vincent dig up all he could on Samuel, Dylan, and every man that worked under them. I'd wanted pictures, backgrounds, bank accounts, anything that was tied to their name and fingerprints.
Everything we could find on Samuel and Dylan had come up as Stefan had stated. There had been no extra money in their accounts, which just meant they had it hidden under different aliases. Vincent had worked his ass off to find out what they were. I'd learned a lot that I hadn't wanted to know about my uncle and cousin. Samuel constantly cheated on my aunt with high end prostitutes, which I'd already known, but what I hadn't known was he liked them young—eighteen, to be exact. Dylan watched too much anal porn. I could have gone my whole life without knowing that.
Hours of research and I'd known pretty much everything about Samuel’s men. It had been information overload, but it had been worth it when Mark Ferguson’s filehad been the next one for me to go through. He was our lead. Mark was Dylan’s head enforcer.
Two years ago, Mark’s brother had opened a new bank account. Mark’s brother who had been deceased for five years. How did a dead guy open a bank account with routine deposits of large sums of money for the last two years? I had no idea, but I was going to find out.
The amount of money being deposited into this dead man’s account wasn’t enough to cover all our losses, not even close, but it was enough to be suspicious. Mark was the key.
CHAPTER 29
Showing off the platinum wig, I twirled around in the costume shop. “What do you think?”
Dressed casually in a T-shirt, denim jeans, and the ball cap I'd bought him at the sporting goods store we'd just left, Dean looked positively bored out of his mind as he watched me.
Last night, I'd realized I wasn’t equipped to spy on someone. That someone being Mark Ferguson. The first thing on my list of spy supplies had been binoculars because…come on?Who spies on people without binoculars?I'd gotten a pair at the sporting goods store along with Dean’s hat. Next on my list was a disguise. “The black wig or the blonde?” Putting my hands on my hips, I stared at my fellow sleuth expectantly.
Dean eyed the platinum blonde wig I was wearing. This morning, before we'd left, I'd gone over the plan with Vincent and Dean. Vincent’s job was to track Mark’s phone and give me updates on his whereabouts. As of right now, he was at McLoughlin’s, a bar owned by the family and one of the many fronts Samuel and Dylan used to conduct business, I'd recently learned. Dean and I were headed there next.
“The blonde,” he answered. Without taking the wig off, I ripped off the price tag and paid for it at the register.
Sitting in my parked car at an unnoticeable distance down the street, I peered through my new binoculars at McLoughlin’s.
“I don’t know what you think you’re going to gain from doing this,” Dean grumbled from the passenger’s seat while scrolling through his phone.
“I already told you. We’re going to follow him until something happens.”
He sighed. “Whatever you say, Nancy Drew.”
“None of Stefan’s personal security are mouthy,” I murmured under my breath.
Out of my peripheral, I caught Dean’s head lift from his phone. “Then you should have picked one of them to babysit you.”
Well,there went my good mood.
“Do you think I like having a ball and chain all the time? At the end of the day you get to go home, enjoy your independence of running errands, have the privacy of going on a date, feel the freedom of just walking out your front door without having toasksomeone to accompany you.” I squeezed the curved sides of the binoculars. Envy was a bitter bitch. “I’m sorry you don’t like being stuck with me. Just remember your agony is only nine-to-five. You get to clock out. As for me, I’ll be shackled to someone else.”
He didn’t respond to my spew fest. For the longest time, the only noise was the cool air being pushed through the car’s vents until he quietly asked, “Why did you choose me?”
I lowered my binoculars to meet his eyes. He was staring at me intently, waiting. “I have many reasons,” I said with a smirk. “Mainly, I don’t like ass kissers. But most of all, you surprised me. Underneath that surly personality of yours, you have a moral sensibility I find refreshing.”