Page 85 of The Demons We Hide

“I’m not even going to ask how you got in here,” he says with a shake of his head. “All I want to know is if you’ve found my wife. If you’ve found anything to help my case. The trial?—”

I wave a hand through the air, cutting him off. “I know the trial was moved up,” I say. The court system updated automatically when the change was made and I’d set an alert to come directly to my cell if anything changed regarding the Donovan case. “And no, I haven’t found your wife yet. I’m working on it. I’m here for something else.”

“Information,” he says, repeating my earlier answer.

“Yes.” I nod and push away from the sink. Allen Donovan stiffens as I approach, not bothering to hide my annoyance as I back him into the half wall between stalls. “I find it difficult to believe that you had no idea of the embezzlement scheme cooked up in your company,” I inform him. “I find it awfully suspicious, too, that your wife suddenly disappears not long after you’re incarcerated and the only one left to deal with the aftermath of fucking over an entire town is your daughter.”

Donovan pales. “I-I didn’t even know Denise was missing.”

I eye him contemplatively. “Be that as it may, where are the trust funds?”

“Trust funds?” He blinks up at me, a deer caught in a hunter’s trap.

I scowl. “Yes,” I snap. “The trust funds. Your wife had her own family’s trust fund and your daughter should have had money separated out for her.”

“The government took it all!” Donovan insists, the paleness of his cheeks receding as he reddens in outrage. “They seized all of our assets!”

My upper lip curls back and I tilt my head down, staring into his ruddy face. “There would still be accounts marked for their trust funds,” I say slowly as if he’s a particularly stupid man who needs me to spell it out for him. “There’s nothing.”

He frowns. “That’s not true.” Donovan shakes his head. “That can’t be true. Morpheus would’ve told?—”

“Morpheus?” I cut him off. “Why would your business partner know anything about your wife or your daughter’s trust funds?”

Donovan pushes back against the wall, earning himself a bare scant inch of space from me. “Because he’s my partner,” the man snaps. “Morpheus…” He drifts off, and his face goes slack for a brief moment. “Morpheus had access. He…” Donovan swallows and I take a step back as he gags a bit, afraid he might vomit right on top of me. “He couldn’t have…”

I pinch the bridge of my nose. In the weeks since this man first contacted me to look into the embezzlement, I’d already checked into Morpheus Calloway. “There’ve been no records of him pulling funds from the accounts. Everything was done from your login.”

“He has my login information!” Donovan bursts out.

I go still. Of all of the most idiotic… With a barely withheld curse, I rip out a folded notebook from my back pocket along with the pen I brought for just this case—to write down any new information this man has. I shove both into his chest.

“Write down every date, time, and account you can think of. Every time you pulled or moved large funds,” I order.

He clutches the notebook and pen in his hands for a moment and then turns, flattening the pages on the wall, and begins to write. Seconds tick into minutes, and I know from the clock bolted to the wall above the exit that my time is almost gone.

When we’ve got less than two minutes left, I snatch the notebook from his hand. “That’s enough,” I snap, shoving the notebook and pen back into my pocket as I glare at him.

“Do you really think Morpheus would do this to me?” Donovan asks, shaking. “My best friend…” I have a sneaking suspicion that there’s more here than meets the eye, but telling him as much won’t help.

There are a lot of loose ends. Morpheus Calloway is still in Silverwood, and Denise Donovan is the one missing. If the business partner is really the one involved, then he’s got some fucking balls. Then again, if it is him—then why would Denise Donovan disappear? I feel as if all of the numbers needed for the equation are sitting right in front of me, but they’re not placed correctly, and each time I rearrange them, I keep coming up with the wrong answers.

“Keep this meeting to yourself,” I say, backing towards the door as the guard outside knocks twice, his signal that it’s time for me to get out. “I’ll be in touch.”

With that final word of parting, I turn and walk out, leaving Allen Donovan to tremble with the after effects of finding out that the man he trusted with everything might have been the one to bring his kingdom crashing down around him.

* * *

“Where the hell have you been?” Gio’s question shoots out at me the second I step through the door of his house.

Rolling my head to the side, I crack the stiffness created by driving back and forth from Silverwood to Hansgard from my neck. “Working,” I say.

Gio eyes me with a grumpy scowl, but doesn’t ask anything more as I stride through his living room and into the kitchen. The smell of meaty chorizo reaches my nostrils, and I inhale deeply. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until this moment. Spying G’s Mama at the stove, I amble towards her and peer over her shoulder.

“That for us?” I ask.

Mama Camila jumps as if she hadn’t heard me enter the kitchen and whips around. “Oh, Lex.” She breathes a sigh of relief before smacking my stomach with the back of her hand. “You scared me, boy!”

I grin and then reach around her to pilfer a bite of sausage from the pan and pop it into my mouth. Her eyes widen and she lets out a stream of Spanish words too fast for me to even pick out one in the mix. The hot sausage burns the inside of my mouth, thankfully one of the fully cooked pieces in the pan. I chew quickly and swallow as she lifts the wooden spoon she’d been using to cook it and holds it up like she’s planning on whacking me with it.

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