Page 88 of The Brigadier
“Not necessarily. I just don’t like being fucked with. You should know that by now.”
“Yes, I do. Did you have any idea about Tanner?”
“He never gave me a reason to take a deeper dive into his life. Who the hell is the man?”
“We need to have him thoroughly checked. He could have a Russian family member or friend, but it could be worse too. We never considered the New Jersey Bratva could be mixed up in this.”
I laughed bitterly. “The Italians. The Armenians. The Russians. The Irish. We can’t keep guessing. We need answers.”
“Yeah, I know that. Look, you need to run the men at the house through our private system. I’ll call Aleks and tell him to do the same. By now, too much information could have been provided to this person behind the scenes. Whoever he is.”
“At least Tanner was kept mostly on the outside with purpose. He doesn’t know where the house is at the beach. I honestly didn’t have time to tell him.”
“And business mentioned in Russian?”
I thought about the question, which was necessary. “I don’t know for certain but our discussions in our native language were always behind closed doors. Every room is swept for bugs on a regular basis, various military tactics used to eliminate the possibility of anyone attempting to get information from a long distance.”
Vadim was now laughing. “Any of this security suggested by Tanner?”
I opened my mouth to retort but couldn’t with any honesty. “I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.”
“You better be glad you didn’t offer him the keys to your beach house kingdom,” Vadim said as he patted my arm. “Keep Chantel safe and be prepared to move at a moment’s notice.”
“I plan on keeping here safe. She’s special.”
“Through the midst of violence, love can rise from the ashes like a phoenix.”
“More romantic than I remembered, Vadim.”
“Chalk it up to Caroline opening my eyes. It’s good to see you care about someone other than just Damien. Even if you didn’t follow my recommendation.”
“You know when I want something, I get it.”
He snorted. “All three of us are that way.”
I don’t know why I took comfort in staring from one side of the street to the other. Traffic was slowly moving again but the pedestrian traffic was still nil. As it might have been hundreds of years ago. Great. Now I was lamenting about a past I could never know. “You should see her with Damien. That kid is entirely different than three days ago. I had no idea I’d been paying too close attention to experts who didn’t know shit about my boy.”
“Just don’t take that extreme rage out on them. Not sure I can protect you.” His laugh was full of amusement, but he understood how much my little boy coming into my life had changed me. As the wind whistled, we both stood silently, maybe reverently, for a few seconds. Today had been more violent than we were used to. Yep. Maybe we were going soft.
His phone rang and he yanked it from his jacket pocket. As soon as he answered, he turned to face me. “The girl? You found her?” His jaw immediately tightened. “Yeah, as we suspected. Any idea who?” When he laughed again, I glanced away.
We’d been played from every freaking angle.
“Yeah, have your men search the place. Often in eliminating collateral damage, mistakes are made.”
I waited about three seconds after he ended the call. “She’s dead.”
“Yeah, along with her roommate. Wrong place, wrong time. And it was a bloodbath.”
“This must be Rossi’s doing.”
“I’m going to check but going under any assumptions isn’t the best thing to do.”
Vadim, as always, was wise.
“Yeah, I know,” I said with a certain amount of ire in my tone. The truth was that I was exhausted from fighting this unforeseen war, although my thoughts were running wild.
Vadim patted me on the back and within seconds, I noticed two vans arriving. They were our cleanup crew, many of the folks experts in forensic science.