Chapter 33

Faye

There are a few things in private investigations that always work well for me: asking the right questions, giving people the space to insert their foot in their mouth, and a great distraction. And Cortez was distracted at the rodeo, which is how I lifted his phone and added the screen mirroring app. I knew he didn’t come to the house to see me that day—that had been obvious. But I read the exchange between him and my sister all wrong. It wasn’t personal or sexual. It’s business.

MAGGIE

Go fuck yourself, Cortez.

CORTEZ

Maggie, you fucked up. You’ve been fucking up. And now I need you to do the right thing. Get me what I need.

MAGGIE

And if I don’t?

CORTEZ

We’ve already gone over this. Then we forget about our agreement. We’ve got plenty of evidence around your “web design” business. What you’ve been doing is called grand larceny, btw.

But you and I both know that’s not what we’re after.

She told everyone she was a web designer, but Maggie isn’t building landing pages or rebranding websites. She’s been manipulating the coding that ran off-track betting in Kentucky for Finch & King, siphoning off funds in a way that I will probably never comprehend. She was hired by them to do “web design.” It had been the same story as Foxx Bourbon, but neither company was rebranding their website—they were cover jobs. Foxx had her selling specialty bourbon on the secondary market, but Finch & King had her manipulating the off-track betting systems to increase their winnings. And she did all of it without even having to step foot inside of the racetrack. I knew this from what Maggie had shared. But if that was what Cortez was investigating, the case would be with the district attorney, and their arrest warrants would have been issued. But that wasn’t what was happening, which meant whatever they were after was bigger than that. She was an FBI asset.

That’s what Blackstone brought to the table. They needed someone involved in Finch & King’s business who was dirty enough to threaten and turn him into a source.

I shove the doors to the precinct open and scan the space behind the front desk.

Del’s huddled around a small group on the other side of the glass, and I give him a wave. He raises his hand, but it’s not the usual happy-to-see-me greeting.

“I’m here to see Agent Cortez,” I say to the front desk clerk.

He buzzes me on through, pointing to the corner office on the left. “I’ll let him know you’re coming.”

“You would think after all the shit that went down with the Foxx fire that we’d catch a break,” an officer to my right says.

I angle my body to listen.

“I got FBI breathing down my neck about these horses that are being fucking slaughtered. Money showing up in transfers anonymously to Fiasco Savings Bank from offshore accounts too. The FBI catches wind of it, and here we are, taking direction from Cortez. Fucking hate that guy,” he grumbles. “Don’t even get me started on the U.S. Marshall bullshit too. I hear she’s coming through in a week or so.”

“Faye, what are you doing here?” Del asks as he comes over from where he’d been huddled. “There’s a lot going on today, so if it’s to grab a coffee...”

I cut him off and offer a tight-lipped smile. “I have something for Cortez. ”

He glances at Cortez’s office, and then back to me before he asks, “Everything okay? I thought things with your support had closed?”

Instead of answering him, I say, “I’ll bring coffee next time, Del.”

Del gives me a nod, just as someone calls out, “Delaney,” and Cortez waves me over.

“Hey, ba—” Stopping himself, he says, “Faye, I mean. I was actually just going to call you.”

“What are you doing with Maggie?” I ask point-blank, not in the mood to fuck around. And without giving him a chance to respond, I hold up my hand. “Don’t give me some bullshit line. I know you’re using her, have proof of it, but what I haven’t figure out is for what?”

He sits back in his chair and folds his hands. “Shut the door,” he says. When I do and take a seat, he admits, “She’s been working with me as a source.” Releasing a heavy breath, he leans forward and takes a sip from the coffee mug on his desk. “There had been complaints filed about inconsistencies in winnings and odds versus attendees. Payouts were unbalanced.” He starts ticking off locations where some of the most attended races take place: “Saratoga, Belmont, Louisville, Lexington. All of them had the same pattern of winnings, but your sister’s smart. She shuffled money around, and that’s what took us so long to find her. She made it look like she just had a helluva gambling problem, not that she was the one running this. She was smart about the optics. When people started seeing her with Finch and King, and the fact that she hadn’t been taking on any new web design clients...” He shakes his head. “It’s not something that would have been noticed if we hadn’t lived in such a small town. But that was just the beginning of it.”

Cortez leans on his desk and runs his hand through his hair. His posture is all off, like he’s trying to work through something.

So I fill in the blanks. The details that hadn’t been obvious before now. “Finch and King have been raising flags here for a while. So Maggie being involved, you just assumed it was bad news? Is that why you’re using her?”

He tilts his head to the side, weighing his response. “There’s a ticker tape of things happening with horses, jockeys, trainers—and even owners. If we’re going to pursue anything, we have the burden of proof. Maggie was the start.”

“That’s why Blackstone is pivotal. He’s another source? Like Maggie?” Cortez needed to work Blackstone the same way he had worked Maggie—get enough dirt and evidence to threaten them to either cooperate or serve jail time for their own criminal actions.

But Cortez looks past my shoulder, through the glass on the door, and toward the bullpen of officers before his eyes lock onto mine. “Was. He was pivotal. Blackstone is dead.”

I freeze, blinking my eyes to really register what he just said. Dead . That can’t be right. My chest tightens. “What?” I pinch the bridge of my nose. “How?”

“This morning. A call came in from housekeeping at the estate he’d been renting. His throat had been sliced on either side of his neck. Strung up in the ballroom. Bled out.”

My stomach sinks and bile rises in my throat as a flash of the murder scene I walked into five years ago flashes through my mind. There’s no such thing as coincidences. The devil was in the details. I know who’s responsible immediately.

I grit my teeth, stand, and point at him, making it crystal clear that this wasn’t okay. “Get my sister away from this, Cortez.”

“We’re on the same page here. I don’t want her getting hurt, Faye. We knew this went beyond fixing horse races. This is an entire industry being manipulated. Blackstone was who Finch & King had been using to acquire massive amounts of drugs. We’re talking performance enhancers, cocaine, snake venom. All traces found in the bloodstream of horses that had been tested post-race and those that had been found dead.”

The shipment documents for his private auction had each of these line items.

“We’ve had two jockeys, a veterinarian, and a trainer go missing. I have boxes filled with suspicious incidents from injuries to personnel deaths.” His hand runs along his five o’clock shadow just before he adds, “The coroner’s report never flagged anything in your mother’s death, but with her being a trainer for them for so long, and then her sudden heart attack, that had concerned a few in the department at one point as well.”

The room feels like it tips just enough to throw me off balance, both light-headed and weighed down all at once. I step back, the backs of my knees grazing the chair, guiding me to sit. This was too close. What they were after would take down an entire industry. And now, my sister was at the center of it. “Dammit, Maggie.”

Cortez leans back in his chair, clearing his throat. “Maggie cornered me that night, before she was drunk or arrested. She showed me a series of exchanges between a trainer, a jockey, and Wheeler Finch about last season’s triple crown winner having to be put down. She said it was the eleventh one this past year. And it didn’t feel right. She had no idea that we had been building a case already. And all of a sudden, I had an asset with direct access to everything. And you were already lined up to deliver me Blackstone.” He pauses, regret laced in his tone and says, “The Calloway sisters were my secret weapon in taking down an empire.”

“We’re not—” But he cuts me off before I can tell him that he has no fucking right.

“Four hours later, Maggie was picked up on a ‘drunk and disorderly.’ She had been beaten up, bruises along every inch of her, and she wouldn’t talk. She refused to be checked out. Del tried talking to her, even getting her involved with the U.S. Marshall, but she wasn’t having any of it. I haven’t gotten a piece of intel from her since—that’s why I’ve been leaning on her. She backed off.”

I know it’s because of Waz King. She wanted to see him pay for what he had done. What my mother and I had shouldered the blame for. It’s the one thing that none of them understood. The piece that seemed to never be digested very well: nobody, especially women, wanted to be used for someone else’s agenda.

I sit forward, stabbing my finger into his desk. “Only you kept me in the dark about all of it, Cortez.” I shake my head. “And now your other source is dead. So what’s the plan?”

He crosses his arms. “The plan is the same, Faye. Build the case. You and I both know that the only way things stick is if it’s done the right way. We need sources.”

“You need proof ,” I say with a bite. “And I have plenty of ways I can get that for you. Let me do what I do better than any other person in this place. If I can get access to Finch & King property, the training center, and possibly their staff lounge, there is no way I won’t get exactly what you need. And if I can figure out a way into Wheeler Finch’s private residence, there’s no reason why I couldn’t plant?—”

“Are you out of your fucking mind, Faye?” Cortez cuts in. He looks over my shoulder and out into the bullpen of the police station. More quietly this time, he says, “You do realize that none of that would be admissible in any court proceedings.”

And as I say it, I know right away why it would never work. “Then get warrants. Loop in the district attorney. There are ways to make this work here, Cortez.”

“You haven’t been gone that long, Faye.” He levels with me, pushing out a breath. “You think the Foxx brothers have connections? That’s nothing compared to what Wheeler Finch and Waz King have. The friends they’ve made are very wealthy, powerful people. We’re talking judges, attorneys, clerks, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were local PD out there on some sort of payroll too.”

I think about the people Wheeler rubs elbows with—business owners, judges, just about everyone in this town. He’s not wrong. I know everything he’s saying makes sense. More criminals got out on technicalities and the mishandling of evidence than for any other reason.

There’s too much history. Too many awful things that my family and I have had to go through at the expense of Waz King and Wheeler Finch. I’m not interested in waiting, the same way I’m not interested in seeing when the FBI is going to make a move.

When I stand up and move for the door, Cortez says, “Faye, I’m serious. I do not want you involved in this.”

Filled with resolve, I smile and turn to look over my shoulder. “Involved in what?” I say, feigning an innocence that we both know doesn’t exist.

There’s no way in hell I’m going to sit back and wait for Cortez to fix this or for something to happen to the only source they have left.