“Tell me you live with a bunch of guys without telling me you live with a bunch of guys,” she said drily.
“You didn’t strike me as the type of woman who subscribed to gender stereotypes.”
“And I thought you’d be… neater.”
He laughed. “Touché. Please, sit.”
She did, putting the coffees and the donuts on the surprisingly clean table. Patrick took the chair at the corner of the table rather than across from her. Close enough that it felt more like a collaboration than a briefing. That was what they were doing, right? Collaborating?
She removed the plug from the coffee lid and took a sip, glad it was still hot.
The dog—Bruno—had followed them in and settled under the table with his chin on her foot.
“You didn’t have to drive all the way down here. I would have come to you,” Patrick said.
“I know. I didn’t want to wait.” She looked at him, taking in his damp hair, freshly shaven jaw, and tired eyes. “Looks like you didn’t sleep much either.”
“No.”
He reached into the jacket draped over the adjacent chair and produced a folded sheet of paper. He smoothed it on the table between them. “Without further ado.”
She leaned forward, anticipation a tangible thing, read the name at the top, and frowned. Anthony Varro.
“Does the name mean anything to you?”
Morgan shook her head. After a slew of dead ends and forum threads and a face without an identity, someone had put a name on the man she’d found on a steel table in Pine Ridge. She read the rest of it carefully: address, employment history, prior record. She read it twice.
“The address,” she said.
“It’s a mail drop. Commercial service out of Trenton.” Patrick leaned forward, forearms on the table. “The street address looks real until you look it up.”
“Let me guess. The consulting firm is a shell?”
He nodded. “Minimal web presence, no clients listed, and the phone number isn’t attached to a legitimate operation.” He paused. “The prior record is one count of disorderly conduct from eleven years ago, reduced to a fine.”
“Just enough to look plausible.”
He beamed at her. “Exactly.”
She sat back. She’d seen this kind of paperwork before—not often, but enough to see it for what it was. In her four years as an MDI, she’d worked cases that occasionally brushed up against organized crime, and she’d learned to recognize a probable constructed identity. They followed a similar pattern: the maildrop, the shell company, the one minor charge that made the background check feel plausible. Her mother’s family had more than a few toes dipped into that pond.
This had the hallmarks of all of that.
“Everything points to this guy being hired muscle. The kind who does low- to mid-level operational work.” She looked at the fabricated name above the fabricated history. “He wasn’t here by accident.”
“No.”
“And whatever he was here for connects to Philadelphia. To my case. To me.”
“That’s what it looks like,” he agreed, watching her closely, waiting for her to explain why hired muscle from Philadelphia would have followed her to Pine Ridge.
As if she knew.
The kitchen was quiet, the only sound the tick of the clock on the wall.
The real question was, assuming Varro was exactly what he appeared to be, who killed him? And why? Because whoever took him out was arealpro.
That was even more disconcerting than the not-coincidence that put Varro in Pine Ridge.