One-Eyed Royals Read online

  “Meet the groom-to-be,” said Gibbs. “His friends found him like this when they woke up. Poor bastards.”

  Time came unstuck. Levi reeled backward, stumbled, and crashed into the wall hard enough to rattle a nearby painting. He hadn’t breathed for at least ten seconds, so when he finally sucked in air, his loud gasp echoed through the bedroom.

  Everyone stopped what they were doing to stare at him. Martine hurried to his side.

  “Levi, what’s wrong?”

  “He’s one of them,” Levi croaked. He couldn’t take his eyes off the victim.

  Though the man’s face was a decade older, Levi would never forget it. The image was seared into his memory like a cigarette burn—those same features twisted into a hateful sneer, spewing homophobic bile at him while he was beaten to within an inch of his life. Those hands had choked him, punched him, held him down. Those feet had kicked him again and again, until he felt his ribs break and puncture his lungs and he knew he was going to die right there on the dirty asphalt of the parking lot—

  “One of who?” Martine asked.

  A violent shudder racked Levi’s body. “He’s one of the men who attacked me in college.”

  Martine didn’t react at first, so Levi wondered if he hadn’t said it out loud. He forced himself to turn his head, and found her staring at him in utter incomprehension.

  Then she blinked once, looked at the victim, and her face twisted with horror.

  “What’s going on?” Gibbs moved closer. “Abrams, you okay, man?”

  Levi coughed, clutching his chest. He knew he was breathing, but none of that oxygen was reaching his lungs. Crushing pressure squeezed around his heart—was it possible to have a heart attack from the shock of something like this?

  God, this man was going to be the death of him after all, just ten years later—

  Martine grabbed his elbow, dragged him into the en suite bathroom, and slammed the door shut. He caught a glimpse of his chalk-white face in the mirror before she pushed him onto the closed toilet seat and crouched in front of him.

  “Levi,” she said in a calm, measured voice, “you’re having a panic attack.”

  He shook his head blankly. He’d never had a panic attack in his life. His problem had always been rage, not anxiety.

  His heart throbbed, and he doubled over with a groan. The lack of air had his vision graying out. “I can’t breathe.”

  “I know it feels that way, but you can. Try breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth, nice and slow.”

  He gave it a shot, but all his breaths were raspy wheezes. He made a thin, frightened animal noise he hadn’t heard himself make since—since that night—

  “Levi!” She gripped his knee. “You’re safe here. I’m not gonna let anything happen to you.”

  That was true. He grabbed that thought with both hands and held it tight.

  “Now, I want you to count upward in multiples of eight, okay? Just do the best you can.”

  He had to swallow several times before he could start. “Eight,” he said through gritted teeth. “Sixteen. T-twenty-four . . .”

  The count gave him something to focus on besides his fear, but he still made it all the way to 120 before the pressure in his chest eased and he could breathe normally again. He abandoned the count, buried his head in his gloved hands, and said a silent prayer for strength.

  He heard Martine stand up and move away. “You okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” He took one more deep breath, then stood on shaky legs. Though he desperately wanted to drink some water, maybe splash some on his face, this entire hotel suite was an active crime scene. It was bad enough that he’d sat down.

  She looked him over. “Let’s get you out of here.”

  He couldn’t have agreed more.

  They returned to the bedroom, Levi already flushing at the thought of how all these people had seen him freaking out. Most cast curious glances his way but continued going about their business. Gibbs was the only one to spread his hands and say, “What the hell?”

  “Detective Abrams has to recuse himself,” said Martine. “He knows the victim.”

  Levi missed Gibbs’s response, because he’d locked onto the dead man again like he was caught in the pull of a tractor beam. He walked closer to the chair without meaning to.

  “Why is he bound and gagged?” he said. “The Seven of Spades has never done that before.”

  He dropped his eyes to the victim’s wrists, which were bruised from yanking against the zip ties. He’d bet there were similar marks on the victim’s ankles beneath his pants.

  “This one struggled,” Levi said to Martine. “And look at his face—he was terrified. The ketamine hadn’t fully paralyzed him.”

  “Maybe the killer had to tie him up because there were other people in the adjacent rooms. And maybe the whole thing took so long the drugs started wearing off. Either way, you don’t have to worry about it.”

  She took his hand and tugged him toward the door. Though he didn’t resist, he walked backward, his gaze fixed on the corpse of a man who had once beaten him to the edge of death.

  “Wait, hold up!” Gibbs said. “You haven’t heard the whole story.”

  Martine stopped with a groan. “Whatever it is—”

  “There are three other men missing.”

  “What?”

  “Ten guys came on this trip. The six out there found this one when they woke up, but there are three more who are nowhere to be found. They haven’t been seen since last night, and they’re not answering their phones.”

  Levi and Martine looked at each other. He saw his own conclusion mirrored on her face before she even asked the question.

  “How many men—”

  “Four,” he said numbly. “There were four.”

  Dominic yanked irritably at the knot in his tie as he folded himself into the driver’s seat of Carlos’s Toyota Camry. They’d traded vehicles for the day, since Dominic’s pickup truck didn’t mesh with his current cover.

  One of the things he missed most about being a bounty hunter was not having to wear a suit. He wrestled out of his jacket, tossed it aside, and loosened his tie a little more. Then, on second thought, he ripped the fucker off altogether.

  Much better.

  He glanced back at the house he’d just left, which belonged to the last of the four surviving kidnapping victims. He’d spent the day interviewing the victims and their families, introducing himself as a representative of KIG—which was technically true, though in this case he’d implied he was investigating the validity of their claims. In his experience, nothing encouraged candor more than the belief that money was on the line.

  All four victims’ stories had been the same, barring a few additional and unfortunate details in Rose Nguyen’s case. These kidnappers were clean. Professional. Precise. They executed their missions with a minimum of fuss and treated their victims with polite detachment.

  This was not the work of a street gang or common criminals. These men were hired mercenaries. And where there were mercenaries, there was a client.

  Hefty ransoms might be motivation enough to go to the expense of hiring a team of mercenaries—if not for the fact that every victim had an insurance policy through KIG. Why specifically target only those people when Las Vegas was bursting at the seams with high rollers ripe for the picking? Was it just for the assurance that victims with K&R policies would be able to meet the ransom demands? If so, the brains behind the operation must have gotten a nasty shock when they found out Buckner’s policy had lapsed.

  Dominic sighed, turning the key in the ignition and checking the dashboard clock. He had a few ideas for how to pursue this investigation, but it was getting late, and he had to be at Stingray in a few hours for a closing bartending shift. If he left now, he’d have just enough time to drive to the Railroad Pass and get in a few poker games before he had to come back.

  No, come on. If he needed to take a break from work, there were other thing
s he could do—hit the gym, take Rebel for a run, see what Carlos and Jasmine were up to—

  But why shouldn’t he gamble? It would be the best way to relieve the tension of the day and get him in a positive frame of mind for a night at Stingray. Besides, even if he lost money, he’d make it all back in tips. It was no big deal.

  As he put the car in drive, already distracted by the buzz of excitement, he had the passing thought that it was strange he’d gotten to all the victims before the police.

  Levi sat ramrod straight at the table in the conference room where the official Seven of Spades Task Force had gathered. Ever since they’d found the latest victim that morning, he’d been so stiff that every muscle in his body ached.

  The task force had been established in November, when it became undeniable that the Seven of Spades would not be caught through ordinary means. In addition to Levi and Martine—the lead detectives of record—the team included their immediate superior Sergeant James Wen, Captain Dean Birndorf, a handful of uniformed officers, several detectives handpicked from bureaus across the department, and some technical support staff, all vetted by Internal Affairs after the fiasco of Carmen Rivera’s betrayal. Leila Rashid represented the DA’s interest in the case.

  The FBI’s Rohan Chaudhary had returned to Quantico after completing the Seven of Spades’s profile, concluding with his theory that the killer’s flawless technique might have resulted from a previous stage of practice killings of which the police were unaware. In his place, the local FBI office had assigned their own permanent liaison to the task force. Special Agent Denise Marshall was a bubbly, energetic woman whose irrepressible enthusiasm for everything frustrated and awed Levi in turns.

  Of all the people in the room, only Martine and possibly Wen knew about Levi’s assault, which put Levi in the nauseating position of having to tell everyone about it.

  “When I was a junior in college, four men jumped me in the parking lot of a gay bar,” he said, his voice as clipped and emotionless as he could manage. “They beat me unconscious. I woke up in the hospital and spent a long time recovering. The case was never closed; there were never even any leads.”

  He kept his eyes on the wall straight ahead, because he couldn’t bear to see the pitying expressions he was sure surrounded him. But he heard one of the uniformed officers mutter, “That explains a lot.”

  “Yeah, and what explains your shitty arrest record?” Leila drawled in her usual bored tone. “Oh, right—you’re incompetent. Another mystery solved.”

  The officer stammered an outraged reply while a few people snickered, which had the effect of both breaking the tension and shifting some of the intense focus off Levi.

  “I asked the other guys in the bachelor party for pictures of the missing men.” Gibbs showed Levi a handful of papers. “Would you . . . I mean, is it all right if . . .”

  “Of course,” Levi said. He steeled himself as Gibbs spread the papers out in front of him.

  The photographs had been culled from social media sites, showing the same three handsome men at parties, on vacation, having fun with family and friends. These men had left Levi broken and bloody in a parking lot and gone on to live their lives without a care in the world. Had they ever even wondered what’d happened to him?

  Levi cleared his throat. “This is them. Including this morning’s victim, they’re the same four men who attacked me in New Jersey.”

  “Scott West, Wayne Reddick, and George Quintana,” Gibbs said, tapping each man’s picture in turn.

  The first victim was Jared Foley. Over a decade later, Levi could finally put names to the men whose actions had haunted him for most of his adult life.

  “Foley was getting married in May,” Martine said. “According to his friends, he won an all-expenses-paid bachelor party trip to Las Vegas through his wedding registry website. But when I contacted the site, they had no idea what I was talking about. It was just an elaborate ruse perpetrated and funded by the Seven of Spades.”

  Sergeant Wen had been called in on his day off, and though he was immaculately groomed—his military background allowed for nothing less—he looked exhausted. “They wanted a way to get all four of Abrams’s attackers in Vegas at the same time.”

  Gibbs picked up the story. “The guys had VIP bottle service at Ambrosia last night. That was the last time anyone saw the missing men. They think they were all roofied there, because none of them remember anything past 10 p.m. They don’t know what happened at the club, how they got back to the hotel, when Foley was separated from the rest of them. Nothing.”

  “Ketamine?” Levi asked. In addition to paralysis and other dissociative anesthetic effects, ketamine could induce short-term memory loss.

  “We’re doing blood tests to confirm, but I think it’s a safe bet.”

  “I checked out the club,” said Hannah Ostrowski, another uniformed officer. “It’s a kidnapper’s dream—no video surveillance in or around the building, easy access to the back exit, plenty of space to park a vehicle for transport.”

  “The Seven of Spades has never taken living victims before,” Denise Marshall said. Her eyes were wide and shining, her voice excited. “It’s difficult enough to handle one captive, let alone three at the same time. This could be where the killer makes a fatal mistake. We’ll be bringing all the resources of the FBI to bear in locating these men while they’re still alive.”

  “Sure,” Gibbs muttered. “By all means, let’s spend a bunch of taxpayer money rushing to the rescue of three violent, homophobic dirtbags.”

  Denise was one of the few people Levi knew who Gibbs couldn’t provoke; she only gave him a gentle smile. “We don’t have a choice in who we protect, Officer.”

  “I’m more concerned with how the Seven of Spades knew who to lure here in the first place,” Leila interrupted. “If these men were never identified and even Levi didn’t know who they were, how did the killer find them?”

  “I’ll contact the Trenton PD and request the case file,” Martine said.

  “Trenton?” Gibbs said to Levi with a faintly horrified air. “Dude, why would you go to a bar in Trenton?”

  Shrugging one shoulder, Levi said, “It was close to where I went to college.”

  Gibbs made a face. “Which was where?”

  Levi shifted uncomfortably, glanced at Martine, and sighed. “Princeton.”

  Surprised murmurs rippled through the room, and he rolled his eyes. There was a reason he preferred not to tell people this.

  “You went to Princeton and then decided to move to Las Vegas and become a cop? Why would you . . .” Gibbs’s eyes fell on the photographs still scattered across the table, and he faltered. “Oh.”

  Now everybody was staring at Levi again.

  “Abrams,” said Wen, “you’re not going to like what I have to say next. It’s been clear from the beginning that the Seven of Spades has a strange attachment to you. But now they’ve gone out of their way to lure victims with connections to you into the city, and they’ve deviated significantly from their MO. Considering the card they left for you in Harding’s office and the details of this morning’s crime scene, this is all obviously intended as a gift for you.”

  True. Whether the Seven of Spades’s “happy belated birthday” theme was sincere or tongue-in-cheek, these men had been targeted for one very specific reason.

  Wen exchanged a glance with Birndorf. “Captain Birndorf and I have discussed this at length. I’m very sorry, Abrams, but we have no choice but to remove you from the Seven of Spades investigation.”

  Levi’s vision went black, and the next thing he knew, he was on his feet, his chair on the floor behind him. His pulse pounded through his head hard enough to shatter his skull, and both his hands were clutched into fists so tight that his nails tore into his palms.

  When he got angry, it usually built up over time—sometimes just a matter of minutes, but there was always a sense of escalation. He’d become aware of the warning signs in his rapid breathing, his tense
muscles, his violent thoughts, and he’d have a chance to calm himself down or remove himself from the situation.

  Not today. Everyone in the room had backed away and was watching him warily. Some of the cops had their hands hovering over their guns. Even Denise looked startled.

  The only person who hadn’t moved was Leila, who was sitting in her usual state of quiet readiness, regarding him with an unreadable expression.

  “This is the best course of action for everyone involved,” Wen said. His eyes flicked down to Levi’s hands.

  Though there was a wide table between them, it wasn’t a serious obstacle. Levi could hurdle it in seconds, grab Wen’s throat, and squeeze—

  He bit down hard on his tongue. His entire body shook with the effort it took to remain still. He tried Alana’s thought-stopping technique, but it was powerless against the fantasy of smashing Wen’s face into the conference table until his nose spurted blood.

  The feverish imagery was so frightening that Levi whirled around and dashed out of the conference room like it was on fire. He’d rather let everyone believe he was running away than risk losing control of himself and doing something unforgivable.

  He went straight to the men’s room, locked himself into a stall, and braced both hands against the metal door, hanging his head between his arms. His ragged breaths echoed loudly off the tile.

  In a corner of his mind, he’d known all day that this would happen. It was department policy that detectives couldn’t work cases in which they knew the victims. An exception might have been possible in this case, given the involvement of such a prolific serial killer, but Wen had been searching for an excuse to kick Levi off the Seven of Spades investigation for six months.

  This case had eaten a year of Levi’s life. He’d pursued the investigation at great personal cost even when everyone else believed the Seven of Spades was dead. He’d been called crazy and obsessive and worse, hounded by the press, taunted and bugged and stalked by the killer themselves. He’d sacrificed every part of his life to hunting the Seven of Spades, and what did he have to show for it?