Chapter 91

Marc had to work to keep his face neutral and positive as he thanked Jillian and she led the lawyer out of his office.

His gorgeous secretary was starting to get impatient, and her latest method of letting him know she was waiting to hear about his conversation with Felicity was to shoot him pointed looks when she knew no one else could see them. Nothing that could be read by someone else if they did notice, but enough that Marc understood the implication that she was not happy with him.

He headed back to his desk, reaching for the Purell he kept in a drawer - it wasn’t that the lawyer had been particularly clammy or dirty, and he didn’t have anything against lawyers, but the man had been one of those. A shark without even bothering to mask it. He represented an International client who wanted a deep dive into a company that was poised to be ripped out from under its current owner. It wasn’t an uncommon position for Marc to find himself in, but usually everyone kept the silent part quiet instead of openly talking about the intention to tear the company apart for its pieces and sell off anything halfway useful.

Marc was busy scrubbing his hands when a flash of red outside his office drew his attention, and he looked up in surprise as Sinead stopped just short of bursting through his office door. She could see him, and she blushed slightly as she raised a hand and knocked. He stood up and went to her, opening the door and gesturing her in. “Detective,” he said. “Quelle surprise. What can I do for you?”

It had only been a day since the warehouse, and Marc was still mentally recovering from that particular sequence of events. He wasn’t necessarily shaken, he’d known the possibilities going in there, and Victor turning up murdered didn’t even make the top ten of the worst possible outcomes he could imagine. He was, rather, concerned. Not paranoid, at least not yet, but he’d spent the previous evening organising some new firewalls for his personal accounts and holdings, and examining the weak points in his daily routine.

A Mafia captain was interested in him, after all, and had him in a room with a dead body.

Sinead came in with a tight smile, a mild amount of nervous energy in the clench of her jaw. “Sorry for not texting or calling,” she said. “But this isn’t something we wanted an easy record of.”

“Oh?” Marc asked, raising an eyebrow as he shut the door to his office, noticing that Jillian was giving him a pointed look from halfway down towards her reception desk. “That sounds ominous, Detective. How concerned should I be?”

Sinead gave him a look like she thought he wasn’t being serious, and Marc wasn’t sure if that meant he’d been playing the game too well, or if perhaps he was letting the two personas of his life blend together a bit too much. He decided to consider that later and gestured the slim redhead towards the small lounging seats in the corner of his office.

“You’re not in any danger,” Sinead said as she sat down, slipping a hand into her leather jacket and fishing for something in her breast pocket. “Well, not any more than yesterday, anyway.”

“Have you found out who might have killed Victor?” Marc asked.

“We don’t even have a body yet,” Sinead grimaced, finding what she was looking for and pulling it out to hand over to him. “This is about this.”