“When will we be able to talk to her?” Fitz asked.
The doctor shook his head. “I’m keeping her sedated and on a ventilator for at least the next twelve hours.”
“Any idea why she was unconscious?” Leo asked.
“She hit the pavement pretty hard, decent laceration on the back of her head, but there wasn’t anything on the CT to indicate any long-term issue. A repeat CT will confirm that. When we take her off the vent, she should wake up.”
Leo and Fitz exchanged glances.
“Do you have her identity yet?”
“No,” Fitz answered.
The doctor shook his head. “We get a lot of Jane and John Does in Vegas. Eventually someone comes looking for them, often the police.”
“I’m sure that’s true.” Vegas didn’t earn the name Sin City for nothing.
When the surgeon turned to leave, Leo stood and put out his hand. “Thank you.”
“Of course.”
With a nod, he left the room.
Leo looked at his watch. “We have about four hours until Brackett arrives. You might as well go back to the hotel and get some rest.”
“What about you?”
He shook his head. “Better I stay here, get as much information from the locals so I have something to tell our boss when he gets here.”
Fitz looked as if she wanted to say something, but instead turned toward the door. She stopped. “If you do come back to the hotel . . .”
“I’ll take a police escort. No need to give the shooter a second chance.”
Fitz glanced over her shoulder. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad it’s her in the ICU and not you.”
Leo couldn’t say the same.
He lifted his tired ass out of the chair in search of fresh coffee.
It was going to be a very long night.
“You look like shit.”
Leo had managed an hour of chair sleeping in the waiting room before Brackett arrived and delivered a crap sandwich.
Now, in the early hours of the following day, Leo stood outside the courtroom doors with Neil MacBain passing judgment.
“Rough night.”
Neil was the head of the investigative team that had taken Mykonos down.
The man was big, the kind of big that you saw walking toward you in a dark alley and you hopped barbwire fences to avoid. Retired military, with a team filled with highly skilled special ops individuals that the feds would love to get their hands on. But those talents were happy in the private sector.
“I heard. How’s the girl?”
“Still in the ICU. Hoping she’s awake by the time I get back.”
“Any idea who did it?”
“Who squeezed the trigger and who asked for it to be squeezed are two different things.” Leo nodded toward the closed door of the courtroom. “Your guess is as solid as mine.”
Neil shifted his gaze without moving a muscle in his body. “I’ve sent Claire and Cooper back to LA. They were visible, you were visible.”
Yeah, Claire had pretended to be a high school student and Cooper a substitute teacher and coach in the sting to flush out Mykonos. It would be easy to assume Neil’s team could be a target as well. “Smart. Although I doubt they liked that.”
“I’m the boss.”
“When I spoke with Claire last night, she said you had eyes on Navi.”
“We do.”
“Wanna elaborate?”
Neil looked at him dead-on, then away without answering.
“Okay. If you have anything solid, you’ll share?”
Neil gave a quick nod, and then focused on the open space in the foyer. “Claire and Cooper’s replacements are here.” Without saying anything else, Neil stepped away.
Behind him, Fitz walked up with two cups of coffee, handed one to him. “You look like—”
“Shit! I know.” Leo accepted the coffee and added the new caffeine to the old. “Thanks,” he muttered, putting the cup to his lips.
Leo was halfway through his coffee when the lawyers arrived.
Mykonos had three high-profile, high-dollar, and high-attitude attorneys wearing suits that cost more than Leo made in a month.
It was nauseating.
Whoever said crime didn’t pay had their head up their ass. As that thought drifted through Leo’s mind, he followed the district attorneys into the courtroom and took a seat. One look at the victim . . . the twenty-year-old girl who’d lost her dignity, her innocence, and any value she had for her own life reinstated Leo’s desire for cheap suits and the path for right versus wrong.
Marie Nickerson had been sold into the sex trade at the age of sixteen.
Human trafficking took the form of a boyfriend who convinced her to join him in Vegas with a fake ID and the promise of a good time. Next thing the girl knew, she belonged to Mykonos.
And when she tried to escape Mykonos and the life he’d forced upon her, she was rewarded with attempted murder and dismemberment.
Her physical wounds had healed. The bruises gone, her hair grown back. But if you looked close enough, you saw a thinning at the base of her skull where the burn was too deep and the hair wouldn’t regrow.
Then there was the look in her eyes.
Empty.
Soulless.
Her eyes tracked Mykonos with palpable fear.
Every second of the trial was one second closer to her throwing in the towel and backtracking on her testimony.
Fear stopped victims from righting wrongs every second of every day.
The way Mykonos stared at Marie would make most people shrivel into a ball of dust as if Medusa herself had narrowed her gaze on them.
Every once in a while, Mykonos splayed his lies for the jury to hear, his easy smile and charming personality weaving a tale just as fanciful as Cinderella’s. Only he used broad strokes to describe his role as fairy godmother giving a young woman a home and security even though she was unfaithful to him. The defense’s case was based on a relationship where Marie was in the wrong, addicted to sex and drugs, and Mykonos was the hero.
But today was about cross-examination and closing arguments. His story wouldn’t hold up.
Or so Leo hoped.
The district attorneys wanted Mykonos and all of his kind exiled from Las Vegas as soon as humanly possible. He, and those like him, soiled the already slippery landscape that encompassed the Vegas lifestyle. Gamble, drink, have sex with strangers . . . but leave the kids out of the equation. Nothing infuriated the powers that be more than sexual predators targeting children.
No matter how much Mykonos tried to convince the jury that Marie was an adult, one look at her said something different. Yes, she was twenty now . . . but the photographs of her at sixteen running for her high school cross-country team painted a different picture.
All of those visuals were courtesy of Neil and his team.
The evidence against Mykonos trumped everything his fancy-suit-wearing attorneys could come up with.
The only way the jury would deliver anything but a guilty verdict would be with someone fucking with them. Which was where Navi stepped in.
The jury, however, had been sequestered for the duration.
And hopefully that safeguard hadn’t been compromised.
The courtroom filled, the doors closed, and the judge made his way to the bench.
CHAPTER FOUR
Life exploded in her brain like brief psychedelic, drug-induced, painful flashes on a movie screen.