At the door, Max turned and Mitch almost bumped into her. “Who’s Harrison Monroe?”

He stared at her. He was trying hard to keep his face impassive, but his pupils widened and a small tic jerked the side of his mouth up.

“I don’t think I know anyone by that name,” he said.

“Why are you lying?”

She might be playing with fire here, but she was really enjoying how easy Mitch was to rattle.

“I—I’m not. I might have heard the name, I don’t know, I really don’t. Are you always this suspicious of everyone?”

“Not everyone,” Max said, and walked out.

Chapter Fifteen

TUESDAY, LATE AFTERNOON

Lucy got off the phone with Sean. Nate frowned.

“You didn’t tell him about the accident?”

“He doesn’t need to worry about me when he is dealing with the shooting,” she said. “He’s tracking someone for Max, he didn’t give me the details. He was clipped.”

“Did he get checked out?”

“No.” Which irritated her, but she didn’t really have the right to complain. She hated going to the hospital, too. “I’ll look at it when I get home. Grant’s on life support, and the prognosis isn’t good.”

They were in a small conference room going over all the files from the Denise Albright case from three years ago, waiting for Laura Williams, the White Collar Crimes agent who had originally been assigned the embezzlement case. Lucy was looking through photos of the Albright house, but nothing was jumping out at her.

Rachel Vaughn walked in. “I just read your report, Nate. What happened?”

Nate told her about being followed yesterday but unable to verify the tail, then being followed today and run off the road. “It was a tag team. We’ll be prepared next time.”

“If you’re being followed, that tells me this isn’t a simple homicide.”

“It’s never been simple,” Lucy said.

Nate said, “Lucy and I don’t think they left the country. That tells us that more than one person was involved—likely several people. To stage the house so it appeared that they’d left, to drive the car across the border, to bury the bodies. Honestly, it sounds like organized crime.”

Rachel looked surprised at Nate’s comment, then said. “I’ll reach out to headquarters. We’re going to need more resources if this is organized crime. Denise Albright was an accountant—could she have been working for a criminal organization? What about Kiefer, the company she embezzled from?”

“We’re looking into him, but on the surface he has no ties at all to a criminal network, and he’s the one who lost everything when the money went missing,” Nate said.

Lucy said, “We considered that Denise feared one of her other clients—that’s what we’re going over now—and took the money to run, because she felt threatened.”