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Back Deceptive Innocence
Chapters (48)
  1. Cover
  2. part one
  3. prologue
  4. chapter one
  5. Four years later
  6. chapter two
  7. chapter three
  8. chapter four
  9. chapter five
  10. chapter six
  11. chapter seven
  12. chapter eight
  13. chapter nine
  14. chapter ten
  15. chapter eleven
  16. chapter twelve
  17. chapter thirteen
  18. chapter fourteen
  19. part two
  20. chapter fifteen
  21. chapter sixteen
  22. chapter seventeen
  23. chapter eighteen
  24. chapter nineteen
  25. chapter twenty
  26. chapter twenty-one
  27. chapter twenty-two
  28. chapter twenty-three
  29. part three
  30. chapter twenty-four
  31. chapter twenty-five
  32. chapter twenty-six
  33. chapter twenty-seven
  34. chapter twenty-eight
  35. chapter twenty-nine
  36. chapter thirty
  37. chapter thirty-one
  38. chapter thirty-two
  39. chapter thirty-three
  40. chapter thirty-four
  41. chapter thirty-five
  42. chapter thirty-six
  43. chapter thirty-seven
  44. chapter thirty-eight
  45. acknowledgments
  46. About Kyra Davis
  47. Copyright
  48. contents

That’s it. Five names and some question marks. Probably just another form of doodling, but I take a snapshot of the list anyway before putting the book and the notebook back and opening another drawer. Perhaps I’ll find a flash drive or something—I have to find something really good, otherwise what exactly did I get out of the evening?

On my knees, my hands sliding down his hard thighs as I pull off his jeans . . .

Again I try to shake off the image, but it’s not so easy this time.

Standing in front of me, naked. I push the jeans aside; something in the pocket hits the floor with a faint knock . . .

Something in his pocket . . .

Maybe?

Possibly?

I immediately turn and go back to the living room, find the jeans . . .

. . . and his smartphone.

I pick it up, activate it . . . and it’s not password protected.

Such a small misstep on his part.

And such a major victory for me.

I flip to his text messages. There are a few from women, hopeful texts. You can hear the unwritten words: Will you save me, Lander? Will you share your life, your love, your checkbook?

Looking at Lander’s responses, when he bothers to respond at all, the answer is always a resounding No.

Then there are the texts from his brother. Those are friendly but impersonal. The ones from his father, Edmund Gable, are incredibly curt. He never asks Lander to meet him; instead he tells him to. There isn’t one text complimenting an achievement but many cataloging his mistakes. If Edmund loves his son, he doesn’t express it here.

Oh, and look at all these texts from Lander’s BFF, Sean White.

I study the name on the screen for a moment. It sounds so innocuous. A man with a name like Sean White could be a waiter, a lawyer, an actor, a janitor, anything. But of course he’s not just anything; he’s the head of security for HGVB Bank.

He used to be a cop.

I remember the first time I saw Sean White, all those years ago. The night had been off-kilter from the get-go. A little before eight p.m., my mother had told me that we were going to meet Nick Foley in Brooklyn Heights.