Lynn turned to Hawk. “Because he was on the phone, and when he got off, I noticed he’d doodled while he was talking. And in the scratching on the notepad, there was one word. ‘Dynamite’ with a bunch of question marks. Outside it being weird, and maybe about some case he was working on, I didn’t think anything of it. And in the end, it might not mean anything.”

From the looks on faces, everyone had the same response to that.

No one knew anyone called Dynamite on the street.

So maybe it was an individual working woman.

No one in that room knew the names of all the ladies of the evening.

Which meant a chat with Knight, another visit with Brandi and everyone hitting up all their informants to find out.

“So how did you know Lance Mueller didn’t do what the bogus suicide note said he was doing with sex workers?” Ally asked. “Did Tony go into specifics about this skimming or blackmail?”

Lynn gave another shake of her head.

“No, he just said Lance Mueller was a lot of things, but he loved his wife and he’d never ‘do that.’ And there was a rumor about that which freaked Tony. Because he said it didn’t jibe. He didn’t get into it, but it was when he was talking about there being sex workers involved. When I heard about the murder-suicide, and what was in the note, that was when I knew what that was. The implication that Lance was taking freebies from working women.”

Now Heidi was looking at her lap.

“And maybe something else,” Lynn continued. “Something about some motorcycle gang or something.”

And…yeah.

Tony had made the connection.

And then he’d been whacked.

But it seemed only Tony knew who he told about this, if he told anyone at all.

Say, if he took it to his superiors, and they were involved, so they made moves to take him out, because the cops on their crew had looked into it, and they knew Tony hadn’t made anything he was doing official.

Or if whoever “they” were caught Tony nosing around, and that was enough to make moves to keep him quiet.

“Do you know who he was talking to on the phone?” Cisco asked.

More head shaking from Lynn.

“He was on the phone a lot. He had a network he was building. He said the evidence has to be there and he can’t be everywhere the evidence was. So he had to rely on people to keep tabs. That’s all he said about it. But I assumed he was talking about people in certain communities, Black and Latino, who could record incidences and report them to him.”

Everyone looked to Mamá.

She also shook her head, which meant it wasn’t her, and she didn’t know who it was.

But the way she looked at Hawk, she was going to find out.