Prestige, page 1
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Epilogue
Also by Marci Bolden
About the Author
Copyright © 2024 by Marci Bolden
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Cover design by Amber Maxwell.
ISBN: 978-1-950348-78-7
Prologue
Personal security guard Troy Buchanan took in the scene at the so-called safe house.
Blood spatter covered nearly every surface of the living room. The couple he and his team had been protecting had clearly been tortured prior to being killed.
Richard Bantam’s stomach had been slit open and his innards placed on his chest. Disemboweled. The method of choice for killing snitches in the circles Richard had run in for decades. Sharon, his wife, used to talk a mile a minute. Now her tongue was gone, and her throat slit. Their deaths had been violent and painful. Even more—the grisly killings would send a message to anyone else who might be thinking about oversharing with the feds.
Troy and his team were responsible for keeping their clients safe. They didn’t always like who their clients were, and that was definitely the case now. Though this client was a financial advisor, Troy was fairly certain Richard had earned his millions by stealing from others—skimming here, overcharging there, hiding money. Before going into hiding, he’d seen Richard with less than stellar people, including runners for Gunner Escobar—the latest head of the Escobar family drug cartel.
As soon as he’d started to put the pieces together, he’d suggested that perhaps the Bantams weren’t their ideal clients, but that wasn’t his call. The money was good, and apparently that was more important than keeping the Lochlin name clean.
Troy had been with the security firm for almost a decade, and this was the first time one of his clients had been murdered in all those years. Lochlin Private Security did more than simply protect politicians, celebrities, and other elites. The firm hired highly trained guards and investigators to not only protect their clients but dig deep into the shadows to root out those who threatened them. They were the best of the best in the business. People didn’t die on their watch.
This was bad. On so many levels.
Richard had hired Lochlin Private Security because he’d started receiving increasing threats, though only Troy’s superiors knew exactly what those threats had entailed. Troy was the lead on this team and was supposed to keep the Bantams safe. But soon after he took the case, Troy started to suspect the Bantams were in more danger than he had been told. Troy’s gut had told him to keep close to them. Too bad that instinct hadn’t been enough to keep them alive.
Just last week, he’d asked that the family be transferred to a safe house where they could be better protected. This was supposed to be a safe place. No one was supposed to know the Bantams were here.
Standing in the blood-stained room made Troy feel sick to his stomach, but not because of the gory crime scene. The only way the Bantams could have been found and murdered was if his gut had been right. Someone with inside information was responsible for this.
Now the Bantams were sprawled across the living room of their new home as blood dried on the walls, the ceiling fan, and soaked into the gray shag carpet.
Not all the Bantams were accounted for, however.
“Where’s Logan?” Troy asked.
The six-year-old boy who cried every night because he missed his room, his toys, and his friends was not among the fatalities in the living room.
Sharon had tried to make this like a vacation for her son, but she was scared, terrified of something that no one wanted to share with Troy and his team. Logan had picked up on her fear, and that had fed into his own.
Troy didn’t have a kid, but even he knew they should have tried harder to protect Logan.
“We haven’t found him,” Randall Gillion said. “They probably took him.”
Troy didn’t blink, didn’t jolt, but he did hold his breath for a second.
His colleague came to that conclusion without much emotion. Troy knew being hardened against violence was part of the job, but Randall’s lack of compassion for the child was a red flag that Troy tucked away in the back of his mind with the rest of the flags he’d been collecting over the last few weeks—like the gold watch that sparkled on Randall’s wrist when he checked the time before making a note on his little pad. He’d been wearing a scratched-up leather band the week before.
When Troy had asked about the new watch, Randall had dismissed it and said it had been a gift. He’d gotten a good enough look to verify the brand name. Omega. How did a guy like Randall receive such an expensive gift as an Omega watch?
Hank Malony, another member of the team, said, “We’ll get a group looking for the boy. If he isn’t dead, he’ll be for sale soon.”
Just as Troy’s gut had told him the Bantams were in danger, his gut also told him Logan wasn’t about to be put on the black market. And Troy always listened to his gut.
Their old team leader had pounded into their heads that they listen to their instincts. She said they didn’t have to believe in karma or God or anything else, but they damned well better believe what their guts told them. Troy did. He’d known something bad was going to happen. He’d tried to warn his supervisors. Nobody had listened.
Troy hoped Logan had listened. He hoped the kid heard every word Troy had told him when he’d pulled him aside and showed him where to hide if something went down.
“Any idea who did this?” Troy asked.
Randall scoffed. “I don’t think we have to reach too far to know it was the Escobars.”
“Not who was responsible,” Troy clarified. “Who did the deed.”
Hank kneeled beside Sharon’s body and grimaced. “Somebody with a strong stomach. This is vile.”
“I’ve seen worse,” Randall said and then proceeded to share details of a rape and dismemberment when he was a cop.
Troy tuned him out. Randall always had a story to outdo everyone around. He’d let him and Hank determine who had seen the worst of the worst.
Slipping away from the team he’d grown suspicious of, Troy moved down the hallway of the contemporary ranch house to Logan’s bedroom. The room was decked out in a race-car theme that the little boy had confided in Troy that he hated. Looking around the room, Troy’s heart started beating faster.
The red race-car-shaped bed had been flipped over, and the clothes from the closet had been tossed on the floor. Whoever had broken in had looked for the boy. They’d intended to kill him too.
Troy looked down the hallway, verifying he hadn’t been followed, before easing the bedroom door shut. Moving to the window, he slid the glass pane open and popped the screen. Poking his head out, he checked that the small grassy area was clear. A week ago, when his suspicions grew into real concern, he’d crept around the back of the house and loosened three boards in the wooden privacy fence. Removing those boards would leave a big enough hole so a grown man and a little boy could escape in a hurry.
Crossing the room in three long strides, Troy aimed his flashlight toward the ceiling of the closet. He whispered the code phrase Logan had chosen: “Race cars suck.”
A moment later, Logan peered out from the top of the shelves. His dark-brown eyes were wide, and his lip trembled. Troy pressed his finger to his mouth to signal Logan to be quiet, and then he gestured for the boy to come out of hiding.
Logan climbed down the shelves and, without a word, took Troy’s hand. Troy glanced through the window and confirmed the backyard was still empty. Thankfully, the guards were still focused on the bloody scene in the living room. He lifted Logan through the window, then he climbed through the opening too. Once safely on the grass outside in the yard, he pulled the window closed behind them and replaced the screen so they didn’t immediately tip off anyone who walked into the bedroom.
Troy guided the boy through the loose boards and then followed him. In the alley, Troy hefted Logan onto his back and hooked his arms around the kid’s thin legs. Logan clung to him, hugging tight, as Troy ran off into the night.
1
Meri Osborne tried to hide her irritation as she watched the woman across the table blowing her nose into the third tissue she’d plucked from the box that sat on the Prestige Security and Investigation Services conference room table. Though the conference room was the largest in the modest-sized office setting, the walls were close enough to echo the sniveling and whimpering coming from the woman.
Meri wasn’t the most sympathetic member of the team, but she’d done a pretty good job of reassuring and offering condolences to the woman who was convinced her husband was cheating.
More times than not, the person hiring them was right—his or her spouse was cheating. The private investigator
Or she had until she’d joined this team. Part of her skillset as a professional security provider was blending into the background. That was perfect for someone trying to snap photos of a lying, cheating spouse.
After a year of working cases like this, Meri was learning to fake the sympathy their clients needed. The fact that the entire Prestige team was female drew in women like Ana Cortez. They likely assumed they’d find genuine comfort here, but that maternal gene had somehow skipped Meri’s DNA. She’d spent too much of her career dealing with liars and scumbags to easily dip into the sensitivity their clients sought.
Some of her other teammates were natural caregivers, but Meri had to bite her tongue so she didn’t tell the woman to toughen up and confront the bastard. That’d save her time, heartache, and the money she was about to spend having her husband followed.
As the pile of used tissues in front of Mrs. Cortez grew, Meri’s desire to work with this woman decreased. She cast a glance to her left, assessing her team leader’s reaction in a split second. Lynn Sanchez sat stoic, as unemotional as a statue as she waited for their potential client to gather herself enough to answer why she was so confident her husband was seeing someone else.
They were used to clients getting emotional while explaining their cases. However, Mrs. Cortez took that to a level Meri didn’t think she’d ever seen. The woman had to have been an actress at some point in her life. No one else could possibly display such dramatics with so much ease. The woman was borderline wailing as she explained that she found a receipt for a motel room in her husband’s pants pocket.
A knock at the door was a welcome distraction. Trista, the team administrator-slash-Internet sleuth, poked her blond-topped head in. “Excuse me?”
Oh, please need me, Meri silently begged.
“I need you,” Trista said, as if she’d read Meri’s internal plea.
Meri smiled politely at the crying woman and started to stand.
“Lynn,” Trista clarified. “I need Lynn.”
Sinking back in her chair, Meri did her best not to let her disappointment show. Returning her focus to the sobbing woman across the table as Lynn rushed toward freedom, Meri picked up her pen again.
“Do you have that receipt with you, Mrs. Cortez?”
As if she were a robot on an assembly line, Meri asked the right questions, gathered the required information, and walked Mrs. Cortez to the door. Before ushering the woman out, Meri assured her that someone would be in contact with her soon. She couldn’t bring herself to commit to being that person.
Closing the door, she walked straight to her office, not bothering to check in with Lynn to see how she had gotten so lucky as to be pulled from the meeting. As she dropped into the black faux-leather chair behind her desk, Meri tossed her notebook aside with a level of disgust she hadn’t intended.
God, she hated working these cases. She spent far too many hours sitting in a car watching people brazenly throw away the lives they’d built. If they were so unhappy, why didn’t they walk away? That was what she’d done. When her old life had become too burdensome to bear, she’d washed her hands of it and walked away. She’d left before she could hurt those she’d grown to care about. That was what any reasonable and responsible person should do. Not lie, cheat, and deceive. That was the cowardly way out. Leaving was the right thing.
Wasn’t it?
She rarely doubted herself, but lately, she had to admit there was a voice in the back of her mind mocking her past decisions. A year ago, before she’d come to Prestige, she’d been responsible for the death of a teammate—not directly, but Sarah’s death had been a chain reaction of events that never should have even started. Everything stopped that day. Everything Meri thought she knew about herself caved in on her. She no longer had confidence in herself or her choices. A security guard can’t be filled with self-doubt and survive. And she shouldn’t have been leading a team.
She’d resigned, walked away from everything—everyone—and started over. She’d never questioned that decision until recently. She’d found a new place with the Prestige team. She fit here. That was the only thing she didn’t question. But she had started to question if she’d been too rash in walking away. Maybe she should have stuck things out a bit longer to see where the chips would fall instead of assuming she knew.
The kicker was that now she’d begun to doubt being a private investigator. Was following philandering men around actually filling the void she’d created in her life, or temporarily masking the hole inside her? She wasn’t sure anymore.
“Meri,” Lynn called. “Everything okay?”
Meri nodded rather than telling a blatant lie.
Lynn noticed. In fact, everyone on her team had noticed she wasn’t herself these days. Some had asked why, others hadn’t bothered.
She loved that the Prestige team was so supportive of each other, but she tended to keep her problems to herself. Not only because she didn’t want to burden others, but she couldn’t very well tell them she was questioning everything about her life, including if she really belonged at the agency. Even though she fit here, she was no longer certain she had made the right decision to walk away from her old life.
The day she had resigned, her former boss told her there would always be a place for her at the agency. Whenever she was ready to return, he’d make a place for her. Of course, at that point, he didn’t know everything there was to know about Sarah’s death. He surely did by now and might have a different opinion of Meri.
The other side of that was that she didn’t think she could possibly walk away from her new life. These women had become her family. Her sisters. She felt especially close to Lynn. They had the same dry wit and serious attitude. Too serious sometimes, Meri suspected. Lynn was loosening up, though. She was engaged now, soon to be married, and Meri figured a woman who had someone to go home to made her feel she could relax and enjoy life a bit more.
As she entered Meri’s office, Lynn eased the door shut so the click didn’t alert any other members of the team. A closed door in their office was like a siren’s song, luring others closer to hear office gossip. If any other member of their team got the idea that some great secret was being shared, they’d all be crammed in Meri’s office trying to solve her life problems.
Sitting in the chair across from Meri’s desk, Lynn held her gaze. “What is it? What’s been on your mind lately?”
Meri cocked a brow, her universal and completely effective way of making someone shut up.
“If you say nothing, I’ll break your kneecaps,” Lynn said.
Meri smiled as she tempted fate. “It’s nothing.”
The two shared a quiet laugh before returning to their usual serious natures.
“Talk to me,” Lynn said.
Unsettled. That was the only way Meri could describe how she’d been feeling. But she couldn’t really explain why. When she’d started this new job, she’d been determined to keep herself at arm’s length. Getting too close had been her last mistake.
But it hadn’t taken long for her to get invested in each and every member of her team. Not only did she want them to succeed, but she needed them to be safe—though she knew she couldn’t always do that. That sense of failure hit a bit too close to home after burying Sarah.
Lynn tried again. “You have been distracted for weeks. Why?”
Tapping her fingers on her desk, Meri let out a measured breath. “Honestly? I think I’m a bit restless. I’ve been here a year. I’m settled in.”
Concern lit in Lynn’s eyes as she read between the lines. “You’re unhappy.”
“No.” She nearly tripped on the word. “I don’t know. I feel…restless. Like I said.”
“These damn adultery cases.” Lynn frowned. “Nobody likes spying on cheating spouses, Meri. But the money—”
