Lost Justice (Croft Family Mob Series Book 2) Page 6

  “What did you want to discuss with me?” he asked, sipping his beer. He didn’t have anything new to give them, and tomorrow they’d hit the ground running with the case.

  “I want to take Natasha to the charity art show this weekend. I want to take her on a date.”

  He stared at the man.

  “What?” Dimitri asked, caught a little off guard. Not so much by the man wanting to take out his sister, but that he was asking.

  “I think that was crystal clear. I want to take your sister on a date. You know…when two people get dressed up, get in a car, and then make out for hours afterward.”

  Greyson sighed.

  Chris was asking for some pain.

  That was the absolute wrong way to approach this, and the man should know better. Someone was going to get hurt, and his name started with C and ended with R.

  Before he could say anything, there was feminine laughter from behind them.

  The three men turned to stare at Emma and Natasha heading their way. Emma was wearing a polka dot bikini. It was the other one that made her husband insane.

  Natasha…she was tan, slim, and sporting a white one. It left nothing to the imagination.

  Chris whistled low. There was no doubt which of the women he was focused on. “Yeah, this weekend I’m going on one hell of a date.”

  Dimitri cleared his voice.

  When Chris turned, his face was met by Dimitri’s fist. He fell backward into the pool with one hell of a splash.

  The women gasped.

  Chris sputtered as he broke the surface.

  “What the fuck, Dimitri? You didn’t even pull that one! What were you thinking?”

  Oh, he knew what he was thinking. There was no way in hell he was going soft on the men who chased down his sisters.

  Yeah, no.

  He crouched by the pool, ignoring the looks from everyone else. This was how he rolled when it came to Natasha and Katerina.

  “You may take my sister on a date. I give you my blessing, but she isn’t wearing that bikini.” Dimitri looked up at her. “BURN that thing. NOW!”

  He pointed at the house and Natasha headed back inside to remove it.

  Chris watched her leave as he rubbed his face. His jaw hurt, and he wasn’t sure that if he got out of the pool, the man wouldn’t knock him back in.

  With Dimitri, you never really knew.

  Greyson handed him a new, unopened beer to put on his jaw. “You may need this,” he offered.

  Chris needed more than another beer.

  An explanation would be nice right about then.

  “So why the hell did you hit me if you’re going to let me take her out?” he asked. “You have to be insane. That was totally uncalled for!”

  Dimitri laughed.

  Oh, he was crazy all right.

  When it came to his sisters, nothing was uncalled for in life. It was about protecting them from circling men.

  Curtis had gotten his ass knocked into the pool, and now the Captain had too.

  It seemed like a tradition that had gone full circle.

  “Well? Why?” Chris asked again, watching the Russian warily. He didn’t trust him.

  “That’s easy.”

  “Why?”

  “Now we are perfectly clear.”

  Chris didn’t get it. “No, we really aren’t. I have no freaking idea why you sucker punched me in the face!”

  Greyson got it.

  Dimitri explained.

  “That’s to remind you what I will do if you make her cry. If you hurt her, break her heart, or knock her up, it’ll be a million times worse, my friend. That was nothing compared to what I will do to you if you make my sister shed a single tear.”

  “You have to be shitting me.”

  Greyson pulled Emma beneath his arm.

  Dimitri pulled off his sunglasses and stared at her next. “You should change too.”

  Emma started laughing.

  Then Greyson shoved him into the pool.

  Chris stared at the man as he came up sputtering. He was laughing now too.

  “What the hell?”

  “I like my kitten half-naked. Mind your sisters, and I’ll mind my wife.”

  Greyson handed him a beer.

  “Fine. I’ll stare at your wife in her bikini.”

  Greyson stopped laughing.

  Emma didn’t.

  “He got you there, babe.”

  Yeah, he really did.

  And it proved one thing.

  Dimitri fit in just fine.

  Chapter Two

  W hen the family reconvened in the living room, almost everyone was there. The only two members not around were Paris and Tessa Archer. They were out of the area getting IVF treatment in New York to start their family. They were in the middle of the process, and while they would be missed, the family got it.

  This was something they desperately had to do in order to be happy. They needed a little one to make their lives complete. Baby fever had hit Terrace Glen.

  Curtis and Katerina were expecting.

  Greyson was trying to knock his wife up at every given chance.

  And even Dimitri was excited, even though he tried not to let on that he was. The man was gaga over babies—especially since he was going to an uncle.

  Or grandfather.

  Or both.

  Needless to say, the family was excited for the Archers, and they wanted them to have great success. So, they would have to work this case while down their profiler and one investigator, taking one for the team.

  They would still make it happen.

  As they sat there, preparing to begin, Greyson walked in carrying boxes of pizzas that they had delivered for dinner. Since they were going to start researching tonight, he figured why not have a chill night on the couch?

  They liked those kinds of evenings the best.

  It was going to be a chaotic couple of days with the gallery show on Saturday, and Curtis and Kat’s wedding the following afternoon.

  The weekend was going to be back-to-back functions and they needed to squeeze work into the schedule. Since they all suspected Dalton Harding was dead, and his wife merely wanted his body found, they didn’t have to hit this case as if the world was on fire and their very lives depended on it.

  They could ease into it. That was new for all of them. Normally, it was rush, rush, rush, and this time they could focus and hit it logically.

  This was going to prove interesting.

  “Are we ready?” Emma asked, as she carried in plates and napkins beside her husband.

  Curtis eyed up the pizza boxes and couldn’t help but grin. “I think I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” Emma said, placing them on the table.

  “I meant the food.”

  She smacked him in the back of the head when she went to take her seat.

  He greedily eyed a pizza.

  “Kat, you get food. Curtis, you don’t get food until you tell us what you have on Dalton and Tiffany Harding,” Greyson said, pulling the box just out of his reach. He knew how the man worked, and the minute they gave him food, he was going to talk with his mouth full, get cheese on his laptop, and not be focused on anything but greasy goodness.

  “You’re mean.”

  Dimitri pointed at the sleek laptop sitting on the man’s lap. It was pricey, it was his, and he liked to keep pizza grease off of it. They didn’t grow on trees and getting a new one wouldn’t be easy.

  It also wouldn’t be legal.

  The Dark Web was teeming with undercover cops.

  With Curtis, that wouldn’t be happening.

  “Talk fast,” Greyson said, as Emma handed Katerina a slice on a plate.

  He began grumbling even as he typed, but nonetheless, it had worked.

  Kat giggled.

  She’d heard what he said.

  Emma cleared her throat. “You’re lucky I can’t reach you for calling him old, Curtis.”

  The man winked at her.

 
; “We have Dalton Harding, age forty-six, and his wife, Tiffany Harding, age forty-four.”

  So far, he wasn’t giving them anything they couldn’t find on a police report.

  That didn’t make him happy.

  Greyson wanted more.

  Curtis kept typing, even as Chris Ford entered the room holding an ice pack to his face.

  “What happened to you?” Curtis asked.

  “Dimitri.”

  Everyone who wasn’t witness to the sucker punch by the pool glanced back and forth at both men.

  “Uh oh,” Curtis said, noticing that there weren’t any angry glances between the two men.

  That must mean…

  Dimitri laughed. “He wants to date my sister. That was nothing.”

  Curtis got it. He’d been down that road himself with Dimitri. “At least he just shoved me into a pool.”

  “He did that too,” Chris admitted, “but at least he took a swim too.”

  Well, that explained his wet hair.

  “Children,” Emma stated, getting them back on track. “How about we work and then we can bitch and moan later in the privacy of our own rooms about how Dimitri is a big bad meany?”

  It caused a burst of laughter.

  Most of it from the man himself.

  As for work, that was fine with all of them. Curtis wanted food, and there was one thing standing in his way.

  Details.

  “I’m running their bank accounts, and I can tell you that after he went missing, nothing went into his account. The funds stopped rolling in about two weeks ago.”

  That was interesting.

  So, Tony Mays stopped paying the man.

  Curious.

  Dimitri took a bite of pizza. “That sounds about right. His wife, Tiffany, said that she couldn’t afford to keep their finances going. She wants us to find his body so she can get him declared dead. He has a life insurance policy, and she needs access to it.”

  Emma looked over.

  “She knows he’s dead?”

  He wiped his mouth before speaking. “Would you know if Greyson disappeared for two weeks if he was dead or shacked up with some other woman?” he asked.

  She stared at her husband. “I’d know. He’s my soulmate. If something bad happened, I’d know in my heart that he was gone forever.”

  Croft felt the same.

  Softly, he left a kiss on his wife’s lips. “You’re my soulmate, too, kitten.”

  Her heart skipped.

  She was grateful for that. Yeah, she’d know, and it would kill her if she had to live her life without the caveman beside her.

  He was her everything.

  “Besides,” Dimitri offered, continuing to speak, “she told me this isn’t his normal behavior. They have his car, they have no money going in or out, and he seems to have fallen off the grid.”

  To all of them, that basically meant one thing.

  He was dead.

  The man worked for a scumbag. That alone was enough to point them in that direction. It was going to be a matter of tracking him down.

  “If he was messing with Tony Mays, he’s going to be swimming with the fishes,” Emma stated.

  They all agreed.

  “He’s a two-bit gangster wannabe,” Emma added. “He spends most of his time pretending he’s Greyson, and the rest doing dirty deeds.”

  She was spot on.

  That’s exactly what they had thought earlier.

  “Next?” Croft asked. Greyson took a bite of his pizza and ignored the fact that Katerina was feeding Curtis. As long as he kept working, he didn’t care.

  “We don’t have anything on his credit cards, his social security number, or any bank accounts,” Curtis offered.

  Again, that said dead.

  He sent the information to the large screen TV in the room so they could all check for themselves. “Two weeks is a long time not to use a credit card or take money out of the bank.”

  They all seemed to agree.

  “Well, unless he was preparing for something like this,” Emma stated. “Do we know if he has any side accounts that his wife may not know about?” she asked.

  Curtis stared at her. “That will take hours.”

  “Then I suggest you begin typing,” Emma offered without even flinching. “Get to work.”

  He stared at her. “I used to like you best. Now I’m not so sure. He’s made you mean like he is. That’s not pretty on you.”

  She snorted and shoved a plate with pizza on it toward the man. When he winked at her, she knew he was busting her ass.

  “Thank you, Mom.”

  “Type.”

  Curtis kept going.

  “What about the wife?” Chris Ford asked, as he tried to balance a plate and watery ice pack. “What do we know about her?”

  “Tiffany Harding, previously Tiffany Marmont, married her high school sweetheart twenty-six years ago. There are no divorces in either of their backgrounds. They were together all those years.”

  “That’s sad and sweet,” Kat stated, as her sister walked into the room carrying a new ice pack for Chris Ford. “She has to be incredibly sad that he’s missing. I would be lost without Curtis. I couldn’t imagine after twenty-six years having him disappear from my life. She has to be struggling.”

  They all got it.

  Anyone in love in the room knew what Kat was saying.

  Curtis leaned over and gently gave his fiancée a kiss on the lips. “I’ll never leave your side,” he promised. “There are only three more days until you’re my wife and bride. We’ll be married before you know it.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “I can’t wait.”

  Dimitri watched them with fascination and love. He truly was happy for his sister and Curtis. The young man was proving to be a sweet, gentle soul for his battered sister.

  He couldn’t hate the man for it.

  It touched a soft part of his heart that very little had access to anymore.

  Then he glanced over at Chris and his other sister. She had put space between them, but the man was watching her. He knew that look.

  It was the same one he saw Curtis giving Katerina months ago. This was going to be interesting. It appeared that the man wasn’t going to run from the mess waiting for him.

  Dimitri hoped his sister didn’t get hurt.

  He didn’t want to kill Chris Ford.

  “I couldn’t imagine it either,” Emma stated. “What would I do if I didn’t have a caveman to boss me around?” she asked, teasing him. Still, it was true. If anything ever happened to Greyson, she’d be lost. He was the center of her world.

  “Anything suspicious we need to know about?” she asked as her husband left a soft kiss to her knuckles. It made her heart race at the touch of his lips.

  All Emma was thinking about was sitting in his lap, letting him kiss her more, and then getting naked with her sexy older husband.

  Yeah, she had a one-track mind.

  Curtis’s fingers danced across the keyboard as he sought out anything that Emma might want to know about. He’d done this so many times before, that he knew what to look for in the woman’s past.

  Then he sent it to the big screen.

  “She has two credit cards to her name, and both are almost maxed out. She wasn’t kidding when she said she needed money to survive. At this rate, she’s flat broke in a week.”

  They scrolled through the charges.

  “It’s mostly bills and groceries.”

  Dimitri relaxed once he saw she had been telling the truth. It helped him rationalize offering her a job and taking this case.

  “She’s starting tomorrow at ‘Aquarius’. I’ll make sure she keeps her house and the kids aren’t displaced,” he stated nonchalantly.

  Emma smiled at him. He tried to be a hard ass, but Dimitri was anything but. Beneath the shell there was a sweet man who genuinely liked helping people.

  “You’re a good man, Dimitri.”

  “I don’t see why you have to kee
p insulting me with all this mushiness.”

  Emma knew he hated when someone offered him a compliment. That’s why she did it. It made the tough guy squirm.

  That was always entertaining.

  She could tell it made him uncomfortable by the flush creeping up his neck and the way the Russian came out in his voice. Those two signs gave it away each and every time. What good was having all these men around if you couldn’t torment the hell out of them?

  “Anyway,” he continued, “her home will be available to be searched tomorrow. All of her kids are school age, so they will be out of the way. You’ll have access to everything, and she won’t be there to stop you.”

  That was good.

  No one wanted to disrupt anyone’s life—especially children. They were likely suffering as it was. They probably missed their father a great deal, and they didn’t understand what was going on around them.

  Yeah, searching while they were there wouldn’t be helpful at all.

  “Emma and Chris are going to handle the search,” stated Greyson.

  Everyone looked over at him. His words were highly unusual. It was odd for him not to be by his wife’s side while starting a new case. Greyson generally stuck like glue.

  Was he sick?

  Did he have a fever?

  Was this the end of the universe as they knew it?

  “Where will you be?” Emma finally asked out of curiosity. Her husband had to be up to something.

  She could smell it a mile away. Greyson wouldn’t look at her.

  “Dimitri and I will be handling Dalton’s employer,” he offered. “We will be talking to Tony May about his missing employee.”

  The minute he said his name, Katerina and Natasha both glanced over at their brother.

  He didn’t even flinch.

  Unfortunately, Emma had caught the look between them, and that worried her. Something was going on, and she wanted to get to the bottom of it.

  “What?” Emma asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “Don’t ‘pardon’ me, Dimitri. Why did they react that way when they heard his name? I know you well enough, since we live under the same roof that something is going on. What aren’t you telling me?”

  He stared at her.

  Sometimes, he actually forgot she’d been a cop—a homicide detective no less. Emma rarely missed anything and that didn’t always weigh in his favor.