Elemental Assassin 01 - Spider's Bite

With her fucking life.
    After Finn realized I wasn’t budging, we got to work. Finn reached out to a few people willing to give him information on Donovan Caine—for a price. Meanwhile, I went back through the file Fletcher had given me on Gordon Giles.
    I didn’t know when Fletcher had been approached to do the job or by whom, but he’d compiled a substantial amount of information on Giles. Net worth. Business deals. Real estate holdings. Hobbies. Habits. Charitable causes. Favorite restaurants. Fifty-four years of life reduced to a single folder’s worth of paper. Kind of sad.
    But the more I reviewed the information, the less convinced I became that Gordon Giles was a devious embezzler who’d stolen millions. For one thing, he didn’t need the money. Giles had several million tucked away in various accounts and annuities, and pulled down even more as the chief financial officer of Halo Industries. And he didn’t spend money like it was going out of style. Other than expensive suits, nice meals, deep-sea fishing trips every few months, and weekly visits to hookers, Giles tucked most of his money away. He even gave more than a million dollars to breast cancer research every year, in honor of his dead mother. What a prince.
    Sure, lots of people hid their true natures behind fund-raisers and winning smiles, Mab Monroe being the prime example. But I was good at reading people, even on paper, and there was nothing in the file to suggest Giles needed or had the desire to steal. He just didn’t seem greedy or desperate enough.
    I flipped back to the part that detailed Giles’s spending habits. You could tell a lot about a man from his vices, and they’d helped me get close to more than a few of my targets. Hookers seemed to be Giles’s main expenditure. At least once a week, he dropped several thousand bucks on the girls at Northern Aggression, an upscale nightclub that would service any need, desire, or addiction you had. Sex, drugs, blood, a combination of all three. Hmm. Finn and I might have to pay Roslyn Phillips a visit at the club and see what she knew.
    It was a long shot, but maybe Giles had told one of Roslyn’s hookers something, had whispered some sweet bit of nothing into her ear that might lead me to his killer.
    Information was power, and more importantly, leverage. I didn’t like blackmail, thought of it as the basest form of arm-twisting, but I’d stoop to it if it got us out of this mess. And then, in a couple of days or weeks or months, when the Air elemental thought our agreement was holding and everything was kosher, I’d kill her.
    There was a reason my mother had given me a spider rune. Even as a child, I’d been patient. Able to wait for my turn, for the right moment to speak, hell, even for Christmas to come every year. Somehow I’d always had that sort of internal restraint. I might feel cold rage over Fletcher’s death, but I could control it—no matter how long I had to wait to avenge his murder.
    An hour later, Finn leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head. He sat at the kitchen table, a mug of chicory coffee by his laptop. “According to one of my sources and his credit card receipts, Donovan Caine likes to have lunch every day at the Cake Walk.”
    “That greasy dive over on St. Charles Avenue?” I asked.
    “The one and the same.”
    The Cake Walk was a lot like the Pork Pit—a hole-in-the-wall gin joint that served better food than Ashland’s five-star restaurants. The Cake Walk specialized in desserts, along with soups, sandwiches, and iced tea so sweet you could grit the sugar in it between your teeth. It was close to the community college, and I’d eaten there several times. Too much mayo in the chicken salad for my taste.
    Using my own laptop, I googled the restaurant, pulling up all the information I could find. The Cake Walk sat across from one of the quads that ringed the edge of the community college and fronted a busy four-lane street that cut through downtown. My eyes studied an online map showing the restaurant and other landmarks.
    “Get me the blueprints of the restaurant and some better maps of the area,” I told Finn.
    He nodded, dialed a number on one of my disposable cell phones, and spoke to someone in low tones. A few minutes later, Finn flashed me a thumbs-up sign and hung up.
    “Being e-mailed to me straight from the city planner’s office,” he said.
    I raised an eyebrow. “City planner’s office? Not your usual