An Offer You Can't Refuse by Sal Bianchi (best beach reads .txt) 📕

to interrupt your fun, we need to go over the data I managed to pull off of the USB.”

“It’s fine,” Nick replied as he shoved our things back across the table at us. “What did you find?”

“Well, a lot of it was corrupted,” he sighed. “Probably from when you yanked it out of the port before it finished.”

“Sorry,” Nick muttered. “I was trying to hurry before--”

He cut himself off and glanced at Roland. Of course, very few people were actually privy to the details about what Nick did as a part of his job. Roland especially would be clueless considering he’d just started here.

“Right,” Stein cleared his throat. “In any case, I wasn’t able to find anything directly relating to his father, but I did discover that he made a very large withdrawal from his bank about a month before his father died. Exactly five thousand dollars.”

“He had that much?” I frowned in confusion. “I thought the whole issue was that his dad had cut him off.”

“It was nearly everything he had,” Stein confirmed. “At least, it was, before he received the inheritance money. It completely cleaned out his bank account, and according to the bank records, he was even in the negative for a few weeks before the inheritance money came in.”

“So he took all the money out of his account,” Nick reiterated. “Even though he was left with nothing to pay his bills, and this all coincidentally happened a month before Carlisle Rutherford was found dead? Seems pretty suspect.”

“It does.” Stein nodded. “There was something else, too. I managed to recover a deleted email. It was a bit a miracle, to be honest, considering how corrupted the files were, but it was still there. It was from a throwaway account. You know, one of those services that will generate a onetime use email and hide your location behind a proxy. Anyway, the email only contained an address and a time.”

“Was there anything significant about the address?” I asked impatiently. Stein was a brilliant information analyst, but he had a tendency to ramble and meander on his way to the point of whatever it was he wanted to say. Though it was probably hypocritical of me to complain, considering my own tendency to space out and get distracted.

“There was.” Stein nodded again. “The address is for a bakery here in Miami, and two months ago, one of the employees there was found dead in the bakery’s kitchen.”

“What?” I gasped. “Are you kidding me? First Ryan and now Shane? How do these cases keep leading to other murders?”

“Well, that’s for you boys to find out,” Stein replied. “I’ve already forwarded the information to your tablet. The body was found early in the morning by a man named Chris Davis. According to the report he gave the police, he discovered her body early in the morning before the store was even opened. Apparently, she was the keyholder at the time and went in half an hour early every morning to start the ovens.”

“Did the police look into him?” Nick asked.

“They did,” Stein replied. “It was easy to rule him out in this case since the security camera caught footage of the killer. Unfortunately, he was wearing a hood, and it was still early enough in the morning that it was too hard to make out fine details. The camera footage shows a man entering the store just a few minutes after the victim, Josie Keller. He leaves a few moments later, and ten minutes pass before Chris arrives, but he has a completely different height and build.”

“Can we see the security camera footage?” I asked.

“Sure, it’s included in the files I forward to you,” Stein replied.

I pulled my tablet out of my bag and switched it on. Because we handled such sensitive information, we communicated from emails that could only be accessed through our personal tablets, and we could only unlock those tablets via a fingerprint scan. Once it was open, I quickly scanned through the email Stein had sent me until I found the video file. I set the tablet on the table so that Nick could see it too, and I could see Roland pointedly looking away while fiddling on something with his phone. Since he worked here, it really wasn’t a big deal if he watched it too, but it was kind of funny watching the rookie awkwardly try to figure out what he should be doing.

Just as Stein had described, the video began with a young woman approaching the bakery and unlocking it before going inside. I grimaced as I watched the footage. She looked like she was still just a teenager. It was a tragedy anytime anyone was murdered, of course, but it always seemed especially awful when it was a kid just starting out their life.

I continued to watch the clip until the suspect appeared. Even though it was the middle of summer, he was wearing a heavy black puffer coat with the hood up. Honestly, that in and of itself was so suspicious in the height of summer in Miami that it was amazing to me that no one had come forward with any information about it.

It was early enough that the first rays of sunlight were barely beginning to illuminate the sky, so it was impossible to make out the killer’s features beneath his hood. Because of the puffy coat, I couldn’t even say with certainty whether the suspect was male or female, but judging by their height and the width of their shoulders, it was much more likely that it was a man. I watched as he looked up and down the street casually before moving forward to unlock the door. That time of the morning was probably when there were the least people on the boardwalk. The previous night’s party-goers would have already stumbled home, vacationers would probably still be sleeping in, and even most of the locals wouldn’t be heading to work for another hour or so.

“Wait,” I exclaimed as