Chasing Daybreak

  ***

  The account number wasn’t in the file, but there was a receipt from a motel that used the old card slides. Using that number, I called the company and got an e-mail of the recent charges. Lisa had used the card to pay for lunch with her sister, but that was the last charge. There was also no record of who’d ordered the card, but I did get the billing address. A law firm downtown.

  Also in the file was an accounting of what Lisa was being paid and the reduction of debt owed by her husband. Almost every penny from her illicit activities was going to pay off a fifty-thousand-dollar debt Robert Welch owed to a bookie referred to only as 360.

  I dug back into Robert Welch’s police file. Robert worked as an accountant for the law firm of Morris, King, and Deford. The name seemed familiar. Flipping back to the file from Xavier, I discovered why—a memo regarding a potential client for Lisa, a Judge Harris. It suggested that compromising photographs of said judge might be helpful in passing state legislation regarding a vampire registry bill, one of the many ideas circulating in congress.

  The memo was on Morris, King, and Deford stationery. And the icing on the cake? Lisa’s credit card bills were being sent to M, K, and D.

  A quick search confirmed the Council had ties inside the law firm, so many in fact, that I was beginning to believe the entire firm was a front for Council activities. I’d always believed that lawyers were blood-sucking demons. Now I had proof.

  So Robert was working for the company responsible for coercing his wife into a life of prostitution. His alibi for the time she went missing was airtight. But was that by design? I was beginning to suspect that the grieving husband knew more than he was admitting.