She pulled out her wallet and handed him her ID.
It was a perfectly legitimate-looking California driver’s license. He checked the back. She was right. Whoever had done this had been a master at his craft. “Okay. This guy seems to be good.”
Her nose wrinkled in that way that let him know she was annoyed with him. “Girl. Woman. She’s excellent. She typically works with women running from abusive relationships. She helps them get away when everything else fails. Charged me ten times what she normally does. I paid it happily because I happen to know she also does it for free when a woman has no money.”
Ah, there was the girl he remembered. He handed back her fake ID. “Now why don’t you tell me why you need a fake ID? Who are you trying to evade?”
She sat back, weariness apparent in her every move. All she seemed to have with her was that backpack. She set it on the floor at her feet. “My boss. Something’s happening at Byrne Corp.”
“Okay.” He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and quickly dashed off a text to both Ian and his partner Alex McKay requesting a meeting. “I’ll get you into the morning conference. At McKay-Taggart we have a morning conference three times a week where we can present cases for consideration. Can you explain it all there? We can go over it in the morning, but they’ll need a complete rundown of what you suspect is happening so we can come up with the right team.”
Her eyes had widened. “Team?”
“Yeah, you need an investigative team, right?” He was already thinking about how he would handle the meeting. He would need to make certain Big Tag understood this was about more than just his dick because Big Tag was definitely going to accuse him of that. “That’s why you came to me. Are you in immediate danger? I can make sure you’re safe here tonight, but we’ll hire an extra guard if you need protection twenty-four seven.”
“I don’t think anyone knows what I’m doing. I don’t have friends at the office, so I haven’t talked to anyone about it. I know I seem paranoid, but I’m only being careful. The project is at a delicate stage, so I think caution is a good thing. I know something’s wrong, but I can’t get to the system I need in order to figure out what’s happening.” She yawned again. “But I didn’t come here to hire McKay-Taggart. I’ll figure this out on my own. I need you to…this sounds so stupid.”
Ah, so they were getting back to that one little word that had shaken his world. “Just say it.”
She seemed to steel herself. “Okay. But it is stupid. It’s…I needed to get closer to Nolan and I found out that he was interested in certain topics and liked to talk about them.”
Damn it. “Let me guess. BDSM? Nolan Byrne is in the lifestyle?”
She seemed to consider how to reply. “No. He’s interested in the lifestyle. He’s a weird guy. He goes through these phases, and then he tends to surround himself with people who are similarly minded. Like a couple of years ago he was completely obsessed with competitive biking. Suddenly no one was driving to work. They were all biking and wore the worst shorts. It was not a good time to be there. Chess was a good year of his life. The breakrooms were covered with dudes playing chess. Often it’s because he’s seen some movie or read a book that catches his imagination. Everyone knows that one way to move onto whatever team Nolan’s interested in is to talk about his favorite subject of the moment.”
“He openly talks about his sex life?”
She shook her head. “Oh, no. This one is kind of a secret. I was reading a book about BDSM and his assistant caught me, and she was the one who mentioned he was trying to get into a club. Not just any club. Apparently there are many around the LA area, but he wants access to the one in Malibu.”
He knew it well. He had a couple of friends who played there. “The Reef?”
Her eyes widened. “It’s true. You are a BDSM guy. BDSM person.”
“We tend to prefer to call ourselves Doms or tops.” He remembered his recent mistake. “I personally identify as a Dom. Many men are subs or bottoms. Same for women and nonbinary people.”
A brow rose over her eyes. “That’s awfully forward thinking for a guy from Calhoun, California.”
“I’ve learned a lot over the years. You’ll find I’m pretty open to whatever makes a person feel happy and complete. Especially when it doesn’t affect me in any way. I can only truly understand my own experience. If a man feels wrong in his body and feels better as a woman, who the hell am I to say he’s wrong. How does her happiness make the world a worse place?” BDSM had smoothed so many of his edges, teaching him to not merely tolerate differences, but to find joy in them. He now had friends of all kinds. “So why were you reading about BDSM?”