So Wright (The Wrights 1)

Jack’s mind was already tripping over connections. “You think they’re being transported by personal vehicles?”

“I do.” Klein glanced up and down the street before looking at Jack again. “Construction workers often work side jobs, right? And contractors are always looking to cut their costs. A lot of guys won’t ask or care where the discounted supply comes from. Especially not if they’ve worked with the guy offering those supplies.”

“I know a guy who knows a guy,” Jack said.

“Who’s got a brother-uncle-cousin…” Klein continued.

“That’ll be hard to prove,” Jack said. “We don’t have surveillance cameras on the employees’ parking lot.”

“But you have them here.” He gestured toward the building. “And whoever is picking up these supplies would have to bring their vehicles onto the property to load up. I’ve been working my way through the footage, getting makes and models of vehicles on-site. There hasn’t been much after-hours traffic, which means—”

Jack’s focus narrowed on Klein. “They’re stealing it in broad daylight. Right in fucking front of us.”

“Maybe. I’m trying to match the makes and models of vans and trucks seen on the site’s surveillance cameras to company and employee vehicles.”

“That might nail the people buying the supplies, but it won’t nail Alex.”

“Those employees are going to want to roll on their food source for a lighter sentence. This happens in the drug trade all the time. A fabricator sells to a major player who sells to street punks who sells to a user. The user rolls on the seller who rolls on the major player. We have to start at the bottom and work our way toward the top to nail Alex. That’s how we’ll ultimately get him. How he’ll serve time.”

Jack shook his head. “I knew that bastard didn’t fall far from his rotten tree.” Jack’s fists were clenched so hard, his fingers ached. “I want every last fucker involved.” He looked at Klein. “How many other bad apples have we got?”

“Right now, I’m focused on tracing half a dozen employees. In the end, you’ll probably only have enough evidence to prosecute one or two.”

“Fine. I just want this cleared up and a direct message delivered to the employees. My dad’s going to have a clean slate when he gets back to work.”

16

Miranda twisted and stretched into an impossibly crazy angle to make a weld at the corner of two freshly set beams. She felt like a sloth, slinking along the underside of a metal I beam on the twenty-sixth floor of the newest office building to grace the Nashville skyline, hooked into a harness that pulled on her in all the wrong places.

It would have been a lot more comfortable if Jack hadn’t worked her over inch by luscious inch last night. She’d left his bed mere hours ago and was cursing herself both for going at it so hard on a work night and staying to fall asleep in his arms.

Her heart fluttered at the memory. Then a steel beam swayed past her as the crane operator wrangled it toward another steelworker, reminding Miranda she couldn’t afford to be distracted up here.

Weld done, she righted herself and let her blood settle before she shimmied along the beam until she reached the next weld point. She and a few ironworkers were the only crew members working on this floor today. There were no walls, just a slowly assembling skeleton.

Once she welded the top of the beam, she swung to the underside and started again. Sometimes these welds required moves worthy of a circus act.

“Randy.”

She heard Alex yelling at her but didn’t look away from her work until the weld was complete. As the project expediter, Alex managed the flow of all supplies to the building site. He was also the son of one of the partners. He was a couple of years older than Miranda, but they’d been in high school at the same time. They hadn’t been friends then, but they’d grown on each other since she’d been hired. They’d risen through the company side by side, Miranda on the site, Alex in management. Alex had gone to bat for her whenever there was an opportunity for promotion or a pay raise. And she knew him well enough to know that the tight set of his shoulders now signaled trouble.

After righting herself, she looked his direction. He had his head down, his gaze on a clipboard in his hand. She straddled the beam and stretched her back. Her whole body groaned, exhausted from the night before. Damn Jack Taylor. But she smiled.

She lifted her welding mask. “Hey. What’s up?”

Alex glanced over his shoulder toward the stairs, then started up the ladder.

Miranda laughed, incredulous. “You don’t belong on a ladder, Alex. You’re going to get

that pretty suit dirty.”

When his head reached the beam, Alex stopped and met her gaze, his expression sober and frustrated. “The owner’s son is on-site, shaking things up.”

“Owner of what? The building?”

“No, us.” He used the clipboard to point to the floor. “Pinnacle.”

She’d worked for Pinnacle six years, and not in all that time had she seen the company’s owner on a jobsite. But it wasn’t unusual for worker bees to have little to no information about the executives. “Why?”