Trigger: Day 18

Word Count: 108,001

Summary of Events:

Armed with the possible addresses that could be the Billionaire Queen's house, Spencer went to the north side to see if he could find her house. Unfortunately, most of the houses appeared to have families or couples, and there were multiple empty houses, reminding him that it was vacation season, thus his idea of determining the empty house to be hers wouldn't work. He then headed downtown to the casino her boyfriend — whose name he learned was Brody — worked at and managed to discreetly take him aside for interrogation that dragged out far longer than Spencer had expected . . . 

Excerpt of the Day:

Both of them jumped at a loud sound. Brody quickly pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. It was ringing. He snatched it from Brody before it could be returned to the pocket and turned it to look at him.

On the screen was the smiling face of the Billionaire Queen. In narrow, sans-serif white text across her forehead was half the information he was looking for: Rylie.

“How fortuitous of her,” he smiled. “What’s the last name?”

“I don’t know,” Brody replied, shaking his head and looking pretty honest — not to mention James didn’t say anything suggested he was lying.

He glanced down at the cell phone as the ringing stopped and the call was sent to voicemail. After a few moments the screen went dark. He carefully turned it on and then manipulated Brody’s forefinger to unlock the phone and take him to the contacts.

As Brody had said, Rylie was only in there by her first name, and no indication was given there or in the steamy texts they’d exchanged as to what her surname was, or might be.

Shutting off the phone, he shoved it into Brody’s pocket.

“You have your life, your job, and the honour of having not given away your girlfriend’s name,” he said. “You should be thankful your girlfriend just shot herself in the foot with that call.”

He released Brody, who sagged against the wall wearily.

“I respect you,” he said to Brody, who startled and looked at him with surprise.

“You what?” Brody asked.

“I respect you for not only holding out, especially as long as you did, but not giving in, even if it was thanks to your girlfriend shooting herself in the foot,” he replied. “I got top marks in the interrogation unit by miles. If they wouldn’t have known better everyone at school would’ve believed my dad was a cop. One of my professors even asked me if I wanted to be recommended to the Federal Agency’s Interrogation unit.”

Brody stared at him with incredulity, but said nothing. He turned and headed off down the alley, leaping onto a nearby roof from another friendly dumpster and heading off for home. He had a first name and — hopefully — a cell phone number. 

Hopefully a search of the phone book would yield her surname. If not, there was always the fact that her name was usually spelled Riley, thus the fact that she had it spelled Rylie would narrow down the search significantly, wherever it was he happened to choose to search for such details tomorrow afternoon.