Free Whiskey Sour by Liliana Hart Page A

and flawless. Her dark eyes stared sightlessly and were filmed over with a cloudy substance, and her arms and legs were splayed at an odd angle. She was nude, so the single gaping slash across her throat stood out all the more grotesquely.
    “Up close and personal,” Nick observed dispassionately. “Who is she?”
    “Her name is Amanda Whitfield. A twenty-year old undergrad at Emory. She comes from a white-collar family, and on the surface she’s everything a normal college girl should be. With the exception that she turned up dead in a suite at the Ritz two days ago, and underneath her body was a diamond of the first water, and an exact match for one of the stones the Russian courier brought over.”
    “How do you know that?” I asked.
    “All of the gems were museum quality goods, and they’ve all been marked with a serial number invisible to the eye.”
    “Handy,” I said.
    “So Amanda Whitfield wasn’t who everyone thought she was,” Kate said, looking at the picture more closely.
    “Why would you say that?” I asked. One thing I always noticed about cops was that they immediately thought the worst of everyone, with the theory being that people always had something to hide. “Maybe she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
    “Nice college girls d on’t end up murdered in a three-thousand dollar a night suite, surrounded by enough sexual paraphernalia to start their own business, and lying on top of stolen gems,” Savage explained. “But if I told you she was a high-priced call girl, the picture starts to make a little more sense.”
    “You could’ve just said that in the first place,” I grumbled.
    So I had a lot to learn in private detective school. Sue me. Savage grinned at me and I narrowed my eyes in his direction. A pretty face would only get him so far.
    “What did her financials say?” Kate asked.
    “That she was very popular in her profession. She received direct deposits of $25,000 every two weeks for the past year and a half. She was barely eighteen when she started.”
    “Was it traceable?” I asked and everyone turned to look in my direction. “What, I’m not allowed to ask questions?”
    Nick winked at me and turned back to look at Savage, and I was so distracted by the uncharacteristic display of affection I’d completely forgotten the question by the time it was answered.
    “It took some digging, ” Savage said, “but the money has been traced back to a company known as Sirin Incorporated. It has its fingers in a lot of pies—”
    I snorted out a laugh at the unintended pun —you know, call girls and fingers and pies—and cleared my throat. “Sorry,” I said. “Please continue.”
    “And it’s the parent company for Sirin Escorts ,” he said as if I hadn’t interrupted. “I haven’t gotten any names as far as who its Board of Directors are, but the one name that kept popping up in conjunction with the company was a woman named Natalie Evans. She’s listed as CEO and president.”
    Savage tossed another photograph out on the table and we all looked at the most stunning redhead I’d ever seen.
    “Natalie is a forty-eight year old divorcee with no children and an unlimited bank account. She has connections from A-list Hollywood all the way to the White House. She pays for her girls to be educated, most of them getting advanced degrees in things like political science or international business so they can be well informed on different issues, and she also requires they be given lessons in etiquette and languages. The girls have to be in top physical condition, and according to the official propaganda of the company, sleeping with clients is grounds for termination.”
    “Damn, maybe I should be an escort,” Kate said.
    I was thinking the same thing. “That woman does not look forty-eight.”
    “I need to moisturize more,” Kate added.
    “Women are so strange,” Nick said. “This woman is the Heidi Fleiss of the South and all you can talk about