When a wealthy donor drops dead at her charity gala, Fox Theater fundraiser Bunny Beaudoin finds herself thrust into a murder investigation that threatens everything she’s built. Teaming up with enigmatic private investigator Dash O’Neill, Bunny discovers the victim was poisoned—and he’s not the killer’s first target. As bodies pile up and the theater’s reputation hangs in the balance, Bunny and Dash navigate a web of secrets, lies, and dangerous attraction. Between dodging a suspicious police chief and uncovering a conspiracy that reaches the highest levels of Magnolia Heights society, Bunny must decide how far she’s willing to go for justice—and whether she can trust the mysterious man who’s stolen her heart. In a world where everyone has something to hide, the deadliest secret might be falling in love with your partner in crime.
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The response came immediately.
Agios Clinics. Ring a bell?
Bunny’s thumb flew across the screen.
Oh, yes, absolutely. Right next to my favorite supplement company and that one weird juice bar that claims to cure mortality. Of course that doesn’t ring a bell!
She sent it, then immediately regretted the snark. Her phone buzzed again before she could type an apology.
???
Sorry. I’m sorry. That was rude. Cashler really got under my skin. What’s Agios Clinics?
Forgiven, She couldn’t help but smile at her phone, Meet me at my office. There are some things you need to see.
Bunny stared at the screen, the fluorescent lights of the building cloaking each shadow in institutional despair. Her hands were still shaking slightly from the conversation with Cashler, and now Dash wanted her to look at more evidence, more threads, more pieces of a puzzle that seemed to grow more complex every time they thought they were close to understanding it.
She typed back quickly.
How soon?
Now would be good.
Bunny pocketed her phone and the seed packet together, feeling their combined weight like a talisman against whatever was coming next. The elevator ride down felt longer than it should have, each floor passing with agonizing slowness as her mind replayed Cashler’s words. By the time she reached Dusty in the parking lot, she’d already run through everything she could imagine about what Dash might have found. No conclusion was good. She gunned the engine harder than necessary, tires squealing slightly as she pulled out onto the main road. The city rolled past her windows. Familiar streets that suddenly felt foreign, ordinary buildings that might contain extraordinary secrets.
Her phone rang through the car’s speakers. Dash’s name lit up the screen.
“I’m five minutes away,” She said by way of greeting, “What’s Agios Clinics?”
“It’s better if I show you.”
His voice carried a tension she recognized from the night they’d broken into Glen’s mansion. The sound of someone who’d uncovered something they wished they hadn’t.
“Dash—”
“Five minutes, Bunny. Just get here.”
The line went dead. She pressed harder on the accelerator, running a yellow light that was closer to red than she’d admit.
O’Neill Investigations looked exactly as worn and ordinary as it always did, but now Bunny saw it differently. Saw how unremarkable it was, how easily overlooked. The perfect place for someone who needed to disappear into the background of the city’s daily commerce. She took the stairs two at a time, her heels clicking against the concrete in a rhythm that matched her racing pulse.
Dash’s office door stood open. He sat at his desk, surrounded by papers spread across every available surface: printouts, photographs, what looked like medical records with certain passages highlighted in yellow. His laptop screen glowed with a document she couldn’t quite make out from the doorway. He looked up as she entered, and the expression on his face made her stomach drop.
“Tell me,” She said, closing the door behind her, “Whatever it is, just tell me.”
“Something isn’t quite right with our little ‘trustworthy’ friend,” He said without preamble.
Bunny felt the exhaustion of a million years descend on her shoulders.
“I know. I just came from seeing her and… God, I feel like an idiot. She was so nice at first, showing me her plants, talking about gardening like we were two people having coffee. And I bought it. All of it.”
She moved to the chair across from his desk, sinking into it.
“I trusted her just because she had a medical degree and seemed professional. Because she was helpful…” Her shoulders slumped, “I thought that meant something.”
“Don’t beat yourself up too much,” Dash said, though his voice remained grim, “She’s had a lot of practice making people trust her. That’s how cons work. They find what you want to believe, and they show it to you.”
He gestured to the papers spread across his desk.
“After you left this morning, something kept niggling at me. Call it instinct, but I didn’t buy the whole ‘good cop/bad cop’ thing she had going on with Lancaster. You know, she was all reasonable, the one who got nuance, while Lancaster bulldozed through. Which isn’t wrong, necessarily. Lancaster busts balls. But,” He paused, “It just felt too practiced. Too smooth.”
“So you went digging.”
“I went digging. And I found something,” He picked up a printout and handed it to her, “Agios Clinics. Registered as a pain management facility. Opened four years ago in a medical plaza on the east side. Small operation—just a couple of exam rooms, a receptionist, basic setup. Nothing fancy.”
Bunny scanned the document. Incorporation papers with Dr. Elaine Cashler’s name listed as the primary physician and owner.
“Cashler has a private practice? That’s not unusual. Tons of medical examiners do consulting work on the side.”
“It would be fine,” Dash agreed, “If that’s what she was actually doing.”
He pulled up something on his laptop, turned the screen so she could see rows and rows of patient names, prescription numbers, dates.
“I have a contact who works in pharmaceutical fraud investigation. He’s been tracking pill mill operations in the Southeast for the past five years. Agios Clinics has been on their radar for three years.”
Bunny’s eyes scanned the spreadsheet, trying to make sense of what she was seeing.
“Pill mill?”
“A sham clinic that exists primarily to write prescriptions for opioids. Patients pay cash, usually a couple hundred dollars, see the doctor for maybe five minutes, walk out with a script for OxyContin or fentanyl. Then they either use it themselves or sell it on the street.”
He scrolled down, showing her page after page of prescriptions written by Dr. Elaine Cashler. The sheer volume of them made Bunny’s stomach turn.
“Jesus. How many?”
“Thousands. Over the course of three years, she wrote prescriptions for over forty thousand pills. Most of them to patients who saw her multiple times a month, every month. Like clockwork.”
Bunny looked at the names. John Smith. Jane Allen. Michael Johnson. Mary Williams. Generic, forgettable, probably fake.
“Why hasn’t she been arrested?”
“Because she’s careful. Really careful,” Dash pulled up another document, “Look at the pattern. She never writes scripts that are quite high enough to trigger automatic flags. She spreads the prescriptions across multiple pharmacies. She varies the dosages just enough to make it look legitimate. And most importantly—” He tapped the screen, “She only takes cash. No insurance billing. No paper trail connecting her to Medicare fraud. Just patients paying out of pocket for ‘pain management consultations.’”
“But someone must have noticed? The DEA, the medical board, someone?” The desperation in her voice thinly veiled a twinge of fear. Rising panic in Bunny’s throat that felt as sharp as a dagger.
“They did. Three years ago, the state medical board opened an investigation,” Dash handed her another printout, “But before it could go anywhere, Agios Clinics closed. Cashler claimed financial difficulties, dissolved the corporation, and moved all the medical records to a storage facility that conveniently flooded six months later. Everything destroyed. No evidence.”
Bunny stared at the papers in her hands, pieces clicking together with sickening clarity.
“So she got away with it.”
“She got away with it,” Dash’s tone was stark, “And then a year later, Glen Valentino and his associates started dying from belladonna poisoning. Which brings me to the interesting part.”
He pulled out another document.
“Guess who was one of Cashler’s most frequent visitors at Agios Clinics?”
Bunny already knew. She could feel it in the way the air had changed, in the way Dash was looking at her.
“Glen Valentino.”
“Not just Glen. Maurice Katz. Catherine Winters. Harold Finch,” Dash tapped each name on the screen, “But they weren’t coming as patients.”
Bunny rolled her tongue in her mouth, searching for clues somewhere in Dash’s face.
“They were coming as…?”
“As investors.”
Investors? Bunny thought, leaning closer to the screen.
“Small stakes, initially. Cashler pitched Agios as a legitimate pain management clinic serving an underserved community. Glen brought in his usual circle: his lawyers, his CFO, his business partner. They each put in fifty thousand, enough to get the operation off the ground.”
He pulled up another document, this one showing a corporate structure chart.
“For the first year, everything looked legitimate on paper. The clinic showed modest profits, reasonable patient volume. I can’t be sure about it since the guy is dead, but my bets are on Glen asking too many questions. I mean, it makes sense, right?”
Dash took one look at Bunny’s consternation and pushed forward.
“His pharmaceutical background meant he understood prescribing patterns, what normal looked like versus what didn’t.”
She raised her eyebrows in concession.
“And so he figured out what she was really doing.”
“More than that. He started documenting it,” He gestured at the mess of papers around him, “Katz helped him, pulling together evidence from the financial records, patient logs, everything they could access as investors.”
He pulled the laptop closer, scrolling through pages of notes.
“Winters discovered financial irregularities first. Look.”
He pointed at a scanned PDF document with sharp scribbles in the margin.
“It’s kind of hard to read—”
“You’re telling me.”
Dash looked up at her, cracking a wry smile before fixing his features into the severity she’d become accustomed to.
How is he allowed to be handsome under these conditions?
“It says that the money coming in didn’t match the declared patient visits. Cash deposits that were too regular, too large.”
“So they were going to expose her.”
“They were. Katz had already drafted a formal complaint to the medical board. Winters had flagged the financial records for an audit. And Finch. Fucking Finch,” The PI sighed jadedly, “Here, lemme just show you.”
Dash pulled up an email chain that made Bunny’s stomach twist into tighter knots.
“Harold was scheduled to go on discovery once Glen’s lawyers filed the case and served papers. He was going to lay out everything they’d gathered about the ‘clinic,’” He cupped the last word in air quotes, “But he was also already two-timing Glen with the federal investigation. Finch had a real axe to grind. He was an easy target, and everybody already kind of hated him.”
“For trying to do the right thing.” Bunny’s voice rose in protestation, but it sounded feeble even to her own ears.
“Yeah, that doesn’t seem to get you very far in these circles,” Dash countered, twirling a pen around his middle finger, “Snitches still get stiches.”
The office felt smaller suddenly, the walls pressing in. Bunny set down the papers, her hands shaking slightly.
“She killed all of them. Everyone who knew.”
“Everyone who could testify. Everyone who had enough evidence to destroy her.”
Bunny stood, needing to move, needing to do something with the energy cracking through her body.
“But why would she risk it? She’s the medical examiner. She’s the one doing the autopsies. Wouldn’t killing people just draw attention to herself?”
“Kind of. That’s the part I can’t figure out,” Dash continued, and Bunny could feel the wall of frustration that he was bucking up against, “Technically, it could shield her if she feigned genuine ignorance of the circumstances. Maybe she thought her position would shield her. That no one would question the medical examiner’s findings. But it’s still risky. She’s smart. Too smart.”
“Or too arrogant.” Bunny offered. Dash shrugged.
“Yeah, or that.”
Bunny paced to the window again, her mind racing through possibilities. Then she turned back to face him, ready to pivot.
“What about Fenelope? We still haven’t figured out how she fits into all of this. The paint at Glen’s house, her access to the mansion, the way she’s been acting—”
She stopped mid-sentence.
The mask.
The memory hit her like a punch in the stomach. Mickey on stage at the gala, his voice booming across the Egyptian Room: “For the art lovers, our first item is a miniature sized replica of the Mask of Pakal. A stunning hand-crafted mask made of genuine jadeite jade.”
And then, much later, standing in Glen’s gallery with Lancaster, staring at the empty alcove. The pedestal where something had been removed. Something heavy enough to crack a skull. Something valuable enough to display but small enough to conceal.
“Oh my God.”
Dash straightened immediately, recognizing the shift in her voice.
“What? What is it?”
“The mask. At the gala. The first auction item was a jade mask. Small, heavy. Made of jadeite,” The words came faster now, tumbling over each other as the pieces clicked into place, “And at Glen’s house, in the gallery, right where we found the blood, remember? There was an empty alcove. The only empty one in the entire gallery.”
Dash’s brow furrowed.
“Okay. So… Glen somehow had a jade mask that went missing. What does that—”
“No, listen. What if it wasn’t just decorative? What if that’s how Cashler was moving the pills?” Bunny could hear how crazy it sounded even as she said it, but the pieces were falling together too perfectly to ignore.
“A jade mask—hollow inside. Heavy enough that a little extra weight wouldn’t be noticeable. Valuable enough to pass through customs, through security, without anyone questioning it too closely. You said she was careful, right? That she spread prescriptions across multiple pharmacies?”
“Yeah, but—”
“But she still needed a way to move large quantities without raising red flags. Cash payments, fake patients, that only works if she’s also got a distribution network. And what better way to transport pills than in an art piece?”
Bunny grabbed his arm.
“Think about it. Glen was an investor. He probably provided the mask as part of the operation. Something from his personal collection that could be used for transport. And when he figured out what they were really doing, when he threatened to expose them—”
“They had to get rid of the evidence,” Dash was following her logic now, even though skepticism still clung to his expression, “The mask ties Cashler directly to the operation.”
“And to Glen’s death. If we can prove the mask was used for smuggling. I-if there’s any trace of the pills inside it—”
“That’s a lot of ifs, Bunny,” He ran a hand over his head, “You’re talking about a pretty elaborate smuggling operation based on an empty alcove and a coincidental auction item.”
“I know how it sounds. But everything else about this case has been elaborate and careful and calculated. Why would the mask be different?”
She could feel the urgency thrumming through her veins.
“Dash, we’re running out of time. Cashler knows I was asking questions. If she realizes we’re getting close, she’ll disappear. The mask might be our only physical evidence.”
Dash stared at her for a long moment, clearly weighing the odds of this wild theory against the very real possibility that they were wasting precious time chasing shadows.
“The auction records.” He said finally.
“Would be at the Fox. In the event files.”
They stared at each other for a split second, the weight of the revelation settling between them. Dash grabbed his jacket and Bunny snatched her purse from where she’d dropped it.
“This is a crazy hunch.” He said, already at the door.
“I know.”
“If you’re wrong—”
“Then we figure something else out. But if I’m right…”
He shoved his hands in his pocket and shook his head, throwing her another smile.
“If you’re right, you might as well take my badge and license, Ms. Beaudoin.”
They hit the stairs at a run, Bunny’s heels clattering against concrete as they descended. The afternoon had shifted toward evening, the light outside going golden and long. Dash’s Ford sat in the small lot behind the building, and the two barely paused as they slid into the front seats. The engine roared to life as Dash pulled into traffic with enough force to make Bunny grip the door handle. The Fox was eight minutes away.
He made it in five.
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The service entrance stood in the shadow, the evening dusk taking over what little light was left in the day. Dash killed the engine and they sat for a moment.
“Ready?” He asked.
Bunny looked at the theater. Her theater, the place she’d dedicated years of her life to preserving and protecting. The place where Harold Finch had died. Where a killer had walked among the donors and champagne and beautiful things, hiding in plain sight.
“Let’s go.”
The heavy door swung open to reveal the familiar service corridor, but transformed by absence. No contractors shouting measurements. No staff rushing past with clipboards. Just the hum of the building’s mechanical systems and the hollow echo of their footsteps against linoleum.
“Administrative offices are on the second floor.” Bunny whispered, though there was no one to hear them.
They moved through the corridor, past the closed doors of the staff break rooms and storage closets. The emergency exit signs glowed a sickly green, turning the wood paneling cold and alien. Bunny had been in the Fox after hours before, but never like this. Never with the weight of what they were looking for pressing down on her shoulders.
The service stairs opened onto the second floor hallway, darker than the one below. The windows here faced east, away from the setting sun, and the administrative offices had been designed for function rather than the grand aesthetic of the public spaces. They passed Carol’s empty desk, her computer monitor dark, a half-finished cup of coffee sitting beside her keyboard like she’d just stepped away for a moment and would be right back.
“Here.”
Bunny stopped at a door marked EVENT COORDINATION. She tried the handle.
Locked.
Dash pulled something from his pocket. A slim leather case she recognized from their break-in at Glen’s mansion. He selected two picks and went to work on the lock with practiced efficiency. The click seemed impossibly loud in the empty hallway. Inside, the office was exactly as lifeless as the rest of the building. Two desks, filing cabinets, a printer that blinked with some error message in the darkness. Bunny moved to the nearest cabinet, trying drawer after drawer until she found one labeled “Annual Gala – Current Year.”
“Got it.”
She pulled out a thick folder, brought it to one of the desks where a window let in just enough twilight to see by. Dash positioned himself near the filing cabinets, hid back to the door, pulling out his phone to provide additional light. The building settled around them with creaks and groans. Old bones adjusting to the shift from day to night. Somewhere far below, the HVAC system kicked on with a mechanical wheeze.
Bunny’s fingers flew through the folder. Vendor contracts. Catering invoices. Seating charts she’d labored over for weeks. And finally, auction records. Her eyes scanned the pages, looking for lot number one.
“Mask of Pakal replica. Starting bid two thousand,” She read quietly, tracing her finger down to the final sale, “Sold for eight thousand five hundred—”
The name made her breath catch.
“Dash.”
He moved closer, leaning over her shoulder to see better in the dim light. They stared at the buyer’s name, the implications spreading outward like cracks in ice.
Then, a sound echoed from somewhere in the building. Footsteps, maybe. Or just the old theater settling into the evening.
Bunny’s hands stilled on the paper.
“Did you hear that?”
Another sound. Closer now. Definitely footsteps, coming up the service stairs they’d just used.
“Someone’s here.” Dash whispered.
The footsteps grew louder, methodical, unhurried. Moving down the hallway toward them. Bunny and Dash stood frozen at the desk, the auction records still spread before them, their backs to the door. The folder suddenly felt like evidence, like guilt made tangible.
The footsteps stopped.
Right outside the office.
Bunny’s breath caught in her throat. The silence stretched, broken only by the mechanical hum of the building and the rush of blood in her ears. Through the darkness, she could feel Dash tense beside her, could sense him calculating distances, exits, possibilities.
Shit.
The door was still open. They’d left it open.
A shadow fell across the threshold, someone standing just beyond the frame. Waiting. Listening. Bunny’s fingers gripped the edge of the desk, her whole body rigid with the effort of staying perfectly still. Maybe if they didn’t move, didn’t breathe, whoever it was would—
Click.
A different sound than that of a lock opening.
The distinct metallic click of a gun being cocked shattered the silence.