by Jolie Day
Never before had she felt such huge pleasure at ignoring a warning, as she had today.
Chapter 22
She quickly went to look after her sister before making her way to Connor. Suzanne was sleeping very deeply. Mira pressed Mister Knister into her arm, since she had taken him with her, and wrote a note to Suzanne. “Will be back tomorrow before noon. Don’t worry about me. Kiss, M.” Her stomach was a tight ball of nerves, as she remembered what had happened the last time she had stayed with Connor all night. She promised herself that she would check regularly to see if anybody had tried to get hold of her, and changed her mobile phone mode from silent to vibration. Then she grabbed Suzanne’s car keys, checked in the glove compartment for the car’s insurance papers, where they should be, and then she was finally on her way to meet him.
He opened the door himself. For a second and without saying anything, he looked at her like a starving man. In that same moment, she reached out her arms to him, and he pulled her into his. “No apologies,” Mira whispered and buried her nose into his neck. She felt how his body shook with a silent laugh and then he kissed her gently on the mouth.
“But maybe an explanation?”
She sighed. “I am sure we have a lot to talk about tonight, but I don’t need an explanation for your behavior – which was and is unacceptable,” she said. “However, I do understand that you were worried about me. And rightly so.”
“Which means?” Peter had appeared behind him. He pulled his eyebrows up. “What happened? And why the hell did you ignore all of my phone calls?”
Connor turned towards his friend, but he didn’t let go of Mira. “Let’s go to the living room or better — into the kitchen.” He started to walk and pulled her with him. On the kitchen table stood two big mugs. “Coffee?”
“Sure,” she answered. Connor went and poured some of the brew into a cup before holding it out to Mira. His eyes were dark, almost appearing overcast, and he had forgotten to shave. The notion of his scratchy stubble stroking her naked skin sent tingling shivers down her spine, but she pulled herself together. Now was not the time to indulge in erotic fantasies. “I am sorry that I didn’t get back to you,” she then said and included both men in her statement with one look. “I needed some time to confirm that I can trust both of you. Most likely.”
Peter’s lips twitched, while Connor’s features didn’t even change at all. He had put on his pokerface. “And what, if I may ask, has suddenly convinced you of that?” Even Peter’s voice sounded amused, as if he constantly had to convince people of his seriousness and trustworthiness. No wonder… thought Mira and looked at him with a side-eye. In his worn-out leather jacket, he seemed more like an assassin from some Hollywood movie, than an undercover agent for the government.
“Smart girl,” Peter praised her patronizingly. She looked at him through narrow eyes.
“The smart girl, as you put it, does not yet know whether she should be grateful or angry. Why all this stupid secrecy? And I want to know why you gave Connor a false alibi back then.” None of the men seemed surprised to learn that she knew this important piece of information she had received in George’s email.
Connor placed his hand on her arm in a pacifying way, but he spoke to Peter. “Didn’t I tell you that you would have to watch out with Mira? Where did you hear about Peter’s… let’s say, ‘contribution’ to the case?”
Oh boy. Mira took a deep breath as Connor looked straight at her. This man, who had stolen her heart, was unbelievably arrogant in his own way. Nobody had ever said that you had to fall in love with someone who would make it easy on you, right?
She thought about her mom’s favorite book. In Wuthering Heights, the heroine Cathy loved the orphan boy Heathcliff, who was a dangerous and dark man. It seemed as if she finally understood why this novel was loved by so many women all around the world. It mirrored reality, in a literary way, but nonetheless – love was no walk in the park, especially not in real life.
“Do you remember the email regarding Jack Dumont’s case that George Lacroix wanted to send me before his death? He did send it.” It felt easier for her to use her father’s full name and not constantly think of him as her daddy, her father or her pops. “He mentioned the name of the man who gave you a false alibi, Connor.” She looked at both men directly. Both of them at least had the decency to look slightly embarrassed. “And on top of that, I know how to use the internet and Google.” She shook her head. “Did you guys honestly believe that I would not find out about this sooner or later?” She took a sip of her bitter tasting coffee. “What really annoys me the most,” again she looked at both of them, “is the fact that you both have told me this entire time that I should trust you. And that without providing me with so much as a morsel of proof for the trustworthiness of your allegations.”
“And yet, here you are,” Connor noted. “I am sorry, but the story about our connection is much more complicated than it might look at first glance.”
“I figured as much,” Mira commented dryly. “Did you know each other before the case?”
Connor nodded. “For a few months — we were in the same motorcycle gang,” he explained. Peter wanted to object, but Connor cut him off, before he could. “Mira is right. We cannot demand that she trust us blindly. Now that she is sharing her knowledge with us, we should not keep her in the dark either. She deserves to know the truth.”
“Alright then,” Peter agreed hesitantly. “But do I need to remind you of all people that this decision could literally go very wrong and backfire?”
Connor ignored his friend and spoke directly and only to Mira. “Peter is a few years older than me and a little while ago, he had an undercover mission in that biker club we were both in. Our boss was a heavy dealer and when I heard that, I immediately thought about leaving the club. I guess Peter was impressed by my morale and position on these things, so he asked me if I would rather like to work for the good guys instead.”
“So, you met mom because you wanted to spy on her?”
He nodded, embarrassed, and then he reached across the table to grab her hand. “During the time when I spied on Francesca, there was also another agent inside your father’s company, who was following up a hot lead. My job was literally only to find out if your mother had any kind of knowledge and involvement in the dealings with the Mafia. It was more of a side job. Me and my partner were working on the same case, but we didn’t even know about each other, in order to keep things clean and to prevent mistakes,” Connor explained. He looked deeply into her eyes. “And I cannot tell you how much it hurts me that I had to lie to Francesca.”
“Anyway, this side job turned out to be extremely fruitful — in all honesty, his position turned out to provide much better information than that of the other informant. Which is why our bosses agreed to actually have Connor hired by Dumont Ltd and to do his job on the inside like a real employee — always under the watchful eye of agent number one,” Peter continued Connor’s story. Just like her, he seemed to feel that real feelings were bubbling up underneath Connor’s hard surface and that they could burst out at any minute, so Peter steered the conversation back to the facts.
“And you did find evidence, didn’t you? My father… what was he doing for the Mafia? Was it money laundering?”
Connor nodded. She saw that he swallowed. “I cannot even begin to tell you how much I regret that your father was actually guilty. The only thing that I could do for you and your mother was to prove that Francesca didn’t know anything and also that she was never involved. Back then, I… did something that I very much regret to this day.”
“What was it?” Mira whispered and didn’t dare look away from his face.
“I told Francesca that Jack had been involved in illegal businesses with the mob. At the time, I thought we would be able to convince your father together to testify in an important case as a key witness. Every hour that went by made the situation more and more dangerous. So, I agreed to meet with her that night. She and I
wanted to go and talk to Jack together to convince him to clean up shop and to enter the witness protection program. I was absolutely convinced that we would be able to do it. Jack was not a bad guy, I thought back then. Just someone, who had been caught up in bad business.”
Mira tried to remember the last dinner she had had with her father and her mother. Had there been any clues that she might not have comprehended as a child back then, but which she would be able to understand today as a grown up? You are such a bad hypocrite, she remembered her mother’s voice. Mira even remembered specifically what she had thought then and that she had almost laughed, because she had misunderstood something along the lines of “bad… crier” and wondered, why dad hadn’t been crying.
“What happened then?”
“Francesca told me that she would leave the patio doors open, so that I would be able to watch if there were still business partners in the house with Jack at that time. Francesca and I knew that your father often received shady visitors at night, to take advantage of the protection of darkness. In this case, however, I didn’t want to wait until the coast was clear to then try to talk to Jack.” He got up and brought a bottle of water and three glasses to the table. “I did it anyway. When Jack was finally alone, I knocked and entered the study. He wasn’t even surprised to see me and that was when I knew that something wasn’t right.” Mira held her breath and her heart raced inside her chest. “Jack started to yell at me, calling me a traitor — he really lost it with me. I tried to explain to him that he needed to cut ties with the Mafia if he wanted to save himself or at the very least to save his family. He didn’t listen to me.” Connor stared at a point somewhere far away with a motionless gaze, as he remembered. He told his story as if he had done so a thousand times already — always with the exact same words. “At some point, he finally stopped yelling and then he told me that I should just get the hell out of there. As a favor to his wife, he would give me 24 hours to disappear. Once the time was up, he would tell them that I was a mole and then he said that I could imagine whatever would happen with me afterwards.” He emptied his glass in one big gulp and then he sat back down at the table. Mira saw tiny little beads of sweat on his forehead. “I asked him one last time, but he just shook his head and laughed at me. I remember that I got really angry with him. He sat there and played with the lives of his wife and children as if it meant nothing and he didn’t even realize the danger he had put everyone in. I told him that I would tell Francesca to take the kids and leave him then and that was the moment when he flipped out completely. I will murder you, you scrawny little bastard, he screamed and then he grabbed underneath his desk. In that moment, just as he had spoken the last word, I heard the shot. I ducked and tried to establish where the shot had come from, which was the moment when you came into the room. I literally just acted without thinking. All I knew was that no child should see how their father…” He searched for the right words, but he didn’t find any.
“Jack Dumont died instantly,” Peter intervened. It seemed as if he wanted to spare Connor and Mira the gruesome details that came with a bullet in someone’s head.
“I know,” Mira said quietly. “George explained the details extensively in his email.” She closed her eyes and tried to remember exactly what she had seen back then. There was her father, whose upper body was slumped over his desk lifelessly and at a slightly odd angle, but nothing else. The next thing she knew was Connor carrying her up to her bed.
“You know what happened afterwards. Connor carried you upstairs. It really was a heartwarming gesture,” Peter now said, “however, it was one that would overly complicate everything else for us. Now, there was a witness — a child, which was difficult enough — and Connor’s fingerprints all over the room. He had no alibi and in the eyes of the police he was simply a young guy with a questionable past. We didn’t have time to clean up the murder scene or to arrange anything, so we had no other choice but to get through it and see what else we could do for Connor, without endangering our other informant.”
“Why didn’t you prohibit the interference of the police? You say you are working for the government, just like you did back then. Why was there no order not to intervene with your investigation? I thought that type of thing happened all the time, where the state police and the cops get in each other’s way,” Mira wondered.
“Back then, we didn’t have as much influence as we do today,” Peter explained. “We couldn’t really put too much pressure on everything without creating suspicion, which was something we definitely wanted to avoid — in particular, making the existence of an organization like ours publicly known. On top of that,” he smiled quickly, “it’s not as easy as it looks on TV or how the papers describe it. We didn’t have enough time for the paperwork. Our main priority was to keep this operation a secret. The fewer people knew about it, the better.”
“So, you basically just waited to see what would happen to Connor first,” Mira noticed. She didn’t even attempt to hide her disgust about that piece of information. “And when Suzanne testified in my place that she had seen Connor, because she wanted to protect me, you provided him with a false alibi.”
“Back then, Peter was officially still in the army and had an excellent reputation,” Connor mentioned, once he had calmed down. “When one of his superiors confirmed seeing us together, I was pretty much a free man. That alibi, combined with your sister’s contradictory testimony and the fact that they didn’t have any real evidence against me, led to only one possible verdict: I wasn’t the murderer. However, since the prosecutor didn’t allow the case to be dropped, I had to go through the whole thing and follow it to the bitter end. I was released after all, even though it had only been because of a lack of evidence.”
“Why didn’t you keep the investigation going when Russell took over the company?” She quickly explained to them what her drunken brother-in-law had told her before she had come over, and finished with the words: “It seems obvious to me that the Mafia is still very much alive at Dumont Ltd today. Why didn’t you put an end to it back then? You still had your second informant in the company, or not? You didn’t have to end the investigation completely.”
Peter blinked once, before he answered. “At the time, my previous superiors had decided to let the whole thing cool off for a while. And to answer your question about why they didn’t investigate further — I have no answer for you. Over the last few years, I have been working more on… let’s say, an independent basis, for the government.” His dark gaze revealed to her that the disaster of Jack Dumont’s death might have been one of many of such incidents. “Whatever.” He shook his shoulders as if he wanted to shake off some bad memories.
“Now we need to figure out what to do next.” Connor had put his finger on the most important point. “We can’t just sit around and wait to see what happens. Not after the assassination attempt on Mira, her hotel suite being ransacked, and then the death of Lacroix.”
“There is something else that I haven’t even told you yet,” Mira said then and reported back to them, as factually as possible, what had happened to her on Monday morning in the company hallway. It was a tremendous effort for her not to look into Connor’s emotional face, which would have made her lose control, so instead she just stared down at her hands. When she had finished her story, she looked up. Connor had his lips tightly pressed together and his gaze was ice-cold.
“Okay, that’s enough,” he said. “You will not return to the company until we find out what is going on here. We need to first ascertain who is behind all of this, and until we do so, I will not let you out of my sight for one second. And you know what? I don’t give a rat’s ass about you possibly finding that too overprotective or possessive. Your life is at stake here and I will not allow anybody to take it from you. Even if that means that I lose you afterwards.”
Peter had raised his eyebrow. “You are making the same mistake you made back then,” he explained. “You are emotionally involved, even more than you were
seventeen years ago. And on top of that,” he continued, “you are no longer a part of the team. You won’t do anything. Neither one of you. Do you both understand?”
Mira nodded, but Connor defiantly shook his head. “That is non-negotiable,” he said. “I failed once. I won’t fail a second time. Do you honestly expect me to sit around and wait until you and your boys solve the case?” He laughed, but it wasn’t a happy laugh. “And don’t forget, what my line of work is. I am a professional bodyguard, and I am extremely good at it.”
“You were a bodyguard,” Peter replied. “Right now, you only let the money work for you. When was the last time you actively worked on a contract yourself?”
At this point, Mira expected Connor to become angry, but to her surprise he just smiled. “Your source obviously isn’t as good as you think, my friend. If you had researched me a little more thoroughly, you would know that I am still working on the most important contracts myself.” He rattled out a few names, which were unknown to Mira apart from one — a famous movie star — but Peter’s eyes widened for a short moment.
“Okay, I understand,” he said respectfully, but it was palpable that he was angry at his own faux pas regarding this misinformation. Then he grinned. “You want a comeback? Alright.”
“What is going on here? Can one of you two boneheads please tell me what you are planning? I can’t read your minds.”
Both men turned towards Mira with the same smooth and slow motion.
“We will set a trap for the killer,” Peter said.
“And I will be the one luring him out of his hiding spot,” Connor added, pleased with himself. “Instead of waiting for him to hit a second time and to then react, we will bait him out of his hideaway. And BAM, the trap will snap shut.”