Eventually the sobbing stops, and I think, oh, she’s done.
Good, she doesn’t deserve grief.
Then the ringing starts again, this time different.
This time it’s my song.
Did I tell you I loved you
Enough times for you to remember
Won’t make it to heaven, though
So you’re on your own there, love
But you’ll be fine
You’ll fly
You’ve got wings I’ll never have
You’ll fly
So carry my dreams, love
And you’ll be fine
You’ll fly
I push myself onto all fours, then stand. Unsteady, I follow it until I find the source—my phone, and the screen is flashing.
I answer the call, but I don’t say anything.
“You’re crying,” Wilson finally mutters.
“I’ve been crying for weeks.”
“Not like this.”
“No.”
“What is it? What did he do?”
I couldn’t tell him before. But I’ve lost him already. He already knows I’m selfish. And maybe this is the punishment I’m looking for tonight.
So I tell him. I tell him about Keegan, and I start to cry all over again.
—twenty-five—
Wilson
I listen, rage growing inside me, as Tabitha haltingly shares what happened when she was fifteen. I’m so mad at myself for not being there, for being a five-hour flight away, but I’ve been watching her for months now. I know she’s a fighter. I know she doesn’t need me.
But God fucking damn, I want to be there.
She might not be able to tell me all of this in person, though. She couldn’t when we were together before.
I grip my phone so tight it occurs to me I might crack the casing, and I lean in toward the computer screen in front of me until I’m close enough that all I can see is her.
She’s moved to the couch. She’s sitting right in the middle, stiff as a statue.
“I didn’t know I was pregnant at first. I was stupidly innocent about sex. He was the first guy I’d gone all the way with, and he always pulled out. So when I got sick and messed up a studio session he’d lined up for me, I felt bad. I went to a walk-in clinic and paid cash for my appointment. I told them I had the flu. They made me pee in a cup.”
The pause here is longer than in between the other sentences.
“I didn’t tell him right away,” she whispers.
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. No, of course you didn’t, baby girl, I want to say.
“I wasn’t showing, and they said it was so small, just a walnut. I’ll never forget that description. A walnut inside me. Then a plum. I found a website that showed me the size of the baby, and every week I would go and look it up. There was an email sign-up, and I couldn’t fill it out because Grant might see it.”
I’ve done the mental math before, and I’ve never liked it, but now I’m shaking with white-hot anger at a twenty-two-year-old fuck face who would terrify his fifteen-year-old girlfriend to the point where she was afraid to get emails about her pregnancy.
“And then we got another break. Someone we knew had to back out of a spotlight on local indie musicians, and Grant got me the spot. He wanted it for himself, but they wanted a female singer-songwriter. I was really tired that day, and he gave me something. For energy, he said.”
On the screen, her shoulders shake, but it’s silent over the phone.
Maybe this is too much. Maybe I’ve pushed her to tell me.
“I’m sorry,” I say, my voice cracking.
She shakes her head.
“You didn’t know you couldn’t trust him.” I want to tell her more. I want to tell her that nothing she will tell me will change how I feel about her, but she doesn’t need that pressure right now. She doesn’t need to bear the weight of how much I love her when her heart is lost forever.
I get it now. I thought we were the same. I thought we were both so broken that love wasn’t possible.
But I’m broken because I’d never loved anyone, not in that formative way that teaches us how and who to fall in love with.
She’s broken because she’s loved with her entire being and it wasn’t enough.
“I should have known,” she finally whispers. “I should have protected him.”
I wait. I don’t know what she did or didn’t do.
It doesn’t matter.
She was a baby herself, in over her head.
“Keegan started moving inside me, or I started feeling him move inside me, the same day we got offered a recording deal. And that night, we…celebrated. I didn’t drink anything, I claimed I was still under the weather, but Grant wanted…he fucked me that night. That was the last time we ever…And he felt my baby move. His hand was on my stomach and he felt something, and he put it all together.
“Everything moved quickly at that point. His parents are devoutly religious, and he told them. They insisted we get married. I was too young for that, but they knew a judge, and made a petition for an exception due to the pregnancy.”
She’s given me enough information that I’d be able to find her real life identity if I went looking for it. Even as I tell myself to let it go, the data churn begins.
That my mind goes there is probably reason enough for her not to trust me with this story, but I’m in now. I’m in deep, and I’m in forever. I don’t care who she once was. I do care that her connection to that baby was stolen from her, though. I care about that with every fiber of my being.
Grant’s identity wasn’t created at age twenty-two. Why isn’t the marriage in his background file?
“Wilson?” Her voice wavers.
“I’m here. You can keep going if you want. I’m not going anywhere. I’m listening.” And thinking, God help me. “What happened next?”
“Everything happened so quickly. We were married a few weeks later, then we flew to L.A. and we started using these names from the start there. Grant said it would be better if nobody knew we were married, because of the age difference, and he was right. He said once I really started showing, I’d go back to Seattle and we’d make it work somehow.
“Like an idiot, I believed him. And it seemed to work at first. The record execs were all over me. It was a lot to take in, a lot to handle. Grant made it really clear we weren’t making any deals just yet. But he wanted them lined up for when we got back, and when I’d get run down, he’d give me a pill to keep me going.”
Her voice is straining now, but she hasn’t moved from her spot on the couch. I change cameras so I can see her from another angle. She’s twisting her hands together, and something inside me twists with them.
“Four weeks after we arrived in California, there was a party.” Her voice chills, the words sharpening, and I want to tell her to stop, it’s okay, I don’t need to know this part. But she needs to say it, so I want to listen. She needs a witness and I can be that for her. “There were producers and radio people there, label execs. It was at a big converted warehouse. Competing DJs, lots of drugs. We didn’t get there until midnight, and I was exhausted. He gave me one pill, then another. I knew I shouldn’t take the second one. I remember that thought so clearly. It was the first thing I said when I woke up. It was only later that the rest of the night came back to me. Flashes of people in front of me, offers of other drugs. I said no, no, no. I kept saying that, over and over again, and the party kept going. I was there until early morning, and at some point…”
She trails off.
I wait.
When she starts again, her voice is pure ice. “I did a line of cocaine. I can see myself in the bathroom. Another flash. Then an ambulance ride, and waking up in Emergency. I said, ‘I didn’t want it.’ I meant the pills. I didn’t know the rest, not until later. Someone said they couldn’t find a heartbeat, and then it was a blur again.”
This silence stretches so long I think she’s done.
She’s not.
“He was born sleeping, they said. He’d had a cardiac arrest inside me. I killed him. They cut me open to try and save his life. And when they told me he was gone, I wanted them to keep cutting me until I was a million pieces of nothing, because I didn’t deserve to be alive if he wasn’t.”
“You didn’t kill him.” I know it’s not what she wants to hear. I can’t say anything she wants to hear. I can only speak the truth, as impotent as it is. “You didn’t. Fucking hell, Tabitha, tell me that you know that now.”
“I don’t. And you can’t…please don’t. Others have tried. I’m not suicidal, I’m not a danger to myself. But I know what I did and I will never let myself live without that guilt.”
“Why are you still with him?”
For the first time since I called her, she looks around the room, wondering where my invisible eyes are. She scans past me, and I clear my throat.
“Back a little to the left. The clock.”
She gives me a rueful smile and leans back against the couch. “Because if I leave him, he’ll tell the world I murdered my baby. He has video of me doing that line of cocaine in the bathroom. There was a time when I wanted him to expose me, but I can’t do that to Keegan’s memory. Right now he’s my private angel. If people know about him, they’ll find his grave. They’ll say disgusting things about his memory. And it will taint all the things I’ve quietly done to remember him.”
“You said you can’t have children…”
Her face twists. “God’s idea of justice, maybe. Something went wrong during the operation when they tried to save his life. I had messed up cycles for a while after, and then my body gave up trying. It’s for the best.”
“How long after that did you start over?”
“We have that in common, don’t we?” Her lips twist in a cold smile. “Not long at all. Grant was all prepared for it. Fucking bastard said it was for the best that we’d lost the baby. A week later, he’d somehow formalized these new identities for us. He was no longer Grant Rook, but Grant Derew, and I was Tabitha Leyton for real, not just a stage name.”
Like the barrels of a lock sliding into place, my brain spun that information around until it clunked up against something else I knew.
Grant Rook.
Youngest son of Malcolm Rook, a rancher in Washington State.
Brother of Spencer Rook, who is on our firm’s radar as a rising star in the white nationalist movement.
Grant Rook died ten years earlier.
How did he just ghost right there in plain view standing behind one of the country’s biggest pop stars?
I stare at the screen.
Tabitha has no idea who she’s married to.
But I do now.
And everything has just changed.
—twenty-six—
Wilson
Washington
Christmas night
I stay on the phone with my secret girl until she falls asleep. Then I take the tablet into the main space and I prop it on the kitchen counter so I can keep an eye on her while I figure this out.
Most of her details I know by heart.
Her tour dates.
I grab a thick black marker and pace to the wall.
Los Angeles
San Francisco
Portland
Salt Lake City
Denver
Albuquerque
Phoenix
I write the dates next to the cities. There’s a gap of five days between Portland and Salt Lake City. She’s planning on going home to Seattle while the buses go on ahead and everyone gets a day off in Vegas.
Vegas.
I scrawl that in the middle.
Vegas always has potential to fuck someone up. And if Tabitha’s safely out of the way, all the better.
I scrawl Grant’s name at the far end of the wall. How do I get you the fuck away from my woman, you disgusting sack of shit?
His mostly estranged family is one option. I need to dig deeper into their backgrounds, and figure out who helped him with the new identities.
A new thought pulls me up short.
Could he have acquired the identities from the Feds?
I don’t like that idea at all. I put the marker down and head back to my computer. If it was a US Marshall, it wouldn’t have been official. Where to start searching for a ten-year-old cold lead on a corrupt government agent?
But it doesn’t take me long to set that theory aside, because the Feds don’t recycle social security numbers. And Grant Derew was a real kid. Two years older than Grant Rook, he was a California native who studied at UCLA, then worked in the Valley for the regional government until he went missing six months before Tabitha moved to Los Angeles—and then was quietly removed from the Missing Persons registry seven months later.
So whoever helped them trolled through that registry of missing people, found someone that Grant could be—right down to the first name—but no easy identity to adopt for Tabitha.
I pace back to the wall and draw a tall, skinny rectangle around Grant.
He’s my last domino.
How do I get him to tip over?
Who can I set up to push him?
I write some names around him. His family. Silent business partners. Hollywood types.
None of the relationships are particularly strong, though.
What’s his carrot?
What would he do anything for?
Grant got me the spot. He wanted it for himself, but they wanted a female singer-songwriter.
I spin around and grab the tablet. She’s still asleep. I open a new window and search for Grant Rook performances. There he is, skinny kid, big head, real talent.
I don’t feel any sympathy for him, nor does he deserve any, but this helps. Tabitha’s a proxy. I need to give him another proxy—and then take it away, because there’s no reward for being evil. Not if I can help it.
A falling from grace in public would make me happy, but it can’t touch Tabitha.
Vegas.
A falling from grace in the underground would work, too.
Time to set up a fight for Nix in Sin City.
DIRTY LOVE
part four
dirty deeds
—twenty-seven—
Wilson
present day, again
Washington
February
I’ve routed the live feeds from the Tabard Inn to our conference room. Tag is in charge of picking which mic we listen to the audio from, because I’m recording them all separately so it doesn’t matter, and my bots will flag us if anything interesting is said anywhere in the building.
They’ll also flag me privately if Tabitha’s name comes up anywhere, for any reason.
I don’t expect it to, but after the last month, it’s been on my mind that Spencer Rook might have opinions about his sister-in-law.
He’s never spoken about her in his online screeds. And in the conversations we’ve had since Christmas about Grant, when I’ve carefully led her toward his family, she’s never mentioned his brother contacting her. She knows I know more about Grant than I’m telling her. But as far as I know, she doesn’t know about his family’s politics. It’s not like his brother is a household name—yet.
This isn’t where my head should be. I need to be thinking about work, not my personal vendetta, but the fight is in five days and everything is sliding into place. I’m losing my ability to separate the two, and my partners still don’t know about Tabitha.
Jason comes in carrying two extra-large pizza boxes. “Is it game time yet?”
“Not funny,” Cole mutters, his eyes on the screen. One of the local PRISM principals is his estranged mother-in-law, an heiress with an ambiguous sense of right-and-wrong and a generous purse for destabilizing forces. He expects her to show up tonight, and the fact Spencer Rook is there takes that to a whole different level.
Like his extended family getting tangled up in the America First white supremacy movement.
How she managed to spawn Hailey is beyond all of us but we’re all better for knowing her daughter. Too bad the same cannot be said for Mrs. Dashford Reid herself.
Jason takes the seat next to me. “Everything working as you expect?”
I nod. “We’ve got good coverage. A couple of visual dark spots, but the audio pick-up is excellent. I love the new microcontrollers I found, they’re—”
“Got it. Contain your gadget lust.”
“You asked.”
“And you answered more than sufficiently. Any sign of anyone else listening in?”
“Nobody’s planted anything since I did. I don’t know about before that, but you said the rooms were scrubbed yesterday morning?”
“Yeah.”
“And nobody else knows about the meeting.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Well, it’s not like it matters. We’ll share it through the usual channels if there’s anything interesting.” There was so much information being poured into the dark web, it would be a miracle if anyone noticed or cared.
Most hackers think Rook is a joke.
But they take PRISM seriously, as they should. If this is in fact a meeting of minds that leads to a new partnership, that will be an explosive bombshell.
It’ll give Rook an underground legitimacy he’s been craving, and PRISM instant access to an angry network of home-grown vigilantes.
I didn’t bother to try and pick up Rook’s public conversation taking place downstairs in the bar, but I did leave a camera down there to get a visual. There’s a Washington Post reporter five feet away. If he says anything unexpected, it’ll be reported.
Dirty Love (Forbidden Bodyguards #3) Page 11