by K. A. Tucker
My by-the-book, righteous, this-side-of-the-law big brother. And not just any prostitute. A fifteen-year-old.
A fifteen-year-old who also happened to be Dina’s half-sister.
“God damn it, Jackie! I made a mistake! Don’t you dare act like you’ve never made one!” He tugs me farther back, into the shadows, away from prying ears. “She said she was twenty-one! I didn’t know how old she really was, and I sure as hell didn’t know who she was.”
“Oh come on! One look at that girl and I knew she had to be related to Dina.”
“Well, yes. She was a striking girl, but—”
I make a sound of disgust. “The fact that you’d cheat on Judy with a hooker! It would kill that sweet woman if she ever found out.”
Silas holds his hands up in surrender. “You’re right. That’s why Judy can never find out. My kids can never find out. It was a mistake. I made a terrible mistake.”
“And just how many ‘mistakes’ have you made?” I glare at him, daring him to lie to me.
He hesitates. “Twice. And only once with someone under eighteen.”
“How the hell would you know! You thought Betsy was twenty-one!”
“I’m never going to do it again, I swear, Jackie. It’s been difficult at home lately, and with work . . . I just needed to get some—”
“Oh, I know what you needed to get,” I spit out. “What I had to do that night . . . You cost me one of my very best friends, Silas! Worse, I had to chase that girl away so you could protect your precious job and reputation.”
“Don’t pretend you weren’t helping yourself out, too.” He has the nerve to look smug.
“You are right about that.” I jab him in the chest with my finger. “Your ‘mistake’ could have cost me my future, something I’ve worked my tail off for. But to be honest? I was worried about what this would do to your family. To my son.” That boy thinks the sun rises and sets by his uncle.
The only other man he might adore more is the one I just betrayed.
“I’m going to regret covering for you every damn day for as long as I live.”
Silas flinches. “I didn’t mean to—”
“I don’t want to hear it. If I ever catch you with a girl again, I will not bail you out.”
“I promise, I—”
“And don’t fool yourself into believing you’re outta the woods yet. The only reason Abe hasn’t said a word is because he’s protecting Dina, but if he finds Betsy, this will come out, eventually. And it will ruin all of us.” I turn to leave.
Silas grabs hold of my arm again. “Abe won’t be looking for Betsy anymore,” he says softly.
CHAPTER 59
Noah
Klein eases the car into a parking spot. “Let’s go.”
I grit my teeth against the urge to tell him to go fuck himself, to take me home, to give me back my goddamn phone so I can call Silas and ask him why Klein showed Betsy a picture of Silas and Betsy said, yeah, that looks like the guy she was with that night in the hotel room.
Couple that with the limp, and the fact that my mother was protecting someone that night—someone who she’d put ahead of Abe—and I don’t have to ask Silas anything, because deep down, I already know.
I just can’t believe it.
And so I numbly climb out of the FBI sedan. Unable to meet Gracie’s gaze, feeling as if I might heave my stomach’s contents on the sidewalk.
I’m trapped in a never-ending nightmare that keeps getting worse.
“What is this place?” Gracie asks as we follow Kristian down a narrow path of what appears to be a condo complex, either side walled by six feet of brick and canopied by mature, leafy trees. Behind the walls are pint-sized backyards.
Tareen trails us through one of the small black gates and past a door, closing it behind him to seal us in.
“It’s an agency rental,” Klein finally explains. “Sometimes we use it as a safe house. Right now we’re using it for our case.”
“Against Mantis and Stapley?” Gracie’s gaze takes in the honeyed wood and dove-gray walls. There isn’t much in the way of furnishings—a black leather couch, a flat-screen TV, built-in shelves peppered with books, a teapot on the stove in a masculine-looking kitchen of dark wood and stainless-steel appliances. One abstract painting on the wall directly ahead of me.
I feel Klein’s eyes boring into me. “No. Our case against Silas Reid.”
The air leaves my lungs.
“We’ve been investigating him for five months,” Tareen offers, ducking past us and disappearing into a room.
It dawns on me. “You were after someone else,” I mumble. “That’s what my mother said in that message. ‘Since you’re so hell-bent on arresting someone’ . . . or something like that.”
Klein heads to the fridge, stocked with soda cans and water bottles. He holds up a Coke in offer and when Gracie nods, tosses it to her. Gesturing to the couch, he takes a seat in the chair across from it. The sound of his soda can cracking open carries through the quiet condo, as we wait for an explanation.
“Last November, we were contacted by Amy Bivens.”
I frown. “My uncle’s secretary?”
“Ex-secretary. He’d fired her earlier that week. Anyway, she claimed that she overheard an alarming private phone conversation that made her think Silas Reid was looking for a prostitute for himself. An underage one.”
“He wouldn’t be dumb enough to do that over the phone,” I counter.
Gracie’s face twists with disgust. I can’t tell if it’s at my uncle. Or at me, for defending him.
Klein goes on, ignoring my protest. “Bivens didn’t go to the APD for obvious reasons. We thought it might be a case of a disgruntled employee, but she had the date and the name of a hotel in Houston where he was to meet her. So, we decided to look into it.” He pauses for what feels like forever. “Security footage caught a girl coming to his hotel room.”
I squeeze my eyes shut. This can’t be real. This can’t be real . . .
“She was dressed to not raise suspicion, in jeans and a T-shirt. But she stayed for an hour, before being picked up out front by a car with fake plates. We couldn’t get a good look at her face. This girl was a dead end, but we knew we had a case. So we started listening in on his personal and home phones.”
Gracie makes a sound. “You like listening in on conversations,” she murmurs, as if echoing something Klein may have said. They share a knowing smile. A private exchange between them that I don’t understand, and I don’t like.
Klein rests his elbows on his knees. “After six weeks of nothing, I decided to do a bit of fishing. So I went to Jackie Marshall.”
Tareen reemerges, bringing a laptop with him.
“I’d had a few run-ins with her in the past and we got along well enough. Figured I’d see if she knew her brother had a thing for underage prostitutes.”
“That couldn’t have gone well,” Gracie mutters under her breath.
“It got me kicked out of her office.” Klein chuckles, but the humor doesn’t reach his eyes. “But it also ended up being a break for us, because that night Jackie phoned her brother and asked him why the hell the feds were coming to her about him and his proclivities.” He waggles his eyebrows. “Jackie knew. Or at least, she knew it had happened before. She was pissed. She asked him if he’d had any intention of keeping his promise, after Betsy.”
Gracie’s eyes widen. “She named Betsy? You already knew about Betsy?” Her voice drips with accusation.
“We knew of a girl named Betsy. We had no idea who she was.”
“Wait, when was this?” I interrupt.
“January, by this point.”
I do the quick math. That was around the time my mother started drinking heavily again.
“He promised me he didn’t know her age. He promised he’d never do it again.”
“Jesus Christ.” Her rambles were a mess of truths; the “he” wasn’t just one person. It was Mantis, and Canning. And Silas. “He” tol
d her he thought she was of age and she believed him. “She thought it was an honest mistake with Betsy.” Silas being with a prostitute would be shameful, but my mom was the type of woman to forgive a male for satisfying that need.
But if that need involved a fifteen-year-old girl?
Her actions that night let Silas go free of his crime. But he lied to her and did it again, because she protected him.
That would have eaten her up.
“That’s not all we got that night. Silas made references to an APD internal investigation on Mantis and his guys that ‘needed to go away.’ It was clear this was coming from someone else, through Silas to Jackie, but no names were mentioned.”
“Canning,” Gracie says.
“That’d be my first guess. That’s when we broadened our investigation to include your mother.”
Fuck. “Did she know about it?”
“Eventually . . . when we caught a heated phone exchange between her and Canning about how she found Abraham Wilkes’s gun holster buried in a ziplock bag in her garden. She accused Dwayne Mantis of putting it there; some sort of scare tactic to make sure she’d clear him of any wrongdoing in the current investigation.”
I glare at Klein, only to get a weak, “sorry, I couldn’t tell you sooner” shrug.
“She flat-out told Canning that Mantis was guilty and she was going to make sure he was punished. And then two days later, she cleared him.”
My stomach turns. God, Mom, what did you get yourself involved in?
“That’s when I went back in and started putting pressure on her.” Klein shakes his head. “I worked on her for weeks. I knew I could open a case on Mantis and probably dig up enough to bust him, with or without her help, but I wanted Reid. And I needed her for that.” He nods toward Tareen, who hits a key on the laptop.
My mother’s drunken voice fills the room. It’s that same voice message that Klein played for me, that night in Tucson. I close my eyes, the wave of anguish that floods me not quite as shocking as it was the first time around. But painful, nonetheless.
“ . . . I don’t know exactly how Mantis did it, but I know he killed Abe. Look into him. Look into how Dwayne Mantis murdered a good man. You do that and I’ll give you my brother on a silver platter. I’ll at least do that much for Betsy.”
My eyes fly open.
“I didn’t play you the entire message before,” Klein admits without a hint of regret. “I couldn’t jeopardize the case. We needed you talking to your uncle, feeding him information about Dina and Gracie, and what they knew.”
With a flick of his wrist, Tareen plays another clip.
“Money.”
“Yes. Money.”
“How much are we talking about here?”
“Enough to raise eyebrows.”
I feel my face burn as my recorded voice fills the room, in that same way it does when you’ve done something wrong and you’ve gotten caught. “That’s how you knew about the bag of money.”
“And that you were in Tucson, and at which motel.”
“Jesus Christ.” I grip my forehead in my palms. My head feels like it’s going to explode. “But wouldn’t Silas have worried that you had tapped his phones?” Wouldn’t Klein questioning my mother make him paranoid?
Klein smirks. “He was too arrogant to be worried. He told your mother we had nothing on him, and that no judge would issue a warrant based on nothing.”
I believe that. “What else have you guys heard?”
They share a glance.
“Conversations between Canning and Reid that implicate them both in the setup of Abraham Wilkes, as well as a half dozen other crimes. But probably not enough to nail him for what he did to Betsy, and other young girls.”
“But you have Betsy’s testimony now,” Gracie argues, adding bitterly, “and Heath Dunn’s, if he’d stop lying long enough to admit that he recognized the future district attorney.”
“My money’s on her refusing to testify, even if she wants to help. She has a new life now, and she doesn’t want people to know who she was,” Tareen says.
“Besides, there are too many ways to poke holes in her story. It was fourteen years ago, she was high, she couldn’t definitively ID him . . . We need a slam-dunk.” Klein levels me with a look. “And you can do that for us, if you’re willing.” He hesitates, as if somewhere deep down under that callous exterior of his, he has a conscience. Or maybe he’s just using my conscience against me. “For Abe.”
“Of course Noah’s willing,” Gracie blurts out, answering for me. She turns to me and in her green eyes, I see my options—help the FBI put my uncle in jail for life and destroy the only family I have left.
Or lose her forever.
CHAPTER 60
Grace
He’s awake.
I can tell by the rhythm of his breathing, by the rigid feel of his body against mine.
He’s awake, just as I’m still awake, quietly hanging in this state of limbo as I wait for him to commit. To make a choice.
To make the right choice, the one that will see his uncle face punishment for his crimes.
And cause his dead mother’s name to be dragged through the mud.
Now I know what Klein meant when he told me to be careful, to not get in too deep with Noah, unless I was 1,000 percent sure that he would choose me over his mother, and his uncle.
He predicted that Noah might be lying in bed next to me one day, deciding whom to protect.
Whom to disappoint.
Whom to betray.
We all know who Jackie chose. Her brother . . . herself. She chose wrong.
But will Noah make the same mistake?
CHAPTER 61
Commander Jackie Marshall
May 6, 2003
I watch Canning make his way around the pool to where I sit in my lounge chair, under my lilac tree. He’s swaying with his steps.
Or maybe I’m swaying.
I reach down to grab the bottle of whiskey and top up my glass.
“Jackie.” Canning drags over a chair to place it next to me.
“I heard they found things in Abe’s house.” I’m not going to bother with pretenses.
“Yes, ma’am. I don’t know what to tell you, except I’m sorry. I know he was a good friend.”
“There’s no way Abe was dealing drugs.” Just like I know there’s a reason for Mantis and Stapley being placed on this unorthodox “special” investigative team, and there’s a reason that crime scene was shut down like a vault, nobody in, nobody out.
“It’s not lookin’ good for him.”
“That’s because you have Mantis on the case. Mantis!” I hiss. “The very same guy who Abe was about to bury for stealing money!”
“Mantis is as shocked about this as anyone else.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet.” I let out a derisive snort. “Was he shocked when Abe refused to keep the bag of money he found in his car? The bribe from Mantis, to shut him up?”
Canning’s brow furrows in thought. “Did Wilkes say that Mantis handed him a bag of money?”
“No, Mantis left it there for Abe to find.”
“So Abe didn’t see who left this bag.”
“No, but . . .” I sigh. God damn it.
“Is there an accusation you’d like to make, Jackie? Something you can actually prove beyond a reasonable doubt? Something that will sound plausible, next to the concrete case they’re building for Abe’s corruption as we speak?” Canning looks at me through shrewd eyes. “Think carefully. Think about what it could mean to your career. To your family’s happiness.” He leans in as far as his round belly will allow him, to say in a voice so low that only I can hear, “Because the way I see it, nothing good will come of you falling on your sword for Abraham Wilkes.” Then, in a more placating tone, “You warned him, didn’t you? You told him about the greater good, about sometimes making choices that sacrifice the few to help the many. But it sounds like Abraham chose to help the few. Mainly, to help himself.”
But didn’t I help myself, too? What I did to Betsy, I did it for my family—for my brother, for his sweet wife and kids, for my darling Noah who adores Silas—but I also did it for myself. Because in those few minutes by that door, in that drive out to The Lucky Nine, the only solution I could think of was the one where my family, my life, my ambitions were safe.
“You want to play in the big boys’ yard, you need to follow the rules.” Canning reaches into his pocket and pulls out a silver star.
The one that would make me assistant chief.
“Why don’t you hang on to that for now, until this investigation is over. We can pin it to your collar and make it official.” He drops the star into my palm and then heaves himself out of his chair. “Slow down on the drink, will ya? Or you won’t remember anything we talked about.”
Exactly what he’d play on, should I dare ever repeat it.
“Oh, by the way . . . do you know what happened to that bag of money that Abe claimed Mantis left in his car?” He says it so casually, as if it’s an afterthought. I know it’s anything but. It’s evidence, to a story that Canning doesn’t want to get out.
I meet his inquisitive stare. “I burned it.”
He nods to himself. “See? People like you and me . . . this city needs us.” He leaves me sitting under that lilac tree, with a silver star in my palm.
The points gouging into my flesh.
CHAPTER 62
Noah
“Noah!” My aunt Judy is known for giving fierce hugs, despite her tiny stature. Normally, I love them.
Tonight . . . I grab her hands, gripping them tight until I’m sure the urge to rope her arms around my wooden body has passed.
“How are you doing?” She frowns, peering up at me. “You don’t look well.”
Because I feel like I’m three seconds away from vomiting all over her pink slippers. “I must be coming down with something.”
“It’s going around. Silas came home early today, looking dreadful.”
I swallow my anxiety. “Where is he, anyway?”