Hushed Guardian: Brandon's Story

by Shandi Boyes

  He has a point, but I still don’t like it. “Something about this feels off. Melody attended school for months before Crombie found her.”

  “She attended school as Melody Gregg. I scoured over three decades of records seeking a home invasion or murder charge under that name when this case first popped up on Tobias’s radar. I didn’t find a single case with that surname attached to it.”

  “They didn’t make that shit up, Grayson. I held Melody when she woke up screaming and drenched in sweat. You can’t fake that kind of fear. The pain in her eyes… fuck. It still kills me now.”

  Grayson steps closer to me, his eyes comforting. “I’m not saying the home invasion didn’t happen. I’m saying it occurred under a different name. The name those men…” his eyes drop to the massive file he handed me nearly an hour ago, “… knew. Liam kept them off Wren and Melody’s scent for years, but somehow the thread unraveled.” He locks his eyes with mine. They’re more determined now than nurturing. “That’s the thread we’re hunting, Brandon, and I have a feeling it’s hiding somewhere in these files.”

  Since I agree with him, I get started on my investigation. “How were Crombie and Bobrov related?”

  Grayson makes a ‘pfft’ noise. “Third cousins or some shit like that.” He flips over the report I’m holding until he arrives at an image that looks like it was taken at a family reunion—if every member was part of the cartel. They’re all holding guns, and they’re standing in front of a massive shipment of drugs. “Crombie is the kid in the diaper. Bobrov is this guy at the back.” He taps to a dark-haired man in the middle of the back row. “He was the older brother of Kirill Bobrov, once-Russian operative. Details on his movements are shady at best. Up until earlier this week, his last known citing was over two years ago in Kazan.”

  “Where was he seen last week?”

  He hands me a second photograph. “Boarding a cargo ship in Portugal.”

  “Was Katie with him?”

  My stomach drops when he points to a blur of fabric in the far right-hand corner of the picture. The height and size of the person hints to the fact it’s a woman, much less Kirill’s possessive clutch around her waist, but with most of her face covered, I doubt facial recognition picked up a positive match.

  “Are you sure it’s her?”

  I don’t mean to raise mistrust, but Grayson doesn’t see it like that. “I’m sure,” he grinds out before snatching the photograph out of my hand and devoting his focus back to Melody’s case. “We’ve identified most people in this picture, but there are a handful of stragglers. They’re usually dead—”

  “I’m beyond accepting assumptions right now, Grayson. I need to know every man in this photo.”

  He takes my sooty attitude in stride better than he did my mistrust. “All right. I’ll forward you the ones I have and get my crew onto the ones I don’t.”

  I dip my chin in gratitude before handing him back the file. “Who do you have watching Melody?”

  Grayson pulls a face like I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m more than aware he has a crew on Melody because he updated me on Agent Russell’s visit to Melody’s office last week before my guy did. Although Crombie was found hanging in his holding cell hours after his arrest, we must remain cautious. His ‘death’ could spark an entirely new war if anyone in his crew believes his death wasn’t suicide.

  Incapable of standing the heat in the kitchen, Grayson sings like a nark. “I put Malachi on her. He’s a good kid. He’ll make sure she’s safe.” I’m not worried about him calling Malachi a kid. Anyone under the age of twenty-six is classed as a kid to him. He’s an old soul.

  While licking my dry lips, I dig a business card out of my pocket. “Have Malachi make contact with my guy. I don’t want them spooking each other.”

  He looks physically ill when he takes in the name of the private investigator I hired to protect Melody since I can’t. It’s not really my place anymore, but even if it was, I can’t have Agent Russell thinking we still have contact with one another. That will add more flames to her fire that I killed a man to keep Melody safe. I would have, but I’d rather not be prosecuted for a crime I didn’t commit.

  “You hired a PI, Brandon? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  I whack Grayson in the gut before leaving the safety of our hidey-hole. “Who should I have reached out to, Grayson? The Bureau who has IA so far up my ass, I’m not going to shit for a year? Or the CIA who’s hiding the murder of one of their own?”

  Grayson twists his lips. “They flew Crombie to New York on a private jet. Even if you had the capabilities to hire your own plane, there’s no way they could fudge his time of death to make out you were in the same state as him, much less the same holding area.”

  “Agent Russell isn’t implying I killed him. She’s insinuating that I organized his death.” As I pivot around to face him, my jaw gains a tick. “Kind of like I ‘supposedly’ arranged his incarceration years ago.” I air quote one word in my statement, beyond pissed. I understand Agent Russell’s objective, I too would be looking at me if the shoe was on the other foot, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be frustrated as well.

  Grayson pulls on the collar of his shirt, suddenly hot. “You have a point.” He joins me at the rear of my car, his strides apprehensive. “What about the local detective you mentioned a few weeks back? Do you trust him?”

  I make an iffy face. “I don’t know him well enough to trust him. Besides, my trust is at an all-time low right now.”

  Grayson holds his hands up and steps back, hearing the scorn I didn’t articulate. He’s still in my shit book—very much so. If he hadn’t stuck his neck out to help me secure the files he did, we still wouldn’t be talking. That’s how annoyed I am that he kept all of this from me. I may have dropped the ball a handful of times back in the day, but once I proved my worth, he should have been honest.

  Grayson watches me load the final box into the trunk of my BMW before asking, “What now?”

  The tick of my jaw is heard in my reply, “We do exactly what Tobias taught us to do. Heads down—”

  “Asses up,” Grayson fills in with a smile. “Then, when no one is looking, we conduct our own investigations on the sly.”

  I smile for the first time in weeks. “Exactly.”

  Even though I’m still angry at him, I return his man-hug when he ups the ante on our usual chin-lift farewell by wrapping his arms around my back, although I’m tempted to strangle him when he mutters in my ear, “Call your girl. Now is as good a time as any.”

  I slap his back a little firmer than I usually do. “She’s not my girl anymore.” Before he can dispute my comment, I add, “And I’ve got a massive web to unravel first. I don’t want to give her half-assed facts. She deserves to know the truth.”

  Incapable of denying my highly accurate statement, Grayson remains quiet, only speaking when I slip into the driver’s seat of my car. “Reach out if you need me.”

  “Same to you.” I don’t know if he heard my comment or not. He disappeared into the darkness long before my eyes strayed to the side mirror.

  17

  Melody

  “You can call him, you know?”

  I stop peering down at the two-word text Brandon sent me a week ago to stray my eyes to Julian. He’s supposed to be making beef stir-fry for dinner. All he’s doing is making a mess. This is one of those times I hate his I-cook-you-clean rules.

  After dumping my cell phone onto the coffee table, I join him in my compact kitchen. “And say what? I’m sorry your association with me when we were kids has you being accused of murder twice? Or that I’m not the cheating scumbag you think I am?”

  His orange-tinged blond brow pops up high on his face. “You could say both, although I wouldn’t recommend those exact words.”

  I bump him with my hip, steal an almond from the packet he’s sprinkling into the almost-cooked mix, then spin around to sign, “Smart-ass.”

  The almond gets stuck halfway
down my throat when Julian says, “I saw that.” He whacks my butt with a grubby wooden spoon. “Now I’ll add even more nuts to the mix.” After lowering my bottom lip into a pout, I pivot back around to face him. “Nu-huh.” He silently tsks me. “This is what happens when you lie. Your stir-fry gets extra nutty.”

  Ignoring the flutter of my heart as it recalls the last time I ate a nut-riddled dish, I say, “I wasn’t lying. You are a smart-ass.”

  Since he can’t deny the truth, he remains quiet.

  After a few minutes of watching him in my kitchen like it’s as natural as breathing to him, I ask, “Do you think he knows?”

  Julian’s eyes lift from the stir-fry with way too many nuts. “That they changed the ruling on your parents’ accident?” When I jerk up my chin, he adds, “I’d say so. His name was mentioned a few times in the new reports.” He places down his wooden spoon, lowers the gas flame from high to low, then props his hip onto the counter next to mine. “Have you decided what you want to do yet? You’re well within your rights to sue.”

  “Sue who, exactly? The man who falsified the documents is dead.” He was the police chief of my hometown. He died during a routine traffic stop a few months after my parents’ accident.

  “You could sue the state.”

  I sigh. “Then I would have to prove they were purposely negligent. It isn’t as clear-cut as it seems.” My teeth grit when my tone comes out harsher than I intended. Usually, we have these conversations about the incident that saw me moving across the country. Julian believes I should sue Joey’s estate. It isn’t about money, Julian has plenty of that. It’s about giving a voice to a victim even if the accused is dead. Sometimes I agree with him, but it’s only on very rare occasions.

  Even now, years later, I still can’t wrap my head around what happened with Joey. He was the equivalent of a big brother to me. I loved him—I still do in a sadistic, twisted way—so it’s a struggle to understand what caused a massive change in his personality. It wasn’t drugs. That was the first thing the coroner tested for. His blood-alcohol level was elevated, but it wasn’t high enough to excuse a drastic shift in his persona. It truly seems as if it wasn’t him in the room with me that night, and that my mind just made it all up.

  If only I could forget about the evidence I hid in my room years ago. It abundantly proves something happened that night. I just can’t prove it was Joey who hurt me without exposing my secret. My lunch date with Mrs. McGee weeks ago revealed she’s doing better than she was seven years ago, but I don’t think she’ll ever be strong enough to warp her views on her son all because I want a dead man prosecuted. It makes me ill just thinking about what we’d be put through to see those charges transpire. And for what? To have my name on the victim’s side of another report? It’s not worth the heartache it could cause, and neither is suing the state for the belief they may have known my parents’ death wasn’t an accident.

  I swallow to relieve my dry throat before returning my eyes to Julian. I kind of zone out when my mind shifts to the past. “In all honesty, I’d rather everything just go back to the way it was before we found out their accident wasn’t an accident. The man who killed my parents is dead. His crew is debunked, and although I have my doubts, perhaps Crombie did end things the way he did as he felt guilty. It isn’t the first time a convict has taken matters into his own hands, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.”

  Julian looks prepared to enter a debate, but the wariness on my face must stop him. It’s been an exhaustive few weeks. “I’ll support your decision no matter what, Mel.” He returns to stirring the stir-fry before nudging his head to my cell phone. “But I still think you should reply to Brandon’s text. I’m not a lawyer—”

  “You just wish you were,” I interrupt, smiling to show him there’s no malice in my tone. Julian is in the wrong profession. He loves political debates, conspiracy theories, and he devours murder mystery books like his life couldn’t exist without them. He just happens to be an audiologist because that’s what his father and grandfather were. I really wish he’d step outside the realm occasionally. He’d be a great politician or perhaps even a law enforcement officer.

  When he spots my smile, Julian bumps me with his hip, his grin as playful as mine. “He put a lot of effort into the reports he submitted even with the likelihood of them ever seeing the light of day being low. That deserves a response.”

  “It does,” I agree, nodding. If it weren’t for Brandon, my parents’ death would still be classified as an accident. He fought to have their deaths legally acknowledged, knowing it was what I wanted without needing to ask. “But aren’t you worried, Julian?”

  A sprinkling of orange hair falls in front of his eyes when he slants his head to eye me dubiously. “About?”

  “One text could turn into a dozen. A dozen could turn into a hundred. A hundred could—” I yelp when he whips my thigh with the tea towel he had thrown over his shoulder, but I continue with my tease. “… turn into a thousand. Then, before you know it, we’ll be best friends again.”

  He whips me another two times while muttering, “I can handle best friends.” My heart turns a gooey mess when he bands his arm around my back to tug me in close to his fit body. “These, however, they will always be mine.” He nips at my lower lip before giving it a friendly tug. After soothing the sting of his bite with a quick swipe of his tongue, he lifts his eyes to mine. “Won’t they, Mel?”

  For the quickest second, hesitation stirs my gut. Mercifully, I shut it down before Julian knows of its existence. It’s a pity I can’t wipe my guilt just as quickly. I hinted that we’d be together for eternity only months ago, so what’s caused my sudden change of heart?

  I can only think of one thing.

  Brandon.

  Up until a few weeks ago, he wasn’t part of the equation. Although a two-worded text saying ‘thank you’ shouldn’t cause such a massive upheaval to my life, it kind of did. We were inseparable for almost fourteen years. That’s a big chunk of my life to pretend never happened, so not only did his two-worded text twist my stomach, it produced a foreign sound from my heart as well.

  18

  Brandon

  I’ve only just combed through the first box Grayson collected for me weeks ago in the boardroom at HQ when Isabelle bounces into the room. We’ve seen each other in passing the past couple of weeks, but our contact has been sporadic. My thoughts have been too focused on my past to add fuck-ups of the present into the mix.

  It took longer than I would have liked, but I got justice for Mr. and Mrs. Gregg. The person responsible for their death can’t face charges, but Melody knows the truth, and that’s all that matters.

  During the process, I also loosened the noose around my neck. Not only did I discover Crombie spilled details on his crew for a reduced sentence, I found out he was wanted for the arson of a building in New Hampshire that killed an ‘associate’s’ wife and children. The target on his back was so visible, even if his death wasn’t ruled a suicide, there were two dozen suspects closer to Crombie than me.

  IA is still riding my ass, but not even someone determined to get out of her father’s shadow could deny the evidence I produced. There will still be an inquiry into the fingerprints logged into evidence for Crombie’s earlier conviction. I don’t see it doing much. He was an arsonist, there’s no denying that, so I’m confident in a matter of weeks, Agent Russell’s valuable time will be focused on more important cases. Thank fuck. It’s been a long few weeks.

  I stop scrubbing at my tired eyes when Isabelle asks, “Hey, it’s nearly ten o’clock, and we have the weekend off, so what are you doing hiding out in here?”

  I smirk when the enthusiasm on her face drains to her shoes when I reply, “I no longer have the weekend off.”

  She takes in box after box after box of files before flipping the lid on the ones closest to her. “What are all these files?”

  “They’re your Uncle Tobias’s records Alex had shipped here.”

 
; I’m not lying. Alex signed the shipment order. Grayson merely suggested he do it. I’m not necessarily interested in the files Tobias had on Isaac, more the men Isaac associated with back in the day. Many of the faces in the Bobrov crew group photograph were noted in the background of the surveillance images Tobias had of Isaac. Most were the standard bottom dwellers all mafia cartels have, but one was more noteworthy. Col Petretti.

  He was the once leader of an Italian association based not too far from here. It all but debunked a few years ago when several high-up members of his association were served consecutive sentences for money laundering, tax fraud, loan racketeering, extortion, and gambling. The only man left standing was Col. Although that makes him an ideal candidate to slot in beneath someone powerful like Isaac Holt or Henry Gottle, no factual evidence alludes to this. Even certain they’re linked in some way, I’ve yet to unearth their connection.

  A curious crinkle pops between Isabelle’s brows when I move to a stack in the far corner of the room. “These are your uncle’s files from when he worked undercover in the Petretti family.” I point to the smaller pile she’s standing next to. “And these are his records on the Gottle family.”

  Shock is the first thing to register on her face. It’s quickly chased by protectiveness, which is surprising since there have been no reports of her and Isaac uploaded for the past four weeks. “Isaac Holt doesn’t have any business connections with either the Petretti or Gottle family.”

  I take my time deliberating what to say next. My trust isn’t just low anymore, it’s basically non-existent. “We already know Isaac is acquainted with Henry Gottle from the surveillance photo you got of Delilah Winterbottom months ago, but I agree, there has been no known association between Col Petretti and Isaac that would warrant me investigating them.” It’s just my desperateness to prove that they are linked that has me burning the candle at both ends, but since that isn’t something I can share with the woman who could possibly be sharing Isaac’s bed, I shunt the blame for my strong work ethic onto an unsuspecting target. “I can’t find any connection between them, but Alex is adamant I have to spend my weekend rifling through these documents until I unearth Isaac’s dark secrets.”