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” told 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.