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“The army.” His lips quirked as if realizing Maria wasn’t someone he could lie to and get away with it.
“Why’d that sound like a question?” Maria didn’t back down from anyone, did she? Not even me. And that made me nervous. What if she crossed the wrong person one day?
Instead of answering, he offered his hand. “Jesse McAdams.”
Maria reluctantly accepted his palm, but I felt her eyes on me.
I was too worried as to why Jesse was there to look at her. “I need you to go inside now,” I told her, maintaining eye contact with the former army ranger turned CIA hit man. And last I heard, he now worked in private security.
“Yeah, okay.” She gripped my forearm and sent me a reassuring squeeze, as if sensing I needed it, then left us alone.
“I heard rumors you were a chef, but I didn’t believe it until this moment.” Jesse scratched his beard while he assessed me. “I guess you were always good with a knife.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked, cutting to the point, my heart beating erratically at the fact he was there, which meant something was wrong. The pit in my stomach doubled in size when he reached into his pocket and showed me a USB.
“I’m in the middle of a job, and I stumbled across some information you’ll want. Although I do have orders not to share it with you. Not yet, at least.”
“And yet, here you are,” I remarked in a low voice. “Why?”
He handed me the USB, and I held it tightly in my hand, waiting for answers. “My team at Falcon Falls Security is working a case. And a few days ago, we managed to get close enough to a man we were tracking to hack his computer. When we tried to grab him, though he evaded us like Harry fucking Houdini.”
Someone got away from you? That was a surprise. “What does any of that have to do with me?”
He pointed to my fist holding the USB. “My team is worried that if I hand that over to you while we’re still pursuing him, you’ll interfere with our op.” He held his palms up. “But I’ve known you longer than my team leaders, and if it were my sister, I’d want to know now.”
My body went cold, even though my heartbeat doubled in speed. “Isabella?” I opened my palm as if the USB were a grenade with the pin pulled.
“No,” he said. “This is about your other sister.”
Chills like I’d never known before coated my body as I slowly worked my focus back up to look him in the eyes. “What?” The word was a dying breath from my lungs, nothing more. Because that was impossible.
“The man we’re hunting is a professional cleaner. The kind of guy the mob or a dirty politician calls when—”
“I know what a cleaner does,” I roughly bit out.
“Yeah, well, this cleaner also assists with alibis and frame jobs. He doesn’t just clean up the crime, he ensures someone else is to blame and all within hours.”
I knew what he was getting at, and I refused to accept it. Because that would mean ...
My head was spinning. Body starting to sweat.
“Someone hired him thirteen years ago to pin Bianca’s murder on that other guy,” Jesse said, spelling it out for me as if I weren’t putting two and two together. “The proof is on that USB. We just don’t know who hired him, and trust me, when we grab him, we’ll find out.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I killed her murderer. That asshole followed her home from a nightclub.” A million questions raced through my mind, but I held back from asking them.
“And that asshole was framed.”
He gave me a few seconds to adjust to the news and the shock, and now I needed to clarify something. Something that had my stomach dropping. “You’re trying to tell me we killed an innocent man? I had his life in my hands, and he didn’t beg. Didn’t try and convince me he didn’t kill her.”
“Would you have listened?”
Probably not.
“That man wasn’t innocent by any means,” Jesse added, clearly sensing the panic in my eyes. “Based on the cleaner’s records, the cleaner always has a running list of people in New York to pin crimes on at any given time. People who meet certain profiles. So when he gets a request to cover up a crime, he’s able to handle the case much quicker because of it.” He waited for me to look at him before continuing. “The man he chose to frame was a killer, he just didn’t kill your sister.”
I turned and set my palms on the SUV, my mind and heart at odds. Some weird fight-or-flight mechanism taking over. “There was evidence at Bianca’s place. He lived in the same part of town.”
“And the case was dismissed because of evidence tampering or mishandling. Something like that, right? But in reality, the cleaner planted the evidence at her apartment, and based on his files in which he laid out his plan, he even drugged his fall guy so he wouldn’t remember the night of her murder. It’s possible he even thought he’d committed the crime.”
