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“His mother jumped off of a twenty-storey building?”
“Keep reading,” I tell him. “You’ll understand when you get to it.”
“Get to it?” he murmurs, frowning at me. “What do you mean?”
Leanne runs her finger down the page, lips moving silently as she continues to read.
Clearly, there are two things Echo didn’t know.
One, that E.A.’s mother never actually married his father so she was and forever will be known as Edeline Keyes, the woman who went missing for six months fifteen years ago, before leaping to her death from a building in the middle of the city.
Two, that E.A. didn’t know what he was looking at when he found Harlan’s jar, until close to a year later, when he was looking through his mother’s things, helping his father declutter, and he found a photograph of her wearing something very distinct. A gold locket with a baroque black onyx pattern.
A gift from a fiancé who died suddenly, it was a treasured item that his father hated.
He told E.A. she wore it all the time, hidden under her clothes.
She never got over her lost fiancé.
Leanne lets out a gasp. “She was murdered.”
“She was?” Echo asks quietly, as he slowly catches up to the bottom of the page. “Oh … Oh, fuck.”
I could ask why E.A. wouldn’t tell Echo any of this, but I already know why.
Our Omega can’t handle watching the news.
Hearing this kind of nightmarish awfulness was worse than watching the news, because it had happened to someone he loved. Someone who hides his feelings well.
“He does actually have a heart, the bastard,” I mutter, pissed off to be reminded of that so effortlessly.
“We need to find that jar,” Leanne says. “It proves Harlan killed Edeline Keyes.”
She looks so determined. I’m guessing that was the point of sharing his personal pain with her.
“It’s not a good idea,” I tell her.
“Why not?” she asks.
“Harlan doesn’t just traffic in Omegas. There are some pretty convincing rumors that he kidnapped and sold two of Frank Palmer’s earlier victims, before he became a killer.”
She stares at me, her eyes going wide. “Oh my God! That’s fucking awful.”
“We’ve tried to get him arrested a bunch of times,” Echo says. “He’s too well connected. He never does any time for any of the shit we do manage to catch him doing.”
“He doesn’t know we know about the jar,” I tell her. “That’s important. The second he knows, he could destroy all that evidence. It could be the only way we can get justice for his victims.”
“And you guys think he keeps the jar at work? Why would he do that?” she asks.
“He’s married,” I tell her. “And they have a whole bunch of twenty-something kids. His office is the entire top floor of Anchor West. He has a private elevator that goes up to the roof. It’s literally the only access point to that roof.”
“That wouldn’t be the same roof …” Leanne’s face pales as she trails off.
“It is the same roof. Conveniently, the building was still in the process of changing hands when it happened. Harlan West could tell everyone he didn’t even have the keys yet, and the previous owner had already handed them over to the lawyers. Everyone assumed Edeline must have snuck in while the previous office was there. They painted her as mentally unstable because she took anti-depressants as a teenager.”
“Holy fucking shit,” Echo murmurs.
He’s handling this pretty well.
