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My first stop is to find Wells. He’s drained but relieved now that his girls are safe and sound at home. Still, when I find him in his office, fatigue shadows his features.
I knock on his open door. “You okay?”
“I’m good.” He pops out his sucker and waves me in. “Natasha and Celeste are helping Ivy with the baby, so I’m working for a bit. What’s up?”
I lean against the doorframe, not wanting to settle in if he doesn’t have what I need. “Do you still have the files from that handful of erased clients we were passed when we first took over?”
When the CIA revamped us as their go-to contract erasing and identity-mining team, we were given some past off-record cases to follow up on. Our CIA and FBI contacts tend to dip their toes in both the pool of righting wrongs and the lake of excusing them for kickbacks. Offloading those cases once the benefit is realized is essential to maintaining their duplicitous cover. That’s where we came in. New kids on the block, given a stack of fugitive miscreants they didn’t care to follow anymore. Dry wells. Most were well established in their placements, so we didn’t do much beyond being a contact should they encounter trouble.
Wells’s eyebrows scrunch together, his concern divot staring me down. “Yes. Why?”
“I have a hunch,” I say, retrieving my Zippo from my pocket. This may be an angsty process.
“Sit,” he orders, expecting me to elaborate.
I shut the door and mosey into his office, plopping down on his couch with a whoosh. “If you’re too worn out, I can handle this, Chief. I hear parenting can make you age overnight.”
He glares at me while chomping his Tootsie Pop to bits.
“All business it is, old man.” I smirk and pause just to fuck with him for another minute. He’s keeping it together better than anticipated, so I get to the point. “Celeste’s brother died in a car accident.”
“Yeah,” he confirms. “Drag racing.”
“Right.” I focus on the billowing flame while I spill. Even the thought of this guy incites a murderous rage inside me, but I don’t want to reveal that now. “She has a picture of him with his best friend, who was in the car with him. It’s Easton Lancaster, Pruitt’s older brother.”
That piques his interest. He chucks his sucker stick and straightens to attention, jaw tight. “And?”
“Before she even told me the guy’s name, I recognized him. His face is familiar. I couldn’t place him, but—”
“You don’t think he’s dead?” He starts sifting through a box of USB flash drives in his drawer.
“I don’t.” My pulse accelerates. Snick. Flick. Flame. Curling and uncurling my fist in my lap, I clarify the hunch part. “My gut tells me he’s a missing piece.”
“Ben’s best friend,” he muses while still digging. “Any idea how close he was to the Carvers?”
I won’t share Celeste’s private matters involving that motherfucking predator unless I’m certain they’re relevant, so I simply say, “Close.”
He rises with the flash drive in hand, his mind drifting to where mine’s been since she told me his name. “So, running into Pruitt—”
“Not so coincidental if Easton is alive,” I finish.
That’s not a sure thing. It’s possible that even if Easton is alive, Pruitt doesn’t know, and it was an innocent run-in, but coincidences rarely happen in matters such as these. And all five of us felt that prick was hiding something. Hiding Easton is a big something.
Unable to wait patiently, I wander behind Wells to watch him scroll. Each client file has pictures and the details of their entire erasing experience attached. Gotta know what you’re erasing someone from. Their lack of transparency with us generally results in their eventual exposure because something vital wasn’t covered up. While the guys who handled these cases weren’t as fail-safe in their thoroughness as we are, there’s still a wealth of information on these clients.
“Jesus Christ,” Wells hisses, swiping a hand through his hair. “He’s here all right.”
The file opens, and the bastard’s face has my jaw popping. He may have survived that car wreck. He will not survive me.
But as I read the information on his case, my stomach recoils. “What a sick fuck.”
Easton Lancaster didn’t only survive that car accident; he left Benjamin Carver trapped inside, slit the throat of a homeless man attempting to offer help, and threw him into the burning vehicle so the remains of two bodies would be found. No investigation into the identity of the car’s inhabitants was done, as there were over two hundred witnesses who had watched them race. My girl being one of them.
So, not only did this motherfucker take sexual advantage of Celeste as a minor, but he also killed her brother and disappeared. The question is, why? A question unanswered in this report.
If Easton didn’t want to divulge his rationale to the people erasing him, it was a reason he deemed worth more than his best friend’s life, a possible murder charge, and the millions he paid to have himself erased and those crimes glossed over. Quite possibly a reason still relevant.
Wells draws the same conclusions, but that doesn’t get us very far. “Let’s take a breath and think this through,” he says, pouring us both a scotch.
