“Could it be connected to Amie’s disappearance?”
She paused for a long moment, considering.
“Yes,” she said finally.“The baby is a red herring.Nothing else feels right.Out of the blue, Amie disappeared, and now we hear this asshole wouldn’t leave her alone?The only question is, did she leave of her own accord, or did he help her?”
“What do you think happened?”I asked, afraid I already knew the answer.She’d left all that money behind.Shiro found her purse in a bush.
“I think she wouldn’t cooperate anymore, and he took her.”
CHAPTER24
JUSTIN
“Amie was spying on me?For seven fucking years?”
“Apparently so.”
Time and nerves stretched in the near silence as they absorbed the news.The mystery that had shaped their lives a decade ago wouldn’t die.The ghosts of Blackstone House had returned.
Ari was sitting cross-legged on the coffee table in Justin’s living room, her gaze tracking him as he wore a hole in the carpet.Brax picked at his fingernails, Dawson was leaning against the wall, and the whir of Alexa’s fidget spinner was getting on Justin’s last nerve.
“Will you stop that?”he snapped.
“Stop what?”
“Playing with that damn toy.”
“It’s not a toy; it’s an outlet for stress.”
“Yeah?Well, it’s not helping mine.”
She huffed, but she did at least drop the spinner into her lap.
“If Levi wasn’t in prison, I’d break his fucking nose,” Justin muttered.“He had a spy in myoffice.What did he think I was going to do?Break down and make a false confession between meetings?”
“At the moment, we don’t know the reason.But the Sykes family was paying Amie twelve hundred bucks a year, so there must have been one.”
“The Sykeses’ PIs were brutal,” Alexa said.Great, she’d started typing instead, her fingers flying over the keys.Click-click-click-click-click.“They hounded Nolan for ages because of who his dad is.”
Justin’s father had killed his mom in a fit of anger, but Nolan’s dad had been a Little League coach, a part-time pastor, and a bona fide serial killer.Justin wasn’t at all surprised that Linus and Mary Sykes had targeted him, even though Nolan had a solid alibi.They’d been desperate to free their son.
But Mary had passed away several years ago, and Linus had gone quiet.Why was he back?And why now?
“Do you know who they used?”Ari asked.
“Some questionable outfit based out of DC—Liberty Line Investigations.”
Ari’s expression said that wasn’t good news.“I thought they’d gone out of business.”
Justin only remembered the way they’d followed him from dawn till dusk, asking everyone he knew intrusive questions until he found himself more or less alone.The stalking had continued until Alexa stole the Sykeses’ money, and although he often felt guilty for accepting stolen funds, he also thought of Eliza and her cowboy in Wyoming and figured he deserved the compensation for what those assholes had put him through.
“Who’s paying them?”he asked Alexa.“I thought you emptied the Sykeses’ bank accounts?”
“Not completely.I just liberated the offshore funds Linus was hiding from the IRS.He still had an account with Wells Fargo, but he also had a drug habit, and could you blame him?If I’d had to live with Mary Sykes, I’d have snorted coke constantly too.”
“She was a strange one,” Dawson agreed.“The way she constantly called Levi, and he wasn’t allowed to make a decision without consulting her first.That was some weird shit.”
“He was sick,” Brax said.“All those pills he took, and he never wanted to talk about what was wrong with him.”
