Maeve’s expression shifts again, the unease I’d noticed when she stepped foot into my house reverberating off her skin again.
“Max and his friends are actually…brothers,” she explains, turning her laptop around again to show me the three smiling faces of the men we met at the bowling alley. In the professional headshots on the screen, they look like any normal men; but knowing the truth hidden behind their false grins and deep dimples, the proud smiles on their faces wind painful barbs of disgust around my skin.
I wouldn’t have pegged them as brothers. They all have different colored hair, Max’s being black and the other two a blond and brunette, but thematching dimples and blue eyes they all possess make it obvious once Maeve said it out loud.
“They all work for St. Michael’s Homes,” she continues, scrolling her mouse from the other side of her laptop. The screen rolls to their bios on the non-profit’s website, and my eyes quickly scan the words as she scrolls, picking up words and phrases that imply the three of them came from broken, addicted homes themselves, though who knows if that’s true.
She turns the laptop back to face her and clicks a couple of times, twisting it back to me to show the connections she’s come up with. “This is the director of St. Michael’s,” she says, pointing to a picture of a middle-aged man above Max and his brothers.
“Is he the leader?”
“I don’t think so.” She leans around the laptop and studies the screen with me. “He’s definitely involved, though. There are large transactions moving in and out of his personal and business accounts, dating back about five years.” She points to a white square above the director’s photo with a question mark in place of a photo. “Whoeverthisis, I think they’re the one running the show.”
“And they’re coming after me because I’m taking their workers out,” I surmise.
Maeve shrugs but nods, her demeanor further morphing to uncertainty. “I’m thinking so.”
“Well, looks like we just gotta take them all out then,” I say with a smile, sipping my coffee again.
Maeve sucks in a breath, rolling her lips between her teeth.
“What?” I ask uncertainly.
“Someone may already be working on that…” she says quietly, and I only tilt my head at her in question. “I got into the department’s system to look for that EMS report and the DNA report for Max.” Her words come out measured and controlled, and my heart starts beating against my rib cage as Iwait for her to go on. “This crime scene photo was taken a few hours ago.” She swallows as she adjusts her screen again until I’m looking at a picture of the man Maeve had been talking to at the bowling alley—I guess at the party, too, I just don’t remember that.
I bring my hand to my mouth as I stare at the photo of the blond man strung up by his arms between two trees. Bringing my face closer to the screen, I squint my eyes, studying how he’s secured to the trees. But then I realize he’s notstrung up—he’snailed up. His palms are slack, and there’s an unmistakable thick head of a nail in the center of each hand. The man’s head hangs toward the ground, and he’s completely naked, his body covered in welts and scratches. Blood drips over almost every inch of him.
“What the fuck, Maeve?” I whisper at the screen. “Now they’re taking their own men out? That doesn’t make any sense.”
I can’t tear my eyes from the screen as I bring my finger to his stomach, tracing over a large, unintelligible word carved into the man’s abdomen.
“What does that say?” I ask her.
She’s quiet for a moment before she whispers, “It’s my name.”
18
Colin
Captain Barrett looks supremely pissed off as he stares at the whiteboard with his arms crossed. The rest of us are seated at tables throughout the conference room. Lucy and Daniel have their eyes cast down toward the desks in front of them, afraid of what it’s going to be like when Captain Barrett releases his wrath on the room, which is bound to happen.
Three more pictures have joined the whiteboard next to the photos of Richard and Grayson, another red thread connecting them all. Lucy was able to figure out that all three men that The Terror Trio met at the bowling alley are connected to the trafficking ring, as well.
For some reason, they turned on their worker bees, sending Max and company down south to take out the two men who’ve been helping siphon women and children into the dark crevices of their world over the past five years.
Although, the tide seems to be turning on the three men as well, considering Max is in jail and another guy, Logan, was just found nailed to a treenear a cabin they seem to have set up shop in. His picture is taped to the whiteboard as well, though it’s his professional headshot from St. Michael’s and not the crime scene photo we all saw when I came into the office this morning of him in all his bloody glory. The third man, Chase, is still on the run.
We’d effectively closed the case on the teacher and the local family man found dead, Max’s DNA confirming for us that the community was no longer in danger of any moreaccidental deaths.
And confirming for me that Chloe Stark was in fact not the person behind it all.
Now, there’s a new mystery to unravel, and it’s still connected to the woman who’s got me so wrapped up in her web that the more clarity I think I find, the more tangled in her silk I become.
“Chloe didn’t do it,” I say to my captain’s back, and his body shakes with incredulous laughter before he turns to face us.
“Of course she didn’t fucking do it, Mills. How could she when you’ve been posted up in her house doing God knows what for three goddamn days?”
Since the alley where I crossed yet another line by putting the man who’d assaulted Chloe in the hospital with a broken jaw, the captain seems to sense that my feelings toward her have gone fromI’m going to fucking kill her, to,I’m going to fucking kill anyone who touches her.
