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It’s a list of names and dates.
“Do you see what I see?” I ask.
“Gavin Xavier over and over? Yeah, I see it.”
Xavier was the name that Raewyn gave us. The name she heard cops speak inside Tiger’s house.
“Play the video,” I say.
He checks the audio, making sure it’s at an acceptable volume. Then he opens the file and hits play.
It’s dark and not the best quality, but the men in the video are standing under a street light in an empty parking lot. One of them is clearly Mendes while the other one isn’t someone I recognize.
The words are muffled because the person recording is far away. You can tell it’s zoomed in, and the person holding it is shaking. They nearly drop the phone, giving us a view of the bushes they’re hiding in. The image focuses again, and now you can clearly see that Mendes is pissed.
I flick my gaze to the timestamp to see it was recorded a little over two months ago.
When my gaze goes back up to Mendes and whoever he’s talking to, I see the other man put his hands up and step back, shaking his head. Mendes pulls his gun from his holster and shoots the man in the head. The pop is loud. He drops to the ground. Mendes stands over him for a moment, then puts his gun away and walks off like he didn’t just kill a man.
The person recording is breathing heavier now, and it’s all we can hear. Panting. Gasping. Another few seconds of that and he zooms in closer to the body on the ground, blood puddling on the pavement. Then the video ends.
Neither of us says a thing for a few moments, but I notice the water is shut off in the bathtub and the jets are going.
“Fuck,” is all Forge says. He shakes his head, leaning back in the chair. “Fuck.” This time it comes out more aggressively. “What the fuck are we supposed to do with this?”
“We can’t go to the LT,” I say. “Or the Chief. We don’t know how high up this goes.”
“Texas Rangers?” he suggests.
“I think that’s our best bet.” I pause a moment. “For now, it goes into our safe and neither of us touches it until we decide we’re bringing it to them. And we’re making a copy.”
He nods, opening the top drawer to pull out a package of thumb drives.
“We need to do that sooner rather than later.”
“Yes,” I say. “We do. Tomorrow.”
“Fuck,” Forge says again. Then he looks up at me. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you right away.”
I squeeze his shoulder. “It’s okay.”
He nods again, then copies the files onto our drive.
It takes a few moments for us to wrap our heads around what we just watched, but eventually we’re able to talk about it.
“So, what do we think?” I ask.
Forge is staring at the screen, shaking his head in disbelief.
“Nothing here tells us why. Could be anything. But it’s obvious why Tiger was killed. And I bet whoever sent that email is dead too.”
“Had anyone saw Raewyn at that house, she’d be dead too,” I say.
The thought has me nauseous.
“Maybe they did,” Forge says.
“What do you mean?”
