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“Not once. It was like he never existed. She wouldn’t talk about it. We always figured he’d been really abusive.”
“What happened to him?”
“She never said.”
“And you never asked?”
“We were young,” he said. “We didn’t think about it. Then she died.”
“Of what?” Ryan asked.
“Drive-by shooting in our little Iowa town. The first and only. No one was ever caught.”
“Right before Cade showed up,” Talon said. “Seems a little incriminating.”
I nodded. “And more than a little convenient.”
“You think Cade shot his own mother?” Dominic asked.
“You said yourself he was psycho. Do you mean this never occurred to you?”
“Cade acted all broken up about it,” Dominic said. “So no, I didn’t think about it.”
“Your father took Cade in, let him take his name.”
“Yeah. My dad was a good man.”
“Was?” Talon asked.
Dominic nodded. “He died last year. Cancer.”
“Okay.” At least we knew Cade hadn’t offed his stepdad. Even the biggest psycho in the world couldn’t force cancer on someone.
“Fast-forward,” I said. “How did you start working for Brad Steel?”
“Cade kind of took Alex and me under his wing. He taught us how to handle guns, and he was good, man. Really good. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but right around the time Alex and I finished high school, he got a little weirder than usual. Like I said, he was obsessed with your father and the Steels. He asked Alex and me to go in with him, help us avenge him. We didn’t know what he was talking about, and he wouldn’t elaborate, but I could tell he was thinking about doing something terrible. Alex and I declined, and a few days later, we got a phone call from someone claiming to represent Brad Steel, asking if we wanted to work for him. He offered us some outrageous money, so we took it.”
“Was Cade already with the FBI when he showed up?” I asked.
“He’d left the bureau and was setting up a law practice. Like I said, Alex and I were teens. He offered to teach us how to shoot like the FBI had taught him. Our dad was okay with it. We thought it was great at the time.”
“So somehow, between the time your mother thought he allegedly died and the time he came back, he worked for the FBI and managed to go to law school and pass the bar?”
“Apparently,” Dominic said.
“I smell a rat a mile away,” Ryan said. “I wish Ruby were here to listen to this. She’d have called bullshit a half hour ago.”
“You can easily check records to see where he went to law school and whether he was with the FBI,” Dominic said.
“Records can be forged,” Talon said.
“Federal records?” Dominic shook his head.
“Kid,” Talon began.
“Kid?”
“Yeah, kid. What are you? Twenty-five?”
