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This would destroy her. Stomp down and shatter her world into a million pieces.
She switched to begging, pleading, trying to appeal to a tiny spot of affection he might have for her. “My reputation won’t recover from this.”
“I did everything I could, Jessa. You should have withdrawn from the case when I told you to.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Gabby
The lines on the papers blurred together. Gabby stared at her empty coffee mug as she stretched. The pinch in her lower back made her groan. “It sucks getting older.”
She blamed Rob Greene. His files littered her dining room table. She’d read and reread and assessed since their meeting. At one point she had to rush and retrieve the computer charger because she’d burned through the battery doing her own research on the various jackasses who abused, battered, and killed the women unlucky enough to veer into their paths.
Alex Carlisle was the most recent peculiar death, and his seemed fitting because of what he did to the women around him—treating women as disposable, only existing for his pleasure—but he certainly was not the only aggressor. Not even the worst, though she wasn’t sure how to weigh one horror inflicted on a woman against another. Every act demanded that a woman left behind somehow overcome and take on the role of survivor... but only if the man didn’t kill her first.
Carlisle’s wife went from shuffling on the sidelines to a starring role when she claimed the accusations weren’t true. Fingers pointed at her. Police sources—anonymous, of course—talked about her killing her husband out of revenge. But over the last two days the conversation had shifted again. Unnamed third parties stepped up and offered new stories that cast her as damaged by a decades-long marriage filled with terror due to abuse.
The up-and-down, the rolling in and out of responsibility, reminded Gabby of Rob’s claims and his relentless need to convince her that something bigger was at play here. If his grief and passion were pieces of a delusion... she couldn’t see it.
After hours knee-deep in what she’d expected to be nonsense, she had to admit it wasn’t nonsense at all. Damn it. She teetered back and forth, getting sucked into his arguments. To battle that, she supplemented his files with her own online searches into the deaths. The circumstances stacked up until it all looked... odd. Each death sounded reasonable when you looked at it individually. But an isolated incident morphed into something else when you looked at them as a group. It was all too coincidental. Too close to a potential pattern.
She hated that the pieces fit together. She’d read a book on confirmation bias. Part of her thought she was watching the idea in action. Rob talked and talked about his theories and planted them in her head, and now she could only see the fragments that supported his theory. She wanted this to amount to an irrational mess promoted by an unhealthy guy fueled by scary paranoia. All the talk still could be that, but she doubted the answer was that easy.
She looked at his cached articles. Nothing raised any alarms. He didn’t spew or rant about secret societies. He and his writing partner had won awards. They’d appeared on television and come off fine. Then the partner had died, and the tone of Rob’s reporting had changed.
She knew from experience grief was a nasty bastard. It wiggled its way in and shrouded every moment in darkness. It leaked and spread until it kidnapped the good memories and created minefields of pain. All of this—the desperate researching and clinging to things he couldn’t see—could be a reaction to loss. She just didn’t know.
She got up from the chair, happy her legs supported her after hours of not moving very much. She opened the utensil drawer and felt around underneath. The envelope. The one Baines had hidden. A voice told her to hide it, and she did, even though the move reflected a paranoia level that made her uncomfortable.
None of the files Rob had given her contained a single comment or stray thought about Baines. If Rob held negative information on her ex, he wasn’t sharing it... yet. She didn’t know if this hidden bid related to any of Rob’s files, but she felt compelled to look.
What she really needed was a second set of eyes. Only one person might know why Baines thought this document was important enough to hide, but that person hated her right now. Might always hate her, but she had to ask.
She took out her phone and texted Liam, but not before scanning in the three-page document and forwarding that.
Her:Do you know what this is?
Liam:A bid proposal
Yeah, noshit.She’d helped Baines and Liam set up the company. She knew how the bidding process worked.
She debated not going into details but decided that wasn’t an option. She’d kept enough secrets from Liam. He deserved to know about this.
Her:Could you skim it? I found it hidden behind a photo in Baines’s house.
Liam:When?
Her:After he died.
The three dots sat there on the phone screen, taunting her. Either Liam was typing out a long explanation or thinking or... who knew? The longer the wait, the more her stomach rolled and churned. She was about to tell him to forget it when his return text appeared.
Liam:He shouldn’t have this
That sounded dire. Now they were getting somewhere.
Her:Why?
Liam:It’s from the company we’re bidding against for a big job
