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“Leave it,” Maddoc says when Dante makes a move to start another sweep. “Wipe it all down. We need to get out of here, and I don’t want anything left that will get us any attention once the cops finally show up.”
“They won’t know we were ever here,” Dante promises.
Riley finally stirs in my arms, looking over at her father’s body. She swallows hard. “What about Frank?” she asks, her voice a painful-sounding, raspy whisper. “Shouldn’t I, um…”
She starts to tremble, and I slide my hand up between her breasts to rest over the place I’ve marked her, pulling her back more securely against me. “No. You don’t have to do anything for him. The cops can handle the body.”
She sighs—a long, slow breath, like a balloon deflating—and lets her weight fall back on me. It’s complete trust, and it feels odd to have that from her, but also unexpectedly right. As Dante and Maddoc get to work wiping the place down, she barely stirs. Her breath is slow and choppy and occasionally broken by a twitching shudder, but she stays in my arms and, once Sutton’s place is handled, doesn’t object when I lead her out to the Audi.
I buckle her in and make sure she’s secure, exchanging a look with Maddoc before he gets into the Escalade with Dante. My phone lights up with his incoming call before I’ve even pulled away from the curb.
I throw it on speaker. Riley is quiet and seems completely numb to her surroundings now, but she’s still a part of this. I want her to be included, I want her to feel confident that we’ve got it handled, even if the conversation does nothing more than sink into her subconscious as she stares blankly out the window.
“We have to assume West Point got something,” Maddoc starts with, his voice filling the Audi as both vehicles head back toward the house. “I want people on all McKenna’s key players. If they have a lead we don’t know about, then they’re already one too many steps ahead of us right now.”
“We’ll get our people to follow every fucking one of them, Madd,” Dante says. “Do we think Sutton really did hear from Chloe, though? That wasn’t just bullshit?”
I glance over at Riley.
She doesn’t move, still staring blankly out the window, barely blinking.
It… concerns me.
I tighten my grip on the steering wheel, but refocus on the conversation at hand.
“Yes,” I say in answer to Dante’s question. “There was a call from an unknown number on Sutton’s phone. It wasn’t from Riley’s number, which means Chloe must’ve gotten smarter and borrowed a phone or found some other way to call him—and that means tracking her down by pinging cell towers will be impossible this time. The call lasted four minutes and thirty-eight seconds, and came in three hours before he contacted Riley.” I cut my eyes toward her, then force them back toward the road and continue. “That was, presumably, about four hours before… what we found.”
Before McKenna’s people showed up to interrogate Frank Sutton, which allows for plenty of time for them to have gotten wind of the contact from Chloe, if they were tapping the right sources out on the streets.
SourcesIshould have found.
My fury over that is useless right now. Best to store it until I need it. Specifically, when I find out why my own surveillance network failed and can use it to correct that failure… or to correct those who failed me.
“So, West Point breaks in to find out what Frank knows,” Maddoc summarizes, “then they either kill him so he doesn’t share the information with anyone else, or else they kill him by mistake, during the interrogation.”
Dante makes a sound of pure disgust. “We know those fucking weasels just trashed that place as a bonus. Sutton probably caved as soon as they threatened him. No way would he have stood up to much in the way of torture, especially not to protect his daughters.”
“Like he should have,” I add tightly, rage flashing through me again. That reason alone should have given him, should give any parent, the strength to withstand whatever West Point did to him.
“Like he should have,” both my brothers agree grimly before wrapping up what we know and ending the call.
We’re almost back at the house now, and Riley hasn’t reacted to anything she heard on the call. It’s almost like she’s gone catatonic, which just proves what I already determined back at her father’s apartment: Frank Sutton deserved to die.
Heshouldhave died protecting his daughters. Instead, it was the opposite. He betrayed both Riley and Chloe, too many times to count and always for selfish reasons, and that kind of weakness makes him an entirely different type of monster than the one I grew up with. One that the world is better off without.
When we reach the house, Riley finally stirs, unbuckling her seatbelt as soon as I stop the Audi and opening the door to leave the car before the engine stops ticking. I quickly follow. She’s walking on her own, but doesn’t acknowledge Maddoc or Dante as she passes them. It’s like her body is on autopilot, and she doesn’t seem to see or hear anything happening around her.
I catch up with her and take her arm, leading her toward the stairs once we’re inside the house.
She lets me guide her, hold her, without any outward reaction. Maddoc has one, though. He stops me, a questioning look on his face as his concerned gaze bounces between me and Riley.
After a moment, he clears his throat. “Maybe Dante or I should help her get cleaned up. Stay with her for a bit. She’s gonna need—”
“Me,” I interrupt, tightening my grip on her arm to the point that I may leave a bruise. “I’ll take care of it.”
Again, Riley doesn’t react, but Maddoc’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise and behind him, Dante looks shocked too.
I don’t blame them. It’s out of character for me. But I’m still right.
