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“For fuck’s sake.” I scrub my hand over my face and groan in frustration. “I said it’s okay. You said you believe me. We’re both working through some shitty stuff, but we’re choosing to trust. So you talking to the captain is fine. I trust you.”
“I’d fuckin’ hope so,” he grumbles. “I’m not the one who fractured what we had.”
“Fletch…”
“We’re trusting,” he huffs. “Moving on. Interpol says no. NCIC says no. I’ve collated a bunch of potentials outside of the few we tracked down today, so we can get on those tomorrow. Some are in prison, but we both know that powerful men can organize shit outside of those iron bars, so we’ll talk to them, too, and see what’s up. My best guess so far is Kyle owed some bad motherfucker some money. He got in deep, couldn’t get out again, and lost a few appendages as payment.”
“But that doesn’t work for me.” I rest my elbow on the counter and drop my face in my hand. “If money is owed, no amount of torture will bring it back. Someone taking fingers, teeth, eyes; that says our perp wanted information. He wanted data he couldn’t otherwise get. This had nothing to do with cash.”
“Sure, but once the target is dead, that information can’t be gathered anymore. So why hold the body for nearly two days?”
“I don’t know.” And the fact I don’t is what makes my mood swirl and spin. “We need to figure out who the fuck he is. That’ll make all of this so much simpler.”
“So let’s put him on the news.” The sound of rustling paper flitters through the call. “We have a connect with Tiffany Hewitt. She’s respectable. She reports fairly. We’ll ask her to put his face on the morning segment, and we’ll have a name within the hour, guaranteed.”
“Yeah, well, we’re kinda running out of options here. The body’s already cold, and our trail, colder. We have a ‘could be white, but could be black’ van and a timeline that fucking sucks. This is a professional hit, no matter which way we slice it. Not necessarily a hitman, and not necessarily organized crime. But this wasn’t a crime of passion or the result of heated tempers. It was cold, calculated, and malicious. We find out who the vic is, and we stand a chance of learning what information he had. Once we get that, maybe we can track it back to our killer.”
“So I’ll call Tiffany,” Fletch concludes. “Get her to flash his face in front of the public. The fact he’s not popping anywhere is what’s worrying me. He could be an operative, Arch.”
My brows pull tight. “You think?”
“Maybe he works for one of those databases we’re searching. It could explain his lack of fingerprints. Could be why he isn’t on social and has zero internet presence. He’s a fucking ghost, and now he’s an unidentified dead guy. We’ve stretched further to come to a conclusion before.”
“Yeah, but… CIA?” My heart moves just a little faster. “A spy?”
“Could be. Dude has intel perps want. Interpol kicked me out until I got higher clearance. That’s pretty telling. Maybe we’ve stepped in a rose garden we don’t really wanna be in.”
“Well…”Fuck.He could be right. “We’re in it now. If that’s how it is, then you’d better watch your back while this is open. Whoever killed for that information probably isn’t keen on us digging around and searching for it, too. And you’ve got a little girl to protect.”
“We both have people to protect, Arch. Good thing we have each other’s backs.” He pauses for a beat before adding, “Even if you pissed me off that one time. There’s trust here, okay?”
“Hey, Daddy?” a little voice pipes up in the background. “Are you done with work?”
My cue to go.
“I gotta be with Moo,” Fletch tells me. As I predicted. “It’s nearly her bedtime, and she wants to hang out.”
“Yeah. Go watch cartoons. Give her a kiss and tell her Uncle Arch loves her.”
“Will do.”
“Oh, and before you go…” I wait to make sure he hasn’t killed the call, but it’s quiet. “You there?”
“Yeah. What’s up?”
“Can Moo hear me?”
“Nah. You’re not on speaker. What do you wanna say?”
“Jada.” I hate how saying her name wounds him. How her absence in their life hurts, but her presence, somehow, is so much worse. “What’s that look like?”
“Like someone is hacking my fingers off, my tongue in half, and yanking my eyeballs out,” he grumbles. “It’s fuckin’ torture, Arch. She wants everything to be the way it was, but we can’t just…” he stops, and I can picture the way he shakes his head. “We can’t wave a wand around and think that erases the damage. The forgotten birthday party. The inconsistency. The broken fucking promises. I don’t want a romantic relationship with her anymore, Arch. But it’s like, that’s all she can focus on. We removed the cocaine and got her clean for Mia, but now her new addiction is the relationship that died a long time ago. She thinks if we fix that, everything is better. But she’s completely blind to the little girl who wants her mom to prove she’s worthy. That she’ll stick. She just wants her mom to prove she’s trying, ya know? And Jada’s MO right now is emotional manipulation, like her hurt feelings are more important than the little girl she helped create.”
“She’s being a shitty person,” I sigh. “That’s not who she used to be.”
“I guess it’s the new her.” He groans. “Sobriety has made her mean, and because I won’t let her brush her shit aside like it never happened, we’re the assholes.”
“You know you’re not, though, right?”
