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Mac cut him off. “We have Owens notebook, Ben.” That stopped him cold. “We have dates and quantities. We have dollar amounts and initials.Yourinitials. At least at the beginning. You need to tell us about that.”
Ben stayed silent. Darinda looked worried. The baby started to cry. Darinda took the baby down the hallway off the kitchen, trying to shush her the whole way.
Mac said, “I know this is hard, Ben. These people are your friends, your family —"
“They aren’t my fucking family,” he growled. Then he rubbed his face with both hands. “You have the book?”
She nodded.
He rubbed his face again. “Shit.” He let out a long breath. “Yeah, Owens was smuggling shit. Drugs and guns. There was other shit, too. I… I got four kids. I’m drowning in mortgage payments and car payments and just trying to put food on the table. Owens said it was easy money. I…I just needed a break. So, I helped him a few times.”
Darinda came down the hall again and through the kitchen. She walked up behind her husband and put her arms around him. He straightened and squared his shoulders, seeming to take strength from her embrace.
“I took the money, but after making one mortgage payment I just couldn’t bring myself to use any of it. Then I told Owens I wanted out. I didn’t want to do it anymore. I just wanted to do my job. I loved being MSRT. It’s the best job in the world. At least, it was until Owens.
“He told me I could get out, but I had to stay part of the team and keep my mouth shut or something bad would happen to me. Bannister had just quit. Owens said I couldn’t go too, or it would look like something was wrong.”
Darinda went to the kitchen and got Ben a glass of water. She set it down on the table next to him. She didn’t offer the rest of them anything, and Mac didn’t blame her one bit. Hard to be hospitable to people who could take your husband away.
Ben looked at Dane for the first time. “I had no idea about what they were going to do to you. I swear it. I would never have gone along with it. I’m sorry, man.”
Dane nodded.
“After what happened to you, when they were taking you away by medivac, Owens came up to me and said that’s what would happen to me if I said anything. He said he’d make sure I died.”
Dane ran a hand through his hair. “I get it. You’ve got a family. What choice did you have? He would’ve killed you. I know that. I’ll make sure others know it, too.”
Ben raised his eyebrows. “Others?”
“Ben, we need to know what you know about some other people. Craig Owens brought something onto Oahu this last time, something we need to find.” Mac was trying to be gentle. Ben looked like he’d been through the wringer. The last thing he needed was to be yelled at. He’d clam up. “Do you know where we can find the stuff from the last shipment?” she asked in a calm voice.
Ben stayed silent. He looked at all three of them and reached for his wife’s hand. “Am I going to go to jail?”
Mac hesitated. “To be honest, I don’t know. It’s hard to say. If you help us, it will go a long way toward showing remorse.”
Dane leaned forward. “I’ll go to bat for you, Ben. I promise. I’ll tell them that Owens tried to kill me and I have no doubt he would have killed you, too. You were operating under duress.”
Mac wouldn’t have gone that far, and she couldn’t guarantee anyone would buy it, but she loved that Dane offered to help Ben. Instead of being bitter about Ben’s part in what happened to him, Dane chose to be the bigger man, a man she admired greatly because of it. She wanted to reach out and squeeze his hand. Instead, she folded her hands on the table.
Ben glanced up at Darinda. She nodded and he let out a long sigh. “I can tell you where the guns are. I think he already passed the drugs on. He was only ever the middleman on that. He got a percentage off the top for making sure they arrived safely. The weapons were something different. He made a lot of money off those.”
Cain cleared his throat. “We need you to tell everything you know to a Special Agent Rutledge. Will you do that?”
“Yes.” Ben took a sip of water, and Darinda put her arm around her husband.
Cain excused himself to make the call. Thirty minutes later, they met Sinclair in the driveway. “How the hell did you get him to flip? I took a run at him a couple of times, but he wasn’t budging.”
Mac crossed her arms over her chest. She felt the burden of turning Ben Hestman in. He’d made mistakes, but she wasn’t sure he deserved jail time. “He’s tired. I think if you’d tried again, he might have caved. But to answer your question, we found some evidence and when confronted with it, he decided to help himself.”
Dane came up beside her and handed Sinclair the file with copies of the pictures and the pages from the little black book. “You’ll need these.”
Sinclair studied the items Dane had placed in his hands. “What are these?”
“Proof,” Dane said. “Craig Owens was smuggling drugs and guns into Oahu. Ben can tell you where he thinks the weapons are and provide the details you’ll need to arrest the rest of the team. But I want you to give him every consideration you can. Owens would have killed him if he didn’t go along, just like he tried to do to me. Ben Hestman didn’t have a choice. I want that noted. He shouldn’t go down for something he did under duress.”
Sinclair nodded slowly. “I can’t make any promises, but I will do my best. Owens wrecked a lot of lives. We’ll try to limit the damage to anyone else. Hopefully, when we find the rest of the team, they will cooperate as well, and we can figure out the whole network.”
Dane shook his head. “I wouldn’t hold your breath on cooperating. They’ve got nothing to gain now.”
