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BRIANWAITEDFORCharlie to respond, bracing himself for... Well, for anything. It was a given that her confession involved an illicit act. But he knew that Charlie wasn’t a murderer, despite her earlier question.
He stared into her eyes, willing her to trust him.
Something in her was broken. Leftover from her childhood, haunting her. To ever heal from it, she was going to have to put her faith in someone. He wanted that person to be him.
“I didn’t just convince Haley to leave her husband,” she said. “I was in the process of helping her do it.”
“Helping in what way?”
“New location. New name. New everything. Get her off his radar. Make it so that he could never find her.”
She was talking about illegal, fake credentials. “Is this the first time you’ve done this?”
“What?”
“Make a person vanish by giving them a new life.”
“I’ve been doing it for three years. A handful of clients. Only women and children who were in a violent situation. Never for criminals.”
He lowered his hand from her face, his gut tightening. “Do you make the fake IDs?”
It was tough to get credentials that passed scrutiny. Required specialized skills, and while Charlie was talented, he didn’t seeforgerfitting into her wheelhouse.
Then again, she was full of surprises.
“I act as a liaison. The middleman so to speak. My client buys it from one of my contacts. But I make nothing from the deal.”
Relief trickled through him that Charlie wasn’t a forger or personally selling fake credentials. Not that it was good that she was acting as a go-between, but she should have told him this sooner.
“Maybe Haley decided to leave town early,” he said. “Staged the scene at her house to implicate Seth as a going away present.”
“Why are you so cynical about this?”
He shrugged. Came with the territory of being a detective and working a case.
“In my heart, I think Haley is dead. There was so much blood. Too much.” She shook her head. “If she left, where would she go? She doesn’t have a new identity yet. None of her credentials are ready. The clients never have any interaction with my contact. Only I do. And that still doesn’t explain who shot at me.”
Foul play was certainly possible. The blood found at the house matched Haley’s DNA. Forensics also detected latent bloodstains and stated that close to two liters of it had been in the house, though, they’d only been able to analyze traces.
But the fact that a body hadn’t turned up was nagging him.
“This is a dangerous business you’re in,” he said. “Not only for you, but more so for your clients. They have no idea what they might be buying with a fake ID. They could be getting a host of issues from credit problems to a criminal history.” There was no telling.
“The identities are solid. There’s never been a problem.”
“How can you put the lives, the futures of these women and their children, into the hands of some shady scumbag hacker that you don’t really know?”
Charlie rested her head back against a wood post and lowered her gaze. “But I do know him.”
“How well?”
She took a deep breath, released it. “Intimately. Once upon a time.”
A cold lance of jealousy stabbed him. “How long ago?” The words came out harsher than he intended.
She looked up at him, surprise flashing in her eyes.
Yeah, he’d finally lost his cool. Over a former lover of hers, who was also a criminal and still embedded in her life.
