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“We don’t, and she won’t tell anyone where he is, either.”
My gut dropped. “You want me to find out if any of them have that information.” It wasn’t a question.
He nodded. “Yes. I’ll look into their finances and see if anything new has come up since they were last checked, and you find out if they have anything on Roy’s whereabouts.”
Frustrated, I threw my hand up in the air. “How the hell am I meant to do that? If I say anything about him, she’ll know that I know everything.”
Most people would have been affected by my anger, but the asshole just raised an eyebrow at me. “Don’t tell me the great Joshua Reagan can’t think of a way to get information out of a woman like Eva Dawson.”
The way he said her name pissed me off more than the implication I was some sort of lothario. “Watch how you talk about her, man.”
“I’m just saying, she’s not exactly what you’ve gone for in the past. She’s…” he searched for a word, “average. The others were executives and women who dressed to impress, and Eva isn’t. Like she’s going to risk losing you over something like that.”
Getting up and leaning on my hands on my desk, I glared at him and ground out, “In the past, I went for women who knew the score. Were they pretty? Yes. Was I interested in anything more? Hell, no. Eva’s different in so many ways and not the ones you’re implying. I’m not telling you again, watch how you talk about her.”
Reading me correctly, Harry held his hands up. “Okay, message received. She’s different. That doesn’t change the fact you’ve got to get the information out of her.”
Sitting back down in my chair, I rubbed my hand on my jaw, thinking about how this whole thing had gone to shit. It’d been easy when Harry had come to me about it, and we’d agreed I’d find out where his uncle’s missing money was. We’d been friends for so long, I didn’t even want the payment they offered me. But now… I wasn’t talking shit when I said Eva was different.
I didn’t want to lose her, and if I didn’t do this properly, I would.
“I’ll think of something.”
Just as I said it, his phone rang. Knowing I wouldn’t take offense at him answering, he took the call and immediately tensed up at whatever was being said to him. Giving him some privacy, I got up and went to get us new coffees, needing the caffeine hit now more than ever.
This whole situation was a clusterfuck.
I hadn’t shared my thoughts with Harry on Eva’s mom yet because I didn’t have any evidence to support it, but something wasn’t adding up. We knew Roy was involved, but all of the paperwork led to Connie. The police had decided not to charge him—even after Harry’s uncle, James Owens, had given them the proof of his involvement with the theft of his money—because he hadn’t had any of the funds or stolen items in his possession.
After finding this out, James had assumed he’d stand a better chance of recovering the twenty-million from his construction company with Roy being out of prison. Still, no matter where they looked, there was just no trace of him even knowing about it.
The problem was when we’d reviewed the police footage of their interviews with Connie and when it’d been brought up in court, she genuinely hadn’t even known about it, but they’d still decided it was a cut and dry case.
That was so far from the truth, though. The IP address that’d hacked the account had also been cleverly masked. Given that she struggled even to operate the flip phone she’d had at the time when it’d started ringing during the interview, I just couldn’t see her being able to pull that off.
So, while I was trying to find the money for Harry’s uncle, I was also trying to find out the truth for Eva. If her mom had been bribed, blackmailed, or set up, I’d happily take on that battle for her.
Harry had been my best friend since I was five, the guy who’d had my back when my parents had turned theirs on me when I was twenty and had quit college. He’d helped me find the capital to open up Shingle, helped me file all the paperwork that the city needed for it, and found suppliers who wouldn’t try to fuck me over. In short, he’d been my rock.
But now, Eva reminded me of the guy I’d been back then. Sure, she had her job and her brother and sisters, but who had her back, helping her find the answers to her problems? And these all had to be weighing on her like a ten-ton weight.
She answered something inside me I hadn’t known had been calling out, she completed me, and I couldn’t turn those feelings off. Not even for my best friend.
I was halfway back to my office when the door was yanked open, and Harry appeared with a tight smile on his face.
“Looks like we might have found Roy.”
A spark flared in my stomach. “Where?”
“Seems he lives with his family in Gary, Indiana.”
From where we were right now, that put him at just over an hour away. Connie had raised the family in an area of Illinois called Aurora, which would mean he’d been roughly two hours’ drive away from them at the time. That was almost smart, but how had he managed to hide all this time?
Moving around him to put the coffees on my desk, I carefully weighed what I was about to say. It might not all be adding up for me, but I still didn’t want to piss off my friend of twenty-five years.
“I thought you’d looked everywhere for him? How did you miss him being that close?”
“His name’s not Roy Green, that’s why. It’s Tyson Randall.”
