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I GOT HER UP OFF THE floor—which was no place to be sitting in the first place, and certainly no place to have this conversation—and led her to the kitchen table. She flinched when she saw the windows, and I followed her wide eyes, wondering if she'd actually seen anything out there. If she'd seen something, though, I was certain she would have told me. More likely she'd come to the conclusion—same as I had—that if the flowers had been delivered after I left, it was probably because he'd been watching from somewhere.
Waiting for me to leave.
Waiting until she was here alone.
I wanted to punch myself. Dammit! I was stupid. What had I been thinking, leaving her here on her own when I knew for a fact that Tony and his father were both gunning for her? Sure, she'd been in the house, and in theory that made her safe, but we'd also been in my house when Tony tried to burn it down around our ears.
If he loved the girl, he had an awfully screwed-up way of showing it.
Probably because he was broken in the head.
“I'll get the curtains,” I told her quietly. I sat her down and moved toward the windows, drawing the curtains as quickly as I could and then hitting the lights so the kitchen was still bright and as cheery as it could get when a psycho killer might be outside hiding in the bushes.
I wasn't going to share that last part with her.
I pulled one of the other chairs close to her and dropped into it, then put my hands on her knees. To my surprise, she pushed my hands off and climbed into my lap instead, sitting like a little kid with her head against my chest.
She must be really frightened. She was doing a good job of hiding it, but Lily almost never asked for physical support like this. What exactly was going on in that brain of hers?
“Tell me,” I said quietly. “Tell me everything.”
She started talking without any further prompting and told me about the first day she'd been here, when she ran into Tony at the bakery and he’d tried to sweet-talk her. How he'd turned aggressive and then demanding and how he'd followed her all the way back out to her car, trying to bully her into giving him another chance.
Sure, I'd already known some of this. But it looked a whole lot different now that we were in a situation where he'd actually tried to burn a house down and then kidnap her when we escaped.
“I just don't know what he wants,” she said in a small voice. “He was so mean when we were together, and he and his father literally ran me out of town. Paid me to leave and never come back. Then as soon as I get back he tries to convince me to date him again? That doesn't make sense, right? Why would he pay me to leave and then try to get me back as soon as I was in town?”
Because he doesn't like the idea of anyone else having you, I didn't say.
Because he wants to have you all to himself.
And most of all, because he wants to possess you, not love you.
I'd seen the type before. Men—and women—who didn't actually like a person but became fixated on them and then couldn't stand the thought of them belonging to anyone else. People who thought they could own another person and do whatever they wanted with them, including hurt them as often as they liked. Men who would destroy anyone who tried to take that person away from them.
I'd seen them when I was a kid, in fact. My dad had been that way with my mom and had killed her instead of letting her get away from him. And then he'd tried to control me the same way—until I got away from him.
I wasn't going to let Tony do that to Lily. The girl was strong enough to take care of herself, for sure, but also sweet enough that she'd never understand anyone else wanting to hurt her. Which meant she wouldn't see him coming until it was too late.
She needed someone who was expecting the worst to keep an eye out for her. Someone who was strong enough to stand between her and the guy obsessed with owning her and big enough that he could knock that other guy down.
Of course if I could take him down without actually having to use my fists, I guessed that would probably be better.
The problem was, I already knew they had the cops in their pockets. Lily and I had seen that firsthand when we’d tried to submit a report about Tony breaking into her house. The cop on duty hadn't even wanted to take the report, much less do anything about it, and when we’d called him on it, he practically laughed in our face. Then another cop had picked a fight with me for daring to standing against the McCarthy family. And I'd been asking around town long enough to know that other people who had spoken out against him had mysteriously changed their minds—or disappeared.
Of course, the cops hadn't done anything about it. Crooked contracts, money laundering, and physical intimidation. You'd have thought the cops would step in and at least pretend they were protecting the public.
A girl going to the hospital with bruises, cuts, and marks on her throat that showed someone had tried to choke her. And her mother had told me only the doctors cared. The cops hadn't even asked who had done it to her.
Probably because they already knew who it was, and that person had paid them well to look the other way.
The thing was, though, they were contractors. They bought and sold real estate, and they hired people. Money was changing hands, and money couldn't be kept entirely invisible. I might have just been a mechanic in the military, but I'd been around people who worked in higher positions, and one of them had been in charge of tracking things like that. Money laundering in other governments. Corruption.
Men who got away with shit they shouldn't have gotten away with.
I'd never asked how he did what he did, but I remembered the day we'd been talking about one of his cases and he'd been laughing at how stupid the guy was. “The thing is,” he'd said, chuckling, “no matter what they do, if there's money, there's a trail. They might be trying to launder it through a thousand other accounts, but if they're moving it, there'll be a record. And that record is where you start to find out what they're doing.”
That record. The trail.
The McCarthy men weren't smart. They were rich, and they thought that was all that mattered.
Which meant that they'd probably left a trail they didn't even think about covering up.
I just had to find it.
I'd already called that accounting friend, Richard, who was a PI down in Atlanta these days. He'd started digging around. I just needed to make sure he was digging in the right places and find out where I could start digging, too.
And now that I thought about it, Lily might be in the best possible place to help.
“Listen,” I said, sitting back and staring into her eyes. “I think I know a way out of this. We just have to stop being reactive. Stop waiting around for him to do something else. Because we know we're not going to be able to get anyone to do anything when they do. The cops are on their side. So we stop waiting for them to come to us... and go to them.”
She frowned. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” I said, smiling, “that they've got to be messing up somewhere, and we just need to find the proof of it. Proof big enough that the local cops can't cover it up. They're bad men, Lily, and they're probably doing more than just threatening you. If we can find proof...”
“Then we can put them out of business,” she said slowly, her eyes getting wide. “We can run them out of town.”
“And right into jail, if we're lucky.”
Her eyes got even wider, and soon she was grinning, too, relief and excitement washing over her face. “What do we need to do?”
We started planning immediately. Lily was going to draw up a list of all the businesses Mark McCarthy owned and operated, milking her local contacts for details she didn't have, and I was going to pass them to Richard. Then I was going to get started on researching them myself. And while I was doing that, Lily was going to talk to her friends here. Find out what Mark and Tony had been up to since she left town—and if anything stuck out.
And we were going to start with Madison, the girl Tony had dated right after Lily left town.
***
“I DON'T KNOW,” MADISON said again.
I stopped my groan of frustration at the last possible moment and exchanged a glance with Lily. She'd called Madison and asked if we could talk to her, and Madison had agreed to that immediately. She'd told us her address and invited us into her small apartment—which she shared with a roommate who wasn't home.
But as soon as she heard what Lily wanted—any information regarding Tony McCarthy's businesses and what they might be doing wrong—Madison had shrunken into herself and turned very quiet.
Almost like she was afraid to say anything.
I watched her closely, wondering at that, and tried to pinpoint exactly what Lily had said about her. The girl had sought Lily out and told her that she'd dated Tony right after Lily left town. That he'd been abusive toward her and had left her, and that he'd been obsessed with Lily the whole time. That latter part I could believe. The man was still obsessed with Lily. He couldn't seem to leave her alone.
And as for the first part...
Yes, the way Madison was acting right now told me that was true as well. Her hands were curled into fists and held against her chest, her eyes turned down to the floor. She was practically curling into herself, trying to protect the soft inner part of her soul. All because Lily had brought Tony's name into the conversation.
I knew that reaction.
I had that reaction anytime something happened that triggered the parts of me that were still frightened. I curled into a ball at loud crashes. Completely panicked when there were flashes of light that I hadn't expected. Anything that reminded me of months on end in the Middle East, surrounded by bombs and fires and people who were constantly trying to kill us.
And that, I realized, was our way in.
“The memory of him is that bad, huh?” I asked quietly.
Madison's eyes came up to mine, wide and dark, and I could see that I'd guessed right. The question was whether she was going to take my peace offering or not.
“Yes,” she whispered. “He used to come home drunk, after I was asleep, and attack me in bed. Try to choke me, claiming I'd been out doing things with other guys. It got to the point that I locked the door at night when I went to bed if he wasn't home yet. But then he'd just break it down.”
Oh fuck...
I put my hand on hers and squeezed softly. “And that sort of thing never leaves you. You feel it all the time, right? Just waiting under the surface.”
She nodded. “How do you know that?”
“I have it too. I was in the Middle East as a soldier, and when I tell you that I can't sit through a thunderstorm because of how much it reminds me of the bombing we went through, I'm not joking.”
“He's not,” Lily said. “I've found him cowering in the basement during a thunderstorm.”
I sent her a look of disdain that was so overblown it couldn't be missed. “I wasn't cowering, Lily.”
She lifted her eyebrows. “Oh no? What would you call it, then?”
I sat with that a moment, thinking. “Hiding.”
“Right. Because that's so much better than 'cowering.'“
At this point, Madison was laughing at the two of us—as I thought we'd both planned—and she gradually uncurled herself and looked from me to Lily and back. “What do you do when you remember what he did to you?” she asked Lily.
Lily leaned forward and took Madison's other hand. “I get sad for a little. And then I get scared for a little bit more. And finally I move on to knowing that I deserved better and that revenge is the best medicine anyone ever made for a man like that. He beat me up when I couldn't do anything about it. Now that I can do something about it, I'm going to turn it right back around on him. I'm going to get my revenge. Would you like to join me?”
Madison paused, frowning...and then suddenly nodded.
And then she started talking.
It turned out Tony had been setting up a shell business when he was with her and that she'd overheard some of his conversations with his dad when they were registering it. They'd talked about how they needed to hide money that they were getting from people they shouldn't be getting it from. That they needed a way to 'wash' the money.
“He was going to use that new company to move money around without anyone else being able to track it,” she finished. “But we broke up before I could find out anything else.”
Look, I wasn't an accountant or a lawyer, but that sounded an awful lot like money laundering and fraud. Not to mention them getting money they didn't want tracked.
And like I'd told Lily, everything was trackable. You just had to know where to look.
“Do you know what that company was called?” I asked quietly.
Madison tipped her head, thinking. “I think it was Mark Something. Mark Up? Marked Up? Something that they probably thought was clever but really wasn't.”
I grinned at her, took out my phone, and typed a message to myself with the name of the company.
She was right. They'd probably thought they were being clever. But they were wrong.
