Beneath the Truth

by Meghan March

  “Well, someone clearly knew her well enough to send a delivery.”

  The man approaching the box stared at a piece of equipment he held in front of him. “I’m not getting any readings off it that would suggest ordnance.”

  “So, let’s cut the fucker open,” Carver said.

  The former EOD tech pulled on a mask, clearly worried about possible chemical threats. “Everyone get back.”

  The two other guys out front backed away, and Carver and I took two steps toward the house as well. Were we handling this with proper police protocol? No way in hell. We didn’t have time for that shit.

  The EOD tech cursed loudly at the same moment Ari’s scream split the air, so loud I could hear it in the driveway.

  As I broke into a dead run back toward the house, I heard them yell from behind me.

  “It’s a head.”

  56

  Ariel

  No. No. No!

  The image on my computer screen that someone just sent me was so gruesome, I couldn’t comprehend it at first. It had to be photoshopped. It wasn’t real. But I couldn’t stop screaming because something told me it wasn’t a hoax..

  The photo featured Erik’s head sitting on a table next to a cardboard box. His eyes were open, but lifeless.

  Arms wrapped around me from behind, and I turned. The tears spilling down my face blinded me, so I fought.

  “It’s me, Red. It’s me,” Rhett whispered.

  “Erik. He’s—” I couldn’t say anything else. I leaned over and threw up on the floor.

  Footsteps pounded in the entryway before someone else burst into the kitchen. “We need pictures to make a positive ID—”

  The buzzing in my head nearly drowned out Carver’s voice.

  “I think your positive ID is on the screen.” Rhett pulled my hair back over my shoulder. “Come on, Ari. Let’s get you to a bathroom.”

  I shook my head, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, not even caring that it was disgusting. “No, I can’t. I have to analyze the picture. It could be fake. There’s no way it’s real. It’s not. It can’t be.”

  Rhett held me tighter. “Ari, we need to get you cleaned up.”

  From his forced calm, I knew there was something else.

  “What was in the box? The package? Oh my God. Please don’t tell me—”

  “I’m so sorry, Ari. So fucking sorry.” Rhett’s grip on me tightened.

  “Nooo!” I screamed, tears burning paths down my face. My stomach rebelled again, and I gagged and choked on bile.

  This isn’t happening. This is a nightmare.

  I wanted to close my eyes and pretend this day had never started. Erik . . . My body shook with sobs as a hundred emotions crashed into me at once.

  Esme . . . My chest ached. My insides were shredded. My gaze dropped to the floor to see if there was blood puddled beneath my feet from the gaping hole in my heart.

  “Why?” My question came out ragged. “Why would someone do this? Erik didn’t do anything to anyone.”

  My phone rang from its position beside my computer. Too close to the horrific picture on the screen for me to take a single step toward it.

  Rhett didn’t hesitate. He reached out and snatched it up.

  Esme. On the secured line.

  “I don’t know if I can do this,” I choked out. “How do I tell her? I’m not strong enough.”

  “We’ll do it together.”

  I answered the phone, and all we heard were sobs until she started wailing.

  “He’s dead! Someone . . . someone sent me a text message. With a picture. And one of Jan too.”

  My knees buckled, Rhett’s hold the only force keeping me upright. “Esme, where are you?”

  “In an Uber. Going home.”

  “Don’t go home,” I croaked, the words sounding broken. “Don’t go home.”

  “Oh God, they sent it to you too?” Her voice rose to a screeching level. “How is this happening? This can’t be happening!”

  “I’m so sorry. It’s all my fault.”

  “No, it’s those motherfuckers, and we’re going to take them all down.” Esme’s hysterical tone took a turn for the dangerous.

  Rhett grabbed the phone from my hand. “What you’re going to do is go directly to the airport and get on a flight to Vail. You’re going to lay low until this is over.”

  I jerked my head around to look at Rhett. “Vail? Why not here? She should be here. With me.”

  He gave me a hard look and repeated himself. “You understand me, Esme? Don’t take a damn thing with you. Tell the driver right now to change direction. We’ll get you a ticket and message you the details through the secure app.”

  “Okay. Okay.” Esme’s voice shook as she repeated herself. “Colorado. Pot’s legal there. I’ll get so stoned, I won’t remember what happened. I’ll forget. I’ll . . . Erik . . .” She broke into sobs again, and I pulled myself together enough to take the phone from Rhett and form words without crying.

  “Listen to me. We will take them out. We’ll get revenge. No one is getting away with doing this. No one. We won’t just hurt them, we will destroy them.” I didn’t care if I sounded like a bad movie villain.

  “Okay. Pot and destruction. I can do this.” Esme’s voice quavered, but she sounded steadier as we heard her tell the driver to go to the airport instead and she’d pay him cash. He agreed, probably not about to argue with the hysterical woman in his backseat. “Send me the ticket. I’ve got Erik’s computer. I’m going to find out exactly what he was doing, and then I’m going to track down these motherfuckers—”

  “And give us the information so we can take care of it,” Rhett finished for her.

  “Only if you promise—”

  “I swear to God, we will get them, E. I will not stop until we do.” I’d never made a more serious vow. “Call me when you get to the airport and are checked in.”

  “I will.”

  We hung up, and I turned in Rhett’s arms and soaked the front of his shirt with my tears.

  “How can this be happening? What did I do?”

  He smoothed my hair back from my face and held me close. “This isn’t your fault. You didn’t do this.”

  “But Erik wouldn’t have been a target if not for me. Jan either.” I looked toward my laptop and the other message mocking me for not clicking on it. I couldn’t. Not right now. I didn’t know if I could handle seeing more.

  “And you wouldn’t have been a target if not for someone else. There’s a hell of a lot more going on here than we thought. Now we pull our shit together, find the answers, kill the people who need killing, and get Erik and Jan justice.”

  I looked up at him, blinking away my tears. “I need to call my brother.”

  Rhett nodded in agreement. “We need to call your brother.”

  * * *

  After we arranged for the plane ticket to Vail for Esme, and Rhett’s brother Rock agreed to pick her up and keep her safe, we had Carver call in two security guys to watch over my dad at the rehab center. We weren’t taking any risks with the people we loved.

  Rock knew there was a threat, and he promised he would take good care of Esme and Mrs. Hennessy.

  Between Rhett and me, we called Heath six times. Each time, his voice mail picked up.

  Rhett ended the last call and turned to me, his expression serious. “I didn’t want to believe it. Fuck, I still don’t want to.”

  In this moment, I had some idea of how Rhett felt when faced with first, the possibility of his brother being a dirty cop, and then his dad.

  The choking disbelief. The visceral denial. The fear that it could be true. The last shred of hope I held on to that we could have gotten it all wrong.

  I walked back to the printouts of the IA reports on the table and picked up the papers, hating that my brother’s initials were on each one.

  “He had to have a reason, right? He wouldn’t do this without a reason.” My logical, rational mind was fracturing under the weight
of emotion.

  Rhett turned, his lips pressed into a flat line. “We need to talk to him. That’s the only way we’re going to get answers.”

  I heard what he wasn’t saying—the kind of answers I never got from my dad.

  I took a deep breath and pushed the emotion out of the picture in favor of cold, impersonal logic. “Why would a cartel care about someone in IA? Does that even make sense? Wouldn’t they want someone in another department?”

  “IA has total oversight over the department. They police the police.”

  “If I were cartel, total oversight sounds attractive then.”

  Rhett nodded. “It makes a sick sort of sense. In his position, Heath can get into everything happening in the department. Very little information would be off-limits if he had even a shred of a reason to need to know it.”

  If I were brutal and cunning, it sounded exactly like where I’d strike.

  “I hate this. I hate it so much. What if . . . What if he didn’t have anything to do with it, and we’re condemning him because he’s not here to defend himself?”

  “Ari, I know—”

  I cut him off. “We have to find him!”

  “Track his cell. Find out where he is, and we’ll go pick him up if he won’t answer the damn thing.”

  If I’d been thinking clearly, I would have already come to that conclusion myself. I rushed to my laptop. “On it.”

  57

  Rhett

  Ari couldn’t get a lock on Heath’s location, and my guess was his phone was off. I grabbed the stack of call records and scanned the list. Plenty of numbers I didn’t recognize. Burner phones. Throwaways. The kind that CIs would most likely use . . . or possibly cartel connections.

  “Can you get any info on these two numbers he called regularly?”

  Ari’s fingers flew over the keys. “I can try.”

  Within minutes, she’d identified the point of purchase of the burner phones as a small town on the Texas-Mexico border.

  Her jaw clenched. “I really don’t like this. Not at all.”

  I leaned over her and rested my chin on her head. “I don’t either, Ari. But he wouldn’t be the first cop to make a bad decision and have it go a lot further than he thought.”

  We both knew I was talking about my dad. Even now, I wondered what the hell he had to do with this.

  Why would Heath drag out the investigation? There was one other possibility . . .

  “Heath could have been keeping my dad from getting arrested so he didn’t talk. He had to know that if Dad got arrested, the cartel would assume he’d roll over, and then they’d take him out. Maybe your brother was protecting him by not closing the case.”

  I wanted to believe it. It could make sense. Maybe this was Heath’s way of trying to protect a man he considered a second father.

  Ari turned around, hope lighting her gray eyes. “I hope that’s true. I really, really hope it is.”

  My phone vibrated in my pocket.

  “Keep digging,” I told her. With a kiss to the top of her head, I stepped away. “I’m going to take this.”

  “Okay.”

  I fished my phone from my pocket to find it was my brother Rome calling. “Hey, what’s up?”

  “Why the fuck am I seeing the name Hennessy coming up in cartel chatter? I just got off the phone with my computer geeks, and they said they caught a couple mentions of the family name. It sure as hell isn’t because of me this time.”

  “What chatter?” I’d stayed out of Rome’s business before because I didn’t want to know what he was doing down in Central and South America, but if he could help me in any way now, I needed to know.

  “We listen. We monitor. We gather intel. After walking into enough situations blind, we decided we had to step it up. Now we watch for key phrases and all identifiable names.”

  “Got it. So, what the fuck was the chatter about?”

  “You’re on the radar, and I want to know why.”

  “We’ve got a situation here.”

  Ari’s gaze searched my face as I turned around.

  “Does it have something to do with Dad?” Rome asked.

  “Maybe. We’re still piecing it together. But we do know that Carlos Alberto Moreno Herrera is involved somehow.”

  Rome went quiet. “Do you have any clue who the fuck you’re dealing with? That family is way above your pay grade, brother.”

  “I don’t have a pay grade anymore, brother.”

  Rome made a sound of disgust. “You know what I mean. That family is bad news. Brutal. Ruthless. They’ll send you a friggin’ head in a box—”

  “Yeah, got one of those this morning.”

  Ari turned away, and I reached out to grasp her hand.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Rome shouted.

  “I wish I were.”

  “And you didn’t call me? You think you’re equipped to handle this shit by yourself?”

  “Heath was supposed to be handling it. He was working with the Feds to take Carlos out. Now he’s in the wind, and two of Ari’s employees are dead.”

  “Shit. They’ve upped their ante. Let me start working on my end to see if I can tell what’s going on. You need to lay low. I’m not ready to come home for another fucking funeral. Tell me everything you know, and I’ll get my people on it.”

  I laid it out. Every detail we knew and suspected, from the beginning. When I was done, my brother was quiet for a long moment.

  “This shit is fucked. My world makes a lot more sense, if you ask me. None of us pretend to be good. We’re all in it for the money, which is what I’m guessing both Sampson and Dad were in it for.”

  “You don’t know that.” The protest was automatic, even though from what Mom said, he was right about Dad’s motives.

  “You might be older than me, but that doesn’t make you smarter. You’ve always believed that everyone should have a code of honor like you. News flash—they don’t. Everyone’s in it for themselves. That’s how the world works. I’ll get back to you when I have something. Try not to get dead.”

  My brother hung up before I could tell him to fuck off.

  “Who was that?” Ari asked.

  “Rome. Apparently, my little brother knows a hell of a lot more about the cartel than we do. He’s working on his end. Now we need Heath.”

  Ari shook her head. “I can’t trace him. He’s gone. I don’t know what else to do.”

  “What about Carlos?”

  “Nothing. He hasn’t used the number I have for him since he called and texted me.”

  “He has to have another. Or he just uses burner phones and swaps them out constantly.”

  “I can locate those. The numbers that were on Heath’s phone records . . . if you think that maybe—”

  “At this point, it’s worth a shot.”

  I needed to get out there and find him. I didn’t want to leave Ari alone, but without anyone on the streets looking, we weren’t going to find Heath. Shit, even that was a long shot. With the heat this was drawing, I wasn’t about to ask anyone else to step into the line of fire.

  My phone vibrated before I could figure it out.

  Rome. Again.

  “You forget something?”

  “No, I’m just really fucking good. One of the G6s that’s part of the Herrera family fleet filed a flight plan with New Orleans as a destination. If I were you, I’d get my ass to Lakefront Airport and get this fucker as soon as he hits the tarmac.”

  “I’m on it.”

  I pulled the phone away from my ear to hang up, but Rome’s voice came through. “Make sure to bring the big guns. Guaranteed they’re coming in hot.”

  “Done.”

  I hung up, and Ari stood.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Your ex-boyfriend is on his way here.”

  58

  Ariel

  I’d made Rhett promise to be careful and he swore he would, but that didn’t make me feel any better. Fear had settled into my bone
s and dogged my every step. There’d already been too much loss.

  I wanted to curl into the fetal position and pretend none of this had happened. But that would accomplish nothing.

  My eyes burned from tears waiting to fall as I thought about how terrified Erik and Jan must have been in their last moments. My chest felt like it had been crushed beneath an avalanche. The tendons in my hands ached from furiously typing, but I didn’t know how else I could help.

  Lockdown got real this time. I wasn’t allowed to leave the panic room. No one would know if I tucked myself into a ball and sobbed. But what good would it do me? None.

  The time for mourning was after everyone was safe. Until then, I’d hold it together and dig deeper, try to find answers.

  As I put my fingers back on the keyboard, an instant message popped up from a chat service I rarely used but had never bothered to uninstall.

  * * *

  Heath: I really fucked up, Ari. I shouldn’t have tried to fix this on my own.

  Ari: Where are you?

  Heath: I fucked up and we’re all paying the price. I’m sorry.

  Ari: Just tell me where you are. We can help you.

  Heath: No one can help me now. It’s time to face facts.

  Ari: DON’T YOU DARE QUIT ON ME!

  * * *

  I yelled the words as I typed them.

  * * *

  Heath: I’m sorry.

  Ari: LET ME HELP YOU!

  * * *

  But he didn’t reply. No little dots popped up in the dialogue box to show him typing. And then thirty seconds later, the program showed he was off-line.

  His phone. He has to be on his phone. My fingers flew as I ran the trace. Heath might have closed the app, but his phone was on just long enough for me to get the location.

  I sucked in a breath when the address popped up.

  My dad’s house.

  Heath was home?

  It didn’t make sense. I tapped Rhett’s contact, but there was no answer. Before I could leave a voice mail, another call interrupted, and I looked down at the screen.