The Girl Beneath the Sea (Underwater Investigation Unit #1)(38)

“It’s Cindy’s. You’ll like her. She’s nosy like you.” Solar pats the scrum of dog fur and sends them off chasing a tennis ball into the bushes.

We go through a sliding glass door into a kitchen with takeout boxes piling up in the trash. “We don’t cook much,” Solar explains as he leads me into a nicely furnished living room. Beige leather couches surround a large glass coffee table covered in books and magazines. The walls are lined with bookcases and framed newspaper articles.

I take a closer look. They’re mostly investigative pieces on crime and corruption. The byline is Cynthia Trenton. She’s been a South Florida crime reporter for decades. Pulitzers, Peabodys—whatever else they give good reporters, she’s won them.

“Wait? Is your Cindy Cynthia Trenton?”

“Yep.” Solar takes a seat in an armchair and places two beers on the table. “I framed those. She hates it.”

“Huh. I never knew you two were a thing.”

“It’s not exactly a secret, but not exactly a thing we tell anyone.” He emphasizes the last part to suggest I keep my mouth shut.

I drift through the different headlines, realizing the major stories Trenton has covered. One article catches my eye in particular.

SIX NEW RIVER POLICE OFFICERS ARRESTED FOR BRIBERY

The headline isn’t that eye-catching, but the photos of the cops who were arrested are. A young George Solar’s stern police graduation photo is in the middle.

I look back at Solar. He gives me a small nod. “Framed that one too.”

“You guys have a weird relationship.”

“It’s complicated.”

I recall Jackie chastising me for saying that about Run and me. “I can imagine.” I stare at the couch next to Solar and realize I’m still wet. “Have another towel?”

“Yeah. Hold on.” He grabs a towel from a hall closet and lays it on the couch. “When Cindy gets home, she can find you something.”

I get a little nervous that the talk of the girlfriend and her being home soon is just a ploy to put me at ease. What if it’s all a lie and she’s really lying dead in another room?

Solar could be at the center of all this, and I just walked into his trap.

There’s a loud knock, and I jump.

“Babe, we need to get this door fixed,” a woman shouts from the front of the house.

“I’m on it,” Solar shouts back. “We have company.”

“I hope it’s a carpenter,” she replies.

“Better. A McPherson.”

“That is interesting,” says Cynthia Trenton as she enters the room. “Ooh, and my favorite one.”

She’s probably in her late fifties, but she looks younger. Dark skinned with a disarming smile, she makes me think of a Jamaican Meryl Streep.

My hand is wrapped in hers before I know it, and she gives me a firm shake. “Georgie’s told me everything.” She notices I’m wet. “Maybe not everything. Let me find you something. I used to be skinny once. I’ll leave it on the guest-bathroom counter.”

Cynthia disappears into the back of the house, leaving me alone again with George Solar. Or Georgie, as he’s known around here.

I’m reasonably certain I’m not about to get murdered, unless this is an even more elaborate ruse than strictly necessary.

Naturally, Solar reads my mind. “Still think I’m here to kill you?”

“No,” I reply with a little hesitation.

“But you don’t trust me . . . That’s fine. It’s a good instinct. Saved my life a lot of times. We can work with that.”

“What exactly is our work?”

“Getting ourselves out from underneath this pile of crap that’s been dropped on us. Making it so you don’t have to keep looking over your shoulder.”

“And you? What’s your part in this?”

“Unfinished business.”

“That sounds ominous,” I reply.

“You have no idea. No matter how messed up and corrupt you think things are, you have no idea.”

“Enlighten me.”

“This isn’t just about a bunch of drug money that went missing. Reputations are at stake.”

“Cops?”

“Feds. Others. People who intentionally did things and people who got caught up in things they didn’t understand until too late.”

I glance over at the article on the wall with his photo. “Like you.”

“Ha. That’s a story for another day. This is bigger—more complicated.”

That word again: complicated.

“Okay. Explain.”

“We’ll start with the people back at the secret boatyard.”

“They were cops? Right?”

“No.”

“Cartel?”

“Nope.”

“Then—”

“Let me explain,” he interrupts to stop my interrupting. “DIA contractors.”

“CIA?”

“Nope. DIA. Defense Intelligence Agency. They’re kind of like the Pentagon’s own CIA. You hardly ever hear about them in the news, which they prefer.” He pauses, takes a breath, thinking. “This is oversimplified, but I’ll paint the big picture for you. Historically, the DIA ignored drug trafficking because they were focused on armed conflict. The one exception was that they were actually helping facilitate poppy farmers in Afghanistan. They let the heroin business continue so they could stabilize the country’s economy and bargain with the locals. Of course, this being the US government, that DIA division, called K-Group, did more than tell farmers it was okay. After some congressman raised the point that it seemed against our own interests to help the heroin trade only to have it show up in emergency rooms in the United States, K-Group decided to insist upon certain conditions in their little opiate business. Basically, better purity.”