Keep Her Safe(106)

I look to Klein, baffled. “So, Abe’s case is now a joint investigation between the APD and FBI?” And the retired chief, apparently?

“Sure sounds like it, doesn’t it?” If Klein’s bothered, he doesn’t let on, sharing a whispered word with another FBI tech before focusing on the backyard to where Gracie sits on the lounger, speaking to someone—I assume Dina—her free hand waving excitedly, her face filled with a lightness that I haven’t seen before. He exits out the French doors to the back.

Silas’s dark gaze trails after him. “He’s the one you punched?”

“Yes, sir.”

A faint smile of satisfaction flickers over Silas’s face. “I’ll make sure his superiors speak with him. Help him understand what collaboration means.” The smile is followed by a frown of disapproval, as Silas’s gaze drifts over the yard. “Your mother would be upset if she saw this.”

I sigh. Leave it to Silas to give me grief about gardens at a time like this. “Cyclops did some rearranging. Don’t worry, I’ll fix it all.” It’s a good thing he hasn’t seen the mound of dirt at the bottom of the pool.

“Yes. That’s an interesting pet.”

I chuckle. “He’s starting to grow on me, actually.”

“He definitely earned his keep today.” Silas shakes his head. “In all your twenty-five years, Noah, you have never shown me anything but the utmost respect. Until today.”

I avert my gaze.

“I called you five times and you couldn’t answer? Couldn’t call back?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why? Because you were too busy getting the FBI involved, after I specifically told you to wait?”

“I had no choice.” I tell him how Klein tailed and then ambushed us. “As if I had any right to ask Gracie to wait.”

“No, I suppose not.” He shakes his head. “I don’t like the way these guys are operating. Haven’t been able to get much out of anyone, all day. I can appreciate why they’d be tight-lipped, though, especially given Dwayne Mantis’s position, and the fact that they don’t have much of anything that’s concrete.” He runs his hands over his face. “But I can’t help you if you keep secrets from me.”

“And what about the secrets you’re keeping from me?” I struggle to steel my spine as I confront my uncle. “You knew about that video, didn’t you? And about Abe going after Mantis for stealing the money.”

He chews the inside of his cheek in thought, his finger tracing the grain of the wood on the table’s surface. And every second I wait for his answer, my anxiety grows. “I did. And when you came to me yesterday, to tell me all this . . . I thought I was going to lose my breakfast right there in my office. Because I did know about it and I wrote it off as a lie fourteen years ago. If I’d believed it, I would have brought it forward as part of the investigation into his death.”

“What do you mean if you believed it? What the hell did you believe, then?” I can’t help my accusatory tone.

“The same damn thing as Harvey Maxwell! That it was all a part of this elaborate lie Abe was living, another fiber in the wool he’d pulled over everyone’s eyes.”

“Why on earth would he do that?”

“For the same reason he was lying to his wife for weeks about his whereabouts!”

“He was searching for her sister!”

Silas throws his hands in the air in an act of surrender. “I didn’t know that! No one knew anything about this Betsy girl! Dina didn’t even know! Why lie to her about it? If he’d told her the truth, then he would have had an alibi.”

I level him with a look. “Mom knew about Betsy.”

“Well, she didn’t tell me.” His voice is bitter. “And I looked through the evidence they found on his computer and in his house. There was nothing there. So I figured there was never anything there to begin with. Had Dina come to me about this man who’d threatened her . . .” He lets his words drift.

“Is this why Mom blamed herself for Abe dying? Does this have something to do with Dina’s sister? Does Betsy have something to do with the fallout between Abe and her?”

His throat bobs with his swallow as he gazes at the chair my mother was sitting in that night. I had been preparing to warn anyone who made for it today—not that chair; don’t sit in that chair—but no one even came close. “I wish I knew, Noah, but she never told me. Apparently there’s a lot she didn’t tell me. Your mom . . . she was different after Abe died.”

“That’s when she started drinking.”

“It wasn’t just the drinking. She became closed off. To everyone, myself included. She got that promotion to assistant chief not long after and she became so focused on her career, nothing else seemed to matter. She wasn’t the same. I figured it had to do with Abe—with him not being the man she thought he was.” He sighs. “All I know is that with the overwhelming evidence in front of us, we were all left to believe the obvious answer.”

Yes. The evidence. “We went to the motel today, Silas. And there had to be a third person in that room.”

“Maybe there was. But it isn’t as conclusive as what he made you think.” Silas throws a casual hand toward the back, where Klein paces around Gracie, a lit cigarette in his hand. “That guy was still a kid stealing his daddy’s beer and feeling up his girlfriend in the back of a car while I was standing in that motel room, surrounded by dead bodies and blood and drugs and a million hard questions. If there were people in that investigation working to erase fingerprints, to make Abe look guilty . . . well, that means everything was questionable, then, doesn’t it?”