Keep Her Safe(71)

The front door creaks open and out comes Gracie, dressed in jean shorts and a white T-shirt, her hair still a wild frame around her fresh face. She doesn’t wear makeup, I’ve noticed. She doesn’t need to.

“Eat, Noah.” She holds up a sandwich, wrapped in a napkin.

“Marry this girl or I will,” Jenson moans, following with a fake-out and spin, tossing the ball clean into the net again. “Hey Gracie, you wanna play?”

“Nope,” Gracie mumbles between a mouthful.

“Come on. Don’t be afraid. I’ll go easy on you.”

She settles onto the back bumper of my Cherokee. “I hate basketball.”

Jenson dribbles past me, muttering, “Cut bait. It’ll never work between you two.”

I shake my head, giving Gracie an apologetic smile. She responds with an indifferent shrug, her gaze doing a lightning-quick scan of my chest.

“So, why are you here?” Jenson asks with zero ounces of tact, the ball smoothly sailing through the net again.

She gives me a high-browed stare that says, You tell him what you want him to hear.

“Like I said, it’s a long story.”

The problem with Jenson is, he may act like a beer-guzzling goof, but he’s a smart son of a bitch whose brain is usually working a mile a minute. “Noah said Jackie left something for you?”

Gracie chews and calmly studies him the way she once studied me, with complete mistrust.

Finally, I offer, “Money, to help out.”

“Really . . .” He stops dribbling and closes in, dropping his voice. “Is that why you guys are acting cagey?”

Gracie and I share a glance.

“Dude . . . Come on.” He throws his hands out.

“My mom said some things before she died that made it sound like Gracie’s dad wasn’t selling or stealing drugs.”

My Cherokee sinks as Jenson leans down against the rear bumper beside Gracie. “What, like someone pinned it on him?”

“She wasn’t exactly clear, but yeah.” I hesitate. “And there may have been cops involved. At least one.” I walk him through what we know of Mantis, and the Lucky Nine drug bust, and what Dina told us. And, while I haven’t come clean with Gracie about my mother’s phone call to Klein yet, I throw out the idea that maybe Abe was killed because he saw cops stealing money at a bust and maybe one of those cops was Mantis.

Because maybe Jenson can make better sense of this than I can.

He absently rotates the basketball within his grasp. “Ninety-eight thousand dollars.”

“Exactly.”

He lets out a whistle. “So you’re gonna talk to this Maxwell guy, right?”

“That’s where I was heading before you showed up.”

“Where we were heading,” Gracie corrects sharply.

“And you don’t wanna go to the APD with this?”

I give him a knowing look. “Mantis runs Internal Affairs.”

“That shouldn’t stop you. Most of them are honorable cops who’d risk their lives for complete strangers any day of the week. Don’t let a few corrupt pieces of shit stop you from trusting them.”

Corrupt pieces of shit like my mom, maybe.

I feel Gracie’s eyes on my profile and tension slides into my shoulders. “We’ll see what Maxwell knows and go from there.”

“You’re probably better off going to the feds anyway. You must have an in with them, through your job?”

I avert my gaze. I have an in all right, thanks to the asshole stalking me. By my watch, if Klein was serious, then I have another sixteen hours before he comes knocking again. I’m not even as worried about that as I am about what Gracie’s going to say when she finds out I’m still keeping things from her.

Jenson nods slowly, his mind working. “The cops didn’t find the video.” He says it so matter-of-factly.

I frown. “Why do you say that?”

“Logic. Gracie’s mom tells the cops about this video and then suddenly a guy—who she thinks is a cop—comes looking for it. That makes me think someone working on the case tipped him off. And if this guy came to look for it—”

“The police didn’t find it on the computer.” I finally catch on to Jenson’s thinking. “It had to be an external file. A memory stick or something. Wait, did they even have memory sticks fourteen years ago?”

“Good question. I honestly don’t know how people survived back then, without all—”

“Why wouldn’t they have found this memory stick—or whatever—when they searched the house?” Gracie, always quick to poke holes in theories, interrupts.

“Because it wasn’t in the house,” Jenson says, simply. “Abe must have known how valuable it was. Maybe he’d already been threatened. You need to find this video.”

“No problem. Just find a video that my dad hid fourteen years ago,” Gracie mutters sarcastically.

“He must have given it to someone he trusted.”

“He didn’t give it to my mom,” Gracie says. “And he and Jackie were at odds, so it’s not likely he gave it to her.”

“I didn’t find anything that even remotely resembles a video file in the safe, or in that floor compartment,” I add. “So, who’s left?”