Defenseless, page 17
“She’d be thrilled, and you know it,” Kara said, putting the notebook she’d been reviewing to the side before pulling out a legal notepad. “She’d be happy that you found someone you wanted as a partner and that you weren’t going to shy away from letting him know. At least not anymore. You know how she felt about that kind of stuff—”
“Life’s too short to live with regrets,” Sabina finished.
“Exactly,” Kara said with a nod.
“Do you have any? Regrets?” Sabina asked, eyeing a stack of hard disks held together by a rubber band.
“I don’t think anyone can get through life with no regrets,” she answered. “All we can do is the best we can do.”
“You sound just like your uncle,” a voice came from behind Sabina. She and her sister whipped their heads around. It took less than three seconds before they leaped up and rushed over to the woman, squealing in a way that Sabina was quite sure no one in the room had heard since their teenage years.
“Gina!” they exclaimed, wrapping their arms around Gina O’Rourke. Their honorary aunt. The woman who’d come to their aid more than a few times in the past eighteen years.
“What are you doing here?” Sabina asked, stepping back. She glanced up and saw Chad, Ethan, Ryan, and Colton standing a few feet away, smiling at the reunion.
“That one offered to fly me out,” she answered, gesturing to Chad. “I figured you could use a friendly face. Or maybe even a seasoned intelligence agent. I’ve been retired for a few years, but don’t think I’ve lost my edge.”
“Never,” Kara said, grabbing Gina’s hand and tugging her toward the boxes. Not wasting any time in putting the woman to work, she handed Gina a notebook from one of the open boxes.
Sabina watched as the two dived into the contents without missing a beat. She walked toward Chad as the others drifted off to pick up other tasks. “You called Gina?” she asked.
He smiled, and his dimple appeared. “I thought you and Kara might appreciate having her around.”
There was still a distance between them, but she could feel it dissolving by the hour. It would take some time to disappear completely. The important thing was, though, they were trying.
“Thank you,” she said, going up on her toes and kissing his cheek. His hand came out and curled around her waist as she moved. It remained there when she was back on her feet.
“How are you? Really?” he asked, his dark eyes holding hers. Filled with concern.
She lifted a hand and rested it on his arm. “I’m equal parts terrified and relieved. I didn’t think those two feelings could exist together, but they do. I have no idea what’s going to happen, but it feels good to be doing something. To be coming out of the shadows.” She paused. “Even if it took me a long time to get here.”
His fingers twitched against her waist as he held her gaze. Then he leaned down and whispered, “The important thing is, we’re here. Together. All of us.”
Involuntarily, her hand gripped his arm. He drew away slowly, his cheek brushing against hers. When he’d pulled back enough that she could see his eyes again, her stomach jumped at the heat she saw there. It had been a long time since she’d seen that in his eyes. So long that she’d wondered if she’d extinguished it altogether. If she had, she had every intention of trying to reignite it. But with the way he watched her now, she knew it wouldn’t take much to fan the spark into a flame. Even more thrilling, though, was the fact that he was letting her see it. That he wasn’t hiding it from her.
The memory of him curled up behind her that morning washed over her. She stepped away rather than give in to the urge to move her hand from his arm to his neck and pull him down into a long and deep kiss.
“Did Jason Kline say anything?” she asked as they approached Ethan, Gina, and the others who’d joined Kara at the boxes.
“Only as much as he felt needed to be said,” Colton answered. Sabina and Chad sank onto a couple of chairs, and she picked up the notebook she’d been going through earlier as he grabbed one of the hard disks. He popped it into an external drive Collin had found and started perusing the files.
“Kline claims they were hired to investigate a threat,” Colton said. “To whom the threat was made, he couldn’t say. Only that they’d been ordered to do the job and it was a legal hire.”
“What exactly was the job, though?” Sabina asked. Chad cast Colton a look before shifting his gaze to her.
“He claims they were there to reconnoiter,” Chad answered.
“But?” Sabina pressed.
“Their weapons say otherwise,” he said. “The one who was killed was carrying a very expensive, high-powered sniper rifle. A rifle that, incidentally, matched the one used during the ambush on your car. As for Kline himself, he had three weapons, all handguns, all with silencers. No one carries a silencer unless they plan on killing something, or someone, quietly.”
“Any ID on the one who died?” Gina asked.
Colton nodded, brought up a file on his phone, and handed the device to the woman. As her eyes scanned the information, Chad watched. He hadn’t bothered to look up Gina O’Rourke’s file before arranging to bring her to Mystery Lake. With a name like O’Rourke, he’d expected someone of Irish descent, like Sabina. He had not expected a five-foot-ten, whipcord lean Black woman, with a shock of gray hair that hugged her scalp in a cap of curls. She also didn’t appear to prescribe to the belief that women of a certain age needed to dress a certain way. Unless that certain way was however the fuck she wanted to dress. Wearing ripped, skintight black jeans, a gray Ramones T-shirt, motorcycle boots, and a leather jacket, she looked as though she could have been out partying at CBGB during the height of its punk rock popularity.
“I don’t believe that the sins of the parents should be visited on the child, but that man’s father is the worst kind of prick,” Gina said, handing the phone back. “If he’s anything like his dad, it doesn’t surprise me that he’s the one who’s dead. The whole family is filled with arrogant pricks who think they are smarter than everyone. My guess is he tried to do something he thought was badass, but actually had about as much finesse as an actor playing a part?”
Ethan shrugged and nodded in confirmation. “Pretty much.”
“I’ve lost track of his dad, but I’d think about looking into him. Unless something’s changed in the past few years, his son would not have had the skill to handle the kind of rifle you talked about,” Gina said. “My guess is that his dad is involved in Sweet River and somehow managed to get his son a job. I don’t recall him having any ties to Jacobs, but they swim in the same cesspool, so it’s possible.”
“On it already,” Leo called out, making Sabina smile at her eager team. They might be working magic on their computers, but they were still listening.
An hour and four boxes later, Tess Jackson called with an update on her meeting with the Lexington Police. Predictably, George Jacobs had tried to stop the release of the evidence, arguing that the women formerly known as Bela and Nala Houseman needed to be interviewed and their identities confirmed before any evidence was released. Tess had anticipated that objection, though, and had presented notarized documents confirming their identities through fingerprints. When a technician matched those to ones on file from when the girls had worked as lifeguards in high school, there’d been no question that Sabina and Kara were who they said they were. And no question that they had rights to the evidence, especially their mother’s belongings. It hadn’t helped George’s argument that it was his name on the file that had closed the case all those years ago.
While Tess had overseen the packaging up of the evidence, George Jacobs had peppered her with questions about Sabina and Kara that revealed more than the fact that he was nosy. Since Kevin Jacobs already knew about the two women, George either wasn’t conspiring with his brother anymore or, if he was, he wasn’t being told everything.
After the update, Teague and Tucker popped into town and brought lunch back. The break was a welcome one, though short, and soon, they were all back to work.
It was close to dinner when Ryan returned, having left after lunch to check on things at the station. “Jason Kline was released this afternoon, and his bail hearing was just a bit ago. The Sweet River lawyer paid it, but he’s not allowed to leave the county, so we’ll be keeping an eye on him.”
“What’d you book him for?” Gina asked, not looking up from the laptop she was working on. A few hours earlier, she’d swapped with Chad and was now looking through the remaining hard disks.
“Trespassing, intent to commit murder, and a few other things,” he answered, picking up a notebook from one of the last few boxes. Uncle Mike hadn’t left any obvious notes, at least none they’d found so far. Which meant that whatever information he found was either in code or very subtle, and they’d missed it. Or, the option Sabina didn’t care to think about, that he hadn’t written anything down at all.
Suddenly, Ava’s chair flew back as she jumped up with a great big whoop. So startled at the movement and cheer, Sabina nearly dropped her notebook. She wasn’t the only one caught off guard, nor was she the only one who smiled when Ava started doing a little celebratory dance, chanting, “I got it. I got it. I got it.”
“Care to tell us what you got?” Ethan asked.
She held up a finger then walked to the printer that was spitting out paper. Taking the documents, she rearranged them into a particular order then joined them at the table. As she passed out the stacks of papers, she started to explain. “Kevin Jacobs was looking for something when your mother was killed,” she said. Sabina and Kara nodded. “Which made me start to wonder what was going on in his life at that time. Leo and Collin are looking into his current situation, including finances and all that, but something triggered him eighteen years ago, and I wanted to find out what it was.”
A trill of excitement vibrated through Sabina. Leaning closer to Chad to better see the stack they shared, she started to scan the first page. Without question, he handed the papers over and into her control.
“And?” Ethan prompted.
“Long version or short version?” Ava asked, practically bouncing on her toes.
“Short,” everyone replied at once. They could dig into the long version later.
“Short version is that Jacobs was involved in all sorts of illegal activities from gambling to high-end prostitution to bootleg liquor,” she said.
“You make him sound like Al Capone,” Ethan muttered.
“Not far off,” Ava said. “Although Kevin was just a player in the organization, not the head.”
“What does that have to do with our mom’s murder?” Kara asked.
“I believe that whoever was laundering the money for the organization stole it from Jacobs, which then put Jacobs in a panic. And I think, for whatever reason, he thought your mom might have information on who that person was or where to find them.”
“But what would my mother know…”
Sabina felt Kara’s eyes on her as her sister’s voice trailed off. But she kept her attention on the information in her hand.
“Sabina?” Chad asked. “Didn’t you say your father was an accountant?”
“He was. Or is,” she said, looking at the group and holding one of the pages up. “And this is what Uncle Mike found. Hidalgo Jose.” She pointed to a name on the list of shell companies Ava had found that had been used to launder the money. The same name she’d seen scribbled in one of Mike’s notebooks. She’d thought it was the name of a person, and one so common that she hadn’t bothered to run a basic internet search on it. Of course, even if she had, she wouldn’t have found what Ava had.
“So Uncle Mike found evidence of Kevin Jacobs’s illegal activities and Jacobs killed him,” Kara posited.
“It would make sense,” Chad said, his voice heavy. “Is it also possible that your dad was the accountant and that’s what Kevin Jacobs was looking for from your mother? A way to find him?”
Gina made a small sound of disgruntlement. “Mike finding a link between Hidalgo Jose and Kevin would be enough to warrant Jacobs killing him. But if he also managed to find a link between Hidalgo Jose and Richard Houseman, then it would have been imperative that Jacobs kill him because the authorities would have been able to connect Kevin to not just the illegal activities, but also the murder of your mother,” Gina said.
“But is it possible your father was involved?” Ethan asked.
Sabina looked at her sister and slowly, Kara nodded. “I can’t say for certain,” Kara answered. “But it’s possible.”
“Tell us about him. Your father,” Ava urged. She, Leo, and Collin had all swiveled in their chairs and rolled them closer to the rest of the group.
Again, Sabina looked at her sister, but this time, she answered. “He left when we were twelve. I don’t remember any big fights or anything. He wasn’t always the best of dads. He wasn’t terrible to us, but Kara and I were always…”
“Kind of an afterthought,” Kara finished her sentence.
Sabina nodded before continuing. “When our mom told us they were getting a divorce, she simply said that sometimes people aren’t always who you think they are and that they’d grown apart.”
“Do you think she knew he was involved in illegal dealings?” Colton asked. “Assuming he was, of course, which we don’t know for certain,” he added when Chad sent him a quelling look. Sabina appreciated his attempt at tact, but it wasn’t needed.
“She never said anything to us, but after he left, she definitely erased him from our lives,” Sabina responded.
“Not that it was hard,” Kara interjected.
Again, Sabina nodded. “He wasn’t a part of our everyday life much anyway, so it wasn’t hard to move on as usual after he was gone. I know that sounds weird, but that’s the way it was. After she told us they were getting a divorce, she never mentioned him again.”
“If he was involved and she didn’t actually know, she probably suspected,” Kara said.
“I agree,” Sabina confirmed.
“Which would be another reason for her to cut him out of your lives completely,” Chad said.
Kara inclined her head. “The three of us were close. She would have done anything to protect us if she thought there was a threat.”
“Even if that threat was our own father,” Sabina added.
“So where is he now?” Ethan asked.
At Ethan’s question, everyone looked at her and Kara. But like her, Kara raised her shoulders. “I—we—have no idea where he is,” Sabina said. “Like I said, we never saw or heard from him again after he left. Then of course, after the murder, we were in hiding. If he tried to reach out to us after that, he wouldn’t have been able to find us.”
“Is it possible he’s dead?” Kara asked, her question sounding more curious than concerned.
“If our theory holds true, he was alive at least long enough to steal from Kevin Jacobs,” Chad replied.
“But that was eighteen years ago,” Sabina pointed out, looking at her team in silent question.
“I’ll look for him,” Collin said. “Ava, you stay on Jacobs and see if he’s still involved in those activities. Or any other illegal activity, for that matter.”
“And I’ll stay on the Sweet River angle,” Leo said. Without a word, her team swiveled and scooted their chairs across the room until they were once again in front of their weapons of choice.
“We need to call Tess,” Chad said. “We have bits and pieces of evidence, but nothing solid. I don’t know what she’ll be able to do with it, but she’s best positioned to have the answer since none of us are attorneys.”
“I agree,” Sabina said. “Why don’t we do that then break for dinner? I know you wanted everyone to stay on HICC grounds, but any chance we can head out to the Dirty Boom? I could really use a cheeseburger—”
“And a beer,” Kara interjected with a mutter.
“And a beer,” Sabina agreed.
Chad glanced at Colton, and some sort of communication passed between the two. Finally, Chad nodded. “I also think it might be better for you three to stay at my place tonight,” he said, pointing to Sabina, Kara, and Gina. “I know Leo, Collin, and Ava bunked down in the dorms last night, but I think we should move them to the cabin. The operatives can split watch duties between here and my property.”
“Why split up? It seems like we should be sticking together?” Kara asked.
“It sounds dramatic, but the world now knows you’re both alive,” Ethan answered. “When it was just Kevin Jacobs, he could send his henchmen to do whatever he ordered with no one as witness. Now that it’s on record that you are alive, who you are, and what you do, it will be much harder for him to come after you.”
“Don’t get complacent, though,” Chad warned. “He’ll still want you out of the picture. But he’ll have to regroup and think of a new strategy since his current one leaves him too exposed.”
Ethan nodded. “And with the danger levels lower, everyone may as well be comfortable. I suspect Leo, Ava, and Collin will like the beds in the cabin better than those in the dorms. I know you, Gina, and Kara will prefer the ones at Chad’s.”
“And the grounds and house are safe,” Ryan said, stepping into the conversation for the first time since he arrived. “It’s not so much a strategic decision as one of comfort,” he reiterated. “We’re going to have a couple of long days ahead of us. We shouldn’t underestimate the importance of a decent night’s sleep.”
Sabina couldn’t argue with that. She was an eight-hours-a-night kind of gal. Still, she wasn’t the only one impacted. She looked to Kara and Gina.
“Fine by me,” Kara said. “Especially if that means I can have a burger and a beer.”
“A bed is a bed,” Gina said. “If that’s what you girls want, I have no objections.”
“Then it’s settled,” Chad said.
“I’ll go over to the cabin to tidy up a bit,” Sabina said.
Kara stayed her with her hand then rose. “You stay and talk to Tess. I’ll go to the cabin. I’ll pack our things, change the sheets, that sort of stuff.”
