She took a step toward the door, and I stopped her. “We’re in this together, Maisey. Together. You and me. You’re wearing my ring. You promised me forever. I’m holding you to it.”
She didn’t respond, and fear spiked its ugly head, but I did my best to force it down and away.
Opening the door, Cleaver’s face was grim, and Maisey panicked, thinking the worst. “Dad!”
Cleaver shook his head. “No. They stabilized him for now.”
Maisey broke away from me and rushed down the hall.
In her absence, Cleaver and I stared daggers at each other. I was the one to break the silence. “You’ve done a shit-poor job at finding out who’s doing this.”
Cleaver’s jaw tightened. “I’ve been working my ass off to follow the leads. The problem is, we just don’t have enough of them.”
“Well, good for you, then, because this has given you a bunch more to follow.”
And then I shared everything Maisey had just told me with him.
“Carter wants our land. He’s been pressuring Lewis and me to sell. I didn’t really think of it before because this person has been targeting Maisey and not her dad or me.”
Cleaver’s face darkened, and that eased my doubts about him, but only by a hair.
“I’ll get the phone records for Lewis’s phone and hers. Plus, the phone they left in the tower will lead us back to them as well.”
“Parker has a pal on the SEALs who has a way with tech. If you don’t have the resources or your team doesn’t have the skill, I’m sure we could get his help.”
Cleaver bristled. “We know what we’re doing.”
“You mayknowwhat you’re doing, but will you follow through?” I demanded.
“What are you trying to say, Romero? Just spit it out.”
“If this is Carter, your cousin and friend, will you still put the cuffs on him?”
“You think I’m working with him? Screw you. If he committed these crimes, he’ll do the time.”
I spun around and started down the hall after Maisey, tossing back over my shoulder, “Forgive me if I withhold judgment until you actually do something to stop this asshole.”
When I joined Maisey in the hospital room, it was to find Wylee with her. The doctor was giving them a rundown on the blood work. Lewis had been given heroin laced with fentanyl—a deadly combination in a lethal amount. The doctors had placed him on a ventilator because his breathing hadn’t returned fully, and he hadn’t woken up.
“No one can know he’s made it through,” Wylee said sternly.
“There’s a good chance he still won’t make it,” the doctor responded and then grimaced as she met Maisey’s stricken face. “You gave him the naloxone as fast as you could, Maisey. We can hope he regains awareness and starts breathing fully on his own. We can hope the side effects will be minimal, but with what his mind has already been through in the last month, it’ll be touch and go.”
Desperate to somehow comfort her, I pulled Maisey up against my chest and wrapped my arms around her. If nothing else, I could make sure she felt loved and protected for the moment.
“We need to register him under a fake name and change rooms. I’d really like to move him over to the county hospital, if you think he’s stable enough,” Wylee told the doctor. “Call Bob with hospital security. Get him down here so we can discuss it.”
The doctor and the sheriff stepped out of the room, and Maisey pushed away from me to take a seat at her father’s bedside. She pulled his hand to hers, kissed the palm, and then held it tight.
I sat across from her, where I could see the door and the nurses’ station outside. I watched as Cleaver and Wylee talked with the doctor, and a man in a suit joined them. Eventually, another deputy arrived, carrying several evidence bags.
The sheriff grabbed one and stalked back into the room. “Maisey, youdon’t happen to know your dad’s passcode, do you?”
She reached for the bag and typed the code in through the plastic. As the sheriff was adding the code to his notes, Maisey brought up her dad’s messages and then stilled.
Her voice, already raw with emotions, trembled when she said, “There’s a text from…me…asking him to meet me on the back porch of Lauren’s place. It’s not my number, but it’s labeled as Maisey in his contacts. How is that possible?” She was pale as she continued to scroll through the messages. “Yesterday. Someone texted him and said it was me. That I’d gotten a new phone as a security measure.”
Sheriff Wylee leaned over and gently took the phone away. “Don’t feel guilty, sweetheart. None of this is on you, but it might lead us back to the bastard. The phone number will lead somewhere. Even if it’s a burner phone, we can trace it to the store where it was bought. They’ll have security cameras. People forget it’s almost impossible not to leave some kind of digital trail these days.”