He walked to the booth and sat down across from her. Neither of them spoke.
The waitress appeared with two whiskeys, set them down without a word, and retreated to the bar.
Jo didn’t reach for her glass. She looked at Wyatt, studying him the way she’d study a suspect—except this wasn’t a suspect. This was someone she’d worked beside for years. Someone she’d trusted.
She didn’t ease into it.
“I know you’ve been deleting Kevin’s searches,” she said. “I know something’s wrong. Talk to me.”
Wyatt’s hand tightened around his glass. For a long moment, he didn’t answer. The silence stretched between them, heavy with everything unsaid.
Then he exhaled—a long, shuddering breath, like a man who’d been holding it for weeks.
“I didn’t know how to tell you,” he said quietly. “I didn’t know how to tell anyone.”
“Start at the beginning.”
Wyatt stared into his whiskey like the answers were hidden at the bottom of the glass. When he started talking, his voice was rough. Stripped down to something raw.
“My father,” he began, “is not a very nice man.”
Jo listened without interrupting as Wyatt laid it out. The syndicate his father ran—not street-level crime, but something bigger. Corporate fronts. Political connections. A network that stretched across state lines and buried its mistakes deep.
“When I was a kid, my mother figured it out. Found evidence she wasn’t supposed to find.” Wyatt’s jaw tightened. “She got us into witness protection. New names, new lives. I thought we’d escaped.”
“But he found you.”
“Three weeks ago.” Wyatt’s voice was hollow. “I came home from work and there was a body in my trunk.”
Jo felt the pieces clicking into place even before he said it.
“James Cooper,” she said. “The FBI agent.”
Wyatt nodded slowly. “I didn’t know who he was at first. Just... a dead man in my car. And a message on my phone telling me to wait. That someone would take care of it.”
“They moved the body.”
“To the woods. The dump site.” Wyatt looked up, and his eyes were haunted. “It was a message, Jo. To me. To the FBI. To anyone who thought they could touch my father’s operation. He put a dead federal agent in my trunk to show me he could reach me anywhere. That there was no escape.”
Jo’s stomach turned. She’d seen the crime scene photos. Known the body was staged. But this—this was something else entirely.
“The body in the woods,” she said slowly. “That was your father’s work.”
“Yes.”
“And the demand?”
Wyatt’s hands curled into fists on the table. “He wants me to change things in a case file and give him information on an old informant. There’s evidence in those files. Witness statements. Testimony. Things that could corroborate a case against the syndicate. My father wants it altered before anyone connects the dots.”
“That’s not all.” Wyatt’s voice dropped. “There’s physical evidence too. A box cutter from a 2012 case—prints that were never processed back then. With modern forensics, it could tie someone directly to the organization.”
“They want you to steal it.”
Wyatt nodded slowly. “From our evidence room. I’ve been stalling on that part. Altering digital records is bad enough, butwalking into lockup and making evidence disappear...” He shook his head. “That’s the line I couldn’t cross.”
“That’s why they’re escalating,” Jo said quietly. “They’re out of patience.”
“I think so.”