Sully shakes his head and says, “He was killed in October 2007 in a drive by.”
“That’s less than a month after I am taken,” I say. “Did your father think anything of it?”
“He wrote down a couple of theories.” Sully nods. “But nothing he could prove. Whoever did it was a ghost.”
I am getting tired of ghosts.
Bending down, I feel along the wooden floor near the edge of my mother’s old dresser and press down when I feel the wood change from rough to smooth. The wall to the right of the dresser slides open, revealing a dark, musky crawl space.
“Several of these were built into the house on my father’s orders,” Sully bends down to admire the craftsmanship.
“Why would your father protect her mother?” Vas wonders. “Was she paying him protection? Or—” Sully growls and stands, turning on Vas in a second.
“Be careful what you say next,” he snarls. “My father would never exploit a vulnerable woman like that.”
Mysovietnikholds up his hands in a gesture of peace. “Okay. Okay.” He backs off. “But the question remains. Why would he protect her without anything in return?”
“What if she did pay him?” Liam wonders, not the least bit upset about the two men talking about my mother trading sex for protection. His eerie surface calm bugs the shit out of me and I want to ruffle the surface just to see what lays below. “With secrets.”
“That explains a lot, actually,” Sully agrees. “We saw a huge intake of drugs and guns that year. At least on paper. I wasn’t old enough to remember what was taken in.”
Liam smirks. “McDonough pulled out of Portland within a few months of putting a huge chunk of money into a ground transportation company. He said it was because there wasn’t any money to be made there and moved the transport company back into Washington.”
“But you think it was because of all the shipments my father and his men lifted.”
Liam grins. “Katherine was smart. A genius. Plus, she could hold a grudge like no other. She would find a way to screw him over.”
Realization hits. She hadn’t been trying to screw Elias—she had gone after her own father.
“She knew,” I murmur brokenly. “He’s the one who sold her.”
seven
It is all coming together. The morbid pieces of my mother’s death slip into place section by section. Piece by piece. There are so many years of my life I have let slip by, never wondering about her death or my ‘father’s’ mysterious appearance. I questioned none of it as a child, and even as I grew, I simply accepted the life fate handed me.
Until Matthias pulled the wool back from my eyes.
Well, Mark did, but I would never have had the opportunity if Matthias hadn’t bought me.
Semantics.
Teeth dig into my lower lip hard enough to bleed as the scene comes together. The pictures strewn cohesively on the floor make up my mother’s dead body as it was found the day of her murder. Crouching down, I inspect every inch of every photo until I find what I am looking for. A bruise, just barely visible on her cheek due to the poor lighting of the photo.
A bruise in the shape of a cross.
Libby wrote that the silver crossed man sent a woman after Elias’s obsession years ago and then ranted about how he came back with her spawn.
He was talking about my mother and me.
So, the man we haven’t identified yet didn’t know at the time my mother was murdered that she had a child.
How did Elias find out? And who is the woman the man sent to kill her? The presence of the bruise shaped like a cross tells me that it is someone in the upper echelon of whatever secret society Madam Therese and the McDonough doppelgänger are a part of.
Another player we need to identify.
“This.” I point out the weird bruise to Aine. “I didn’t see this documented on the autopsy report.”
Aine shakes her head. “No,” she confirms. “There were several anomalies with not only the autopsy but also the crime scene itself.”