“That’s exactly why I can’t go to him with half the story. You know how Vice gets. He’ll tear everything apart before I can prove anything.”
“That ain’t your problem.”
“He’s my family.”
“So are you.” Sam’s face softened, but I was too angry to care. “Leave it alone,” I said. “For me.”
He looked down for a second before slowly shaking his head. “I can’t.”
“Why the fuck not?”
“Because if I’m right, he deserves to know.”
I’d heard those exact words again in Milan’s statement—Vice deserves to know.
At the time, I’d been too worried about Sam to understand what he was trying to tell me. Now those words were all I had.
Our argument didn’t end well.
That night, Sam grabbed his keys and left after telling me he needed space. I let him go because I was pissed off and tired of trying to force answers out of him.
He came back the next night, but we didn’t apologize right away. Sam never liked being the first one to admit he was wrong, and I was too stubborn to make it easy for him. He cooked dinner like nothing had happened, complained when I didn’t compliment it fast enough and eventually sat beside me on the couch.
“You still mad?” he asked.
I looked at him. “I don’t know… You leaving whatever you got going on alone?”
“No...”
“Then yeah, I’m still mad.”
He sat there quietly before resting his head on my shoulder. “You still love me, though. Right?”
“That ain’t got shit to do with it.”
“That’s not the answer I was hoping for.”
“Yeah, Sam…” I finally answered. “I still love you.”
“Then be mad tomorrow.”
I should’ve pushed harder that night. I should’ve taken his phone, followed him or gone straight to Vice and told him everything I knew. Instead, I let Sam pull me into bed and convinced myself we had time to deal with it later.
A few days later, he was dead.
I stood from the bed before the guilt dragged me somewhere I couldn’t afford to stay. Regret wasn’t going to bring him back. Sitting in the room replaying every mistake wouldn’t put a name behind the gun.
Sam needed me to finish what he’d started, even if I still didn’t understand what the hell he had found.
I walked into my office and turned on the computer. I’d already started building a timeline from the pieces Vice and I knew. Sam had visited his mother days before the shooting and asked questions about Vice’s mother. He’d searched old records, contacted people who knew her and received a warning from a prepaid phone.
The night he died, he went to Grady to meet someone…
Maybe he wasn’t meeting the killer there. He could’ve been meeting somebody who worked inside. Someone with access to old medical records. Someone who knew what happened to Vice’s mother before the drugs took over her life.
I pulled up the list of hospital employees from security and started going through the names again. Most meant nothing to me, but one stood out because Sam had searched it on his phone three days before he died. He had left his phone sitting on the bed while he went to the bathroom with it pulled up.
Dr. Wallace Greene…