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I ended the call, slipping my phone back into my pocket. Neil was watching me, his expression unreadable.
“Who’s Carter?” he asked, his voice hinting at territorial.
“This kid I helped out once,” I explained. “He works with a SEAL buddy of mine, but he’s done some shady stuff for me in the past.”
Neil’s gaze sharpened. “How shady? Illegal?”
“Some,” I admitted, meeting his eyes without flinching. “But I’m not giving you his name, so you have plausible deniability.”
Neil held my gaze for a long moment, then nodded. “I wasn’t asking.”
I leaned back in my chair, feeling the tension ease. We both knew there were lines I danced around in my post-SEAL career, but Neil was willing to let this one slide for now. And for that, I was grateful. We were in this together, even if it meant bending the rules to get the answers.
We reviewed a great deal of other information on the Lennox family, piecing together fragments of their history and trying to understand how it all connected to the present. But nothing could prepare us for what came next—the crime scene photos from the Brothers of Chiron compound. As soon as the first image flickered onto the screen, a cold dread settled over me, sinking into my bones.
“My cousin was one of the people in these photos. She never got out.”
“I know.” He rested a hand on my leg and curled his fingers there, and I took his hand. “I’m sorry.”
I didn’t have the words to say anything anywhere near useful.
The photos were a stark reminder of the horrors that had unfolded there, the images that would haunt anyone who saw them. Bodies were strewn across a dirt yard, limbs twisted at unnatural angles, eyes staring into nothing. The main building, or what was left of it, had been gutted by fire, and its destroyed remains collapsed asif the structure had given up under the weight of what it had witnessed.
Some of the bodies were burned beyond recognition, charred husks of what had once been people now reduced to blackened bones. Others bore the unmistakable marks of bullet wounds, dark stains spreading across their tattered clothing, the final testament to the violence that had erupted in that hellish place. But what hit the hardest—what made my stomach churn, and my hands clench into fists—were the smaller bodies, kids caught in the crossfire of something they should never have been a part of and who hadn’t stood a chance.
It was the kind of end-of-days shit you read about in history books, the kind of tragedy that stuck with you long after you’d closed the file and walked away. I shut them down—we didn’t need to see them for anything other than to understand Micah and the motives for the murder and the gun.
But the gun hadn’t turned up.
Yet.
I suddenly felt an urge for complete honesty, and although I was betraying a confidence, somehow, it seemed right to trust Neil.
“So,” I said, leaning back in my chair, trying to keep my voice steady. “There’s something else I need to tell you. Off the record.”
His gaze snapped to mine, concern etched on his face. “Something worse than a body in a well?”
I took a deep breath, trying to figure out the best way to say it. “It’s about the night of the storm and the landslide at the ranch.”
Neil frowned. “What about it?”
“First off, I want to say sorry.”
“Hmm,” was all Neil gave me, his hands gripping his pen so tightly that his knuckles turned white. “Are you, though?”
“I was looking for the gun.”
“That was why you jumped down there like a freaking idiot?”
“Yes.”
He shook his head. “The walls of the cave-in collapsed—we’d need excavators to unearth anything.”
“Yes.”
Neil let out a long breath, his eyes searching mine. “We won’t go digging,” he assured me. “Whatever’s down there… it’s buried under a ton of rubble now, and there’s a good chance it’s long gone anyway.”
“Okay.”
