Page 42 of Protected from Torment

My heart hurts as I realize just how hard he’s had it. He didn’t just lose his wife. He lost his leg as well.

Tyler glances at me, but I pretend not to have seen. Instead, I busy myself clicking through the streaming services with the concentration of a brain surgeon. “Let’s watch Ancient Aliens,” I announce. “I’m feeling like a change. And it’s one of your favorite shows. It only seems fair.”

He gives his pant leg another quick tug. “Are you sure? I don’t mind watching Parks and Rec. Or The Office.”

I scoot closer to him, so our hips bump together. “I’m sure.”

After a moment, he smiles. Then his arm comes around me, hugging me to his side. “Okay,” he replies. “Ancient Aliens it is.”

And despite the tumult of emotions from before, plus the realization of only moments ago, all at once, everything feels right again.

Maybe Tyler’s right, I muse as the show starts to play. Maybe I am a good person. And maybe I do deserve good things. Like this.

CHAPTER 8

TYLER

The house looks unassuming from a distance.

Tucked into the woods, at the end of a long dirt driveway, a warm glow from a first-floor window cuts through the oppressive darkness of the overcast night. Slender trees planted on either side of the front porch bend slightly in the wind. An old metal milk box at the base of it catches the faint moonlight breaking through the clouds.

If I were just driving by it, I wouldn’t give the house a second thought. Or if I did, I certainly wouldn’t think a violent criminal lived there.

But one does, or at least, I’m ninety-nine point nine percent sure of it.

That’s why we’re here, after all, on the outskirts of Edinburg, a small town five miles east of Northville. After four frustrating days of inaction, I finally got a hit on the identity of Melissa’s attacker. And in only minutes, Webb, Indy, and I are going to break into his house and confront him.

Is what we’re about to do legal? No.

Do I care? Not really.

Under normal circumstances, I’m a law-abiding citizen. I follow the speed limit, mostly. I’ve never stolen, aside from the candy I took from the bin by the register at the local grocery store when I was six—which I felt so guilty about, I ended up confessing to my parents before we even got back home.

For the record, they marched me back to the store and made me apologize. Then I had to dust the house every weekend for a month to earn money to pay the store back for my theft. At the time, I thought the punishment was harsh. But now? I think it was fair. And I’m glad my parents did it, because I never even considered stealing again.

I wouldn’t consider what I’m about to do, either, if there wasn’t a good reason for it. But the man who lives inside that house hurt Melissa. He broke her wrist. Punched her. Kicked her. Shit, he could have killed her. So I think, in the scheme of things, it’s okay to break a few laws if it ensures justice is served.

Just thinking about the man I’m about to face makes me angry all over again. My jaw clenches. My hands tighten into fists. I imagine—as I have many times since I first saw Melissa’s injuries—smashing my fist into Jake Margolin’s nose and hearing the satisfying crunch of it breaking. A grim smile tugs at my lips as I envision the fear in his eyes when he realizes he’s faced with a battle he can’t win.

He won’t win. That I’m sure of. First off, Jake Margolin—thirty, single, works in a warehouse in nearby Amsterdam—might be a big guy, but he’s untrained. He might think, just because he lifts weights a few times a week and guzzles protein shakes, that he’s a tough guy. But weights and protein shakes don’t bring real strength. It doesn’t give someone the skills my teammates and I have.

During my research on Jake Margolin, I also discovered he’s a hothead with a years-long drug problem, which didn’t come as a surprise. No major criminal charges—yet—but he’s been arrested on drug possession and first-degree assault after a bar brawl. So it’s not a stretch that he’d escalate to the violence he inflicted on Mel, especially when he believed she’d stolen from him.

Why he believed that, I’m still not sure. Which is frustrating as shit, because I should have been able to figure it out already. It’s my damn job, investigating stuff like this. And now, when it involves a woman I care about, I’m failing miserably.

At least I found Margolin, though. It took some doing, but I was able to get my hands on a sample of his blood that was found in her house. Just a tiny sample, no more than a droplet, but enough to get a rush order on DNA testing. The police have the same info, but it’ll take days or weeks for forensics to get to it, and I’m not willing to wait. Plus, Margolin’s DNA isn’t in the system, so even when the police do get the results back, it won’t give them anything useful.

Me, on the other hand…

One of the projects I’ve been working on is a program that uses AI to generate a reconstruction of a person’s face based on their DNA. And this was the perfect time to test it out. So I fed the data into my program, and in only a few hours, I had a scarily accurate image of Jake Margolin’s face. Then I cross-matched it with the images I took from the closest traffic camera to Melissa’s house right around the time she was attacked. And bingo—I got a hit.

From there, it was just putting together the rest of the pieces. Once I hacked into his computer, I found evidence of him arranging ‌drug deals using online messaging platforms and using crypto to make the payments. “What happened to drug deals in back alleys?” Rafe asked during our conference call earlier today. “Wads of cash in envelopes? Whispered conversations in bathrooms?”

“Everything’s high tech now,” Webb grumbled. “Especially criminal activity.”

But what better way to defeat criminals than to best them at their own game? That’s what we’re doing now. And by the end of the night, Jake Margolin won’t get the chance to hurt another woman again.

“How long before breach?” Indy whispers, drawing my attention to him. He’s tucked into the shadows alongside me, to my right, and Webb is to my left. The house is about two hundred yards ahead, a short run across a yard speckled with trees. As I quickly assess the best route of approach, unease snakes through me. This is my least favorite part of any op—the part where I have to keep up with my teammates.