I walked back to the printouts of the IA reports on the table and picked up the papers, hating that my brother’s initials were on each one.

“He had to have a reason, right? He wouldn’t do this without a reason.” My logical, rational mind was fracturing under the weight of emotion.

Rhett turned, his lips pressed into a flat line. “We need to talk to him. That’s the only way we’re going to get answers.”

I heard what he wasn’t saying—the kind of answers I never got from my dad.

I took a deep breath and pushed the emotion out of the picture in favor of cold, impersonal logic. “Why would a cartel care about someone in IA? Does that even make sense? Wouldn’t they want someone in another department?”

“IA has total oversight over the department. They police the police.”

“If I were cartel, total oversight sounds attractive then.”

Rhett nodded. “It makes a sick sort of sense. In his position, Heath can get into everything happening in the department. Very little information would be off-limits if he had even a shred of a reason to need to know it.”

If I were brutal and cunning, it sounded exactly like where I’d strike.

“I hate this. I hate it so much. What if . . . What if he didn’t have anything to do with it, and we’re condemning him because he’s not here to defend himself?”

“Ari, I know—”

I cut him off. “We have to find him!”

“Track his cell. Find out where he is, and we’ll go pick him up if he won’t answer the damn thing.”

If I’d been thinking clearly, I would have already come to that conclusion myself. I rushed to my laptop. “On it.”

57

Rhett

Ari couldn’t get a lock on Heath’s location, and my guess was his phone was off. I grabbed the stack of call records and scanned the list. Plenty of numbers I didn’t recognize. Burner phones. Throwaways. The kind that CIs would most likely use . . . or possibly cartel connections.

“Can you get any info on these two numbers he called regularly?”

Ari’s fingers flew over the keys. “I can try.”

Within minutes, she’d identified the point of purchase of the burner phones as a small town on the Texas-Mexico border.

Her jaw clenched. “I really don’t like this. Not at all.”

I leaned over her and rested my chin on her head. “I don’t either, Ari. But he wouldn’t be the first cop to make a bad decision and have it go a lot further than he thought.”

We both knew I was talking about my dad. Even now, I wondered what the hell he had to do with this.

Why would Heath drag out the investigation? There was one other possibility . . .

“Heath could have been keeping my dad from getting arrested so he didn’t talk. He had to know that if Dad got arrested, the cartel would assume he’d roll over, and then they’d take him out. Maybe your brother was protecting him by not closing the case.”

I wanted to believe it. It could make sense. Maybe this was Heath’s way of trying to protect a man he considered a second father.

Ari turned around, hope lighting her gray eyes. “I hope that’s true. I really, really hope it is.”

My phone vibrated in my pocket.

“Keep digging,” I told her. With a kiss to the top of her head, I stepped away. “I’m going to take this.”

“Okay.”

I fished my phone from my pocket to find it was my brother Rome calling. “Hey, what’s up?”

“Why the fuck am I seeing the name Hennessy coming up in cartel chatter? I just got off the phone with my computer geeks, and they said they caught a couple mentions of the family name. It sure as hell isn’t because of me this time.”

“What chatter?” I’d stayed out of Rome’s business before because I didn’t want to know what he was doing down in Central and South America, but if he could help me in any way now, I needed to know.

“We listen. We monitor. We gather intel. After walking into enough situations blind, we decided we had to step it up. Now we watch for key phrases and all identifiable names.”

“Got it. So, what the fuck was the chatter about?”

“You’re on the radar, and I want to know why.”

“We’ve got a situation here.”

Ari’s gaze searched my face as I turned around.

“Does it have something to do with Dad?” Rome asked.

“Maybe. We’re still piecing it together. But we do know that Carlos Alberto Moreno Herrera is involved somehow.”

Rome went quiet. “Do you have any clue who the fuck you’re dealing with? That family is way above your pay grade, brother.”

“I don’t have a pay grade anymore, brother.”

Rome made a sound of disgust. “You know what I mean. That family is bad news. Brutal. Ruthless. They’ll send you a friggin’ head in a box—”

“Yeah, got one of those this morning.”

Ari turned away, and I reached out to grasp her hand.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Rome shouted.

“I wish I were.”

“And you didn’t call me? You think you’re equipped to handle this shit by yourself?”

“Heath was supposed to be handling it. He was working with the Feds to take Carlos out. Now he’s in the wind, and two of Ari’s employees are dead.”

“Shit. They’ve upped their ante. Let me start working on my end to see if I can tell what’s going on. You need to lay low. I’m not ready to come home for another fucking funeral. Tell me everything you know, and I’ll get my people on it.”

I laid it out. Every detail we knew and suspected, from the beginning. When I was done, my brother was quiet for a long moment.

“This shit is fucked. My world makes a lot more sense, if you ask me. None of us pretend to be good. We’re all in it for the money, which is what I’m guessing both Sampson and Dad were in it for.”

“You don’t know that.” The protest was automatic, even though from what Mom said, he was right about Dad’s motives.

“You might be older than me, but that doesn’t make you smarter. You’ve always believed that everyone should have a code of honor like you. News flash—they don’t. Everyone’s in it for themselves. That’s how the world works. I’ll get back to you when I have something. Try not to get dead.”