There was a silence, but when Nico finally replied, his tone was almost icy. “I’ve no doubts he did, the piece of shit. He was good with banging her mom and cheating on his wife, but not good enough to claim his own kid. Fucker! Seems the only good thing he did was to attend the call when he heard the school had detained a student for stabbing another one with a pencil and heard the name Hazel Dunbar.”
“He screwed with the investigation. That piece of shit.”
“Ah,” Nico murmured. “You’ll probably think he did it out of concern for his daughter. The picture I’m getting of him from reading through some files, is that he did it to protect himself. See, it wouldn’t do him any good to be known as having a kid out there he wasn’t paying for and helping to raise.”
“Especially one he had with his wife’s best friend, after roughly twenty years of having sex with her.”
“Right.”
“So he covered his own back, fucked with the case to help get Hazel off, and screwed over Sienna in the process.”
“Seems ‘bout right.”
Grinding my teeth together, I pictured my fist meeting the bastard’s face. Repeatedly. “Any news on his fucked up kid?”
“You could say that. She’s been blackmailing Monroe since she was fifteen. I don’t know if it’s to not tell his wife she’s his or something else, but he’s still sending her money every month.”
How was that even possible? “His wife has to see it on their statements. Come on, that’s impossible to hide.”
“Got some Western Union receipts in front of me my nephew may or may not have found in his trash. I can neither confirm nor deny that possibility. However, I’m seeing him sending multiple cash transactions over the space of eight weeks, going by the dates on them. How do you get cash without using an ATM and your wife not noticing?”
Staring blindly at the surface of the table, I went through the viable options. “Cash back.”
“Correct. Kind husband offers to go to the store to buy the groceries for his tired wife. While he’s there, he requests cash back on the purchase and pockets it. Then, later on in the week, he does the same again and sends both amounts by Western Union to wherever Hazel is.”
Something about the way he’d said ‘wherever’ set my teeth on edge. “Where is she?”
“That’s the really bad news. The last receipt shows he picked a Western Union about forty minutes east of here. Her mom lives to the west of us, so Hazel’s steering clear of her for some reason.”
“Did you question Elda?”
“Sage did. Pretended he’d moved into the area over the weekend and was out for a run. Imagine her surprise when he recognized her and said he’d gone to school with Hazel. She claims she hasn’t heard from her daughter in nine months. He says she was acting shifty, but when he pressed, she caved and told him her daughter had been in trouble with the law. She’s apparently all cut up about that, so she’s cut off contact.”
Some might question how the shit a mother who’d been having an affair with her best friend’s husband, had a kid with him, and had then done whatever else she’d done, have the audacity to cut off contact with her adult daughter for also having no morals?
Survival.
If you’ve got that many skeletons in the closet people know about, you’ll have others you didn’t want attention drawn to. To do that, you had to stay under the radar. Having a daughter who was repeatedly in court and deranged would bring attention and run the risk of the misdeeds being discovered.
Then it hit me, and I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose. “Elda’s hiding whatever happened to Chris Wong, isn’t she?”
Nico was grim when he replied. “That’s what we’re trying to find out. She filed a missing person report shortly after Hazel was let off for the stabbing, claiming he’d packed up and left without saying anything.
“Neighbors stated they hadn’t heard anything at the time, and the officers who attended noted that the place was clean and organized. It also looked like he’d taken some of his stuff, but not all of it—which isn’t unusual in situations like this.”
“What about his car? His job? His phone?”
“The case is being reopened as we speak, and even Monroe’s being brought in for questioning this time.”
Looking into Hazel and questioning Elda was only ever meant to be a way to protect Sienna. Now it was something much bigger.
“Where does this leave Sienna?”
Ever hear the phrase that if you didn’t want the answers, you shouldn’t ask the questions? I should have gone with that mentality because I definitely didn’t want to hear what he said next. At the same time, I had to because it would keep Sienna safe.