Shattered (The Protectors 11)

He smiled and nodded. “Go, I’ll make sure Willa is settled.”

I got up and started to leave the room, but then turned to look at him. “Eli, don’t put your life on hold for him, okay?” I said softly. “Not even for another minute. He’s not worth it.”

He knew who I was talking about, of course. “Yeah,” he said, his voice sounding strangled. He dashed at his face and said, “Can you send Mav up here? There’s something I need to ask him.” He sent me a wobbly grin.

I nodded and left the room to go find my man.

Chapter 21

Jace

“How’s Memphis?” I asked as Mav slid the cup of coffee in front of me.

“He’s fine,” Ronan said. “He’ll need to wear a sling for a couple more weeks, but he won’t need any kind of physical therapy or anything.”

I nodded.

“Jace, there’s something we need to talk to you about. Mav heard from Daisy just as the plane was landing. I didn’t want to say anything in the car with Caleb there.”

I stiffened. “Okay, what is it?”

“Jennings is dead,” Mav said, keeping his voice down.

“What?” I asked in surprise. “How?”

“It appears to be a suicide. His wife found him hanging in the basement of their house. His home office was down there. There was no evidence of foul play, but also no suicide note. Daisy was scanning the local dispatch feeds when she saw the address come through. It’ll hit the local papers in a matter of hours, if it hasn’t already.”

“Fuck,” I muttered. As badly as I’d wanted the fucker dead for what he’d done to Caleb, it would be Caleb who suffered when he learned what had happened. He’d blame himself for somehow driving Jennings to it after the confrontation more than two weeks earlier. I ran my fingers through my hair. Why the fuck couldn’t Caleb just get a damn break already?

“Caleb’s given me permission to talk to you about this,” I said to Ronan. “You too,” I added to Mav. Even though Caleb and I hadn’t actually talked about Mav learning the truth about what Jennings and Rush had done to Caleb, I had no doubt that Caleb had known it was inevitable that his brother’s fiancé would need to be clued in. “Jennings and a guy named Rush raped Caleb when he was fifteen. It happened on a camping trip with Caleb’s father. The fucker handed Caleb to them on a silver platter. He may have taped both rapes on his phone to use against the men.”

Mav lurched out of his chair and went to the back door that overlooked the back yard. He gently pounded his closed fist on the glass. I suspected if it’d been an actual wall, he would have unleashed the anger I could see cascading throughout his entire body. Ronan looked just as pissed, but he remained seated. “If he stored them on his computer…” he murmured.

He didn’t need to finish the sentence. If they’d only been stored on the one computer that Nick had copied the other videos from, then there’d be no proof. The pedophile had been smart enough to install software on his computer that would wipe the hard drive after a certain amount of time if he didn’t log into it. By the time Daisy had hacked into the computer the day after Jack had been arrested, the files had already been gone. The only evidence of Jack’s depravity had been the flash drive. There’d been no videos on his phone or his cloud account.

“Caleb said he thought Rush worked with his father, but that Rush wasn’t his real name.”

Mav returned to the table and sat. His expression was drawn tight with anger. “We can search the DoD records for someone with a last name or known nickname that’s a variation of Rush, but it’s a long shot.”

“Maybe go back further,” Ronan suggested. “College, high school even.”

“Caleb said Jennings was friends with his father when they were both in high school. Start there,” I said. “The timing with this Jennings thing is too convenient,” I added. “Caleb had a gun on him and still the guy refused to confess to what he’d done. Assholes like that don’t feel guilt. He strung Caleb along for years with promises that he’d help him, but he didn’t do shit. He was only trying to keep Caleb quiet long enough to keep him from telling anyone what happened.”

“You think Jack put a hit out on Jennings like he did Caleb?” Mav asked.

“He’s got the resources,” I said. “The guys who hit us out in the woods were pros.”

Mav nodded in agreement and said, “Talent like that could’ve made Jennings’ death look like a suicide.”

I looked at Ronan. “Any chance the coroner will be able to tell?” I asked.

Ronan shook his head and put out his hands. “All depends on the coroner. Some are more experienced than others. If he doesn’t see any signs of a struggle, he’s not likely to order the specific drug tests that will show if he ingested anything that would have knocked him out. Something like GHB would’ve made it easy for someone to string him up without any kind of struggle.”