He was gone.
The shape… Where had I seen it before?
Where had I seen it before?
And then the pain was gone. As if it had never been there. I was back lying on my soft beach towel under the California sun. In the distance, my brothers laughed, splashing each other. I opened my eyes and looked next to me. My beautiful mother sat there, reading a book. Her long brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail out of her face, and she wore a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses.
She was beautiful, my mother. So beautiful.
I turned the other way, and my big strong father was on my other side. He wasn’t reading. He was watching my brothers. My father never took his eyes off us. If we did something wrong, no matter how sneaky we were, he knew.
He watched us constantly.
It was annoying, but I also knew how much he loved us.
We were loved.
I was loved.
I closed my eyes again and let the warmth of the sun envelop me.
* * *
When I opened my eyes, I was back in Dr. Carmichael’s office, back in the recliner. Oddly, I wasn’t clenching the arms.
I looked over at her. “I remember something.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Jade
After I had finished my morning court appearances, I decided to do a little investigation of my own—not on the Steels as I’d been instructed to do by Larry. After all, Larry was no longer here. He had disappeared, just like Nico Kostas and Colin had.
It didn’t seem possible that Larry and Nico could’ve had anything to do with Colin’s disappearance. I hadn’t heard anything yet from Steve Dugan over at the station about whether my phone call had led to anything. If he didn’t call me by the end of the day, I was going to give him a call.
In the meantime, I had some time available, so I decided to do some investigation of Nico Kostas. But no sooner had I started, than I stopped. I had been so upset about Larry bending the rules and bending his ethics when he was city attorney. Now here I was, acting city attorney, and I was investigating something that had nothing to do with my job at the moment.
Damned if I was going to be that kind of an attorney. If I had to, I would do my research here at the office, but I would do it on my own time, after hours. No one would think anything of it if I stayed late working on cases. For now, I was the acting city attorney, and I would behave as such.
A couple hours later, when I’d finished everything on my own agenda for the day, I went back to the last assignment Larry had given me. To investigate the Steels.
He had started out by giving me folders and folders full of bank accounts. The only thing out of the ordinary that I’d found was a five-million-dollar transfer about twenty-five years ago.
One thing I had learned about the Steels—they weren’t ab
ove paying to get what they wanted.
That five million dollars had gone somewhere, and I was going to find out where.
Talon had told me once that something horrible had happened to him. I couldn’t begin to imagine what it might’ve been, but I wondered if it had been twenty-five years prior. What could’ve happened that the Steels would’ve been willing to pay five million dollars to cover up?
I didn’t have any idea, but I could start by trying to find out where that five million had gone.
As much as I knew she never wanted to hear from me again, I decided to call Wendy Madigan, the former National News correspondent who had helped shed some light on the Steels a few weeks earlier. I found her number and picked up the phone.
“Ms. Roberts.”
I couldn’t help smiling. “Thank you for picking up the phone, Wendy. Since you obviously knew it was me, I’m surprised you did.”