“How, indeed?” Rinaldo echoed.
Jonathan had his laptop out a second later, and his fingers flew over the keyboard. Everyone else sat in silent contemplation while he worked. After only a few minutes, he looked over to me.
“Hey, Evan—does the name Keith Davies mean anything to you?”
“Yeah,” I responded. In my head, everything began to focus, and all the parts of the last few weeks began to merge together. I thought the names had to be a coincidence, but they weren’t—they were the key to everything. “Marine. Infantry.”
“Captured about the same time you were.”
“Right before,” I said. “Trent…Kyle—whatever the fuck his name is—he’s his brother, isn’t he?”
“You got it.”
“He blames me,” I said.
“For what?” Lia asked.
“Keith Davies was the guy who was nearly court-martialed for giving away our position when I was captured,” I told her. “It was my testimony they were going to use against him. He took the option of being dishonorably discharged instead. There wasn’t a lot of evidence against him but definitely some suspicions. No one was ever really sure if he was working for the insurgents or not, but my statements at the debriefing had them checking into him.”
“He killed himself eight months ago,” Jonathan said. “It says here his brother was once an FBI agent, but he left the agency a couple years ago.”
Keith Davies’ suicide would have been just a couple of months before I had my little episode and would have given his brother plenty of time to find me and work on a plan of revenge.
“What did he say to you?” I asked Lia. “Tell me what happened when he came to the apartment.”
Lia shifted in her seat and took a deep breath before she spoke.
“I was in the bedroom,” she said, “reading a book, and Odin started growling.”
She looked up at me, and I could see the tension around her eyes as she spoke.
“I’d rarely heard him growl before, and I started getting worried. He got up and went to the door of the bedroom. That’s when the front door burst open, and he was there.”
“Davies?” Rinaldo asked for clarification.
Lia nodded.
“I knew right away,” she continued, “I knew there was something wrong. His eyes—the way he looked at me and kept smiling, even when…when…”
She took in a sharp breath, and I rubbed the back of her hand.
“Go on, babe,” I said softly, though the inside of me was ready to start screaming and breaking a few things.
“I picked up that gun you gave me,” Lia said to me, “and I…I tried to do what you said, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t pull the trigger—I got the safety off, but I just couldn’t do it.”
“Great match for you there, Evan,” Victor snorted.
“Shut the fuck up,” I growled back at him. I looked back to Lia. “What did Davies say?”
“He pointed a gun at me and told me to drop mine. Odin was still growling, and my hands were shaking. He yelled at me to drop it again, and I didn’t know what else to do, so I dropped it. He came into the bedroom, and Odin went after him.”
She paused and her eyes brimmed over with tears.
“He was trying to protect me,” she sobbed. “He jumped at him, and I heard his gun go off twice. Odin dropped down in the doorway, and he just kicked him and walked in. He tied me up, went through everything, and the next thing I knew, he was dragging me out.”
“Motherfucker,” Jonathan grumbled. “I liked Odin.”
Lia started crying harder, and Luisa took hold of her other hand. I was just barely holding it together, trying not to imagine the scene in my head. If I did, I was going to lose it, but some of it sank in anyway.