To her horror, for one terrible moment, tears burned and shimmered in her eyes. She swallowed the lump in her throat and nodded. “Sadly, I do have to agree, although I’ll say men are just as capable of betrayal as women. Don’t put your trust in them either.”
There was a long silence. Harvey turned away from her to look out over the flowers lining both sides of the path before he spoke again. “That man is an idiot for letting someone like you go.”
“I’m not such a prize, but thank you, Harvey. You know who betrayed all of you?”
“Jarrod had a woman living with him. Met her a few years ago and fell hard. She was in it for his money, but he couldn’t see it. She cheated on him with a cop. Ret, Dustin and I had her tailed afterwe started losing our key people and had narrowed our suspects. Unfortunately, Jarrod wouldn’t believe us. I think he confronted her.”
Rory’s heart stuttered. “Please tell me she wasn’t seeing Ramsey.”
Harvey shook his head. “Not Ramsey. We didn’t know who she was seeing. Ramsey was a good cop.”
Rory had the distinct impression that Harvey might have been working with Ramsey to uncover who had been murdering the key people in his organization. Would a criminal do that? Could he do that and not incriminate himself?
“Can’t you just ask her? Did Jarrod ask her?”
“She’s dead. And no, Jarrod didn’t kill her. We believe her lover did.”
Icy fingers trailed down her spine. Harvey was telling her the woman’s cop lover had murdered her. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t want the cops or anyone else to see us talking together. The police already suspect I work for you.”
“No one knows you’re here. My men ran interference to keep you from being followed. The cops are a little thin to keep twenty-four-hour surveillance on you. Carver and Westlake are usually the ones to follow you, but they’re busy a lot of the time. They have two friends, retired cops now, Bill Morris and Jerome Michigan, who take turns keeping an eye on you for them when they can’t. None of them can stay on you all the time. Most of the time it’s your man’s friends. They’re harder to spot. We tried investigating them, but they’re ghosts. That means they’re government. Or CIA. Or worse.”
“He’s not my man anymore. I told you, I’m leaving. I’m putting in my notice tonight, and once I work that out, I’ll be gone. Why did you tell me all this?”
“Because I think you’re being set up right along with me. Everything is pointing in that direction. You’re the logical choice. Themore knowledge you have, the better the chance you have of protecting yourself. I’m worried about you and your friends staying at the apartments. Particularly the two with the kids. I know you don’t like me or what I do, Rory, but sometimes you need a safe place to go. I’m going to give you a key and a number. That’s it. If you and the women and kids need to get away and hide somewhere, just call the number, get into a car and start driving north. You’ll get instructions on where a safe house is. My people will run interference. The house will be stocked with everything you need for a couple of weeks. Think of it as a vacation.”
“If I’m not with them, can my friends still use the house?” She did her best to keep the challenge from her voice.
“Of course.”
“Thank you, Harvey. I don’t know why you’d help us, but I appreciate it.” She didn’t trust him any more than she trusted Gideon, but she took the key and card with the single phone number on it. Everything was so uncertain, she had no idea what might happen.
“I was the one who chose those apartments. It didn’t occur to me that any of this would happen, but it did. It’s my mess and I need to clean it up.”
He was right. It was his mess, but at the same time, someone was framing him if he was telling the truth. She wasn’t so sure her lie detector wasn’t faulty after her encounters with Gideon, but Harvey appeared sincere. People weren’t all bad or all good.
She pressed her fingers to her temple where the headache had fully formed from all the crying. At no time did she reveal the knife she held. She had learned not to trust years earlier, and Gideon had only reinforced that lesson.
“Harvey, were you ever married? In a relationship?” She should keep her mouth shut, let him go. He was a stranger, and she had no one to ask questions of. She wanted answers.
“I’ve never married. Too many women made it easy for me to find another one.”
She frowned. “I don’t know what that means.”
He gave her a half smile, one that didn’t reach his eyes, very reminiscent of Gideon. “You wouldn’t know what that means, Rory, because you aren’t the kind of woman to go after a man for his money. If you decide on a man, you’re going to be loyal to him, and you’ll be with him for all the right reasons.”
“What if I don’t know what the right reasons are?”
“Rory, you aren’t the one at fault.”
“You don’t know that. I don’t know the first thing about relationships. I’ve never been in one. I’ve never seen one that worked. I never even wanted to be in one until I was with Gideon. I fell so hard and fast for him, it was crazy. I didn’t even think. I didn’t have time to think. It was the dumbest thing I ever did.”
“Not thatyouever did. That he ever did,” Harvey corrected. “When a man is in his twenties, and he acts the fool, he can be forgiven because he doesn’t know better. But by the time he’s that man’s age, he should know a good thing when he has it. He should have been treating you with love and concern. Watching over you. Putting you first. That’s a relationship. And that’s his failing, not yours.”
“I don’t even know why I’m asking you these questions, Harvey.”
“I’m not a good man, and I’m lonely for a reason. You’re a good woman, and you don’t deserve to be lonely. That doesn’t mean you aren’t. We just happen to be in the same place at a bad time for both of us.”
Rory knew he was right, and she couldn’t tempt fate any longer. Someone was bound to come along the trail soon. In any case, Harvey had said his men had run interference to keep Gideon’s people from following her car, but she wouldn’t put it past Javier tohave her vehicle bugged. For all she knew, Gideon might even have put a tracking device on her phone. She was going to look the second Harvey was gone. She should have considered that right away. She’d been too upset to reason everything out.
