The remainder of my work day drags on for far too many more hours, and by the time I’m off and headed to Jami’s apartment, I’m so exhausted I want to just spread out on the bed and sleep for days. But when I get to Jami’s place and find her sitting at the breakfast bar with her laptop in front of her and a half-empty bottle of wine next to the glass in her hand, I stop near the door, practically breathing in the stress that’s hanging in the air.
“What’s wrong?” I ask immediately, and Jami slides off the barstool and crosses the room towards me, wrapping her arms around my midsection as she closes her eyes and buries her head into the front of my shirt. I rest my hands on her, horrified to feel her trembling beneath me.
“Jami,” I say again, holding her out in front of me to force her to look at me. “What’s wrong, sweetheart? What’s going on?”
For a moment I think she’s not going to speak, that she can’t speak, and fear rips at my insides. I take her hand and lead her back to the breakfast bar where I cap the bottle of wine and stick it back into the fridge, then turn to face her once more. This time when my eyes catch hers, I see the tears streaming down her face.
“Christ, baby, what is it?”
“It’s about your wife and son,” Jami says quietly, and as the words leave her mouth I want to stop listening, stop hearing because I know that whatever is about to come next I won’t want to hear. I open my mouth to ask her what about them, and then close it again. I don’t want to know, but I have to.
I have to.
Jami takes a breath and then nods her head towards her laptop screen, then she gets up and stands back so I can sit down in front of it. She takes my hand and leads me to the stool, where I sit down and squint at the screen in front of me.
“Read it,” she says quietly, and so I do. For a moment, I have no idea what I’m looking at. Or maybe it’s that I can’t quite comprehend what it is I’m seeing, but after far too many seconds that seem to drag on forever, it begins to make sense, and the tightness in my chest is so severe I think I might just have a heart attack right here in the middle of Jami’s apartment floor.
“It was him,” I whisper, looking up at Jami. At least, that’s what I think I say, because I’m not sure if I’m actually even speaking. “It was Kasper who was involved with the hit on my wife and kid.”
“There’s more,” Jami says, her eyes flickering back to the screen. “There are more than a dozen files with corresponding emails, drug shipment records, and names of accomplices over the years. Kasper Hill’s records.”
“Eduardo Ray is the gang leader I put behind bars,” I whisper, pointing at the name on the screen. “He and Kasper were running a drug cartel to the city together when I put him away.”
“The gang was angry,” Jami says, trailing her finger down the rest of the names. She leans forward and brings up what looks like screenshots someone took of a business conversation between a group chat of people. “They blamed Kasper for allowing you to lock up their boss. An eye for an eye is what they wanted, it looks like. So whether or not it was Kasper’s actual idea, he was involved in the murder. An accomplice.”
I close out of that document and open another to find even more names listed, including many other criminals Denver PD had locked up and taken down over the years. Many of them, I realized, were still out there and doing what they always did … with Kasper’s help.
“Sonofabitch,” I mutter, anger boiling to the surface of my skin. I want to wrap my hands around Kasper’s throat and squeeze until the life falls from his eyes and never returns. I want to watch him suffer as he slips away until there’s nothing left of him but a black hole of emptiness.
“Are you okay?” Jami asks, placing her warm hands on both of my shoulders to massage them from behind. If she weren’t here with me right now, I’d probably be on my way to Kasper’s house to put a bullet between the man’s eyes.
“I ... I don’t know,” I admit, reaching up to place my hands on hers reassuringly. “I always knew he was a mess, Jami, but I never knew he’d stoop so low. My family. My fucking family!”
“I know.” Jami turns me around on the stool and holds me, her chin resting on top of my head, and I cling to her as so many emotions flow through my veins. Anger. Fury. Rage. Then relief. Anger again. Agony.
“All these years,” I say quietly. “All these years I worked with this man and treated him with the same respect I treated my fellow officers, only to find out that it was him all along. That he’s responsible for everything that has affected me both personally and professionally.”
“There’s nothing I could find about Tara,” Jami says, sitting down on the stool next to me. “But if he was involved in her death, I don’t think he’ll be able to deny it anymore, not now.”
“Thank God for a scorned wife,” I mutter, shaking my head, and Jami swallows a lump in her throat.
“Without Tara leaving this to us he might not have ever been caught,” she says, glancing at the computer screen for a mere second before turning away again. “I think Kasper knew that she had this. I think he sent someone to try and find it, and something went wrong. Or maybe nothing went wrong and they killed her just because they’re killers, and that’s what killers do. He would always be a threat to her as long as she had this evidence, and maybe he wasn’t about to chance it.”
“I think you’re right.” Unable to keep staring at the disaster on the screen, I pull Jami into me and hold her, just hold her until the pain eases slightly and the fog clears a bit from my head.
“What now?” Jami asks, leaning her head against my chest. “What do we do?”
“We get him,” I say, and my little boy’s face flashes into my mind. His smile. His laughter. Hislife… cut short by Kasper Hill. “We get him, and we make him pay.”
32
JAMI
The car ride from my apartment and back to the precinct is silent. Ely knows that Kasper is still at work, and sure enough, I see his SUV parked out front as soon as we pull up. It’s almost ten at night, which means Madison must be at Kasper’s house with the babysitter.
“Why is he always around?” I mutter as Ely crosses around his parked car to open the door for me.
“I don’t think he’s slept much in days, maybe even longer,” says Ely. “His conscience must be catching up to him.”
