“Why the fuck didn’t he call me first?” he demanded.
“I don’t know.” My stomach clenched. “He stepped into the hallway to make the call. When he came back, he looked … defeated. He said he didn’t think what we found would be enough to get him out of his arrangement.” I swallowed. “I asked if you could talk to them, and he said if he involved you, they’d toss him back into prison.”
“Tell me exactly what you collected,” Carter said with a groan. “He told me Natalie was working for Knox and that she had a ton of incriminating evidence, but he wouldn’t get into specifics. I told him we’d go through it all and figure out what to give them.” He paused. “Did he take it all?”
My stomach sank. “I transferred everything over to the hard drives. Unless he removed some of it, yeah.” I told him what I’d found in Harlan’s and Natalie’s files—Blackstone Capital, the leases, the police on the payroll, and finally the videos from Dani.
“He handed them the whole case on a silver fucking platter,” Carter said, heat in his voice. “Why wouldn’t it be enough?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “There has to be something else going on.”
He groaned in frustration. “If he’d brought me into the loop in the beginning—when he cut the deal in prison—he wouldn’t be in this situation.”
“Why wouldn’t he let you help set it up?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said bitterly. “He wouldn’t let me do anything to try to get him out. He seemed resigned to staying in there. Then he got a key piece of information from the Hardshaw Group, and months later, he had a deal.”
“Wait.” I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to put this together. “Wouldn’t he have handed the information over before the bust? Or right after?”
“He gave them plenty before the bust,” Carter said, his contempt thick. “But they were lookin’ for reasons to lock him up. He delivered the downfall of an international cartel, and they still called the deal null because he wasn’t physically present when the arrests went down.”
“I know he missed the bust,” I said slowly. “But where was he? Why wasn’t he there if he knew how important it was?”
He didn’t answer for several seconds. Finally, voice tight, he said, “That’s not for me to say.”
My temper snapped. “That’s bullshit, Carter. I’m in the thick of this now.”
“Only a handful of people know where he was, and it’s not for me to tell you.” Carter’s voice went flat. “But the bottom line is, Skeeter deemed it more important. He never regretted his decision. So we have to stand by that.”
What on earth could have been more important than meeting the requirements of his deal?
But Carter was right—it wouldn’t help to focus on that now.
“Why did he hold that piece of information back?” I asked. “Was it leverage in case they screwed him?”
“No.” Carter hesitated. “He didn’t have it then. It came into his possession about ten months after the bust.”
“From where?”
“From the daughter of one of the three men at the core of Hardshaw.” He exhaled. “She visited Skeeter in prison and asked for his help in bringing down her father.”
I had questions about the why, but not of them felt urgent at the moment. “How was he supposed to help form prison?”
“Randall Blakely’s daughter—Carly—was hoping to get him to implicate himself on video,” Carter said. “She figured if she looked like she knew more than she did, he’d start talking. Skeeter gave her that information, in exchange for something he wanted. A file her father had.”
“Did it work?”
“Sort of.” Carter sounded grim. “He implicated himself but was killed during the confrontation.”
That was convenient.
“A few days after Blakely’s death, Carly contacted me. She said she kept her word. She had the file. We deemed it too important to transmit electronically, so I went to Dallas to retrieve it.”
“What was it?”
“Some kind of computer code. I have no idea what it did or what it was for. But once Skeeter had it, things changed.” His tone changed. “He didn’t seem as hopeless. And a few months later, he was released. All charges dropped.” He paused, then sounded resigned. “But he traded one cage for another.”
James had gotten some kind of code from the head of Hardshaw Group, and it had been important enough to get him a second deal. But he’d only been released conditionally—and now he had to bring in enough information for them to bring down a Little Rock human trafficking ring.
