I squeezed her shoulder. “It’s not useless. I actually know the warehouse you’re talking about. At least I did. Maybe it’s not the same one. Keep going.”
Blaire squinted at the loopy handwriting. “There’s not a whole lot else. Oh! He wore glasses. I remember because there was a blood splatter on them. They were fancy, too.”
An image hit me, all at once. A well-dressed man, with overly ornate horn-rimmed glasses. “Freddie.”
“What?” Blaire held her page with her thumb, and looked up at me with wide eyes. “You know him?”
“He’s Conrad’s accountant. Or was, I guess. He fell off the map a while ago, and now I know why.”
“No wonder he hates me,” Blaire muttered. Her gaze went fuzzy.
“No. Nope. No giving up now. Your idea is working, and if we can get through all of them like this, we might be able to putsome kind of picture together.” She rested her hand on mine, and her eyes came back to me. “What’s next?”
This time, her voice was sure. “Loud music. Really loud music. But I don’t think I was at someone’s house…”
On and on we went, through all the dreams in her book, while the afternoon sun settled into dusk, and the music inside the house grew louder.
Conrad’s accountant. His supplier. His uncle.
A dealer I only knew about in passing.
Until we came to, “His second in command.”
Blaire froze. “What?”
I nodded toward her book. “The man you’re describing. That was his second in command. Craig, I think his name was. When was that dream again?”
She checked the date written above the entry. “Two days. Two days before the break and enter.”
“So, you were taking out his men, slowly working your way to the top. Subconsciously, you must have remembered them from your time undercover, and where they tended to hang out. Not that Conrad’s men are exactly discreet.” Leaning back, I looked up at the starless night. “Something had to happen to make him realize it was you who was responsible. Maybe you got too confident and left a trail. Maybe he knew all along and just didn’t care until you took it too far—which wouldn’t surprise me.”
Blaire closed the book, running her tongue along her teeth. “Do any of the locations tell you where he might be?”
“It tells me he’s a cocky son-of-a-bitch, and hasn’t bothered changing much since I worked for him. But, yes. I recognize a few of the locations, and I can take an educated guess at some of the others.”
A lull fell between us, each of us processing in our own way.
“What do we do next?” she asked.
I rose, pulling her up with me. “I don’t know what you saw that night, Blaire. Maybe we will never know. But what I do know is this. Whatever you saw was enough for them to kill Oliver and leave you for dead. And it was enough for you to subconsciously want to pick them off one by one. But whether you like it or not, for some reason, you’ve recently started a chain of events. The only way out is to finish it.”
Blaire pressed her lips together. “You mean killing Conrad.”
I lifted her jaw with my finger. “I mean, doing what it takes for you to be safe. If that means killing Conrad, so be it. He’s had it coming.”
“I just…” Blaire looked away, at something past me.
We were no longer alone on the porch, and the music inside the house pulsed with a backbeat that rattled my chest.
“Hey,” I said. “Talk to me.”
She snapped her gaze to me. “I just wish I knew what happened that night for sure. I wish I could remember who Oliver was, anything about him. I want to know what was so special about him that I’m willing to kill people for him.”
Hearing my brother’s name coming from her mouth hit me like a dagger to my heart, but I couldn’t possibly be mad at her. “It’s okay, baby. You don’t have to remember to know that whatever you two shared was enough for you to take action and seek revenge.”
Her gaze held vulnerability, an emotion I knew she tried hard to hide. “Do you really believe that?”
I paused. “Yes. I do.”
