It was only when the phone stopped moving so crazily that I saw.
“What the fuck?” I reared back in horror.
“The rest of the video is like that,” Gentry said as he slammed the laptop closed, as if he couldn’t bear to see any more of it. “I have Apollo looking into everything. But this has to be done by the book, unless we just want to kill them and dispose of the bodies. But they’re pillars of this community. They’d be missed.”
I swallowed hard. “Tell me what you know. And what you want me to do.”
“After seeing the video, we started to look into them. We found fraud. Embezzlement. Tax evasion.” He grimaced. “The Wheelers run that church on their own. Barton’s the pastor, and the wife is the director. Handles all the books, etc.” He twirled his empty shot glass around on the counter. “But we’re not seeing anything that leads to what we saw in that video. I think everything that was in the video was their own stuff. Not related to the church at all.” He stopped spinning the glass. “Apollo is finding none of it on their computers, either work or at home. Apollo, Sheriff Black, and I think that that’s the reason behind the hidden door in the basement. Everything is private. Not hooked up to the internet. And honestly, would’ve stayed being hidden had Eddy not walked in at the exact right time.”
I blanched.
“You’re telling me that two ‘upstanding members of Sawtooth’ are into child porn and rape, and that there’s no way to get them for it?” I asked.
“That’s where you come in,” he said softly. “We need you to pretend to go in there and fix something. A faulty wire. A fuse being blown. I don’t know. We know their schedules, and Eddy’s shared that tomorrow would be the best day to do it. They’re both gone all day long. Won’t be back until the following day. Eddy can let you in as a worried daughter trying to get her parents’ house fixed so it doesn’t burn down. I don’t know.”
My stomach hurt.
“You want me to go looking for it?”
“I want you to not only go looking for it, but find it. When you find it, you call us in immediately.”
I gestured to the bottle of Jack, and he wordlessly poured me a shot.
“Let’s go over everything you want me to do.”
Because no way in hell was I going through this again.
It might not be the same thing that I’d gone through with Pippa, Stanton, and Sonny, but it was similar enough that I felt like I was tasting ash on the back of my tongue.
Ash from the fires of hell that I’d already gone through once.
Never again.
Four
I’m unstable.
—Text from Eddy to Nettie
Eddy
I was a nervous wreck.
I scrubbed my hands down my face, wishing that I could just fast forward to the end of the day when all this was over.
Life didn’t work that way, though.
Sadly.
The bell above the door rang, and I glanced toward it to find a drop-dead gorgeous man strolling inside.
He had a head of thick and wavy chocolate-brown hair, steel-blue eyes, and a beard that was full and thick with just a hint of red in it. He paused in the doorway to shake the snow off, and I took my time taking in his attire.
Black jeans that fit him like a glove hugging some very powerful thighs, black boots that were caked in mud and snow—thank you, Montana weather—and a hoodie that said ‘Jesper County Co-Op’ on it.
He worked for the power company, which made sense that he would be wearing a sweatshirt with their logo. Had he come straight from work?
This was the man I was meeting.
