“What?” I asked in surprise. “How?”
“It appears to be a suicide. His wife found him hanging in the basement of their house. His home office was down there. There was no evidence of foul play, but also no suicide note. Daisy was scanning the local dispatch feeds when she saw the address come through. It’ll hit the local papers in a matter of hours, if it hasn’t already.”
“Fuck,” I muttered. As badly as I’d wanted the fucker dead for what he’d done to Caleb, it would be Caleb who suffered when helearned what had happened. He’d blame himself for somehow driving Jennings to it after the confrontation more than two weeks earlier. I ran my fingers through my hair. Why the fuck couldn’t Caleb just get a damn break already?
“Caleb’s given me permission to talk to you about this,” I said to Ronan. “You too,” I added to Mav. Even though Caleb and I hadn’t actually talked about Mav learning the truth about what Jennings and Rush had done to Caleb, I had no doubt that Caleb had known it was inevitable that his brother’s fiancé would need to be clued in. “Jennings and a guy named Rush raped Caleb when he was fifteen. It happened on a camping trip with Caleb’s father. The fucker handed Caleb to them on a silver platter. He may have taped both rapes on his phone to use against the men.”
Mav lurched out of his chair and went to the back door that overlooked the back yard. He gently pounded his closed fist on the glass. I suspected if it’d been an actual wall, he would have unleashed the anger I could see cascading throughout his entire body. Ronan looked just as pissed, but he remained seated. “If he stored them on his computer…” he murmured.
He didn’t need to finish the sentence. If they’d only been stored on the one computer that Nick had copied the other videos from, then there’d be no proof. The pedophile had been smart enough to install software on his computer that would wipe the hard drive after a certain amount of time if he didn’t log into it. By the time Daisy had hacked into the computer the day after Jack had been arrested, the files had already been gone. The only evidence of Jack’s depravity had been the flash drive. There’d been no videos on his phone or his cloud account.
“Caleb said he thought Rush worked with his father, but that Rush wasn’t his real name.”
Mav returned to the table and sat. His expression was drawn tight with anger. “We can search the DoD records for someone with a last name or known nickname that’s a variation of Rush, but it’s a long shot.”
“Maybe go back further,” Ronan suggested. “College, high school even.”
“Caleb said Jennings was friends with his father when they were both in high school. Start there,” I said. “The timing with this Jennings thing is too convenient,” I added. “Caleb had a gun on him and still the guy refused to confess to what he’d done. Assholes like that don’t feel guilt. He strung Caleb along for years with promises that he’d help him, but he didn’t do shit. He was only trying to keep Caleb quiet long enough to keep him from telling anyone what happened.”
“You think Jack put a hit out on Jennings like he did Caleb?” Mav asked.
“He’s got the resources,” I said. “The guys who hit us out in the woods were pros.”
Mav nodded in agreement and said, “Talent like that could’ve made Jennings’ death look like a suicide.”
I looked at Ronan. “Any chance the coroner will be able to tell?” I asked.
Ronan shook his head and put out his hands. “All depends on the coroner. Some are more experienced than others. If he doesn’t see any signs of a struggle, he’s not likely to order the specific drug tests that will show if he ingested anything that would have knocked him out. Something like GHB would’ve made it easy for someone to string him up without any kind of struggle.”
“We can’t risk tipping the cops off to look at it as something more,” I said.
“Wecan’t,” Ronan agreed. “But Declan probably can. He’s the one who arrested Cortano. If he can find anything that shows Cortano and Jennings were still in contact in the past couple of years, he can feed that to the cops in Bethesda.”
I knew who Ronan was talking about. Declan Barretti was a captain in the Seattle Police Department. He was also the brother-in-law of Dom Barretti, Eli’s adopted father. Declan and Dom had both been present when Eli had admitted that Jack had raped him repeatedly as a teenager.
“Are you sure he won’t figure out Caleb was the one who was at the Jennings’ house that day?” I asked.
“I have no doubt hewillfigure it out,” Ronan said. “But Caleb’sfamily, and if we’ve learned anything about the Barrettis, even the ones who are a Barretti by law and not blood, you don’t fuck with their family.”
Mav nodded in agreement.
“I’ll talk to him,” Ronan said.
“I’ll have Daisy see if she can find a link between Jennings and Jack that’s more recent. If Jennings panicked after Caleb showed up and reached out to Jack, it would explain how he knew Caleb was no longer in Seattle. It would have been the perfect time for him to silence him.” Mav looked at me and said, “We found a tracker on the rental car we used in West Virginia. I was the one who rented it. Jack probably knew I’d be one of the people going after Caleb and had someone scanning all the rental car agencies for my information. We had the car delivered to the airfield we landed at – the tracker was probably already on it. I’m sorry, Jace. It never even occurred to us to check it.”
I shook my head. “It wouldn’t have occurred to me either,” I said. “I shouldn’t have insisted on radio silence,” I added. “I panicked.” I shook my head. “I can’t stop seeing that laser sight on his chest. If I’d moved just a fraction of a second slower…”
Ronan put his hand over mine. “You didn’t. Nothing else matters. You got him back here and he’s safe now. Jack isn’t getting another shot at him.”
I nodded. “I need to ask you guys a favor. I need to go back to Germany for a few days. Can Caleb and Willa stay here?”
I realized after the question that I hadn’t even pointed out that Caleb and I were together now and that he would be staying with me going forward. Hell, Caleb and I hadn’t even had a chance to talk about what would happen once things settled down. I hadn’t even given thought to where we’d end up. Though after everything that had happened, I was pretty sure that thewherewas the easy part. Caleb’s family was here.
And, as it turned out, so was mine.
I just hadn’t realized it.
“You can’t go after him, Jace,” Ronan said.
