“Why didn’t you call it in? You’re just going to call it in later? Michaels is going to know that body sat out there.”
“How far are you willing to go, Jesse? How far have you gone before? I think I deserve to know.”
Jesse’s quiet while he contemplates his answer, but maybe he realizes that I’m right. I really do deserve to know. “I killed someone. Is that what you want to know?”
“It is.”
“I fucking… I don’t know what came over me. I thought the man was going to kill me. I convinced myself he was going to kill me if I didn’t kill him first. I just…” He takes a deep breath. “Later… I thought about all of the ways I could have run. The ways I could have gotten away from him. The ways I didn’t have to kill him.”
“Whitaker is a manipulator. He drives you into a corner. He makes it seem like there is nothing left for you to do. And then he shows you a different way. Theonlyway out. The only way to protect yourself and those you love.”
Jesse stares at me in disbelief. “I’ve fallen for it again, haven’t I?”
“Not fully. I’m certain Whitaker wouldn’t approve of you trying to take control of Tate.”
“He’s going to be enraged that Tate is dead. He’s going to kill Lacey.”
“What would killing Lacey do?” I ask. “He’d lose his control over you. Do you even know if he truly has her?”
Jesse lets out a sharp laugh. “There’s no fucking way I just tried to ruin your life and got a man killed for nothing.”
“Makes you feel shittier, doesn’t it? Knowing you did something for no reason at all,” I say. “That’s what he wants you to feel. Honestly, I don’t think he has Lacey. I’m sureyou’ve informed her that Whitaker is back. You said she was somewhere safe and I know that Whitaker could have found her, but if he had, he’d have sent you real proof. I’m sure she’s going everywhere with her brother and staying as safe as possible. You panicked. That’s what you did here. Do you have another way of contacting her? I wonder if he couldn’t get to her and went after her boyfriend instead.”
“I know where we were supposed to meet tonight, but I haven’t been able to get ahold of her.”
“Did you check the place or did you immediately believe him?”
“He sent me a picture,” he says. “Can you bring me my phone from my pants pocket?”
After I retrieve his phone that is fortunately water resistant enough that it’s still working, he brings up the picture and hands the phone to me.
I scrutinize it carefully. It really is Lacey, but there’s something off about the picture of the woman taped to a chair. “It’s a fake.”
Jesse grabs it but his hands are struggling to zoom, so I do it for him. “See that line there? It’s her head, but not her body. I’m sure you were too distraught to realize it at first. Let’s send someone out to collect her and move her someplace safe. My bet is he wasn’t able to easily grab her and if she’s somewhere hard to get to, maybe her phone isn’t working. Hell, with this storm, the Wi-Fi might even be down. Lacey and her brother might not even realize it yet.”
Jesse drops the phone and sits in silence for a while. “How can I be this fucking foolish? Am I really this much of a fuckup?”
“Emotions make people fuck up. Now what does he have on you pertaining to this person you killed?”
“The night I killed the guy, Whitaker was following me. Instead of helping me when I thought the man was going to kill me, he took a photo of me killing him.”
“He told you this or showed you?”
“I saw it… back when I was with him. I thought I destroyed it, but I must not have because he… sent it to me just as I was walking up to confront Tate.”
“Do you still have the photo he sent you?”
“Yes… but I don’t care anymore, Liam. This has to end. I can’t just keep dancing around. People are dying. I’d have turned myself in earlier today so no one else would get hurt, but I thought he had Lacey.”
“Exposing him would have solved nothing so far,” I say, truly believing that.
“But more detectives would have been looking into him.”
“Yes, and we’d have had to do things legally. You really think that even if you’d blurted out the man’s name the day Nadine died, we would have been able to dig up a grave with no true connection to him? There’s no police report from when you and Lacey tried to get him caught. There’s nothing to back you up. We have you blaming a dead man who has no criminal record. And in this line of work, proof is what we need. So we’re going to give it to them. We’re going to give them a reason to dig up that grave, to look into Whitaker,” I say. “Do you have anything that belongs to him?”
Jesse thinks for a moment. “I don’t believe so.”
“So when you ran with Lacey, you took nothing with you?”
