“Why?”
“Control and collateral,” Denver added, his voice grumpy and cold. “We think that she’s insurance in case Sawyer ever finds out everything.”
“Why? Who raised her? Who is Felicia?”
“Gail sees her a bunch, actually,” Sawyer admitted. “Has since she was an infant. But she lives with the hacker, Kurt Pruitt.”
“Ida Bell Pruitt?” I squeaked.
They all looked at me. “You know her?”
“We graduated with her, Boone,” I pointed out. “She was that girl that always got bullied for being a nerd. The redhead that got shoved into a locker once a week by all the high school bullies.”
Boone’s eyes narrowed as anger lit his eyes.
Sawyer cursed.
Denver was the only one who didn’t look surprised.
“And Felicia? Where does she fit in all this?”
“We think she knows,” Sawyer sighed. “Not at first. At first, she was just a little girl. My little girl. But now, we think that she’s helping Kurt and Gail run the cons. Didn’t you see her brand-new Mercedes G-Wagon? I didn’t buy that for her.”
“Whoa,” Eddy mumbled.
“So what is it that you’re doing now?” I asked. “Why are you telling me all of this?”
Boone leveled me with a look that said, ‘I know you know why.’
I looked down at my lap. “Because the only way to fix this is to get her out of my life. We’ve spent the last two years tracing the money, but as we said, Kurt’s a really freakin’ good hacker.”
“What about Apollo?”
Apollo was the man that’d helped all of the men that’d once been in prison get out. He’d planned out new lives for them. Created new identities. Established a history in the town. Found them the Dixie Wardens MC.
I was probably one of a couple thousand townspeople that would’ve known the truth when the men had arrived due solely to the fact that I’d had a tie-in to the club. I knew the members, though not well seeing as Boone had joined after we were a thing. But Denver had always been a part of them, and he hadn’t shied away from bringing his club members to the family functions that Sawyer had put on.
Not that Sawyer would’ve ever denied a single person a place at his table.
He wasn’t a part of the club, but he was the most giving man I knew.
“He’s been steadily looking into it. But we can’t have him found.”
I knew why.
Because Apollo was protecting some ex-cons. Some escaped convicts that were now considered dead to the world, and Apollo couldn’t be found out.
An escaped convict, one of which my sister happened to be getting married to.
It was understandable that this operation would need to be very delicate.
“Shit,” Weaver sighed, his first words added to this conversation. “What’s the plan then? How are you going to fix this?”
Because he knew, just as I did, that something needed to be done.
“We’re still trying to find out everything,” Sawyer admitted. “Gail’s not very smart about how she’s doing things. But the man, Kurt Pruitt, is. He cleans up after her constantly. But sometimes, Gail slips up, and we find the information before Kurt gets to it. We now know where the woman we think is my daughter, Ida Bell, is. Apollo has also helped us slip some tracking devices on their phones. Kurt doesn’t clean those up but once every couple of months. We have someone tailing both Gail and Felicia everywhere they go. We know their schedules. We know their way into the company. And now the FBI is involved.”
I blinked. “You involved the FBI?”
