Page 123 of Hard Heart

“Uh… He looks like every other man I’ve seen at a crime scene.”

“Exactly. He’s comfortable undercover. But his posture suggests ex-military or intelligence, and I bet you either he got a dishonourable discharge or there was something questionable about his service.”

I shuddered. I couldn’t help it.

When Flora was little, she’d been scared of the dark. Mum used the “tough love” approach and told her to get over it because monsters didn’t exist, but she was wrong. They did exist. I knew that now. They crept in through your window and hid in your closet and murdered you in the night. I used to check under Flora’s bed because she couldn’t sleep otherwise, but now I’d be checking under my own. Preferably with a loaded gun in my hand.

“How did Ruby cross paths with a man like that?” Ari asked. “She was a student, not a secret agent. Right?”

“Who the fuck knows?” Jerry said. “She worked in a bar in DC, a high-end one. There are a lot of military types around the Pentagon.”

I had to tell them, didn’t I? I had to tell them what Ruby had been doing. Levi tried so hard to protect her, but now Ruby had been gone for a decade, and her choices were still spilling into the lives of everyone she’d left behind. Levi didn’t deserve to spend his life in a cell. Justin didn’t deserve to join him. And even Jerry… She should be whiling away her days terrorising small children or whatever she usually did for fun, not trying to undo Ruby’s mistakes.

Levi might not like my decision, but he’d have to live with it.

It was better than dying behind bars.

“Uh, so Ruby didn’t just work in a bar…”

CHAPTER 37

JEZEBEL

“Why the hell didn’t Levi tell us this before?”

Jerry Knight’s first emotion was anger. Anger at Serafina because how dare she suggest Ruby had been a prostitute? Then, once she walked away and considered the situation for a few minutes, she realised that actually, the pieces fit, and her anger redirected. What the hell had Ruby been playing at?

Could Jez imagine her sleeping with a man for money? It wouldn’t have been too much of a stretch. She’d never been shy about liking sex, and for the first six months she was living in Blackstone House, she’d brought home a guy most weekends, and rarely the same one twice. Several of the others, Jez included, hadn’t been happy about that because of Alexa. A steady boyfriend, fine, but Alexa was a child, and there were too many weirdos around.

There’d been an intervention of sorts, not an argument exactly, more of a heated discussion, and Ruby had agreed to tone down her man-eating ways or at least get a hotel room. That was when she’d begun spending more time with her friend Tina. Tina had her own apartment and also enjoyed male company, so Jez had figured they were taking the men back there, and she’d probably been right. But there was money involved?

“Levi didn’t want everyone thinking Ruby was a slut. He loved her.”

“Serafina, the man went to prison. Surely, his freedom was worth sullying her reputation?”

“There was also an element of wanting to get away from his mother.”

“In a jail cell?”

“I’m not saying it was the best idea, but do you realise how many drugs he was taking back then? They messed with his head. He was basically detoxing alone in prison, and by the time he got clean, it was too late.”

“For a smart man, Levi can be really fucking dumb sometimes.”

“Look, he thought Ruby was murdered because of him. Because of something he’d done. His mentor died just after the trial, so he assumed they were both victims of a Big Oil conspiracy and Justin was a paid participant.”

“Do we know for sure that Big Oil wasn’t involved?” Ari asked. “Because the motive is still a mystery, and hiring a player like Eight-out-of-ten doesn’t come cheap.”

She wasn’t wrong. For a job like that? Freelance? They were looking at high six figures, if not seven. Who did Ruby know with that kind of money?

“I was erring on the side of ‘no,’” Serafina said. “But I’ve been questioning my judgment hourly, so…”

“Why do you think that?”

“We got close to finding out who was responsible, but as I said before, we put that part of the investigation on hold when Justin got arrested.”

“And?”

“And it was two kids. One of them was the son of the local sheriff, which was why nobody ever got arrested, and they were only paid to scare Groveland, not kill him. He died because he ran back inside to rescue his dog.”