Chapter 30
Two hours later, and a good thirty color-coded sticky notes pasted on the wall, James still hadn’t returned.
Had he ditched me? Had his handler arrested him on the spot? Or had he gone somewhere he hadn’t wanted me to know about? Why had he taken two hard drives?
I called Carter.
“Have you heard from James?” I asked the moment he answered, pacing the room.
“Isn’t he with you?” he asked with an edge in his voice.
“I take that as a no.” My throat tightened. “Did he tell you he was meeting his handler?”
“No.” The word was clipped.
I stopped pacing and pressed the heel of my hand to my forehead. “He left two hours ago.”
“Why the fuck did he go meet his handler?” Carter barked.
“Because of what we got from Natalie.” I forced myself to breathe. “What matters is this: we copied everything tied to Knox onto an external hard drive. We made several copies, and James called his handler, then set up a meeting to hand it over.”
“Why the fuck didn’t he call me first?” he demanded.
“I don’t know.” My stomach clenched. “He stepped into the hallway to make the call. When he came back, he looked … defeated. He said he didn’t think what we found would be enough to get him out of his arrangement.
” I swallowed. “I asked if you could talk to them, and he said if he involved you, they’d toss him back into prison. ”
“Tell me exactly what you collected,” Carter said with a groan. “He told me Natalie was working for Knox and that she had a ton of incriminating evidence, but he wouldn’t get into specifics. I told him we’d go through it all and figure out what to give them.” He paused. “Did he take it all?”
My stomach sank. “I transferred everything over to the hard drives. Unless he removed some of it, yeah.” I told him what I’d found in Harlan’s and Natalie’s files—Blackstone Capital, the leases, the police on the payroll, and finally the videos from Dani.
“He handed them the whole case on a silver fucking platter,” Carter said, heat in his voice. “Why wouldn’t it be enough?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “There has to be something else going on.”
He groaned in frustration. “If he’d brought me into the loop in the beginning—when he cut the deal in prison—he wouldn’t be in this situation.”
“Why wouldn’t he let you help set it up?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said bitterly. “He wouldn’t let me do anything to try to get him out. He seemed resigned to staying in there. Then he got a key piece of information from the Hardshaw Group, and months later, he had a deal.”
“Wait.” I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to put this together. “Wouldn’t he have handed the information over before the bust? Or right after?”
“He gave them plenty before the bust,” Carter said, his contempt thick. “But they were lookin’ for reasons to lock him up. He delivered the downfall of an international cartel, and they still called the deal null because he wasn’t physically present when the arrests went down.”
“I know he missed the bust,” I said slowly. “But where was he? Why wasn’t he there if he knew how important it was?”
He didn’t answer for several seconds. Finally, voice tight, he said, “That’s not for me to say.”
My temper snapped. “That’s bullshit, Carter. I’m in the thick of this now.”
“Only a handful of people know where he was, and it’s not for me to tell you.” Carter’s voice went flat. “But the bottom line is, Skeeter deemed it more important. He never regretted his decision. So we have to stand by that.”
What on earth could have been more important than meeting the requirements of his deal?
But Carter was right—it wouldn’t help to focus on that now.
“Why did he hold that piece of information back?” I asked. “Was it leverage in case they screwed him?”
“No.” Carter hesitated. “He didn’t have it then. It came into his possession about ten months after the bust.”
“From where?”
“From the daughter of one of the three men at the core of Hardshaw.” He exhaled. “She visited Skeeter in prison and asked for his help in bringing down her father.”
I had questions about the why, but not of them felt urgent at the moment. “How was he supposed to help form prison?”
“Randall Blakely’s daughter—Carly—was hoping to get him to implicate himself on video,” Carter said. “She figured if she looked like she knew more than she did, he’d start talking. Skeeter gave her that information, in exchange for something he wanted. A file her father had.”
“Did it work?”
“Sort of.” Carter sounded grim. “He implicated himself but was killed during the confrontation.”
That was convenient.
“A few days after Blakely’s death, Carly contacted me. She said she kept her word. She had the file. We deemed it too important to transmit electronically, so I went to Dallas to retrieve it.”
“What was it?”
“Some kind of computer code. I have no idea what it did or what it was for. But once Skeeter had it, things changed.” His tone changed. “He didn’t seem as hopeless. And a few months later, he was released. All charges dropped.” He paused, then sounded resigned. “But he traded one cage for another.”
James had gotten some kind of code from the head of Hardshaw Group, and it had been important enough to get him a second deal. But he’d only been released conditionally—and now he had to bring in enough information for them to bring down a Little Rock human trafficking ring.
So why would they wait three years for him to come through? And once he delivered the information wrapped in a bow, why was it still not enough?
None of this made sense.
That had to be why they didn’t want Carter anywhere near the agreement. No attorney in his right mind would let a client take a deal without clear, enforceable terms.
But James was no fool. So why had he cut Carter out of the loop?
“Okay,” Carter said, sounding like he was trying to regroup. “Skeeter’s been gone two hours. Maybe the handler drove in from Memphis or somewhere a couple of hours away. We need to account for travel time.”
“No.” My nerves pinged. “He said the meeting was in Little Rock, thirty minutes after his call. When I asked how it was happening so quickly, he said the handler was in town. The timing would have put the meeting at around five-thirty. The meeting shouldn’t have taken this long. It should have been a simple handover.”
“You said there’s a lot of information. They may be taking their sweet time going through it. Have you tried calling him?”
“Of course,” I snapped. “And texting. He hasn’t answered.” My chest tightened. “Can you see his location through his phone?”
“Give me a minute.” I heard tapping on his end before he said, “He’s turned off his phone. Let me look up his Google Maps timeline.”
His phone was off? I tried not to panic. He might have turned it off before he met the handler, or the handler might have insisted on it.
“Okay,” Carter said. “I see he was at the Morrison Hotel around five-twenty. Then it shows he was at a diner downtown.”
“What’s the name?”
“The Capital Café.”
I knew the place. “That’s a five-minute walk from here.”
“That’s not his last location,” he said. “It shows he was parked on the street near the corner of Asher and University about a half hour later.”
Why had he gone to a second location?
It had to have something to do with the second hard drive.
First, I needed to focus on where he’d gone, otherwise, Carter might sidetrack me after I told him about the other drive.
“Let me see what’s around there.” I pulled up maps on my computer and typed in the intersection.
I searched the businesses near the location.
“There’s a dry cleaner, a comic book store, a vacuum repair shop, a pawn shop, and another diner.
” Why would he go to any of those places, and what was he doing? “When was his phone turned off?”
“His location went dark about an hour and a half ago.”
My mind raced. “There’s a chance he met his handler at the diner and headed somewhere else afterward. Carter, when he left, he took a second hard drive.”
“What second hard drive?” Carter asked, his voice rising.
“We had three hard drives—the original we copied the files onto, then two more. James said the second one was for his handler and the third was for us, to put in his safe. But right before he left, he insisted I take a break to clear my head. He suggested a shower would help. He made sure I was in the bathroom and shut the door.” My pulse kicked up.
“When I came out, the second hard drive was missing. He took two.”
I drew a breath, trying to make it make sense. “Was he planning to turn the information over to someone else?”
“I don’t know,” Carter said slowly.
“I’ve been trying to figure it out for the last two hours,” I admitted. “And I don’t like any of the scenarios I’ve come up with.” I swallowed. “Would he blackmail Knox?”
“No,” Carter scoffed. “He doesn’t need the money, and he’d never give Knox a way out.”
“But he might use it as bait to lure Knox out.” My voice turned brittle. “He might tell him that he has my mom’s files too and offer some kind of exchange.”
“Maybe…” Carter sounded distracted. “And I can see him leaving you behind to do it.”
I could too. And that made my blood boil.
“It would explain why he turned off his phone,” Carter said. “So I couldn’t track him.”
My pulse thudded. “If he went to meet Knox, Knox could have kidnapped him. Or worse.” I felt sick. “We have to get a location for Knox. What haven’t we thought of? There has to be a way to get it.”
“Now hold on,” he said in a rush. “We don’t know what Skeeter was doing, Harper,” he said in frustration. “For all we know, he took the hard drive to someone else.”
I’d thought of that too, but who?
Then it hit me. “He promised to get the exotic dancer’s charges dropped.”
Carter went quiet for a half beat. “Yeah?”
“The Feds have influence,” I said, thinking fast. “But they might not be able to make that happen. And James gave his word, so he’d want to make sure they got dropped. Right?”
“If he gave his word, then yeah. He’d make sure it happened.”