24. Rio
Ifelt tender, worn out, and needy. All those emotions could be bad, but in Saint’s arms, his low voice murmuring sweet things in my ear, they felt fantastic. I was by and large a Dom, but I still appreciated a thorough fucking and then some aftercare very, very much.
Saint held me for a long time, until I shivered with the chill of the room on the cooled, drying sweat on our skin. “Let’s go rinse off, Osito,” he said softly and led me to the bathroom by the hand. The curtain was open partway and I hesitated for a minute before I took a big breath and stepped forward, but Saint was already there, pushing it back. “Nothing here,” he said.
I looked at Saint, warmed by the way that he was stepping up to take care of me. Other than Rafael, not many people had done that since I was a kid. I wrapped around him and kissed him deeply. “I love you,” I said earnestly, and he flushed with pleasure as he smiled.
We got into the shower after it warmed and I stayed in Saint’s space, stealing kisses that he was only too willing to give me. After we were clean and dry, we went back to the bed and lay down, Saint wrapped up around me from behind. I pulled my phone out and scrolled through, saw a message from John asking me to call him, and tapped the Call button.
“Rio, I’m glad you called,” John said by way of greeting. “I got the reports from Lee. You had a couple of busy days.”
“Sí,” I agreed. “We’re in the hotel now. We got in early this morning and grabbed a few hours of sleep. I had meant to call sooner.”
“No trouble at all, take advantage of the opportunity. I was hoping you were asleep, which is why I didn’t call. Look, Lee has updated me on everything and I just wanted to call and make sure you’re still good with this job, and I wanted to tell you something.”
I opened my mouth to protest the idea that I would leave my post, but then he finished his statement and I felt my stomach drop. “Tell me something?” I asked as casually as possible, as Saint shifted behind me, going up on one elbow to look at me.
“Yes. A friend of mine, Captain Garcia Stacy, has been assigned to the Greene case. He didn’t contact me directly of course, but his name is in the reports now. I don’t know if you know who he is, but he caught some heat some years ago for insisting on the prosecution of a well-liked assistant district attorney.”
I frowned. There was meaning in that statement. “You mean–”
“Yes. Money doesn’t mean anything to him. Neither does a bought-off superior.”`
I grinned and Saint poked me in the side. I turned my head so he could see my smile too. “That’s fantastic news,” I said to John.
“It is,” he agreed. “Lee made sure that copies of the reports from the snake and all made it to the proper people, too, so he has all of that.”
“What about Ginny?” I asked. I felt Saint shifting and heard him suck in a breath.
“Ginny’s been busy,” Saint said, handing me his phone.
I looked at the screen and sighed. “John, just a hunch. They arrested one of Fernandez’s men but the other was still free.”
John was silent for a minute. “Yes…” he finally answered. “Well probably. Why?”
“Well one of them is dead.”
John heaved a sigh. “You’d better call Detective Parker.”
***
Ginny’s message featured the man who had been in the restaurant that morning eating bacon and eggs. The photo showed him on the ground outside the room we had been staying in. A single word captioned the photograph.
Incompetent!
“I’m going to guess that she wasn’t happy that the poison and the snake both missed the marks,” I said.
Saint snorted as he dialed Detective Parker. “Can’t wait to see what they have to say to her once Fernandez finds out. I don’t think he’ll like that very well.”
I shrugged and listened to the conversation with Detective Parker. She knew about the murder already and was rather surprised that Saint did. He sent her the message that Ginny had sent him, confirmed that she had been in contact with Detective Stacy, and she promised that she was following up every lead.
When they hung up, Saint looked at the message again. “You know…” he said quietly. “I’m tempted to make a really, really stupid choice.”
My eyebrows headed north. “Yeah? What choice is that?”
Saint smiled at me with a look I hadn’t seen before, tapped his phone screen twice, and put the phone to his ear. “Hi, Ginny. Have you been naughty?”
“Saint!” I hissed as I heard a woman’s voice come through the phone. It wasn’t loud enough for me to make out more than the sound of her voice, but it was clear she was spitting mad. Saint was nodding along, holding the phone away from his ear when the volume raised.
“Ginny, Ginny, Ginny,” he said. “How do you think this is going to end? You’re Greene’s fall woman, you’re wanted in Tennessee, and now you’re painting an arrow on your back for a gang.”
The phone was even farther away from his ear that time, and I could hear what Ginny was saying but it still didn’t make any sense. Saint waited until she wound down, then sighed into the phone. “Really, little sister. The Bible says you’re not supposed to curse, too, and listen to you now.” He clicked his tongue. “What would Daddy say? See what happens when you fall in with the wrong crowd?”
My eyes bulged and Saint smirked at me. “What are you doing?” I hissed.
“Running out of fucks,” Saint answered succinctly, and my jaw dropped. “You’re not the next prophetess,” Saint told Ginny. “I don’t think this is what Paul meant when he wrote about Christian soldiers.” This time he ignored the voice on the phone and just kept talking. “You’re delusional, you’ve always been delusional. You were when Daddy told you that you’d get to go to heaven if you were a good girl and learned how to be a submissive wife, you were when you fell for Rod Miller’s bullshit – yeah, Shiloah told me all about that – and you are now.” He laughed, a bitter exhalation. “You know, I wondered a few times if our father would kill me. Now I wonder if he left that legacy to you. If there was a hell, he’s burning there, Virginia.” He hung up and threw the phone across the bed, watching dispassionately as it skittered off the edge.
I swallowed, silent for the time being as I looked at him. I had turned over when he was on the phone with Detective Parker and now sat up in bed next to him. He was still looking at the edge of the bed, but after a minute his eyes swung towards me. “That probably didn’t help anything.”
“D’you feel any better?”
Saint sighed. “No.”
I made a soft sound in my throat and pulled him into my arms.
John called again after about fifteen minutes had passed. “Rio, I have Captain Stacy on the line and Officer Hallie’s captain. They wanted to talk to you both about everything that happened when you were out of town.”
I put the phone on speaker and tugged Saint until he was comfortable on my chest with my left hand sweeping over his shoulder. “We’re both here,” I said.
“Good. Captain Donovan, Captain Stacy, we have Michael Durand and Gregorio Torrez. Mr. Torrez is employed with my agency, his current assignment is protecting Michael Durand from the threats made by several people.”
“Hola,” I said. “This is Gregorio Torrez.”
“I’m Michael Durand,” Saint said. “How can we help you?”
“Misters Torrez and Durand,” Captain Stacy said. “I just spoke to Detective Parker in San Julio. We had been in contact last night, but she informed me of the body and the connection to the case. Was that all she sent you?”
“Yes. She claims to have a video of the shooting where Cas was hurt too, but I haven’t seen it. Until the photo, I wasn’t certain she was in San Julio. I suspected, but with Ginny, it’s hard to know.”
“Has Detective Parker seen Ginny?” I asked. “The last time we saw her, she hadn’t changed her appearance at all, I wouldn’t be surprised if she checked in somewhere under her own name.”
“Detective Parker is in the process of investigating that,” Stacy said. I didn’t think that sounded promising but at least it was something.
“You have as good as a confession for the body outside the motel, not to mention it’s pretty damn incriminating for the rest if she killed him because he’s ‘incompetent.’” I pointed out.
“That’s right, Mr. Torrez,” Captain Donovan said. “I one hundred percent agree with you, and I am also very interested in this video she insists she has.”
“John, has Lee come up with anything else,” I asked.
“If he knows, you know,” John said. “He’s been compiling it and sending it on regularly as well. Do you have those files, Captains? I can have a complete list sent to you both, if something has been overlooked.” The unspoken or sanitized hung in the air.
“You know, John, I think I’ll take you up on that,” Captain Stacy said. “Maybe he could email it to both my and Captain Donovan’s personal email addresses? Never hurts to have a backup copy of sensitive information.”
“Consider it done,” John said.
The two captains asked Saint and I about the poisoning and the snake next, and John said that Lee had written a statement about his part in the snake incident too. Everything was scheduled to be sent to both men, straight from Lee so it couldn’t be run through anyone who was in Greene’s pocket. Not that I expected it to have much more effect than it already had, but it was another brick. All we could do was create more bricks.