Chapter Twenty-One
The automatic doors sighed shut behind him, and the parking lot hit Leo with a blast of early morning air that did nothing to cool the ringing in his ears.
He’d said it. He’d actually said it. Out loud in a hospital hallway that smelled of burned coffee and hand sanitizer, with Anja standing there gripping his jacket as though she were trying to keep him from floating off the ground.
I love you.
Leo had been circling those three words for days now.
He’d turned them over at four in the morning while she slept against him.
He’d rehearsed them in the shower. Leo had even discarded a dozen different settings because none of them ever felt right: candlelight, an intimate dinner, any place that wasn’t currently under siege by federal agents and murder confessions.
Instead, they’d slipped out of him in a hospital lobby at five in the morning—definitely not the candlelit scene he’d imagined—right before he’d cowardly sprinted off toward a rideshare without waiting for her answer.
He pulled his phone out and stared at the app.
The little car icon crawled toward the pickup point with maddening slowness.
Leo thought about turning around and going back inside to do it properly.
Except Curtis was sitting in a house thirty minutes away with no idea his best friend of twenty years had orchestrated three murders.
Every second Leo spent fixing his own romantic timing was a second closer to Lydia hearing it from a stranger.
The car pulled up eight minutes later, a battered red four-door with a bumper sticker that read Honk if You Love Jesus peeling at one corner. The driver, having clearly been awake far too long for his own good, leaned over enthusiastically to unlock the door.
“Leo?” The man squinted at his phone screen, then at Leo, then back at the screen. “You’re the one going to Frontenac at five in the morning?”
“That’s me.”
“Big house or little house? I only ask because Frontenac’s got both kinds, and the big ones make my GPS lie to me constantly. Told me a driveway was a road once. Nearly put my car into somebody’s fountain.”
At the absurdity of the question, Leo found himself smiling despite everything. “Big house.”
“Figured.” The driver adjusted his mirror and glanced back.
“You look like a big-house guy. No offense. It’s the haircut.
Rich people always have nice hair.” The driver grinned into the mirror, delighted with himself.
“You want music? I got a playlist of whale sounds I’ve been meaning to try out on somebody. My cousin swears by it for anxiety.”
“I’m good.” Something about the offer, delivered with total sincerity at this hour, nearly cracked him into a laugh he desperately needed but couldn’t quite afford yet.
The rest of the ride passed in comfortable, unbothered chatter about the Cardinals bullpen, a topic Leo answered on autopilot.
His stomach kept twisting tighter with every mile marker that brought him closer to Curtis’s front door.
By the time the sedan turned onto the long, tree-lined drive that led to the Lennox house, the driver had moved on to a story about his mother-in-law’s parakeet that Leo hadn’t absorbed a single word of.
“Here you go.” The driver pulled up beneath the porte-cochère, whistling at the size of the place. “You weren’t kidding. Big house.”
“Thanks.” Leo handed over a tip that made the man’s eyebrows climb and stepped out into air that had grown colder in the hour since he’d left the hospital.
The house sat dark except for a scatter of lit windows on the ground floor, with brick and glass rising up through the trees in a way that had always struck Leo as more museum than home.
He climbed the steps and rang the bell. It took less than thirty seconds for the door to swing open, revealing Lydia, fully dressed despite the hour, her hair done, lipstick fresh, and a smile stretched across her face that didn’t quite reach the rest of it.
“Leo!” Her voice came out too bright, pitched higher than her usual register. “What a lovely surprise. Come in, come in, you must be freezing.”
“Lydia.” He air-kissed her cheek and stepped past her into the foyer, some instinct at the back of his neck prickling at the wrongness of her cheer at six in the morning, with her husband not even twenty-four hours out of a cardiac unit.
Was Curtis worse off than he thought? “I’m sorry to show up like this.
I need to talk to Curtis. It’s important. ”
“Of course it is.” Her laugh was brittle. “Everything’s important these days, isn’t it? He’s in his office. Right this way.”
Lydia led him down a hallway hung with framed photographs of Curtis and Lydia at galas, Curtis shaking hands with politicians, Curtis and a younger Leo grinning over a signed contract, and stopped outside a set of double doors. She knocked once before pushing them open.
“Leo’s here, darling.”
The office beyond looked the same as Leo remembered it from all the times he’d been invited in.
Dark wood shelves lined with case files and golf trophies, a wood-burning fireplace cold and swept clean, a desk the size of a boat positioned to catch the morning light through floor-to-ceiling windows.
And behind it, in a leather chair that probably cost more than most cars, sat Curtis Lennox, looking for all the world to be a man who’d never spent a single hour in a hospital bed in his life.
His color had come back in full, cheeks pink and eyes clear behind his reading glasses. There wasn’t a trace of the ashen, fragile pallor Leo had watched Lydia weep over less than seventy-two hours ago.
“Leo.” Curtis rose, and the warmth in his voice hadn’t dimmed a single degree. “Son, what are you doing out at this hour on the weekend? Sit, sit. Lydia, would you bring us some coffee?”
“Of course.” Lydia lingered longer than necessary, her bright smile fixed in place, before backing out and pulling the doors shut behind her.
Leo lowered himself into the chair across the desk, studying the older man with a scrutiny he couldn’t quite keep off his face. “Curtis, you look incredible. I mean that. Two days ago you were flat on your back with a monitor beeping over your head.”
“Amazing what a little rest and a decent cardiologist can do.” Curtis sank back into his chair, folding his hands over his stomach with the easy comfort of having no worries weighing on him.
“Truth be told, I feel better than I have in months. Turns out lying in a hospital bed forces you to actually sleep for once.”
“How are you really?” Leo pressed. “You were supposed to be on the cardiac floor for observation, not discharge yet.”
“I’m fine, Leo.” Curtis waved a hand, brushing the concern aside with the same ease of dismissing a fly.
“Older than I used to be, that’s all. The heart’s a stubborn machine, and mine decided to remind me it’s not twenty-five anymore.
My blood pressure is under control, labs came back clean, and my cardiologist cleared me for home.
I promise you, I’ve had worse mornings on the golf course.
” He studied Leo’s face. “But you didn’t come here at six in the morning to ask about my cholesterol. What’s happened?”
Leo drew a breath, and everything he’d rehearsed on the ride over crumbled the second he tried to find an opening gentle enough to survive the words that came after it. There wasn’t one.
“It’s Brad,” he began. “Curtis, Brad Hatton killed Vic Shaw. And Danica Webb. And Tim.”
Nothing moved in Curtis’s face. Not a flicker or widening eyes. Nothing at all. For one disorienting second Leo thought the words hadn’t penetrated, that he’d need to say them again louder before they registered. Maybe the medication he’d been prescribed hadn’t let the news fully sink in.
“He confessed to it himself,” Leo continued when the silence stretched too long to bear.
“Vic found out about a betting scheme, or he was part of it and had a change of heart. I’m not sure of the specifics, but athletes were throwing games, and money was being moved through the agency for years.
He was going to expose it, so Brad met him in that hotel room and gave him something that killed him.
Danica Webb started talking, so he silenced her too.
And Tim.” Leo’s words caught, the memory of the wake, the courtyard, and Curtis collapsing crashing over him all at once.
“Tim wanted a bigger cut, so Brad staged a heart attack instead.”
Curtis sat with his hands folded, listening with the stillness of absorbing testimony rather than devastating news, his eyes fixed on Leo’s face the entire time. His unnatural calm set every nerve in Leo’s body ringing an alarm he couldn’t yet name.
“He’s dead,” Leo finished. “Brad. He confessed to us tonight, and then he ran across the highway and got hit by a semi. It’s over, Curtis. The FBI is currently searching their houses, seizing everything. This is going to be all over the news later this morning, if it’s not already.”
Curtis didn’t respond. He sat with an expression Leo had never once seen in six years. It was entirely wrong for a man who’d just been told his friend had murdered three people.
Then Curtis shook his head slowly, and when he spoke, his voice had gone hushed in a way that made the hair on Leo’s arms stand straight up.
“I tried to keep you out of this from the beginning, son.” Curtis’s tone carried nothing but sorrow, warm and paternal.
The exact voice he’d used a hundred times to console Leo through a bad contract or a losing season.
“I want you to know that. Whatever happens next, I want you to know I never wanted this for you. I cared for you as if you were my own.”
“What?” Leo’s stomach lurched. “Curtis, what are you talking about?”
The office doors opened before Curtis could answer. Two beefy men stepped through, wearing plain, forgettable clothes that told Leo everything he needed to know about what came next.