Chapter 52 Kacey
Kacey
I never believed them. I smiled and took the funeral money and thanked Quest for covering everything and shook his hand at that engagement party and told him Thad could rest now because the man who killed him was dead.
But I never believed a single word of it.
Because a mother knows when she’s being lied to, even when the liar is rich and powerful and paying for your groceries.
The Mega story didn’t make sense. Why would some random soldier from a defunct crew kidnap Thad and torture him for months?
Thad was def involved with his cousins. But why would Mega single him out and not the other brothers?
It almost made sense but there was this gnawing feeling in the back of my mind that couldn’t let it go.
But I remembered all of Thad’s contacts out on the West Coast from when we lived in LA. I thought about everyone who used to work for him and who was still around that was loyal to him. We moved out of Cali to start a new life but his family ended his life and I needed to know why.
So I flew to California on a credit card I couldn’t afford and rented a car and drove to the federal facility where Dwight White was serving a fifteen-year sentence for a murder he confessed to.
The confession that got Zainab Ali out of prison.
I told the front desk I was his cousin and they let me in because nobody fact-checks family visits at a facility that overcrowded.
Dubz looked rough. Prison had taken whatever youth he had left and traded it for gray hair and paranoid eyes.
He didn’t want to talk to me. Kept looking at the guards, kept looking at the door, kept bouncing his leg under the table like a man who was afraid of something way bigger than the woman sitting across from him.
“I just want to know what happened to Thad,” I said. “That’s all I’m here for.”
“I don’t know nothing about that.”
“You knew Thad. Y’all ran together. He trusted you enough to have you handle his business when he couldn’t do it himself. So don’t sit here and tell me you don’t know nothing.”
He was quiet for a while, chewing on the inside of his cheek and staring at the table. Then he looked up at me and something moved behind his eyes that looked a lot like guilt wrapped in fear.
“Look, all I can tell you is that some dude came in here pretending to be from an innocence project. Asking questions, showing pictures, threatening my family. He wasn’t no lawyer and he wasn’t no advocate.
He was a killer. I could smell it on him.
And he wanted me to confess to something so that his girl could walk free. ”
“What girl?”
“Zainab Ali. She was locked up for killing her sister and he wanted me to admit that I did it so she could get out. And he made sure I understood what would happen to my daughter and my grandmother if I didn’t cooperate. Somehow he knew that Thad had me do it.”
My hands were shaking under the table. “This man. What did he look like?”
“Light skin, locs, blue eyes. Built like he’d been training his whole life to hurt people.”
Prime. He was describing Prime.
I sat in the rental car in the parking lot for an hour after that visit with my phone in my hand connecting dots I didn’t want to connect.
I typed “Zahara Ali” into Google and the results filled my screen.
Zahara Ali, murdered, case reopened, sister Zainab Ali exonerated after new confession.
I scrolled further. Zahara Ali, survived by sisters Zainab and Mehar Ali.
I knew that name very well. She was the woman I wondered about with Thad. I’d seen her name pop up on his phone. He cheated on me with her. And now Quest was marrying her. Did Quest get jealous of his cousin’s side bitch and kill him for it?
Zainab Ali was Prime’s wife. The woman who was in prison for killing her own sister until Dubz confessed and set her free.
And Zahara. The sister who was murdered. The murder that Thad ordered.
I sat there staring at my phone screen and felt everything rearrange itself inside my chest. Quest didn’t cover Thad’s funeral out of family loyalty.
He covered it out of guilt. He paid for the casket and the flowers and my groceries because he knew exactly what happened to the father of my children and he was buying my silence with generosity.
The whole family knew. Prime, Quest, Mehar, all of them.
They smiled in my face and shook my hand and called me family while they were sitting on the truth about what they did to Thad.
I put my phone down and gripped the steering wheel and stared at the prison walls in front of me and made a decision that I didn’t make with my brain.
I made it with the part of me that carried two children for nine months and raised them alone and buried their father in a casket paid for by the people who put him in it.
Somebody was going to answer for this. I didn’t know how and I didn’t know when but I was going to make sure that family felt exactly what I’d been feeling every night since they lowered Thad into the ground.
I started the car and drove back to the airport with dry eyes and a plan forming somewhere behind my ribs that hadn’t fully taken shape yet but was growing by the mile.