Chapter 13 #3
In the absence of Jenna’s verbal response, Jack continued talking.
“I think he loved her, or his version of love anyway. He was lying to her, but when push came to shove, he left her to protect her.” She heard a rustling over the line and pictured Jack running his hand through his silver hair.
“The craziest part is that he could have had a life with her. If he had let go of his need for revenge, he might have faded into the shadows and I never would have figured out who framed me for Dixie’s murder.
But he didn’t. He couldn’t. And it cost him his life. ”
Jenna wiggled slightly to shift her weight on her hip.
She didn’t need a psychology degree to draw the comparison between Jack’s words and his actions.
“Are you asking me if you should let this go? If you should forget your promise, come home, and we move on like our daughter’s murderer isn’t still out there? ”
“No,” Jack said without hesitation. “Just the opposite. I’m asking for your forgiveness because I can’t drop it. I won’t. It’ll take as long as it takes, Jen, but I swear, I will make the bastard who took our baby girl from us pay for what he did. Even if it means staying away from you.”
Steel, Bulldog, and Ranger rolled up to the colonial home.
They were in the outskirts of Philadelphia, close enough to the city where they had easy access but far enough away where they were not bombarded by the noises and distractions of city life.
Keys’ van was parked off to the side of the massive columns with the four motorcycles of the others parked in front of the stairs.
Since there wasn’t a fifth motorcycle present, Steel could only assume that Scar, and by default Tally, had not made a reappearance.
Which was fine. Scar had helped him get Shaw, which had meant weeks away from Tally.
Steel did not want to cost Scar, or any of his other brothers, time with their loved ones.
Ghost and Ranger might not have a significant other, but they had responsibilities.
Additionally, Ghost’s absence meant Lucky was picking up the slack back home.
It was nearing dusk as they walked up the mossy stairs. The giant house had an empty feel to it, removing the ‘home’ feeling from the house’s description. From the overgrown grass, unkept garden, and weed-covered cracks in the driveway, it likely hadn’t been a home for some time.
Upon opening the door, Steel was surprised to see the overhead lights had power.
He would have thought utilities for a place like this would have been turned off long ago.
There was a dank, mildew smell to the place, along with evidence of an animal nest in one corner.
The large foyer had a naked lightbulb hanging from where one might expect a chandelier to be hanging over the grand staircase.
Its presence was practically useless in such a large, open room.
Flat ceiling lights also littered the ceiling like polka dots.
A sheen of dust on the floor revealed the boot prints of the others as they trekked through the manor.
“What is this place?” Ranger asked from behind Steel. All three of them had a saddlebag slung over their shoulders. When the others had met up with Steel and Scar, they’d had supplies he hadn’t bothered to bring with him the first time. Tally had been the only ‘supply’ they’d brought for Scar.
“Foreclosed estate,” Ghost said as he entered the foyer under a large doorframe from their left. “Keys says the IRS seized the estate and everything of value in the place to pay back the debt the previous owners had accumulated.”
“Everything?” Ranger questioned his best friend.
“Everything,” Ghost reiterated with emphasis. “They even took the toilets and copper pipes. Keys was able to hack into the electric company to get us power, but that’s basically it. We’re roughing it, boys.”
There was a gleam in Ghost’s eyes that made Steel wonder if the man missed the rougher, harsher parts of military life.
Ghost had been a SEAL, but hadn’t retired from injury or old age.
He’d left because he’d been given an order he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, carry out.
And if it hadn’t been for Keys’ interference, Ghost might have been court marshaled for the infraction.
It was one of the reasons Ghost had fought so hard to allow Keys into the club, even though the kid hadn’t been honorably discharged.
“Been a while since I had to shit in the woods,” Bulldog commented as he walked past Steel and Ghost.
Ranger laughed, following the SAA. “Man, have you really lived if you haven’t had to shit in the woods at least once?”
Whatever Bulldog’s response was, Steel didn’t pay attention to it. He and Ghost stood facing each other. The defensiveness in Ghost’s stance made Steel wonder what it was that they’d found at the police station.
Every parent liked to believe that they knew their children, but the harsh reality was that children hid things from their parents as much as parents hid things from their children.
Family dynamics were tricky that way. There were things, life experiences, that could only be had in a family, and yet there was so much left unsaid.
Was Ghost about to tell him something about Melanie’s life that he wasn’t ready to hear?
Guilt for her murder had not dissipated since learning that Griffin Shaw had not been the one to pull the trigger.
The possibilities that Melanie’s murder was not an act of vengeance against Steel did not mean he’d protected her any better.
If anything, it made his guilt worse, because he hadn’t seen her murder coming.
And if her murder had nothing to do with him…
? If it had been something she’d done… Steel wasn’t sure if he could cope with that.
He could shoulder the blame, but he knew in his heart of hearts that he’d never be able to place that blame on Melanie, regardless of whatever it was Ghost was about to tell him.
“Keys looked at the footage again,” Ghost started, crossing his arms over his chest. Steel didn’t need to see the security feed again.
He’d watched it so many times every second of his daughter’s murder was seared to his brain.
“Starbucks and I went to the police station to get Melanie’s file while Cage and Papaw went to campus to look at the…
At where it happened,” he reworded his original sentence.
They found an ATM down the road that might give us a different angle of the shooter’s cage. ”
Steel had never looked into whose car it was, because it hadn’t mattered. The assumption was that it would have come back stolen, so it was a waste of time to verify if the car was registered to one of Shaw’s aliases.
“What did he learn?” There was a coolness to Steel’s voice as he prepared himself for Ghost’s answer.
“Vehicle is registered to a shell corporation. But he’s working on tracking it down. What do you know about Rodney Baldwin?”
Steel’s brows lowered. “He was Melanie’s roommate’s boyfriend.
There was nothing romantic going on between Melanie and him.
” Steel was very sure of that fact. “Tina, the roommate, said he’d just left their dorm.
He must have seen Melanie at the intersection and wanted to walk her back since it was after dark.
” Baldwin’s death had been the very definition of ‘wrong place, wrong time’. “Why? Are you looking into him?”
“The police were,” Ghost said evenly. “In fact, they had more on him than they do on Melanie.”
Steel’s blood turned cold. “Why? Who was he?”
“We’re not sure yet. We’re still going through the files, but we do know that the lead detective, Spurs, he was talking to the gang unit.”
Melanie might have been a freshman in college, but she was responsible. A good girl. She once had Carlos give her a citation for jaywalking. She did her homework on time, volunteered at church, and advocated for household spiders. She never would get involved in a gang.
But that didn’t mean she hadn’t been the target of one.
“Was he a lure?” Steel asked Ghost.
Human traffickers used them to bait people, mostly women and kids, into compliance, made them trust the people so they didn’t see the trap coming.
College campuses were the perfect hunting grounds for traffickers.
Young adults who were testing the limits of their newfound freedom, who thought the world was their oyster, and that they could do no wrong. Especially in a city college.
Had Melanie been the target of a trafficker? But then why kill her?
Ghost shook his head. “No, but they suspected he was running drugs on campus.”
A drug dealer? Steel had no patience for drugs. Too much harm, greed, and money came from them. Too much unknown. The skin trade was fucking disgusting and awful. He wouldn’t have even wished such a fate on Shaw, whom he could have categorized as his worst enemy up until a few days ago.
He had no idea which possibility he would hate more if he learned Melanie had gotten mixed up in one.
Steel pressed his thumb to the middle of his forehead. “Baldwin would have a supplier. Who?”
“They were still working on that,” Ghost said, uncrossing his arms. “If they figured it out, it wasn’t in the file.”
In the month since Melanie’s murder, the police would have been working the case, sure, but they also would have been working many others.
While a shooting on a college campus was tragic, it wasn’t a mass casualty event.
Forensics took time, and as much as Steel hated to admit it, he might have slowed the process down in taking the bullets from the police station.
He’d thought they belonged to Shaw’s gun, which meant that the police hadn’t been able to run them for evidence.
Steel lowered his hand. “What do they think happened to the bullets?”
“Misplaced evidence. They think they got accidentally logged in another case and have techs searching for them in their evidence lockup. You and Scar left no trace of a burglary, so they think it was their error, but they still have the initial finds from the bullets.”
Which likely wouldn’t hold up in court, but then again, Steel had no intention of bringing Melanie’s killer before a judge.
“Hey,” Starbucks poked his head out of the big room behind Ghost. “Keys says he’s got something.”
Ghost and Steel followed Star into what was likely once a living room or fancy sitting room. No couches or furniture of any kind were present. Keys was sitting on an upside down bucket with his laptop on a windowsill while the others were either leaning or sitting against a wall.
Turning, Keys nearly fell off the bucket. There was a good chance he forgot he was on a bucket and had tried to turn like he was on his swivel chair. Flapping his arms like a flightless bird attempting to fly, he was able to steady himself without falling flat on his face.
None of the club members were wearing a cut, though all but Keys was dressed for battle in fatigues.
The Tech was wearing a t-shirt with a T-Rex holding a chopstick in each small hand and using the tool to type on a keyboard.
The caption I’m Unstoppable was in large letters under the cartoon dinosaur.
After getting his balance back and righting his glasses, Keys sat up and tried to play it off like he hadn’t nearly fallen on his face.
“I found who owns the cage. They don’t call them shell corporations for nothing.
It’s like playing Three Card Monte while drunk to follow some of those trails.
But I got it. Cage is part of a fleet owned by the Gavigan crime family. ”
Steel didn’t blink or outwardly show his confusion. “Am I supposed to be trembling in my boots? Who are they and what is their connection to Melanie?”
“They’re low-level Irish mob. Not like the K-and-A, but they recently inherited a chunk of a business that wasn’t previously theirs.
Hence the shell game I just played,” he added with a thumb over his shoulder towards his laptop.
“They deal mostly in protection and running guns and prescription drugs. As far as I can tell, they don’t touch human trafficking. ”
They were running drugs, and Baldwin was a dealer. Steel was starting to get a sinking feeling, and an idea was taking root that he’d never even considered before.
What if Rodney Baldwin hadn’t been in the wrong place at the wrong time, an innocent bystander who died for chivalrously walking Melanie back to her dorm room?
What if Melanie was the one who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time? What if Melanie had been the innocent bystander in someone else’s war?
Red-hot rage battled the ice in Steel’s veins at the possibility that Melanie’s death was nothing more than circumstance.
“Get me everything on the Gavigans.” Steel didn’t even recognize his own voice as he headed back out of the room.
“Where are you going?” Cage called after him.
Steel didn’t answer. There was a chance he was heading to the hardware store to get more screws, or he could be heading to the cemetery to piss on Rodney Baldwin’s grave.
He didn’t know. All he knew was that he was going to pick off the Gavigan family one by one until he learned who had pulled the trigger.
Who had sat cowardly back in his car as he pointed his gun at an innocent girl to get to his real target.
He didn’t care what it took or how long it took. He’d bring the Gavigan family to their knees and make the streets of Philadelphia flow crimson with their blood.