Chapter 26

Slate

F or more than a week I’ve followed Mark Edwards around without him realizing it. If he could follow Emma around and terrify her, make her a nervous wreck, it was only fair that I returned the favor. I watched him laze about at his office, pretending to work for his clients before he hit the street in his oversized four-door sedan. I watched him stuff himself with fast food and draft beer, none the wiser that he had a shadow.

I used my advantage over him to watch every move he made, to learn all about what he did on a regular day when he thought he was free to be, free to watch and intimidate whomever he pleased. Today however, I didn’t watch Mark, I tasked Gio with keeping an eye on my girls while I dug more into Mark’s life.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Maverick joined me as the lookout while I made an unsanctioned entry into the private investigative offices of Mark Edwards as if that meant fuck all to me.

“Good? It’s a necessary step for a man who is trying to ruin my little girl’s life.” Despite everything they’d been through, Emma and Ash were a team, they were a dynamic duo. Mother and daughter were thick as thieves, a bond that couldn’t be broken. A bond I refused to let be broken by a bitter man with shaky morals.

“I’m here for you brother, but even I think that’s dramatic.” Maverick laughed and shook his head as I broke into the office and made myself comfortable.

“I’ll let that slide only because you didn’t see how scared of him Ash was. He and his brother terrorized them both. Even if they never laid a hand on Ash, she was terrified of them both as if they had.”

“Fuckers,” Maverick bit out.

“Exactly,” I muttered as I sat behind Mark’s desk and looked around at his files as if they were my own. I browsed through his client files and his billing, neither of which had any discernible labeling. This was the mark of someone who wasn’t operating in good faith. “The fucker is overbilling his clients. Probably because he knew they didn’t want anyone to know why he was hired.” I shook my head and snapped a few photos of the passwords he kept taped to the bottom of his keyboard. Then I started up his PC and rummaged through his documents.

“Anybody good?”

My gaze zipped through the files and the names on the invoices but not many stood out. “A few interesting names but those are probably because of who he used to be.” Former cops, even crooked ones could always rely on their former brothers in blue to keep them flush with work. “Plenty of suspicious detectives, that’s for sure. Looks like he was researching suspects for a few active-duty cops too.” I saw a familiar name and pointed at it, “Eric Owens, he was the cop who tried to frame Hawk.”

“Bastard!” Maverick spat out.

Owens had ended up being arrested after he took Laura, Hawk’s old lady, hostage. We decided to let the law deal with him, though unsurprisingly, as a dirty cop he didn’t last long inside and got himself shivved in the showers, “Got what was coming to him,” I muttered.

“Crooked motherfuckers,” Maverick growled to himself. “You really think he’s a danger to Emma and Ashlyn?”

I wanted to say no but experience had taught me to never underestimate hurt people. “I do but I can’t say why.” I copied a few files to a flash drive and stood. “Ready to hit his house?”

A smile touched Maverick’s mouth. “Damn straight. If I gotta be away from my woman, I want it to be because I’m tearing some asshole’s life apart.”

We slipped from his PI office as covertly as we entered and walked down the block until we reached our bikes.

The ride to Mark’s small two-bedroom cottage house took less than fifteen minutes. The place was furnished with bulky, masculine furniture and decorated sparsely. It looked as if he’d just moved in rather than lived in the place for more than a decade.

“How does it feel knowing you’re a dad?”

I shrugged as I found Mark’s home office and slid into his chair as if it was my own. “I’m not sure. It doesn’t feel quite real but every time I look at Ash, I’m struck with this sense of overwhelming love. This sense that it’s my job, my duty to protect her. Is that odd?”

“Not at all. The moment Sophie took a liking to me, I felt the same way. I can only imagine it’s even more intense because she’s your blood.” He flashed a proud grin. “It’s intense and crazy as fuck though, isn’t it?”

I nodded as I focused on getting into Mark’s laptop, which I did after one attempt because the fucker used the same password as his office PC. “Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by it. That shit is scary as fuck.”

Maverick laughed. “So fucking scary but we don’t let the women know because they’re champs, they handle this shit as if it’s as simple as washing hands after a piss.”

I laughed. “You have the eloquence of a poet, Mav.”

He flipped me off and I laughed again. “Does Ash know you’re her father?”

I shook my head rather than answer. I hadn’t even approached Emma with the topic of telling my daughter that I was her father. I was scared that Ash might reject me or that Emma would refuse. “Not yet. Should I push it?”

“Yeah,” he growled. “After everything she’s been through, she deserves to have a man, a father who loves her, who would protect her with his life.”

“You make it sound so easy,” I told him as I opened up folder after folder, learning everything there was to know about Mark’s business.

“That’s because it is easy, at least it is when you’re not being a scared little pussy.” He laughed when I flipped him off.

“Shit,” I muttered when I found a folder labeled ‘payday’.

“What did you find?”

“Look at this shit.” I didn’t know much about Mark, mostly what Emma had shared and what I was able to find with research but this surprised me. “It’s Alex.” There were photos all over Steel City and beyond of Alex—Emma’s husband—with multiple women in and around Nevada and beyond. He gambled. He indulged in illicit drugs. He fucked tons of women and spent money like it was going out of style.

Emma probably had no idea.

“Looks like he was planning to blackmail his brother if he wasn’t already doing it,” Maverick stated, watching as I flipped through photo after photo of Alex taken from a distance.

“A good way to get his debt paid off,” I grumbled.

Maverick agreed. “Only if Alex agreed.”

There it was again, the suggestion that Mark was just as good a suspect as Emma, better even considering what he stood to gain. With what we’d found today, we wouldn’t have to bother manufacturing evidence to get him on the cops’ radar, here it was in full color. “It’s been going on for months.” Inside the main folder were multiple folders going back at least eighteen months.

“What are you gonna do?”

I snapped a few photos of the photos so that I could search for the file names when I made it back to my own computer. The digital copies would help Sheriff Cross and his boys add another suspect to the list and maybe leave Emma alone for a few days. “I’m going to make the best fucking case I can against Mark for his brother’s disappearance.” It pissed me off that Cross and his boys hadn’t done a fucking thing to help Emma when she needed them.

“And if it doesn’t get Emma off the hook?”

I flashed a wide smile. “Then I’ll have them chasing their tails from now until the end of time.” I’d gotten my start making government types go on wild goose chases and if it helped Emma, I would do it again.

And again.

Whatever it took to keep my woman, and my girl, safe.

Maverick laughed as he knocked over a few photos and awards. “I’m all about doing anything that makes the pigs look bad. Whatever you need brother.”

“Mark is a dirty cop. He’s got more confidence than common sense and in the end that will be the thing that trips him up. I’ll do what I do and wait for him to fuck up.”

“And then,” Maverick asked hopefully.

“And then I’ll ruin his fucking life and make him wish he’d never fucked with Emma.”

“Fuck yeah.” Maverick smacked his palms together and went through Mark’s place, displacing shit and taking it just to fuck with him. I hadn’t planned on making my presence known but since he continued to fuck with Emma, I figured turnabout was fair play.

“Let’s get out of here.” Being in his personal space put me on edge and I texted Gio.

“Ladies are all good,” he replied quickly. “My gut is about to burst though,” he replied with a bunch of food emojis.

Maverick pouted. “No arson?”

“Sorry brother,” I grinned. “Not yet.”

He shrugged. “Good enough for me.”