Devil You Know(Lost Boys Book 1)(118)

So thrown from his odd request I said a bit bewildered. “What?”

“For almost three years I’ve been waiting, wondering. It’s nerve racking.”

The first pang of dread moved through me “Waited for what?”

“For my past to come back and haunt me.”

Ice formed in my blood, but as the pieces started falling into place ice turned to red-hot rage. I all but snarled at him. “You?”

“It’s hard defending criminals and sometimes it is even unethical, but to make a difference, to stand out, sometimes you have to do the unethical. Your dad never understood that.”

It was Uncle Tim, not Uncle Guy. My dad’s childhood friend was the one behind his death. I wanted to hurt him, rake my fingers down his face, but I held myself immobile. “Why did you do it?”

“It was his damn Boy Scout ways. He was digging and I encouraged him to stop, that no good could come from investigating his own. That it was career suicide, but he didn’t listen. So black and white your father.”

“Why did you really encourage him to back off?”

“Because if he dug deep enough he would have learned it wasn’t just cops on the take.”

The investigation into evidence tampering at the station, it had been Uncle Tim behind that. He didn’t have a magical acquittal rating. He had been cheating. And then a thought turned me cold. Mrs. Cooke’s attack. At my apartment that day, he had made a comment about my mail. I hadn’t thought anything of it at the time, seeing him flip through my mail, but he wanted access to my mail at her place. “You had Dobbs doing your dirty work…Mrs. Cooke’s attack and screwing with evidence. Did he also intimidate jurors at your command?”

“Cop logic runs in the family. Miguel is just a pawn. He is so hungry for money and power, he makes it all too easy for someone to pull his strings. Salvatore Federico realized that too, so he scratched my back and when I’m elected into the Senate, he will have a friend in Washington.”

“So you had Dad killed?”

“He should have left it alone. I think he suspected at the end, I could tell when we talked there was a remoteness to him.”

“And this?” I asked as I palmed my key.

“There’s that lovely little box in your dad’s study. You remember it.”

His special box, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t made the connection. I’d seen him open it enough times through the years. “What’s he got on you?”

“I wasn’t sure he had anything on me, but when the case on Dobbs started heating up I didn’t want to take the chance. You were the executor of his will. If he left something, you would have found it.”

Which was why he had been interested in my mail and when that didn’t pan out. “You hired someone to come at me?”

“He would have been gentle unless you were uncooperative.”

Gentle? The man put a knife to my back.

“The cops never showed up at my door. I actually thought it was all over until I saw that key just now around your neck—a key to the box that he kept all his important things in. I’m guessing he sent that to you right before he died. I thought he was getting wise to me, now I’m sure of it.”

“You’re an unimaginable bastard.”

“And I’ll be the next Senator for the state of New York.”





Guy took us to the IA base operations located a few blocks from where we picked him up. Anton was going to flip the fuck out when he learned Federico had played him.

“How long have you been working in Internal Affairs?”

“Since Edward shared his suspicions with me. He hadn’t told me how deep into it he was, but after the shooting I contacted IA.”

“So you played dirty?”

“And left a few breadcrumbs for Cam to find. I needed an in to get closer to Dobbs, but Dobbs is too stupid to pull this off on his own. He’s motivated by greed, pure and simple, but he is not a logistical thinker, just the hired muscle. There’s another player and recently I got some insight from the most unlikely source.”

“We thought that player was you.”

“I know.”

“So who is this source?”

“Follow me.”

There was a room at the end of a short hall and sitting at the table was an older man who looked tired and scared. Chris McKay.

“So you pulled him in.”

“Yeah. He was getting reckless.”

“So what’s he got?”

“Timothy Gallagher.”

Apprehension twisted in my gut and my body went cold. “Come again.”

“McKay had been stalking him, following his every move.”

“And you were following him while he followed Gallagher. What did you get?”