“Call Chris.” She handed JJ her phone. She unbuckled and opened the side door.
Hadley beckoned her to approach the back of the car. She kept her hands loose at her sides, focusing everything she had on taking one breath and then another, and walked to join him. He waited for her to catch up and then put a hand on her arm. “Let’s have a little chat,” he said. He kept her walking all the way back to his car, and she didn’t protest.
“What is this really about?” she asked him when he stopped. His hands on his hips, he looked at her inscrutably. “What do you want, Uncle Rick?”
“I want you to stop playing games,” he said. He didn’t sound cheerful anymore. His voice was low and dangerous.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’ve been playing dumb for fourteen years,” he said. Emma’s hands shook. She balled them into fists to keep them still. “Pretending you didn’t know what happened that night. Pretending you had nothing to do with it.”
“I didn’t,” Emma said. She gave him a hard look. “Did you know what Dad was doing? About the robberies?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” he asked.
“I think Ellis knew. And I think Nathan told him exactly what he found, and what was on that flash drive,” Emma said, aware that she wasn’t explaining herself properly. She watched Hadley carefully. Her father’s best friend. Ellis’s second-in-command. Was it possible he didn’t know? “He thought he was doing the right thing. He thought he could trust the police, and now he’s dead, just like Kenneth Mahoney.”
“Now, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time,” Hadley said. He paused, as if considering long and hard. His thumbnail scraped along his jaw. “All right. Let’s say you’re right. Where is this flash drive?”
“I don’t know,” Emma said, frustrated, and then she noticed the intensity in his voice. The spark of paranoia in his eye. She backed away half a step. “I don’t know,” she repeated.
Hadley took a step toward her. She fell back on instinct, but he grabbed her arm, wrenching her toward him, and Emma realized she’d made a mistake. A terrible one.
“Tell me where the flash drive is, and we can clear this all up,” he said. JJ’s car door opened. She stepped out, but didn’t approach. “Tell me, or I will shoot you in the fucking head and tell them you reached for my gun. You already killed your parents and your husband. You think they won’t believe me?”
“I don’t have it,” Emma said. And neither did he.
“Emma—” he began.
Tires squealed, and JJ’s car reversed—barreling toward them.
49
JJ
Now
JJ sat in the car, her knee bouncing with nervous, jangly energy. She watched Emma and Hadley walk toward the SUV. He couldn’t just arrest her, could he?
Chris. She was supposed to call Chris.
She looked at Emma’s phone and realized it was locked. Did she even have Chris’s number on hers?
The screen lit up. She was about to ignore the call when she saw the local area code. Something made her stop. She answered. Held the phone to her ear.
“Hello?”
A pause. “Juliette?”
“Logan. What the hell are you doing calling my sister?” she asked.
“I was actually trying to reach you,” he said. “I didn’t have your number. Look, I felt bad about the way things went when we talked. It freaked me out, that’s all. And I’m not repeating this to anyone who could vaguely be construed as an authority figure, okay?”
“What are you talking about, Logan?” JJ asked. What were Hadley and Emma doing? She popped open the door and stepped out, keeping the phone to her ear.
“The gun. My gun,” Logan said. “I promise you, you didn’t have it that night. Neither did I. I hadn’t had it for a couple of months.”
“Who had it?” JJ asked. She watched as Emma stepped back, and back again. As Hadley reached for her.
“I got caught with it. He took it off me, let me go with a warning.”
“Logan. Who took it?” JJ asked, urgency in her voice.
“Rick Hadley.”
Hadley had the gun.
Red hand.
She could almost remember pulling the trigger.
Almost.
But she couldn’t have had the gun that night, could she? Not if Hadley had taken it. If the gun had been at the house that night, so had he.
JJ threw herself back into the seat, barely closing the door before she threw it into reverse.