Page 65 of Operator
“I’m going to kill you!” Gwen shouts, but I hold her back. “What did you do? Tell me the truth! Goddamn you.” I almost don’t want to hear his answer. It would be easier if I didn’t. I steel myself like I’m preparing for a punch.
William hangs his head like it’s too heavy for his neck. “Yes.”
“Tell me. Tell me how you did it. Now, you sonuvabitch.” Gwen’s voice is raw with emotion, and she’s quivering at my back. I’m holding it together by a hair for both of us.
“I was helping him in the beginning. I was. He was doing well. Excited to start a family with you.” At this, Gwen’s sob cuts through and I hold her tighter. I’m shaking, but I have to keep it together for her. “He started telling me about what happened during his last deployment a year ago. How he was excited to be there with his brother.” My grip on her tightens, but she doesn’t even notice. “He’d been working the gate the night a Marine was killed. He was there when they brought his body back. From his vantage point, he could see and hear everything, but they couldn’t hear him. He would never divulge exactly what he heard, and I never asked. Not once they contacted me to kill him. I was afraid if I found out, they’d kill me, too.”
“Did he give you a name?” I bark out. “Who was the Marine?”
William chokes on his own spit before he can say, “Tate. Ryan Tate.”
Ringing sounds in my ears. Tate? My Tate?
“Keep going. Finish it,” Gwen demands.
“A few weeks into therapy, I was attacked outside my office. They blindfolded me and took me somewhere. Don’t ask where, I don’t know. They kept me blindfolded the whole time. I didn’t recognize them, and they didn’t give me any names. All they said was I had to convince Ian Reece to commit suicide—or kill him myself. Otherwise, they’d torture and kill me.”
“So you convinced a sick man there was no hope? You taunted him into killing himself?” I can’t speak now, so Gwen does the talking for both of us. That woman is stronger than all the people I know combined. Her red hair explodes in a halo around her head, and she looks like an avenging angel. My angel.
William looks despondent. “They were going to kill me. I didn’t have a choice.”
She calms, her breathing going even and measured. She’s no longer shaking like a leaf. With a placating look at me, she moves around me and stares down at William’s shaking body. “Youalwayshave a choice. You may as well have held a gun to his head.”
“They were going to kill me,” William pleads.
“You’d better be glad I don’t kill you myself.” Gwen moves quicker than I thought possible, but I’d been anticipating her move. When you decide to kill someone, really decide it, there’s a sense of calm that descends over you. I have no doubt if I were to let her go, she’d take the weapon from my holster, put it to this man’s temple, then pull the trigger. I have half a mind to let her, but I heed my better judgement. I don’t want that stain on her. She already has enough to deal with.
“Have you heard from them again?” I ask William. “Did they contact you after Ian died?”
William shakes his head. “Only to wire me money and to send an anonymous letter that if I ever said a word about this to anyone, they’d have me killed in a similar way. I swear, I didn’t want to hurt him. I’m a therapist. I wanted to help people.”
“Well, you did a bang-up job, doc,” Gwen spits out.
William dissolves into tears, and I tug Gwen out of the room. She fights against me, but only for a second once I take the baby from her arms. “We have to go to the police. I don’t know if it’s murder, but it certainly isn’t suicide if Ian was coerced. There will be evidence somewhere. His house. Phone records, maybe a burner phone. Emails he’d scrubbed. We have to do this the right way” I rub at the growing headache behind my eyes. Ian knew something about Tate. But what? What could have been worth the trouble of this cover up?
Whatever was happening has a bad taste in my mouth. It was serious enough to warrant killing Tate. Silencing Ian. Murder means money. There’s always money involved when it’s worth it to kill people to protect secrets. My stomach churns at the thought that Ian and Tate had died because of someone’s greed.
She buries her face in my chest. “I know. God, Cal. He must have been so terrified. I should have helped him. I should have helped him, and I didn’t even know he was hurting.”
“It’s not your fault, baby. He wanted to protect you. It’s no one’s fault but theirs. We’ll make them pay for it, I promise you.” Now that we knew more, I won’t stop until we find every rung on that totem pole and burn it to the ground.
Gwen burrows into my arms and kisses Violet on the nose. “How are we going to do that? We don’t even know who put William up to it.”
I don’t respond because she dissolves into well-earned tears, but if anyone is going to get to the bottom of this, it’s my team.
They broke us up once, but like hell they’ll do it again.
“I’ll go talk to him. See if I can get any names out of him. Maybe we can find out more about whoever blackmailed him.”
We move to the spare room, and I know the moment I step in the doorway, something is wrong. It’s quiet. Too quiet. The hairs on my forearms and the back of my neck stand on end. I peer around the bed where we left William sobbing and almost expect to find it empty.
Except he’s right there where we left him.
A river of red oozing from his wrists.
Gwen gasps and backs out into the hall. I hand her the baby and tell her to call the police. She doesn’t need to see this.
But I stay there to make sure the bastard’s dead and feel no remorse. He died the way Ian did, and if that isn’t justice, it’s at least revenge.
