Page 22 of Clever Deceit

She needed someone who was expecting the worst to keep an eye out for her. Someone who was strong enough to stand between her and the guy obsessed with owning her and big enough that he could knock that other guy down.

Of course if I could take him down without actually having to use my fists, I guessed that would probably be better.

The problem was, I already knew they had the cops in their pockets. Lily and I had seen that firsthand when we’d tried to submit a report about Tony breaking into her house. The cop on duty hadn't even wanted to take the report, much less do anything about it, and when we’d called him on it, he practically laughed in our face. Then another cop had picked a fight with me for daring to standing against the McCarthy family. And I'd been asking around town long enough to know that other people who had spoken out against him had mysteriously changed their minds—or disappeared.

Of course, the cops hadn't done anything about it. Crooked contracts, money laundering, and physical intimidation. You'd have thought the cops would step in and at least pretend they were protecting the public.

A girl going to the hospital with bruises, cuts, and marks on her throat that showed someone had tried to choke her. And her mother had told me only the doctors cared. The cops hadn't even asked who had done it to her.

Probably because they already knew who it was, and that person had paid them well to look the other way.

The thing was, though, they were contractors. They bought and sold real estate, and they hired people. Money was changing hands, and money couldn't be kept entirely invisible. I might have just been a mechanic in the military, but I'd been around people who worked in higher positions, and one of them had been in charge of tracking things like that. Money laundering in other governments. Corruption.

Men who got away with shit they shouldn't have gotten away with.

I'd never asked how he did what he did, but I remembered the day we'd been talking about one of his cases and he'd been laughing at how stupid the guy was. “The thing is,” he'd said, chuckling, “no matter what they do, if there's money, there's a trail. They might be trying to launder it through a thousand other accounts, but if they're moving it, there'll be a record. And that record is where you start to find out what they're doing.”

That record. The trail.

The McCarthy men weren't smart. They were rich, and they thought that was all that mattered.

Which meant that they'd probably left a trail they didn't even think about covering up.

I just had to find it.

I'd already called that accounting friend, Richard, who was a PI down in Atlanta these days. He'd started digging around. I just needed to make sure he was digging in the right places and find out where I could start digging, too.

And now that I thought about it, Lily might be in the best possible place to help.

“Listen,” I said, sitting back and staring into her eyes. “I think I know a way out of this. We just have to stop being reactive. Stop waiting around for him to do something else. Because we know we're not going to be able to get anyone to do anything when they do. The cops are on their side. So we stop waiting for them to come to us... and go to them.”

She frowned. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” I said, smiling, “that they've got to be messing up somewhere, and we just need to find the proof of it. Proof big enough that the local cops can't cover it up. They're bad men, Lily, and they're probably doing more than just threatening you. If we can find proof...”

“Then we can put them out of business,” she said slowly, her eyes getting wide. “We can run them out of town.”

“And right into jail, if we're lucky.”

Her eyes got even wider, and soon she was grinning, too, relief and excitement washing over her face. “What do we need to do?”

We started planning immediately. Lily was going to draw up a list of all the businesses Mark McCarthy owned and operated, milking her local contacts for details she didn't have, and I was going to pass them to Richard. Then I was going to get started on researching them myself. And while I was doing that, Lily was going to talk to her friends here. Find out what Mark and Tony had been up to since she left town—and if anything stuck out.

And we were going to start with Madison, the girl Tony had dated right after Lily left town.

***

“I DON'T KNOW,” MADISON said again.

I stopped my groan of frustration at the last possible moment and exchanged a glance with Lily. She'd called Madison and asked if we could talk to her, and Madison had agreed to that immediately. She'd told us her address and invited us into her small apartment—which she shared with a roommate who wasn't home.

But as soon as she heard what Lily wanted—any information regarding Tony McCarthy's businesses and what they might be doing wrong—Madison had shrunken into herself and turned very quiet.

Almost like she was afraid to say anything.

I watched her closely, wondering at that, and tried to pinpoint exactly what Lily had said about her. The girl had sought Lily out and told her that she'd dated Tony right after Lily left town. That he'd been abusive toward her and had left her, and that he'd been obsessed with Lily the whole time. That latter part I could believe. The man was still obsessed with Lily. He couldn't seem to leave her alone.

And as for the first part...