Page 44 of Sunburned
“No,” he said. “My wife’s not a murderer.” He uncapped his bottle of water and took a swig. “Unless, of course, she is.”
My muscles twitched with the desire to smack him.
“Is that all you’ve discovered?” he asked, emphasizing the word “discovered” in an obvious attempt to belittle my job title.
“I was thinking about who might hold a grudge against you, outside your inner circle,” I said evenly.
He crossed his arms, his jaw tightening. “And?”
“Do you remember Andie? Ian’s girlfriend?”
“The Australian girl? Barely. She wasn’t exactly memorable.”
It was true we’d never spent a lot of time with Andie, and it hadbeen more than a decade since we’d seen her. But still. “I know she went back to Australia, but we’d be remiss not to at least look into her.”
He was already shaking his head. “It’s not her.”
“How do you know?”
“She’s dead.”
I raised my brows in shock. “When? How?”
“Not long after Ian disappeared. Her car went off a bridge.”
“Shit,” I said, unnerved. “Are you sure?”
A sharp nod told me that no matter how dimly he might remember her, he’d checked, and thoroughly. Tyson was nothing if not cautious.
“That’s so…sad.”
“Is it?” he asked, his eyes full of meaning.
I shook off his implication, abruptly changing the subject. “What happened at the meeting today?”
“The city council put a hold on the permit, pending further investigation.”
“I gathered,” I said evenly. “Why?”
“Monterey tightened environmental regulations recently, and the city decided to hire their own inspector, who provided a report that differed significantly from the one our inspector had supplied.”
I raised my brows as he continued. “Someone on the council here got hold of that report, and they’re now demanding that an independent inspector be contracted to perform an environmental assessment before the permit to break ground can be issued.”
“Why were the results of the assessment in Monterey different from what was reported by your inspector?”
“I don’t know. That’s not my area of expertise.”
“No,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “But you told me long ago that your area of expertise is recognizing brilliance and harnessing it for your own purposes. Did you not hire a service you thought was brilliant?”
“I hired a service to perform the job at a level that suited my needs,” he said.
A level that suited his needs.The depth of his duplicity hit me like a truck.
He was so worried about the Monterey report leaking and all the other centers wanting to perform their own independent assessmentsbecause they would all find discrepancies. Centers would need to be shut down all over the world, adjustments made at great expense to the company. That is, if he even had the technology to produce the kind of environmental reports he needed to keep De-Sal afloat.
I met his confrontational gaze, holding on to my composure by a thread. “Do Cody and Allison know this?”
“They do now.”
