“I need to get out of Billings,” she said.
“I have an idea of where you can go,” Ink told her. “I’m just waiting to hear back from someone.”
She nodded. Okay. Good.
“Wouldn’t Vince have known about the cameras?” Ink asked. “He was in that initial meeting when we talked about getting a security system put in.”
“He might not realize that we had some aimed at the street and he kept his balaclava on until he got back to his car. He probably also doesn’t know that we’ve worked out that he’s been using his aunt’s car. I wanted a camera recording the street traffic because of Ryan Straun, Maya’s stalker,” Matthieu said to her brother and Detective Reeves.
“Her what?” her brother asked.
“Her ex-boss?” Detective Reeves asked. Hmm, he was way more clued in on her life that she ever could have guessed. “He was stalking you?”
“Um, yeah, as it turns out he was,” she said.
“What happened?” her brother snapped.
“Perhaps we can get into that another time,” Ink suggested. “Ryan has been taken care of, Vince is still out there.”
“And unfortunately the person I sent to his place hasn’t seen him,” Detective Reeves said.
“I’ve got people looking for him too,” Ink told them.
He did?
“So you don’t know why Vince would escalate?” Detective Reeves asked her.
“I really don’t,” she replied.
“You know that Dad can’t bury this, right?” her brother asked. “He’ll have to take hard evidence seriously. And this is arson and attempted murder. He cannot make excuses for Vince.”
Maya swallowed heavily. She couldn’t help but feel like he’d try, though.
“We don’t have enough evidence yet against everyone who is corrupt in the force,” Detective Reeves said. “But Vince could be what we need. He’s obviously played a big role and he likely knows who the key players are. If we can find him, we could turn him. But we need to do that before he’s taken out.”
She stared at him in shock. “You think that someone might kill him because of what he knows?”
“If I was a corrupt cop and I wanted to keep that secret and there was a loose cannon out there who knew . . . that’s what I’d do,” Detective Reeves said.
“You’re talking about our dad,” she said, her gaze flicking to her brother. “You think that Dad would have Vince . . . killed?”
“I don’t want to think this about our own father. But I’ve seen the evidence myself. And there have been some witnesses that have gone missing in the past couple of years. So . . . I guess if he saw him as a threat, he might,” her brother replied.
“You don’t think that Dad . . . that he told Vince to . . . to get rid of me?” she asked, that thought just occurring to her now.
She was going to be ill. She felt Tank press close to her on one side and Matthieu shifted closer to her on the other side. She took strength and comfort from them both. Big Berry snorted and shuffled in next to Tank.
She really was the best pig.
“No.” Her brother shook his head. “I don’t think that. Seems our dad has a huge amount of faults, but I don’t think he’d have one of his own kids killed. There would be no reason for it. Especially not when he hired someone to protect you. Although that did surprise me. I think that for some reason, Vince decided to do this on his own. Now he’s in the wind and we need to find him. Once we do, we may get the answers we need.”
“You haven’t gotten anywhere in the investigation of who is threatening the Chief?” Brody asked.
“No.” Her brother frowned. “And it’s frustrating. The threats are sporadic and we’ve no idea who is sending them. There are too many suspects at this point.”
“So you’re going to tell Dad? About Vince and what he did?” she asked.
Her brother nodded. “We’ll go there after this. He already knows someone set your place on fire. But he doesn’t know about Vince. We did think about hiding the video footage until after we had Vince in custody but we have to be careful to do this aboveboard and to not tip anyone that we’re onto them.”
