My Biker Husband Is a Murder Suspect

Chapter 9 - Dean's Secret Payment

Cain doesn't let me go alone. I knew he wouldn't.

We compromise — he drops me at the corner, stays in the car where Halloran won't see him, and if I'm not back out in twenty minutes he comes in regardless of who's watching.

"Ten minutes," I tell him.

"Twenty."

"Fifteen."

He looks at me like he wants to say something that isn't about timing at all. Instead he just reaches over and adjusts the collar of my jacket — the borrowed one that still smells like him — and doesn't let go for a second longer than necessary.

"If he touches you," Cain says, "I don't care about the case."

I don't tell him that shouldn't make me feel as safe as it does.

Halloran is waiting in a coffee shop three blocks from the hospital, not his car, not the precinct — somewhere with witnesses and exits and a table by the window, which tells me he's scared too, and that is somehow more frightening than if he'd seemed calm.

He looks worse than he did in the garage. Older. Like the last few hours peeled something off him.

"Sit down, Ms. Calloway."

I sit. I keep my hands on the table where he can see them, and I keep my face very still, and I do not let him see that I know what's in the photograph Rosa handed me forty minutes ago.

"How's Marsh?" I ask.

"Alive. Stable. Cooperative." He says the last word like it costs him something. "He's giving us everything. Names, dates, money trails — thirty years of it. He's got nothing left to protect and he knows it." His eyes meet mine. "He told us some things about you."

My stomach drops, but I hold his gaze. "What things?"

"He told us the night your brother died, Eli had been making calls. To a number that traces back to a federal tip line." Halloran folds his hands on the table. "Your brother wasn't just trying to run, Wren. He was trying to talk to the feds. He had information about the club's money laundering operation and he was going to trade it for protection."

"You knew this already," I say. "Before tonight."

A beat of silence.

"Marsh flagged the calls," Halloran says carefully. "It came to my attention at the time."

"It came to your attention," I repeat. "And then Eli died."

Halloran doesn't answer.

"Why am I here?" I ask. "What do you actually want?"

He leans forward. His voice drops, loses the practiced detective flatness, gets something raw underneath it.

"I want you to understand what you're about to walk into," he says. "If this case goes federal — and it will go federal now that Marsh is talking — everything connected to the Sons of Hollow Creek goes under a microscope. Every account. Every transaction. Every person who touched that money."

"Including the account Cain set up."

"Including that account." His eyes don't move from mine. "And including whoever accessed it recently."

"That was Rosa. Cain's sister."

Something flickers in Halloran's face. Not surprise. That's what I'm looking at — a man who already knows Rosa is alive.

"You knew," I say.

"I've known for two years," Halloran says, and the admission comes out like something that's been under pressure for a long time. "I found her. She found me first, actually. She had information I needed and I had protection she needed, and we made an arrangement."

"She's been feeding you information."

"She's been building a case." He holds my stare. "Rosa Reyes spent six years in hiding collecting evidence on Marsh because she knew what he did to her brother and she knew she couldn't come back until she had enough to bury him with."

"And you didn't tell Cain."

"Because Cain is next in line to run the club," Halloran says. "If he knew his sister was alive and working with law enforcement, either he'd pull her out, or he'd be compromised as a witness, or Marsh would find out through him, or all three. Rosa made that call herself. She told me not to tell him."

I sit with that for a moment. Rosa chose to let her brother grieve for six years. There will be a reckoning for that. I can see it coming from a distance like weather.

"Why are you telling me this now?" I ask.

"Because Rosa surfaced," Halloran says, "and because Marsh just told me something else. Something I think you deserve to know before the federal team comes in tomorrow morning and it becomes official."

He slides a single sheet of paper across the table. A name at the top. A date. A dollar amount.

I read it three times before I understand what I'm looking at.

"This is a payment record," I say.

"Yes."

"This is a payment made to Eli." I look up. "Three weeks before he died. Sixty thousand dollars."

"Yes."

"That's more than the debt he owed the club."

"Significantly more," Halloran says.

"Where did it come from?"

Halloran's finger moves to the name at the top of the sheet. The one I've been avoiding looking at because some part of me already knows it's going to be the worst thing I've read all night.

It's Dean's name. My ex-husband's name. Dean Calloway's name, on a payment to my brother, three weeks before someone cut his brake line.

My ex-husband paid my brother sixty thousand dollars right before Eli tried to run.

"What did he buy?" I ask, and my voice comes out barely above a whisper.

"That," Halloran says quietly, "is what I need your help finding out."

My phone buzzes. Cain. Fifteen minutes are up.

I stand. My legs work, which surprises me.

"One more thing," Halloran says. "The account Rosa accessed two days ago — someone else tried to access it last night. After her. Different credentials. Different device."

"Who?"

"We don't know yet," he says. "But whoever it is, they're not in this room, and they're not in that parking lot, and that means someone we haven't identified yet knows about that money."

I walk out into the cold.

Cain is already out of the car, crossing the sidewalk toward me, reading my face from twenty feet away, and whatever he sees there makes him stop walking.

"What did he say?"

I look at him — this man I barely know, this man I cannot stop trusting against every instinct I've ever had — and I think about Dean's name on a payment record, and Rosa choosing six years of silence, and Eli dead on a road at nineteen years old with sixty thousand dollars in an account nobody's explained yet.

"Dean paid Eli," I say. "Before he died. A lot of money."

Cain is very still.

"Cain," I say carefully, "did you know my ex-husband had any connection to the club?"

The answer is on his face before he says a word.

And the answer is not no.