My Biker Husband Is a Murder Suspect

Chapter 10 - The Last Video

"Tell me right now," I say. "No thirty seconds. No 'trust me first.' Tell me."

Cain looks at the street like he's choosing between two roads that both lead somewhere bad.

"Dean came to the club eight months ago," he says. "Before you and I ever met. He came to Marsh."

Eight months ago. Three months before Dean threw me out in the rain.

"Why."

"He had gambling debts. Not to us — to a different outfit, operating out of the city. He needed them settled fast and clean, in a way that didn't end up in the sports pages." Cain's jaw is tight. "Marsh agreed to settle the debts in exchange for a favor."

"What kind of favor."

"Information." Cain finally looks at me. "The hockey team runs through our territory. The club taxes everything that moves in this city — gyms, bars, venues — and the arena is the biggest venue there is. Marsh wanted someone inside the organization who could tell him when the team was planning events, when security would be light, when cash moved. Low-risk intelligence. Marsh did it with every major business in Hollow Creek."

"Dean spied on his own team for the Sons of Hollow Creek."

"For about three months." Cain pauses. "Then Eli found out."

The cold is sharper suddenly.

"Eli knew," I say. "That's what he had. That's the information he was taking to the feds — not just the club's money laundering. He had proof that Dean was feeding information to Marsh."

"Which meant he had leverage over your husband," Cain says. "Which meant Dean had a reason to want Eli quiet before he got anywhere near a federal tip line."

"Dean paid Eli sixty thousand dollars to stay quiet."

"And when Eli took the money and ran anyway—"

"Someone cut the brake line." I press both hands flat against the car roof because I need something solid. "Marsh or Dean. One of them, or both of them."

"Marsh had motive and access," Cain says. "Dean had motive and money. The question is whether they coordinated it or whether it was parallel — two men who both wanted Eli dead arriving at the same solution independently."

"And Dean is—" I stop. "Where is Dean right now?"

Cain looks at me with an expression I don't want to interpret.

"He's been at every home game this week," he says. "Season's in full run. Team's playing tomorrow night."

Dean has been skating across that ice and shaking hands and smiling for cameras while my brother's case has been open and unsolved, and I have been working off Eli's debt in a garage, and he has been twenty minutes away this entire time.

"You knew all of this," I say. "You knew Dean had a connection to the club before you ever met me."

"I knew Dean Calloway had done business with Marsh," Cain says. "I didn't know you were Dean Calloway's wife until the night you walked into my bar soaking wet and set a box of broken pictures on my counter."

"And then?"

He holds my gaze. "And then I kept it from you because I didn't know how much you knew, or whether you were protecting him, or whether you'd been sent to the club to find out what we knew about the payment to Eli."

It hits me like ice water.

"You thought I might be working for Dean."

"For about twelve hours," Cain says. "Then I watched you ask about your brother and I knew you weren't performing it. You didn't know anything." His voice drops. "I should have told you sooner. That's on me."

I want to be furious. I am furious. The fury sits on top of something worse — the understanding that every single person in my life has been playing angles I couldn't see, and I have been walking through this story like a woman who showed up to a chess match without knowing what a chess match was.

"I need to see him," I say.

"Wren—"

"I need to look him in the face." I turn toward him and I let him see all of it — the fury, the grief, the exhaustion, the thing underneath all of it that isn't going to let me walk away from this. "I need to hear him try to explain why my brother is dead and he's still skating."

"He's not going to confess to you."

"I'm not going for a confession. I'm going because I spent three years married to that man and I never knew what he was. I need to know what I missed." I hold Cain's eyes. "I need to know how much of my own life I didn't understand."

Cain is quiet for a long time.

"The team practices tomorrow at six a.m.," he says finally. "The rink opens to staff at five-thirty."

"And you know this because—"

"Because I know everything that happens in this city." His voice is flat. "It's my job."

I nod. I move toward the passenger door and he doesn't stop me, just walks around to the driver's side, and for a few minutes we drive in silence through the pre-dawn streets of Hollow Creek, the city dark and quiet in a way that feels like a held breath.

"Rosa," I say, eventually.

"I know."

"She let you think she was dead for six years."

"I know."

"Are you going to be all right?"

He doesn't answer right away. He drives two more blocks, and then he says, very quietly: "I don't know yet. Ask me when this is over."

"What if it's never over?"

"Then ask me anyway," he says. "I'll still want you to ask."

My phone lights up on my lap. An email notification. From an address I don't recognize, a string of random letters, the kind of address someone uses once and abandons.

The subject line says: Eli's last video.

My hand is shaking so badly I can barely open it. But I do. And inside is a file — a phone recording, forty-three seconds long, timestamped three days before my brother died — and before I hit play I already know it's going to change every answer I thought I was close to finding.

I press play.

My dead brother's voice fills the car.