Narrow Escape Read online

  She nodded, not trusting her voice.

  They squeezed onto the small table with their plates and bowls, and Arissa hesitated. “May I say grace?” she asked.

  Liam nodded, not surprised by her request. Perhaps he was Christian, or from a Christian family.

  But Nathan’s jaw tensed for a brief moment, and he looked away. Then he relaxed with a visible effort and said curtly, “Sure.”

  But even as she said a prayer, Arissa felt uncomfortable, as if the words just hit the ceiling and bounced back. Her heart was cold inside her, a strange feeling in the year since she’d become a Christian. She’d gotten used to that quiet peace that touched her whenever she prayed, but now her prayers seemed rote, dull, lifeless.

  She also realized this was the first time she’d prayed in a while. When had she last spent time with God?

  What was there to say to Him besides a fervent plea to survive? And what good would that do? What she needed was answers or a really juicy lead on what Mark had been doing, and it wasn’t as if God could deliver those things in her lap right at this moment.

  She ended the short prayer a bit awkwardly, and they started eating in silence. She normally loved melting grilled cheese, but something about the prayer unsettled her, and the sandwich tasted too salty and too oily in her mouth, the soup too sweet.

  Finally Nathan cleared his throat. “We need to figure out what to do now.”

  Arissa wiped her mouth with her napkin. “I have Mark’s password, so I can review his bank statements. Do you mind lending me your computer again?” she asked Liam.

  “Go ahead.”

  “I can look through Mark’s boxes again for that safe deposit key.” Nathan threw his napkin on his empty plate. “Now that I know what to search for, maybe I can figure out if he hid it inside something innocuous.”

  Privately Arissa thought that Internal Affairs would have found it if it were there, but she knew Nathan felt helpless and restless, not knowing what he could do besides laying low here at Liam’s house.

  “If you don’t mind, I have calls I need to make.” Liam stood with his plate. “I’ll use the phone next door so I don’t disturb you two.”

  “I’m sorry for forcing you out of your own house.”

  He only shook his head and grinned. “I get fed in return—I’m fine with it.”

  She helped Nathan clean up the dishes, then got onto the internet on Liam’s laptop. She logged into the bank’s online website using Mark’s account number and password.

  The amount in his account made her gasp.

  “What’s wrong?” Nathan was at her side in an instant, enveloping her in musk and lime that seemed to calm her as she struggled to draw in breath.

  He stiffened as he saw the amount of money Mark had saved. “When did he start depositing funds?”

  She searched the records and found the account was about five years old. “His first deposit was a few months after Mom’s cancer diagnosis.”

  According to the electronic records, he had deposited large amounts of cash at the bank’s ATM at irregular intervals. “Are these...” She swallowed, then pointed to the screen. “Are these deposit dates about the same as dates when the LAPD...”

  “There were several cases and operations where information was given to the drug dealers before the LAPD arrived. I don’t know those dates offhand. I’d have to talk to my friend Steve to ask him to look them up for me.”

  There was a chance these cash deposits weren’t because Mark had been paid off by the drug cartel. Maybe he got this cash selling stuff on eBay or something. Arissa drew in a breath, but it sounded to her ears like a sob.

  The next thing she noticed about the account was that the only withdrawals were in the form of checks—no cash withdrawals at the ATM or from the bank tellers. The bank had scanned images of the checks online, so she clicked on a link and a pop-up window appeared. It took a few seconds for the image of the check—back and front—to appear, but she recognized the recipient. “He paid off Mom’s medical bills.”

  She clicked on more checks, one after another. They all paid for her mother’s health-care charges, to a variety of places. “Dad never said anything about Mark paying the bills for him.”

  “He could have intercepted the statements when they arrived in the mail—you two were living with your parents at the time, so it would have been easy to do.”

  She nodded, tears starting to pool in her eyes. In the first few months, he’d used all his money to pay Mom’s bills. His account balance had remained low. Then he started making more deposits and although he also paid off more of Mom’s charges, the amount he deposited exceeded the checks he was writing.

  “How did he get this money?” Her voice had a slightly hysterical edge to it.

  “Arissa.” Nathan put his hand on her shoulder and forced her to angle toward him. His eyes were close to hers, dark gray and velvety. “Whatever he was doing to get this money, he only did it for one reason—to help your mother. That’s the Mark I remember.”

  Nathan’s voice shook slightly. Perhaps this new knowledge about his partner had affected him—for so long, all he’d known was what he’d seen, Mark selling out the LAPD. But here was proof about why he did it—a son’s devotion to his sick mother.

  It still didn’t excuse what he did. Arissa understood that. But images began to flash in front of her eyes—Mark cradling Mom’s fragile form after they’d heard about the diagnosis, tears shining in his eyes even as he reassured her she’d be all right. Mark bending down to tenderly kiss Mom’s cheek as she lay in the hospital bed. Mark cooking and cleaning for Mom even though he’d come off a long shift. Mark holding Mom’s hand as she slept, the chemo making her weak and sick.

  Yes, Mark would have committed any felony to save their mother, without hesitation or regret.

  His last check had posted after his death, but had been written the day before the shoot-out at the chop shop, a payment for some tests Mom had had done. Arissa reached out to touch the laptop screen, tracing his signature on the check, just barely readable from the scanned .jpg file.

  There was nothing else in his account but those cash deposits and checks. She checked other tabs on the website, but he hadn’t taken out any loans—obviously—and he hadn’t set up any automatic bill payments.

  But then she had an idea. She clicked on his account information and found the link to update his settings. There, a Yahoo! email account she had never seen before. He’d had his account statements emailed to him there.

  Nathan stared at the computer. “Internal Affairs checked his computer at work—and I’m assuming they checked his home computer, too. If they’d found this email address, they’d have checked it and discovered this bank account.”

  “He must have gone through extreme measures not to check this email account on any computer that would leave a record in the browser history.” Arissa opened a new window and opened Yahoo.com, then selected “Check Mail.” She typed in the email address, hesitated, then typed in the password he’d used for his other personal email and the same password he’d used for this bank account.

  She successfully logged in.

  The emails she read made her want to scream.

  Some were obviously from members of the LSLs because they signed their unique nicknames, which Nathan could recognize. Other nicknames were not so obvious—he got several emails from “Sleepy” and “Grumpy” and Nathan remarked that practically every gang in Los Angeles had members with nicknames like the seven dwarfs.

  But the content of the emails were similar, and they all pointed to one indisputable fact—Mark was selling information from the LAPD.

  Her eyes burned as she read email after email, but she couldn’t stop, she couldn’t turn herself away. She couldn’t end the torture.

  Finally Nathan grabbed her hand as it
worked the mouse and forced her to let it go. “Arissa, we don’t need to read any more.”

  “Yes, I do,” she bit out, although now her throat was burning and acidic tears scalded her cheeks as they fell.

  “Arissa—”

  “I need to see everything. I need to know everything he did.”

  “You do know—”

  “I don’t know how he could do this.” She clamped her teeth together, felt them scrape against each other.

  “Yes.” His firm fingers grasped her chin, turning her away from the computer to look into his eyes. “You do.”

  And suddenly she was sobbing and wailing, and Nathan held her close, her cries muffled by his shoulder.

  For so long, she had believed Mark was innocent. Even when the gang had kidnapped her, she had never quite relinquished the hope that it was some misunderstanding.

  But here was proof. Horrible, finger-pointing proof that her brother wasn’t the upstanding police officer he’d presented to her parents and to their family, but a filthy, dirty mole. Her brother, who had nagged her in her earlier years about her partying and drinking. Her brother, who hadn’t wanted their father to go to the unsavory money lenders when the bills started coming in.

  What ludicrous hypocrisy.

  She screamed into Nathan’s shirt, twisting it in her fists. She thought she might have even pounded his chest with her hands a few times in her frustration, her rage, her sorrow.

  He held her, a steady rock, and his hand never stopped smoothing her head.

  Finally her emotions rolled back, like a receding ocean wave. She felt drained but strangely calm as she tried to pull away from him, but Nathan resisted and held her close. He reached out and grabbed some clean paper napkins from their lunch, handing them to her. She wiped her nose and face even as she remained leaning against his chest, her other arm wrapped around his waist and gripping the back of his shirt. His arms around her tightened, a reassurance that warmed her even more than the heat from his body against her cheek.

  Then she backed away slightly, reached up and pulled his head down to kiss him.

  She felt his start of surprise, but almost immediately his lips warmed and softened against hers. She hadn’t thought his arms could tighten around her any more, but they did, holding her close as if he could shield her from a nuclear bomb.

  And that’s what his kiss was like. Maybe because she trusted him so completely. Maybe because of remnants of the past and her attraction to the tall, mischievous narcotics detective her brother had introduced to the family. Maybe because he had held her in her pain, setting himself aside to comfort her when she knew this proof about Mark must devastate him, too.

  Nathan was so many things—the adventurous man he’d been, the determined man he was now. He’d been shadowed by his pain and disappointment but was still true to his inner values, his identity as a protector, first and foremost. He made her want to drop the defensive walls around her heart and embrace all of him, his pain and his joy, his weakness and his strengths. She no longer saw him as the idealized detective she’d known three years ago, but a man whose honorable heart shone brighter than the noonday sun.

  But even as he deepened the kiss, she knew that this moment only highlighted the fact that their relationship could never go beyond this point. Her brother had been a mole, the mole who had cut Nathan’s career short. She and Charity were in danger and may need to run so they wouldn’t put anyone else at risk, including his parents. And what kind of man saddled himself with a woman with a three-year-old, much less one with a drug gang after her?

  She still reveled in his closeness, in the touch of his hand at her jaw, the scent of musk that wrapped around her. And another tear fell from her eye, this one because these sensations were everything she’d never have again.

  “Arissa, don’t cry.” He drew back his head and his thumb wiped away the tear.

  She looked up at his wonderful, handsome face, and her heart shattered. This could never be. “You were right,” she whispered brokenly.

  His eyes faltered, and their connection dissolved.

  She sat back in her chair, licked her lips nervously and tasted him there. She closed her eyes for a moment, clinging to the last threads of warmth she had felt in his arms.

  Then she opened her eyes and straightened her back. Time to face reality. Her brother had been a mole.

  In the silence, her eyes had been staring at the computer screen, but unseeing. Now, however, she focused on a folder in his email account labeled “Jemma.” Mark’s girlfriend, Charity’s mother. She reached for the mouse and clicked on the folder.

  Hundreds of letters, some teasing, some a bit mundane, some racy and heated, some unbearably tender. Mark had truly loved Jemma and had been excited about the child she carried.

  From what Arissa could infer from them, Jemma’s father had known, and although he’d been worried about the fact Mark was a cop, he hadn’t disapproved. Since Jemma’s parents knew, she hadn’t been pressured by anyone else to divulge the identity of her lover. The rest of her extended family respected the silence of her parents as to the father of her child.

  “Mark met her because...” Arissa swallowed.

  “Because he’d been meeting the members of the gang,” Nathan said, which was kinder phrasing than, because he’d been selling information.

  She turned to him, capturing his whole attention with the earnestness in her eyes. “Tell me what happened that day at the chop shop. Tell me what you saw.”

  He looked away, and for a few moments she thought he’d refuse her, but then he said, “It started at the station. I saw a green folder on his desk. He wasn’t sitting there at the moment, and I don’t know why, but I looked inside. It was information about a sting operation planned for the next morning.”

  He sighed. “I thought it was a bit unusual that he had the info, but I figured maybe the captain in charge of the raid had asked Mark for some help. I went back to my desk. But then Mark came to his desk and said he was heading home a little early. He laid his jacket on the folder, and then picked it up as he left.”

  “That’s why you followed him that day.”

  “I almost didn’t find him because he was driving your car instead of his. Finally I recognized the paint chip pattern on your trunk because it looks like a bird. I followed him to the chop shop, parked a couple blocks away and snuck inside. I hid behind a blue Buick. I saw Mark hand the folder to Johnny Capuno. Johnny was about to hand Mark an envelope—and even from where I was hidden I could see it was gaping open, full of cash—when I heard a shout behind me, and a bullet hit the Buick only a few inches away from my shoulder.”

  His hand rubbed his thigh, although Arissa didn’t think he realized he was doing it. “It was chaotic. I hid behind a nearby Trans Am and returned fire. I saw Johnny darting out of the chop shop with the folder in one hand and the envelope of money still in the other.”

  “That’s why the information and the money was never found on Mark’s body,” Arissa said slowly.

  “There were LSL gang members everywhere, and while some were shooting at me, I think most were confused. They didn’t understand who was the threat.”

  Arissa thought back to the report she’d seen of the shoot-out. “The forensics report said several gang members were shot by guns belonging to their own crew.”

  “It seemed like there were bullets flying everywhere. Then I saw Mark take cover behind a Lexus.” Nathan’s face paled as he remembered. “He...he saw me behind the Trans Am. And then...” He suddenly grimaced and turned away from her, his hand bunched up in a fist.

  “Nathan.” She touched his fist, then smoothed fingers over his cheek. “Please tell me.” A part of her wondered if maybe he needed to let it out, if making him talk about this was cathartic somehow. She wondered if he’d gone to a counselor at all.

&nb
sp; He finally turned to her with a face tense and hard. “Mark saw me, raised his gun and shot at me.”

  She felt as if she’d been shot herself. Pain blossomed at the base of her throat, making it hard to breathe. She forced herself to swallow. “He’s the one who...your leg? But I thought...”

  “No, he missed me. But I’ll never forget his face when he fired. He looked absolutely determined.”

  Arissa couldn’t think of anything to say.

  Nathan continued, “I raised my gun—it was almost automatic. But I didn’t fire. I couldn’t.”

  “Oh, Nathan,” she whispered.

  “Then a gang member ran into view and shot at me. I returned fire and ran behind a Taurus. I remembered hearing the sirens at that point, but as soon as I got behind the car, I...” He winced. “I got hit.”

  His femur bone shattered by a gang member’s bullet.

  “I don’t remember much after that.”

  Arissa’s mind turned back to the police report she’d pored over, had almost memorized. “Nathan, you were behind a Trans Am when Mark shot at you?”

  He blinked at her. “Yeah.”

  She remembered something from the police report, something she’d noticed only because it had involved Mark. “There was a gang member found dead behind a Trans Am, directly in line of sight from where Mark’s body was found.” She didn’t know why, but she grabbed Nathan’s hand. “He’d been shot with Mark’s gun.”

  His fingers twitched beneath hers. He was silent a minute or two. “Are you sure? How do you know?”

  “I got a copy of the police report and I went over it, even though the IA investigation was closed by then. I made note of everything involving Mark—including his gun. He shot three gang members, counting the one behind a Trans Am.”

  Nathan pulled his hand from hers and stood, pacing in the small living room space, his palm rubbing his forehead. “No one else shot with Mark’s gun, it was found in his hand.” He looked at her with eyes like burning coals. “You’re saying he shot at a gang member who was behind me.”