All of the Lights (40 page)

I want to walk away.

I want to wrap my arms around her.

But I can't.

Rae

Whiskers brush against my skin and then a soft, furry head nudges my cheek. My eyes flutter open to see two pale yellow eyes blinking back at me and Freya doesn't miss a beat. She sits back on her haunches—right on top of my chest—and opens her mouth to let out a familiar, high-pitched mew.

"Alright, baby," I murmur. "Alright."

That's all she needs to hear. She leaps off the bed and skids to a stop right in front of the door before I even have a chance to throw the covers off. By the time I let her out of my bedroom and shuffle into the kitchen to meet her, she's too preoccupied to notice there are two bodies lying in the living room. When the faint sounds of SportsCenter float around me, I have a pretty good idea which one of them is up.

Let's just say I've never seen Bennett linger on ESPN for longer than two seconds.

After I shovel a scoop of food in Freya's bowl, I've only got a couple minutes before she leaves food-mode and slips back into psycho-mode, so I half-tiptoe, half-limp to the living room and peer over the side of the couch. Bennett's splayed out on my couch with one arm thrown over his eyes, snoring and all. I blow out a deep sigh and finally let my eyes wander to the floor, where Jack's lying in front of the TV with a pillow propped up beneath his head and a remote in his hand. He lifts his free hand in a wave and shoots me a soft grin.

"You sleep okay?" I ask, even though I'm pretty sure I already know the answer.

"Ah," he shrugs and shifts so his arm rests behind his head. "I can sleep anywhere."

"Coffee?"

His lips spread apart in a gorgeous grin. "Now you're speakin' my language."

I'm having a hard time concentrating on the matter at hand when the sight of him in the morning is so distracting. The short sides of his dark hair are all matted down while the longer strands on top of his head are all mussed and disheveled like he just ran his hand through them. His T-shirt is riding up a little too much, showing off some taut abdomen muscles that I can't tear my eyes away from. Not to mention that both sleeves of tattoos are proudly on display.

Unfortunately, that's also the moment Freya sneaks out from the kitchen, brushes up against my legs, and finally stands protectively in front of me with her teeth bared. Like she's so tough. Like she'd be able to do anything that might actually hurt him. But because I don't want to give her the opportunity, I scoop her up in my arms just as the hissing starts and stow her away in my bedroom again as fast as my bum knee can carry me.

By the time I teeter stiffly into the kitchen again, Jack already has a cup of coffee brewing in my Keurig. He tosses me that well-used bag of frozen vegetables and hands me a bottle of ibuprofen with his lips set in a grim line.

"It's always a little stiff in the morning," I grumble anyway as I pop out a couple pills.

He doesn't reply, but his eyes linger on the speckled and purple bruise coloring my knee for longer than I'd like.

"Morning, friends," Bennett calls out from the living room and waves us over. He's already got his laptop open and mine sits just a few inches away on the coffee table. "What do you say we find out what that dirty prick is hiding?"

I guess it's go time.

So, once we all have caffeine in hand and I've happily downed three ibuprofens, we huddle up on my couch as Bennett sticks the flash drive into a USB port on his computer.

"Just for safe-keeping," he tells us absentmindedly while he copies the files onto his computer. "You can never be too careful."

Now that that business is taken care of, he hands the flash drive over to Jack, who follows suit until a folder pops up on my screen. The energy in the air is palpable, zipping around us, over our heads, and finally settling into tiny goosebumps on my arm. It crackles in the air as I reach forward and click on the folder.

Everything that follows seems to unravel in slow motion.

It's surprisingly organized—each subfolder is clearly labeled and dated as if the mayor himself needed to remember specific details to keep all his secrets straight. Because it just makes the most sense, I click on the subfolder labeled for this year and start flipping through the files as Bennett gets to work on his own computer.

Jack is hunched next to me, his forehead creased in tight lines of concentration.

"Follow the money," he murmurs and I nod.

Follow the money indeed.

Because the deeper I sink into these files, folder by folder and year by year, the more one fact becomes crystal clear: the mayor, Valentino Moretti, and the elusive businessman, William Rossi, are one in the same.

The evidence is all here on my computer—each business deal conducted under the Rossi alias, signed and dated with a falsified signature, including the most recent plans to buy up that land in Southie for the stupid, sole purpose of building a mall. Documents with plans to raise taxes and increase rent to push occupants out, leaving room for 'William Rossi' to swoop in and scoop up the properties are all here one after the other. Not to mention various documents furthering the lie: receipts, emails, and there are even digital copies of a passport, driver's license, and birth certificate, all to testify to a person who doesn't really exist.

Val Moretti gets the bills passed in city council and William Rossi writes the checks.

Figures.

And the most recent 'official' Rossi acquisition? A warehouse right in the heart of North Boston. The very same one we tailed the mayor to that first day and the same one currently held by the Gianotti brothers for their new boxing arena.

"Holy shit," Jack exhales next to me. "Is this what—"

"Yeah," I nod tightly. "It's exactly what it looks like."

"Oh my Stefani Germanotta," Bennett whispers, his dark eyes wide as saucers.

Even for someone like the mayor, who is the definition of icy, blatant neglect and indifference, I never would've imagined he was capable of something this twisted, this calculated, this
evil.

TWO HOURS LATER, we're still sifting through the files. Disbelief, horror, and escalating adrenaline fills my living room and finally, Jack leaps up to his feet, tears both hands through the short strands on top of his head, and starts furiously pacing the length of my carpet.

"This is bullshit," he mutters to himself. "I should've known. I can't believe I didn't know."

"Jack..." I try, but I don't know what to say. There isn't much any of us can say that will make this right.

There's a fierce, thunderous storm brewing in his gunmetal eyes and I'd like to think I know him well enough by now to know that we just need to ride this out. Weathering this particular storm, however, is going to require more than just a sturdy shelter.

"This whole damn time," he whispers gruffly and shakes his head before running a hand over his face. "He was behind every single move this whole damn time."
I suppose, on one hand, what did we really expect? There's a lot for the mayor to gain by having his hand in both sides. This way, not only does he control the legal and political aspects of gentrification in the city, but he also gets to benefit from it financially without anyone being the wiser. If there's a plot of land he has his sights set on, all he has to do is rezone it through city council and boom. He's gotten exactly what he wanted.

"We got the son of a bitch," Jack bites out, running both hands through his hair again as he strides from side to side of my living room. "We fucking
got
him." He jerks a hand at my computer. "That's fraud. That's so many other things, I can't even wrap my head around it. All I know is that's enough to nail that asshole right to the floor."

Maybe that's true. If anything, it would topple the mayor's reputation in a nanosecond, even if all that evidence mysteriously disappeared. I wonder how many other people are privy to this information, how many people he has on his payroll who have the sole purpose of managing his two identities. And at the end of the day, how has no one ever put two and two together before? I guess the answer's in the question: the mayor would never let them get that far. They'd be squashed before they could even think about opening their mouths to cry foul.

Which makes the fact that we've gotten this far even more miraculous.

I still don't really know how we were able to find information like this, but maybe that's just it. You always find what you're not looking for and that's exactly what's happened this morning. We've stumbled on something bigger than us, something more complicated than I can fully comprehend, something dark and sinister, but we still didn't find what we were looking for.

"Jack," I whisper and his stomping slows long enough to look at me. "This isn't enough."

His eyes crinkle in bewilderment. "This isn't enough? What do you mean? We've got proof. Hard, cold evidence that he's playing the system. That he's defrauded the voters and this city and he's probably been embezzling money for longer than what those files show. He's working with the Gianotti brothers—no one has ever been able to prove that before and now we have that proof. How is that
not
enough?"

Just as my lips part to respond, Bennett jumps in, literally hopping to his feet with his arms spread out wide to put some space between us. "Okay. Let's just think about this for a second before anyone jumps the gun. So we've got these files from his computer. What do we do with them?"

"What do you mean?" Jack practically growls.

"If we turn them over to the cops, how do we explain how we got them?"

I push out a heavy sigh and wince. "He's right, Jack. If there's even a suggestion that we got these files illegally, which we did, they couldn't use them even if they wanted to."

"It would be enough to get a warrant," Jack reasons, but his voice falters just a little, betraying that he's slowly but surely seeing the reality of our predicament.

"Maybe," I lift a shoulder and sigh again. "But you told me yourself the mayor's got half the PD on his payroll and the ones he doesn't report to the ones who are. How can we just walk in there and report this? How do we know it won't get 'lost' just like my statement and how many other pieces of evidence he's made disappear over the years?"

"We don't," Jack tells me firmly and he folds his thick arms over his chest just to reiterate his point. "Maybe there's another way. There's an FBI base in the city. Maybe they'd be a little more reliable than half the PD on Moretti's payroll."

"Maybe," I whisper again and smile sadly. "But that still doesn't help Sean."

And there it is.

All this dirt on the mayor and yet there isn't a speck of evidence shedding light on what really happened that night. In the grand scheme of things, this new information is just an interruption to what we've really set out to do. None of this leads back to Sean. None of this leads back to what Sean saw that night—at least one of the Gianotti brothers smashing my knee with a tire iron. None of this explains why they would do something like that to the 'daughter' of someone they're closely connected to in business and in crime.

And now, as his shoulders hunch and he slumps against the wall with his face in his hands, Jack knows it too.

When he finally unearths his face from his hands, his features are tortured and twisted, like he knows just as well as I do that we might never find what we've been looking for. That we might fail more epically and completely than we could've ever anticipated. If we don't act on this information, the mayor could get away with it. If we do, we might never find a way to prove Sean's innocence and he'll just continue rotting away in prison.

Damned if we do and damned if we don't.

Finally, Jack's hoarse voice calls out to me.

"What should we do, Rae?"

I don't need to hesitate, but I still hobble off the couch and limp over to him. When I'm within reach, my arms snake out and plant themselves on his shoulders. This isn't going to be easy for him to hear, but he needs to hear it anyway.

"I think we should see Sean today."

Jack winces, but he has to know I'm right. It's Sunday—we can and we should visit him.

"And if you can look him in the eye and tell him you'd rather take the mayor down than get him out of prison, then we'll take those files and bring them down to the FBI headquarters today."

His Adam's apple bobs up and down as that hangs in the air for a few moments.

"But if you can't," I push on softly. "Then I think we keep playing this the way we have from the start. Let's think about what we know: the Gianottis are responsible for what happened to me. Sean saw one of them that night. We know that. We don't know why, but we do know the mayor is involved with that warehouse and their new arena somehow. You've got an in with them now, Jack. Maybe if we just keep digging, if we just keep trying, we can still find what we're looking for and still nail the mayor to the floor."

His eyes study me, trailing up and down my face. I don't know what he's searching for, but his hand drifts toward my face for just a second. A beat later, his hand drops back to his side and he nods tightly.

"This is all just an excuse to convince me to let you come along to that next meeting, isn't it?"