Page 59 of Cruel Hearts

I bristle. “Why shouldn’t he have? He was grieving his parents. He was trying to run a billion dollar company and didn’t know how. He was lonely and scared. All he wanted was to know why his parents were dead.”

Clenching my hands into fists, and I remember asking, no, begging, him not to hurt me, but he rammed his cock into meanyway. I remember Maryanne and her blank stare. I have no business defending him.

“Others knew that too, and used it against him,” Max says. His tone softens. “What did they say?”

“They said the investigation went nowhere. That the plane’s manifest wasn’t complete and that it was unreliable. That there could have been undocumented passengers on the plane who could have been targets.”

“Like whom? Did they have any suspicions?”

I wrack my brain. “I think they said something about a senator having an affair. It’s been over five years, Max.”

“It’s okay. I was just wondering what Zane knows. Nothing, I guess, or what he thinks he knows are all lies.”

“Why would he question the FBI?”

Max smiles around a mouthful of wilting green leaves. “Exactly.”

Denton’s quiet, letting Max do all the talking. He’s eating, which I’m happy to see, too. All this has been hard on him. Suspecting Clayton Black was responsible for the deaths of a good friend and his wife and not being able to do anything must have eaten at him all these years.

“The senator in question is alive and well—he retired to Cabo San Lucas and is more than comfortable living with the anonymity and the secrecy. His wife moved into a career in politics, using her husband’s abandonment as a campaign platform for women’s rights. She doesn’t seem to mind her husband absconded with the nanny.”

My eyes widen in surprise. “Nanny? They told Zane his mistress was the head of a huge gambling ring.”

“Nothing so sordid. At any rate, her disappearance would have made news. No one cared about an adulterous senator. He wasn’t on that plane, nor was his mistress, nanny or otherwise.”Max’s mouth quirks. “No one shared that plane with Kagan and Lark. The information on the cockpit voice recorder proves it.”

Denton shoves his paper plate away. “How do you know all this?”

“The FBI, after an agent sat in while the NTSB extracted the information off the cockpit recorder, took possession of the physical device and the digital data and buried it.” Max pats his lips with a paper towel and balls it up. “My ex-girlfriend works at Quantico in evidence. Her senses went on red alert when the device was logged in but then a heartbeat later the records were ‘lost’ because of a computer glitch. We met in school—she was going into journalism, too, but she decided to use her curiosity for good, not evil.”

“The NTSB didn’t care the FBI stepped in?” Denton asks.

Max lifts a shoulder. “Planes crash more often than we think. Once the FBI claimed the case, there wasn’t anything they could do, and there were other crashes that needed their attention that year. A rich debutante bride-to-be from San Francisco and all of her bridesmaids were flying to Las Vegas for the bachelorette party. They died in a violent crash in the middle of Death Valley, and that made top billing in the news not long after Kagan’s and Lark’s deaths.”

“What about the pilot?” Denton throws his plate away and grumbles into his mug. “Do you have anything stronger?”

“Beer in the fridge,” Max says good-naturedly.

Denton offers me one, but I decline.

“There’s not a lot on the pilot besides the fact he was in debt up to his eyeballs because of a betting addiction. His little girl was diagnosed with leukemia that year. Funnily enough, after the crash, his debts were paid off by a holding company based overseas, and a huge lump sum landed in the wife’s account a week later. The little girl is in remission now.”

“Someone paid him to commit suicide.” I choke on the last word.

“The sad part is, Kagan Maddox was a really nice guy. Everyone knew that, except the pilot, I guess. If he would have asked Kagan for help, he would have gotten it. Black fed on his fears instead.”

Denton perks up. “You know it’s Clayton Black? Why didn’t you say so?”

Max tips his chair back and balances on its hind legs. His kitchen is so tiny, if he falls backward, he’ll slam his head against the fridge door. “Because it’s unsubstantiated, that’s why. If you dig deep enough, the money that suddenly showed up in the wife’s account came from an offshoot of an obscure company that ispossibly owned by Black Enterprises. His holdings are like peeling an onion. There are so many layers, and without a warrant, which I don’t have, impossible to search. But,” he continues, “the one million dollar question is why did Clayton Black want Kagan Maddox dead? They were good friends all their lives.”

“Do you have any ibuprofen?” I ask. My ribs are killing me, and my whole body aches. Denton wasn’t kidding. He tackled me hard.

“Yeah, sure.”

He drops his chair, and the sharp sound of the legs hitting the floor vibrates through my skull. I can’t sit and talk anymore. The pizza helped calm my stomach, but a pain resembling a migraine has started to pound behind my eyes. I need sleep.

Max grabs a white bottle out of the cabinet above a microwave and slides it across the table to me.

I struggle to open the child safety cap, and Denton covers my hands and pulls the bottle out of my weak grasp. He drops four into my palm and offers me his half-empty beer. “Here. It will help.” He smooths the back of my head, my hair a snarly mess.

---