Page 43 of Dirty Liars

I’d left my medical bag in the car, but I wanted to make sure we collected all the pieces of Max Ortega’s skull and brains in case there were bullet fragments inside. Every bit of evidence mattered now. I refused to let whoever did this get away because we missed something in the chaos.

“From the damage done to his skull it was a high-caliber rifle,” Cole said, his eyes traveling to the balcony where Max lay in an expanding pool of crimson.

I could tell I was in shock, and I was trying to ground myself and focus on the work ahead. I could fall apart later. Later, when we were safe. Later, when Jack and I were alone. Later, when the weight of how close we’d come to dying could be processed in private. Right now, there was work to do.

We stepped back out onto the balcony and stood over the body. The afternoon sun illuminated the scene with an inappropriate cheerfulness, glinting off the wet blood that had splattered across the white railing. The coppery scent hung thick in the air, mingling with the faint smell of gunpowder. A pair of mockingbirds chirped in a nearby tree, oblivious to the human tragedy below them.

“Kill shot through the skull and into the wall of the carriage house,” Jack said, pointing to the cracked stucco where the bullet had entered the wall. His hand was steady, his voice clinical, but I could see the tension in every line of his body. “Downward trajectory supports that he most likely made the shot from the bell tower. It’s the only location in Newcastle that’s high enough to give him a clear shot. That would be about a two-hundred-yard shot. Not a big deal for someone with the right training.”

I couldn’t help but picture it—a shadow figure in the church bell tower, setting up a rifle with practiced hands, watching through a scope as Max stepped onto his balcony with us. Waiting for the perfect moment. The casual brutality of it made my stomach turn.

“You get any useful information out of him?” Cole asked, keeping a professional distance from the body. His eyes kept darting between us and the corpse, as if trying to reconcile how differently this scene could have played out.

“It was more about what he didn’t say than what he did say,” Jack answered, his jaw tightening. “Let’s get this scene wrapped. I want you and Martinez at my home office in three hours. I’m going to go pay another visit to Ambassador Vasilios.”

“Hopefully not looking like that,” Cole said, mouth twitching as he gestured to our blood-soaked clothing.

Jack looked down at his clothes and said, “It’s tempting.” The grim humor barely masked the dangerous edge in his voice. I’d heard that tone before—when Jack was past diplomacy and moving into retribution territory.

“You want backup?” Cole asked, obviously reading the same warning signs in Jack’s demeanor.

“Yes. Have two officers in uniform follow me out,” Jack said. “My patience has run thin with whatever game is being played. I can put two and two together, and if the State Department thinks they can protect Nicholas Vasilios from what’s coming down on his family then they’re all deceived.”

Jack stopped and looked at me, his expression softening slightly. “Anything you need to do here?”

“No,” I said, my professional mask firmly in place despite the chaos of emotions churning beneath the surface. “I need to reach out to Lily.”

“She’s already on the way,” Cole said. “She said she was swinging by to pick up Sheldon on the way. He heard the callout on the police scanner.”

“Okay, good,” I said. “We can put him on ice for now. I’ll deal with him tomorrow.”

The crime-scene team came up shortly after dressed in their white jumpsuits and gloves, and one of them stood in front of Jack and meticulously tweezed the brain matter and bits of skull into a bag. The methodical, detached nature of their work was strangely comforting—a reminder that no matter how personal this felt, it was still a crime scene that needed processing like any other.

I stood watching in dazed bemusement until another tech came up and started to do the same to me. I closed my eyes, preferring not to think about what I might be covered in. The sensation of someone plucking bits of a dead man from my hair and skin was surreal, dissociative. Part of me wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it all, a sure sign that shock was still working its way through my system.

“The shower in my office at the sheriff’s office is closest,” Jack said once we’d been picked clean and were back in the Tahoe. The smell of blood still clung to us despite the team’s efforts, and my clothes felt stiff and heavy with Max’s dried bodily fluids.

“I don’t have any clean clothes at your office,” I said, staring out the window as Jack drove away from the crime scene. The quaint streets of Newcastle scrolled by, their charm now tainted by what we’d experienced. I’d never look at the church bell tower the same way again.

“We’ll go home then,” he said. “We can shower and then I can go pay a visit to Ambassador Vasilios.”

“You want to go alone?” I asked, turning to study his profile. His jaw was set in that stubborn way I knew too well.

“I think it’ll be better if you’re not there,” he said, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. “I’ll have deputies there for backup. Maybe we can come to a gentleman’s agreement as far as this case is concerned. I’m hoping that he’s causing interference to protect his son’s reputation.”

“And if you’re wrong?” I asked, the unspoken danger hanging between us. If Nicholas Vasilios was behind this, Jack was walking straight into the lion’s den.

“Then he might very well be behind it all,” he said, his voice hard as granite. “There’s no gray area here. He either thinks he’s protecting his family or he’s intentionally trying to let someone get away with murder.”

I leaned back against the headrest, the adrenaline finally beginning to ebb, leaving exhaustion in its wake. The image of Max’s foot—with that same pattern of dots that had been on Theo and Chloe—kept flashing in my mind. Whatever that symbol meant, people were dying to keep it secret.

And now Jack was heading straight for the man who might be orchestrating it all.

* * *

By the time we made it back home, the adrenaline and shock had started to fade, leaving me hollow and vulnerable. My body betrayed me with violent tremors that I couldn’t control, waves of delayed terror rolling through me like aftershocks from an earthquake. I’d seen death before—I made my living among the dead—but I’d never been so close to becoming one of them. Never felt someone else’s life explode across my skin in warm, wet fragments. Never watched the light disappear from a person’s eyes one second before it could have been mine.

I stared at my trembling hands, disgusted at my weakness. I knew this was par for the course—I’d been there before when cases had gone sideways—but it always made me feel like a weakling, like I was somehow failing at the strength Jack seemed to possess in endless supply.

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