She took another bite and swallowed. “I’m not sure why Errol and Ariana hated me and my mother so much. My mother wanted nothing to do with them after she found dear old grandma through a private investigator. Only to discover Ariana had tried to sell her to the highest bidder.”
“Is that what made you want to become a P.I.?”
“No, that’s what made me want to become an FBI agent. In my naïve youth, I actually thought they were the good guys.”
“Most are.” Good guys who were usually assholes.
“Not the ones I worked with,” she said, placing the seared bulgogi beef onto a lettuce leaf, loading it up with rice, hot peppers, and bean paste. “I was framed for the mishandling of evidence that I was asked to pull from a secure location by one of my superiors.” She took a rather large bite for such a small person. “When the evidence went missing, he denied ever instructing me to pull it in the first place and, on top of that, claimed I never brought the evidence to him. I was pegged as the guilty party.”
“Let me guess, you got tagged for drugs.”
He took another bite of his grilled pork belly as she finished off the bulgogi beef wrap.
“You got it. One point one pounds of fentanyl. They didn’t charge me, as the evidence was considered circumstantial, a ‘he said, she said,’ scenario. But I was a first-year agent and lost my job while my life-timer of a lying boss got a big fat promotion.”
“You think Errol or Flynn or whatever the fuck their names are were responsible?”
“I know they were.” She hesitated. “But not Flynn. Errol and Ariana.”
“How?”
“After the Bureau dropped the case against me and terminated my contract, Errol sent two thugs to my apartment to rough me up and convince me to leave town.”
His eyes widened. What the fuck?
She nodded “Broke my arm.” She took another generous bite of a spicy Korean rice cake. “Unfortunately, I’m slow on the uptake and became a P.I. to leverage the skills I learned working for the Bureau. So while I took pictures of cheating husbands, on the side, I researched the wrongdoings of my estranged family. Then, out of nowhere, I get a call from Marshall Shepherd. Who hires me and puts me on retainer to keep an eye on my morally defunct uncle and twisted grandmother.”
“You must have been successful.”
“I am…was… I mean, I was able to keep two steps ahead of them at every turn. But I had a security team, hired by Marshall, who babysat me twenty-four seven. It’s a lot easier to keep track of criminals when you’ve got a team of men and women the size of sheds protecting your back.”
“What went wrong?”
Tatiana had just picked up a dumpling and then it was as if her internal light shut down, along with her appetite. She dropped the dumpling, set her chopsticks down, and sat back in her chair, her face instantly sad. “Marshall got sick.”
Grant nodded and then fidgeted as she wiped those pillow soft lips with a napkin.
“I failed to recognize a wolf in sheep’s clothing who was right under my nose. Under everyone’s noses.” Her hand fisted around the napkin. “So stupid,” she said, almost to herself.
“Who was it?”
Clearly, she was reticent to divulge that critical piece of information as she unfolded the crumpled napkin and then smoothed it out while chewing her bottom lip.
Just as quickly her spine stiffened, as if having weighed her options and determined, what the fuck, she said, “His name is Dr. Hillsboro. Dr. William Hillsboro. He’s the man who was given orders to force me into a coma and to kill Marshall Shepherd.”