The Assignment

Chapter 29

Three months later...

Joey was released from the hospital a couple days after Veronica was apprehended. He'd lost a lot of blood and it took him a while to get his strength back up. I was there every single day, having almost every meal together and spending every night I could with him. Nurse Melissa bent the rules for us so I wouldn't have to worry about visiting hours. She'd been a joy to be around, and I was going to miss her. Sometimes when Joey was asleep, Melissa and I would talk about everything from her ex-husband to my plans after college. It was bittersweet when we hugged and said goodbye the day Joey discharged, but we promised to keep in touch.

Although I still wouldn't trust him completely, it turned out that Detective Rawlings had not been in on Mike's scheme. He'd just been doing a very shitty job of pinpointing the guilty parties. Despite his attitude, however, John did have the decency to apologize to me for the false accusations, as well as his mistake in ignoring the evidence Joey had brought him. He ended up being reprimanded for said mistake by his superiors.

Brad spent some time in jail before the trials began, but between he and Jack, I was able to get answers to all the questions I'd given him at the hospital.

My coworker, Heather, had been true to her word in not divulging our conversation when I'd called her on the run. Jack discovered that Mike had kept a record of nearly every conversation and deal made during the ordeal. On the day that Samantha called my burner phone, she'd gotten the number from Mike, who hoped she could get me to tell her our location because the transmitter signals were spotty that day. Though there was obvious animosity between Sam and I, that was the extent of the role she played in the crime, and the court's only punishment for her involvement was a fine for fifty dollars more than the two hundred that Mike had paid her.

During one of Veronica's many interrogations, it was revealed that the mysterious call to my burner from Fairytale Weddings had been an accident. She'd planned on trying to intimidate me into giving her the code to my aunt's records file – which I didn't even have – but when I wasn't the one who answered, Veronica hung up – or so she thought.

She never explained why she and one of Mike's minions had been at my aunt's business, but Joey had a theory that they'd been searching for client payment records to steal money from more people.

When I quizzed Joey on why he'd acted so strange about the call, he explained that he'd thought he heard voices on the other end mention Mike, but at the time, he'd still trusted Mike and never suspected him. He'd been so confused by the call; he hadn't wanted to say anything in case he could've been wrong. He deleted the number from my phone because he thought I might try calling back and potentially get myself in even more trouble. I told him I wished he'd just explained that to me at the time, and he promised never to act like that again.

Another of Brad and Jack's discoveries was that Mike had been the driver of the second black SUV that disappeared instead of following us to Marty's Car Mart. He'd fled the scene when things hadn't gone as planned, because he didn't want to chance Joey or me recognizing him. His original plan had been to corner us in our motel room and end the controversy there. The SUV was found a week later, hidden behind a nightclub that Veronica frequented.

Neither Brad nor Jack could give me an explanation for why Joey had a file on my aunt's homicide in his nightstand drawer, so I finally asked Joey, point blank. His answer was that he'd been trying to climb the ladder at the department, and the original detective on the case, Detective Blake, had allowed Joey to review evidence with him and given him a copy of the file. Joey had spent the weekend before we met going over it at the beach house. Detective Rawlings had acquired the case a couple days before Joey had arrived at my apartment, because Blake had been shot on the job and was expected to be in the hospital for quite some time. Rawlings never knew that Joey possessed a copy of the file until the investigators combed the beach house for evidence after Mike and his partners were killed.