will do it; I won’t play with her like Donnelly. Wham bam, dead.”
“Not now. But later. I promise, when everything dies down, you can do it.”
“You really promise?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. I’ll go.”
“Be safe.”
He ended the call. Thank God he didn’t tell Elise where he was or who had broken him out of prison. She was too wild, too impulsive, and while Jimmy Hunt wasn’t overly concerned about Jonathan Paxton, he was a tiny bit concerned about what he would do if he got really angry.
Elise was his daughter and he loved her. She was the only family he had left. He didn’t want her dead.
He finished his meal and his beer and Mrs. Yancey asked him if he’d like to freshen up. He would—it had been a long, exhausting day. She escorted him to a suite on the second floor.
When he was alone, he took out his burner phone and called one of his two men who were on site.
“Trevor, it’s Jimmy. You and Paul being treated well?”
“Yeah—we have this apartment over the garage and there’s a fucking full bar.”
“Don’t get drunk. Rest up, we’re leaving before dawn.”
Chapter Forty
HOUSTON, TEXAS
Lucy had Megan with her in the hotel suite, and Rick and Kate were both on speakerphone. She was brief, because how she came to the conclusion was not relevant, but she wanted them to at least know she wasn’t pulling this theory out of thin air. She went through the methodology of looking into Michael Thompson’s past and why it had seemed so familiar to her.
“And when I saw that Thompson had served with Sergio Russo in the Army, I knew why his MO was familiar. He, like Russo, lost a child to a sex offender. Jonathan Paxton feeds off the grief and despair of these lost men. He turns them into vigilantes.”
“Senator Paxton?” Kate asked.
“It’s exactly how he operates.”
“Lucy,” Rick said, “this is a leap. There’s no connection between Jimmy Hunt and Paxton—Paxton is a narcissist with a God complex who saw himself as judge, jury, and executioner. But he went after other criminals. Hunt is the epitome of everything Paxton hates about our system, and the reason he thought he had to take the law into his own hands.”
“True, but Paxton is blinded by his rage, twisted by his grief and guilt over his daughter’s murder. He worked with criminals in the past for what he saw as the greater good,” Lucy reminded him. “Do you know how many times he called me Monique?”
There was silence, because they all knew that Lucy bore a striking resemblance to Jonathan Paxton’s long-dead daughter.
“I know Jonathan didn’t go to prison,” Lucy said. “He cut a plea deal after his conspiracy to poison sex offenders in prison didn’t work.” She had been angry about the agreement, even though she understood the reasons. Paxton could have made a lot of people’s lives extremely difficult if he ever stood trial. It would have come out that he’d orchestrated a conspiracy that targeted sex offenders. He could have easily become a martyr, a leader in a vigilante movement that would destroy society. People would follow in his footsteps.
Lucy, more than anyone, knew that the system sometimes failed. That some evil people evaded justice; the system couldn’t catch or prosecute all of them. But without the system, they had nothing. No laws or punishment; no rules or morals. There would be a vacuum, and someone would fill it.
Their system, however flawed it was, was the best thing they had going for them. To protect the rights of the innocent, some of the guilty went free. They were not God; they couldn’t see all. They didn’t know everything.
Lucy believed in the system … even though the system, at this moment in time, thought her husband was a killer. Even when she knew that sometimes the law enforcers got it wrong.
“Well?” she said when no one spoke. “I’m not wrong.”
“Why?” Rick asked. “What you’re saying is incredible, to be honest. I’m not saying I disagree, but what would Paxton’s motive be? Put aside the hit man—because yes, that is his MO. He finds men who have lost someone they love and twists their grief into vigilante justice. That Thompson served in the Army with Russo—who is still a fugitive—convinces me this angle is viable. But what’s the connection to these victims? A drug dealer and a councilman who may have taken bribes? What’s the connection to Hunt?”
“I don’t know why Hunt. But I know why those victims. The teacher in