phone number. My father passed away some years ago, and my uncle became a surrogate father to me. He didn’t approve of Dennis, and when I told him we were getting married, he said I was making a mistake. He didn’t think Dennis was good enough for me and because Dennis is—was—fifteen years younger than I am, thought he was after my money. He wanted me to marry someone in politics, someone with connections. But Dennis was charming and funny, and I didn’t care that he didn’t have money. I had enough for the two of us. I fell in love with him.
“But money became a big issue for us—more for Dennis than me, really. When I had our daughter, Emily, he became distant, withdrawn. He complained that he didn’t fit in at any of our social events, and…well, after a while, he stopped attending functions with me altogether, claiming that he had to work. We grew further apart. Money became a constant bone of contention between us, and I finally asked him for a divorce.”
Pain flickered across her face as she stared down at her hands and played with the wedding rings on her finger.
She lifted her gaze and continued. “After a while, Dennis started talking about a reconciliation, but I didn’t think it was a good idea. We were so different, and for six years we hadn’t been able to make our marriage work.” Her expression became earnest. “One day he told me that he was working on something big—an exposé that was lifechanging. He said he’d noticed a pattern in some data that he’d collected, but every time I asked him about the details, he dodged the questions. I didn’t believe him, but he was so insistent, I started to wonder. I hired a private investigator to follow him. That’s when I found out about…the other woman.” She swallowed.
Miles opened his briefcase and removed a mini-computer that looked like a silver portable DVD player. He pressed his thumb to the biometric panel on top and it snapped open. He shoved it across the table to Cruz.
The dark screen lit up and populated with a series of photos, and Cruz flipped through them. The first few were of buildings, but he stopped when he came to the photo of a woman. He was immediately captivated by one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen.
She had golden skin and laughing brown eyes and was thick bodied with a round face. In the photo, she wore an off-the-shoulder, loose-fitting dress covered in a gold and blue geometric design, and her pink lips were puckered toward the person holding the camera. In another photo, she was standing with a flower in her hand. The picture looked like it could have been pulled from her Instagram account, with its perfect lighting and the way the sun reflected off her curly black hair.
“The few days my investigator followed him, Dennis spent a lot of time with the woman in the photos. One night he slept over at her apartment.”
“What’s her name?” Cruz asked.
“Shanice Lawrence. She left Texas three days after he died, and we lost track of her for a while but found her in Miami a few days ago. If anyone knows why he was killed, I believe she does, and if she had anything to do with it, I want her punished to the fullest extent of the law.”
Cruz tore his gaze from the beguiling woman in the photos. “They officially ruled his death a suicide?”
Miles spoke up. “The official conclusion was suicide by hanging.”
“What’s the unofficial conclusion?” Cruz asked.
Miles glanced at Karen from the corner of his eye before answering in a grave voice, “We believe he was tortured to death.”
Karen winced and closed her eyes.
Cruz shook his head in disgust. Torture should always be a last resort. For one, it didn’t always yield the answers people wanted, and then there were results like this, where the torturer went too far and the interrogation ended in a mess.
There were better ways to get information out of people. Fear and intimidation worked in a pinch because a prisoner in a bad situation did not want the situation to get worse. Cruz’s favorite method was to get the mark to trust him. It was a delicate dance and took time, but if done right, yielded the best results.
“Any idea what he was investigating?”
Miles nodded at Karen to continue.
“No, but for every major assignment he worked on, he kept a separate