Detective Marinetti shook his head. “Not Scott. Cash Kelly. He agreed to this right away. In all of my years, I’ve never seen him roll over for anyone.” He paused. “Anyone but you.”
I crossed my arms over my chest, feeling a chill all of a sudden. “I’m his wife.”
“It shows,” Detective Marinetti said. “Still. It’s something to see. Like a man walking on the moon.”
“He wanted you out,” Harrison said, narrowing his eyes at me. “And he didn’t want the charges to stick.”
I nodded, but my brother kept staring at me. Finally, I mouthed what?, and he shook his head and turned to face the window.
A second later, Scott stomped in. He stood across from Kelly, looking down on him.
“Glad you could finally make it,” Kelly said, relaxing even further into his seat.
“I’m only doing this for one reason,” Scott said, his jaw hard. “My partner.”
“Marinetti.” Kelly nodded. “There’s a man who knows how to do his job and then shut if off at the end of his shift.”
“You don’t know a thing about his fucking job.”
“You’re nothing without me,” Kelly said, opening and closing his hands around the cup. “I’ve always known that. You know that. That’s why you despise me.”
“Nothing without you,” Scott spit back at him.
“If I didn’t exist.” He pointed to his chest. Then he pointed at Scott. “You wouldn’t exist.”
“You know what wouldn’t exist? Your marriage.” Scott placed two hands on the table, narrowing his eyes at Kelly. “Mine. You went after what was mine. You manipulated her into marrying you.”
Kelly shrugged. “In the beginning, but we both know it’s turned into something else.”
“What would that be?”
“That’s between my wife and me.” Kelly’s grin came slow. “But you have eyes. You see it. Even feel it.”
The entire room seemed to still while Kelly and Stone stared at each other from across the table.
Then Scott leaned in a little closer, a grin to match Kelly’s on his face. “You have no idea who Ronan Kelly really was. Maraigh.” Scott pronounced the word like MA-RAH. I’d heard some of the men that worked for Kelly call his father the same thing. “You walk this earth like you have a purpose. Like what you do means something. Because it meant something to your old man. Go back home for a while, Kelly, and ask your ma if she has the same hero worship for the man who ruined her life.”
I was so stunned by what Scott had said that it took me a minute to look at Harrison, who was staring at me. Cash Kelly’s mom was dead. She’d died before he left Ireland with Ronan. Father Flanagan had told me.
Kelly stood to his full height, and even though he hadn’t lost his cool, I could tell the tiger on his neck had made it to his eyes.
“Did you ever tell my wife the connection you had to the man who killed her sister?” Kelly paused, and it felt like all oxygen had been sucked from my lungs. “Bert Langster was your father’s best friend. He was having marital problems, if I recall, and was chasing after his wife in another car, got reckless in his anger, and killed an innocent child and her grandparents on the way to a Broadway show. Miraculously, the charges were dropped.”
“Then, to return a favor he owed, Maraigh had Bert Langster killed.”
It wasn’t Kelly or Scott who had spoken those words, but my brother. Bert Langster was the man who killed Roisin and our grandparents. A year after they were killed, they found him in his car, dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. He let the car run in his garage for too long. Or that was what I overheard my mam telling one of my aunts.
“What are you talking about?” I barely got out.
“Da,” Harrison said. “Ronan Kelly used to buy from his shop in Hell’s Kitchen.” Then he glanced at Detective Marinetti—he didn’t want to say any more.
Our father had opened an imported glass shop when we were little. He only sold things you could find in Ireland and Scotland. He must have gone to Ronan Kelly after my sister was killed, seeking justice through lawless means.
My father.
The man who rarely spoke—we all joked that my mam had stolen all of his words—had gotten another man killed, a man who had walked free of a crime that stole my other half.
I wondered if it was Ronan Kelly or his son, my husband, who