Liam scrubs his jaw. “There’s one from right field. I didn’t expect that. Does he know who the man is?”
“No. He’s just this perpetual mystery we can’t solve.”
He studies me with hooded eyes, several seconds ticking by. “About Jared--”
“I’d been with him all of an hour. He tracked me from my travel just like you did.”
“Why is he even involved in this?”
“He’s an old friend of my brother’s,” I explain and detail everything Jared has shared with me.
“You believe him?” Liam asks, sounding more than a little skeptical.
“He had a voice message from my brother begging him to protect me. I heard it, Liam. He’ll play it for you.”
“So your brother’s...alive.”
“Yes. Or he was. All these years he’s been alive and living a few blocks from me. But now--” Meg is gone. “Oh God.”
I sit up and Liam follows. “What is it, Amy?”
“Meg was my connection to whoever has Chad. I was so taken aback by Chad’s voicemail, I forgot how important her link to my brother is.” I scramble of the bed and cringe with cramps.
“Amy.” Liam is by my side in an instant, arms around me. “Easy, baby. What’s wrong?”
I swallow hard and straighten. “Nothing. I’m fine. It’s over. Just some cramps. From sex, I think.”
His brows furrow. “Is that normal?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll call Dr. Murphy.”
I grab his arm, urgent to save my brother’s life. “Not yet. Not now. My brother left me a message with Jared. He said he wasn’t going to make it through the night but to tell me 111 was the way to protect myself. I hope it’s also what these people want so we can get him back. I hope he’s still alive.”
“What’s 111?”
“He was doing this message in a bottle thing where he wrote notes and stuffed them inside it. I asked him what it was and he said ‘a hundred reasons why and eleven assholes’.”
“What does that mean?”
“I asked that and he said he hoped I never had to find out.”
“His back-up plan. Where is it?”
“My senior year, right before the fire, my gym class buried a time capsule at school to be opened in twenty years. My brother brought that bottle and put it inside.”
“Then we need to go dig up a time capsule. Right after we deal with Jared.”
Chapter Nineteen
It’s ten o’clock at night when we reach the back of my old high school near the football field, and the site of the buried time capsule. Tellar does the dirty work while I, Liam, and Jared keep our flashlights beaming for him. Thankfully, the building hides the lights from the main road. The capsule is buried close to the surface and the shovel clangs against metal in all of five minutes.
Tellar dusts off the big steel box and we squat around him as he lifts the lid. Anxiously, I dig through the various items placed with such care inside, relieved when I spot the bottle. “Thank God,” I whisper, removing it and hugging it to me. “Please let this be the ticket to saving Chad.”
Liam strokes my hair behind my ear. “Let’s hope, baby.”
Tellar shuts the lid and covers the hole and we kill our flashlights to make the dark trek back to Liam’s rental, a massive Land Rover that easily holds all four of us. Tellar and Jared pile in the front of the vehicle and Liam and I claim the back. I immediately uncork the bottle and start trying to remove the paper stashed inside.
“We should wait until we get to the motel again,” Liam warns, having arranged a nicer place for us to stay up the road that he says is safer. All I care is it’s farther from my old home. Being near it is harder than I’d thought it would be. But I’m not prepared to wait to get there.
“I need to know what’s inside and if it can save my brother.” I pull out several pieces of paper from the surprisingly wide opening of the bottle.
Liam curses and Tellar locks the doors with a grumble of, “I guess were doing this now.”
Obviously caving to my urgency, Liam beams his flashlight over one piece of paper after another until I prod, “Well?”
He glances around at all of our watchful gazes and announces, “Names, dates, and types of transactions. And the details are clear. They’re all illegal.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Jared says. “Powerful men believe they can get away with anything.”
Liam arches a brow.
“Some powerful men,” Jared amends. “And the jury is still out on you.”
“How do the crimes tie to Chad?” Tellar asks, ignoring the exchange.
A larger piece of paper piques my curiosity and I unroll it to see the names my brother had alluded to, with Sheridan’s name at the top. I hold it up and show it to Liam. “The eleven assholes.”
“What?” Jared and Tellar ask at the same time.
“When my brother was filling the bottle he said there were a hundred reasons ‘why’, whatever that means, and eleven assholes. These are the names of the eleven assholes.”
“Rich assholes,” Jared adds.
Liam glances at the list and hands it to Jared. “Anyone else you know on it?”
Jared gives it a once over. “I hacked for #3. Don’t know the rest.”
Tellar surveys the names. “No one from our research, but I’ll get Derek to run it through the FBI system.”
“Don’t,” Jared warns. “It could trigger alerts we don’t want with law enforcement. Chad would rather be dead than in jail, I promise you.”
I remove a larger piece of paper with my name on it and show it to Liam. His hand slides to my leg and he leans in as I unroll it, shining the light on it, and reading it with me.
