Kane scowled as she looked at him pointedly, but he spoke up. “My CI set up the meet for me. He told the BECA contact that I’d had someone here willing to sell me guns illegally, but it fell through. I probed a little, trying to see if I’d get a reaction. Said my contact was inside Petrov Armor, but it seemed like the illegal gun sales there dried up when the new CEO stopped the legal side of the gun distribution. He texted someone right after I said that.” Kane cringed. “I’m sorry, man. Given the timing...”
The person Kane’s BECA contact had texted was the man who’d followed Leila from her office and tried to kill her. That guy still wasn’t talking, and Kane’s contact was now dead.
Davis’s hands fisted hard under the table and he could feel his heart beat faster, rushing blood to those hands, ready to fight. But he pushed back the instinct, nodded tightly. It was a logical move on Kane’s part. They knew someone inside Petrov Armor was selling guns off the books. Bringing it up was what any good investigator—one who wasn’t blinded by a target in the investigation—would do.
“The good news is, that tells us something,” Melinda said, her gaze darting from him to Kane and back again.
“The guy you were meeting with didn’t know why the gun production was halted. Once he realized who was to blame, he wanted revenge,” Davis stated, a million possible implications running through his mind. If BECA members really had been getting guns off the books from someone at Petrov Armor, they’d probably been feeling the pinch since Leila stopped gun production. The inside source couldn’t get as many guns out without drawing attention. Typically, someone in that position would tell their customer about their pain. The fact that the seller hadn’t told BECA the guns were drying up because of Leila probably meant that person was protecting her, didn’t want BECA or any other buyers to know she’d been the one who’d shut things down.
“It seems more and more likely that Leila’s dad was in charge of the illegal gun sales. And that his partner killed him because of what Leila did. Maybe he’d meant to just threaten him, try to get him to restart production, but the threat went wrong, and Neal ended up dead. It probably took about a year for their stock to run out to the point where the illegal sales would be noticed. Turning to cheap armor to bank the extra money isn’t working out the way this person expected,” Kane said.
“Leila said the excess guns were destroyed, but I assume that’s just what she was told, and Neal or his partner simply moved the remainder to sell off books. But what if it wasn’t Neal?” Davis thought of the picture Leila kept on the credenza behind her desk. An image of her and her father, sitting next to each other at some outdoor function, both of them with heads thrown back and laughing. “What if he was never involved at all?”
Kane’s lips turned up in a “give me a break” expression. “Your objectivity is shot.”
“Maybe,” Davis admitted, because the truth was that he didn’t want Leila’s father to be involved. Not because of anything to do with the investigation. Simply because he didn’t want Leila to feel that kind of betrayal from the father she’d loved so much and who she’d barely begun to grieve.
“But hear me out,” Davis pressed when Kane looked like he was going to keep theorizing how the attack pointed even more to Leila’s father being involved. “Her father has been dead for three weeks. If his partner killed him because he was angry that Neal supported Leila’s decision to stop the gun side of the business, why didn’t he tell his customers as soon as Neal was out of the way? If it was just Neal who was trying to hide Leila’s involvement, why wouldn’t his partner spill what had happened as soon as he killed Neal? Wouldn’t he have bragged to BECA that he was going to turn things around, get the guns flowing again? Three weeks after Neal’s death, why wouldn’t they already know who was to blame, before Kane told them?”
Melinda nodded slowly and even Kane looked a little less skeptical now.
“Maybe Neal’s partner is also trying to protect Leila,” Melinda suggested. “It makes sense that Neal would run the illegal side of the business with someone he trusts, someone he’s close to. It also makes sense that he’d want to keep his daughter out of it. But what about his brother? Or the guy he thought of like a son, but wasn’t really his son?”
“Yeah,” Davis agreed, even though he didn’t like this theory much better, because it still meant someone Leila cared about deeply was betraying her. “Both Joel and Eric would want to protect Leila. But would either of them really kill Neal? They’re both taking his death hard.”
“Or pretending to,” Kane interjected. “You’ve been FBI long enough to know that the most successful criminals are two-faced. They’ve all got families they probably love. They’re loved at the office. But deep down, it’s all about number one. Anyone who’s pulled this off for at least a decade—and honestly, I’ve got to believe it’s a lot longer—is a pretty successful criminal.”
“It makes Theresa less likely as a suspect,” Melinda said. “She and Leila don’t get along, right? She wouldn’t protect Leila, try to keep her name out of it?”
“Probably not.” Davis sighed. “But she was the one with the best access for swapping out the armor. Neither Joel nor Eric have a lot of contact with the raw materials.”
“But they all have general access. They could go in after hours,” Kane said. “Any luck with that?”
Davis shook his head, his mind still trying to unravel a scenario where Leila’s father wasn’t involved at all. But he’d founded the company; he was one of the few people who’d been there
