This was so much worse than the betrayal she’d felt from Eric. Davis had made her believe they were working together to stop the saboteur. All the while, he was hoping to yank another person she loved out of her life.
She pulled her hand from the wall, pressed it to her chest as she spun and walked a little faster, desperate for escape. The ringing in her ears slowed, and she could hear Davis’s voice, farther away now, whispering, “I’ve got to go.”
She turned the knob on the front door slowly, pulled the door open as quietly as possible, then bolted for her car. Putting the key in the ignition seemed to take forever, but then she was speeding away from his house as fast as she could.
It was time to make a clean break from all the people who were lying to her. It was time to stop relying on the FBI to get to the truth. If she was going to prove that the people she loved weren’t responsible, she was going to have to do it herself.
It was time to investigate on her own.
Chapter Fifteen
The FBI still considered her a suspect. Not just for selling the military defective body armor, but also for illegally selling guns to criminals. Presumably even of killing her own father.
The fact that Davis didn’t believe she was responsible didn’t matter. He believed it was someone she loved. Despite all his promises to keep her informed, he was shutting her out.
On one hand, she understood. This was his job, and his top suspects were people close to her. But she’d given him access to everything, tried to help him find the person responsible, no matter who it was, no matter if it destroyed her career. Still, he didn’t trust her with the truth.
That meant she couldn’t trust him to keep her informed. She couldn’t trust him to handle this in a way that would spare all the employees at her company who weren’t guilty.
After she’d run from his house yesterday, he’d called her. She’d known if she ignored him, he would come over and check on her. So, she’d given herself a few minutes to calm down, for the ringing in her ears to fully subside, then she’d answered his call.
She’d been surprised how normal she’d sounded, how strangely calm she’d felt, as she told him that she’d needed to go home and process the news about her dad’s murder. He’d expressed all the right words, even offered to come and sit with her. He’d sounded so genuine that she’d clutched the phone until her hand hurt. But still, her voice had come out even and suitably sad to convince him she just needed time alone.
This morning, she’d waited in her car until he pulled into the office, then cornered him outside when she knew they wouldn’t have much time alone. She’d told him she wanted to focus on finding who was to blame for her father’s murder, then figure out whatever was going on with them afterward. She’d even managed to say it with a straight face.
He’d nodded, slid his fingers along the edge of her hand and promised, “We’re going to figure it out, Leila.”
It had taken everything she had not to scream. She’d considered tossing him off the property, denying him access, but that wouldn’t help anything. They still needed to find out who was destroying Petrov Armor, who was responsible for the deaths of all those soldiers. But she wasn’t about to feed Davis details about the people she loved and let him use the information to destroy them.
He could look at the company finances and security logs all he wanted. Eventually—hopefully—those things would lead him to the truth. That someone else was responsible, someone other than Uncle Joel or Eric. Even though she wasn’t Leila’s favorite person, someone other than Theresa, too.
Meanwhile, Leila had started her own investigation. The first thing she’d done was put an additional alert on the security system, to notify her if anyone tried to manually override anything. If someone was trying to take armor outside the building without going through proper procedures, Leila wanted to be sure she spotted it.
Now it was time to call in backup, the person she’d trusted with her deepest secrets since she was thirteen years old.
She hit an internal line on her phone and then asked, “Eric? Can you meet me at the loading dock? I want to discuss something with you.”
She knew Eric was still on Davis’s suspect list, but Eric had no motivation to wrong the company, to hurt her or her father. If he’d wanted to gain something—more money, a promotion—he could have done so easily without resorting to murder and sabotage.
She hung up before he could ask any questions, then slipped out through the front door. That morning, she’d set Davis up at a computer near where Theresa worked, giving him access to their gun database. She’d suggested he review it to see if he could figure out which gun identification numbers didn’t match up to legitimate sales. Davis had told her the Petrov Armor pistols from FBI case files had their ID numbers filed off. So, it wouldn’t be an easy match. But she’d suggested he look by date, see if he could come up with anything that seemed suspicious.
The truth was, she hoped he did find something, some evidence that would tie all of this to someone other than Joel, Eric or Theresa. The number of employees who’d been around long enough to be involved in the illegal sales for at least eleven years and had access to armor material wasn’t large. But it was certainly larger than just her uncle, her ex and Theresa.
Thinking of Theresa made her frown. She was the only one on Davis’s suspect list that Leila didn’t know as well. The woman wasn’t always friendly and could sometimes approach insubordinate. But she was paid well and seemed to
