Page 88 of After All The Wreckage

“And following us around D.C. is your way of asking?” I scoffed.

“I know you don’t have any reason to trust me, Rory.”

I bristled at my name falling from his lips. I pushed the gun into his neck a little harder and had to give him credit for not reacting.

“But your mom did,” he added. “She was working my case before she crashed.”

My chest nearly exploded at the mention of my mom. A month ago, I would have believed I’d known every file she was working on, but the last few days had crumbled that belief like a sandcastle being washed out to sea.

“Tell me why a Space Force astronaut needed a private investigator, Casada.” I used his name on purpose. So he knew I was aware of who he was just like he’d known me.

He glanced down at my weapon, and I pulled it away, returning it to its spot underneath my jacket. I took a step back, running into Gage. He put a hand on my waist as if to steady me, and the warmth of him drifted through me as I warily assessed the mammoth man in front of us.

Casada wasn’t taller than Gage, but he was twice as wide, and it was all carefully crafted muscle. He pushed his sunglasses up, resting them over the brim of a NASA cap, and I was hit with the same pair of green eyes that had looked out at me from his bio page.

“She really didn’t tell you anything about what we were investigating?”

Thewestung almost as much as the disappointment in his eyes. Why had she trusted him and not me?

“I know she was worried enough to encode her notes.”

He lifted a large hand, scratching the back of his neck, and then glanced around. “Can we go somewhere to talk? This isn’t exactly?—”

“No,” I said. Behind me, Gage stiffened. “But you can sit in the back seat of our car, and I’ll hear you out.”

I whirled around and headed for the SUV. After a beat, I heard two sets of footsteps following me. Gage and I got in up front, and Casada stuffed himself into the back next to Ivy’s car seat. He glanced at it and then up to me as if surprised by it.

“Talk,” I said.

“Hallie was helping me investigate Argento Skies.”

Because I’d already suspected it, I simply met his stare with a steady one of my own.

“My family lives in Parkerville, Colorado. Ever heard of it?” he asked.

I’d read about it last night, but he continued without waiting for my answer.

“Its claim to fame now is being one of the highest elevations in the United States, but it once was known for its silver and turquoise mines. The silver mining left contamination in the soil and water. Kids, pregnant women, and people with weak immune systems are tested regularly to make sure they don’t end up with silver iodide toxicity.”

“This is about the cloud seeding lawsuit.”

His eyes flickered with a surprise that came and went. “My mom died. Kidney failure caused by silver toxicity. Except my mom had never had symptoms until a year before her death. She’d lived there her entire life and had never been sick.”

“Cloud seeding doesn’t put enough silver iodide into the air or the water to be harmful,” Gage said with a frown as he repeated what he’d told me the night before.

“Normally, that’s the case. Except, Argento Skies is running five times the ground-based generators they’re reporting. And there was a major spill from a tanker hauling the chemical in 2020 that no one did anything to clean up. They cited some bullshit about it not being more than what was naturally occurring. A year later, my mom was dead and large portions of our community had their skin changing color and were havingbreathing issues along with constant nausea. Toxicity that had been all but dormant for several decades came roaring back to life.”

“If the number of ill people is that large, there has to be an investigation going on,” I said.

Casada’s face grew tight. “You’d think, right? But their CEO, Shawn Walden, has ties here in Washington.”

West’s words from the phone call came back to me. He and Dunn had to be the ones who’d helped Shawn bury this.

“I tried to convince Argento Skies to stop what they were doing. After they stopped taking my calls and emails, I cornered their former CEO, Tim Walden, in the bathroom of his favorite restaurant. I shoved a printout of the numbers at him, and when he read it, he acted like he was completely surprised. Even looked sick about it. He said he hadn’t received any of the information I’d sent, but that he’d get to the bottom of it. A month later, his plane crashed and his brother took over. Shawn made it very clear if I pursued my so-called attack on his company, he had people who could end my career as an astronaut.”

“You think he killed his brother?” Gage asked, surprise in every syllable.

“I think it’s an awfully big coincidence otherwise,” Casada said, an echo of what I’d been thinking, and my mom must have thought it too. Every word only continued to confirm that West had been talking to Shawn Walden on the phone earlier.