Page 17 of Secrets Beneath the Waves (Beach Read Thrillers #2)

CHAPTER

SEVENTEEN

Ramon ran to the edge, and his momentum nearly sent him flying over.

His foot slid down the gravel ridge, sending a spray of dirt and small rocks down the hill.

He grabbed the closest tree and hung on, trying not to go down the same way Zeyla had.

If he did that, the steepness of the hill would have him tumbling to his death.

He scanned the ground, everywhere he could see.

The whole thing was far too steep to keep his footing without a rope to stop him from falling all the way to the bottom.

What they needed was a rescue team with rock climbing gear and medical supplies.

If he tried to go after her, he was only going to be as injured as she was.

Or dead.

He sank to his knees and started to slide down the hill. The loose gravel wanted to suck him the way of gravity, relentlessly pulling him to the bottom. One step and he would be falling.

“Zeyla!”

He yelled her name a couple more times, then waited. Listening as hard as he could for the sound of her yelling back to him.

But there was no answer.

Finally, he spotted her all the way at the bottom of the hill—more like a cliff for all he was able to scale his way down there. She lay curled up on the ground, unmoving.

He called her name again, two more times. Trying to convince himself that wasn’t blood in her hair.

She was gone.

Dead, just like Miguel. He stared down at his hands, now stained with Miguel’s blood. Ramon had wanted to be a different kind of person, but he was still exactly the guy he had always been. The person he always would be. No matter what happened, that man was always going to be inside him.

He wasn’t sure how long he waited, sitting there and watching to see if she moved. He called out a few more times, but Zeyla never answered. If he wanted to get her back, even just her body, then someone else was going to have to go down there.

Exhausted and covered in dirt, Ramon managed to stand. The nausea in his stomach persisted, but he decided not to think about it. Or the way Miguel looked lying there on the ground, blood soaking into the dirt beneath him.

Ramon crouched and went through the man’s pockets, finding his wallet and cell phone, along with the car keys.

He took the cash from Miguel’s wallet and used his face to unlock the phone before changing the password to an easy pin.

He stared at the screen and the blank background where someone with a life and a family would have put a picture.

But there was nothing. Because Miguel’s life wasn’t one with personal attachments, and he didn’t cling to any places.

Ramon’s phone had an image of a New Mexico sunset, a spur of the moment image he’d snapped one night when they were out on a case.

Bruce had stopped to admire the colors of the sky with him, but Zeyla hadn’t bothered.

Because in all her life, the ability to find peace and finally make her life as she wanted it hadn’t happened yet.

She had still been waiting for her future to start.

The things the rest of them had taken so much for granted were what Zeyla had been working for. And would have given her life to gain.

Tonight, she might have done exactly that. Which meant it was up to him to ensure that her death had been worth it.

Ramon used Miguel’s phone to call Maizie’s number.

It rang a number of times before she finally answered. “Banbury Investigations.”

He tried to speak, but the words caught. He cleared his throat. “It’s Ramon.” He cleared his throat again. “Can you pull everything from this phone and find out who hired him to kill me and Zeyla?”

“What’s going on?” Maizie asked gently. “Did something happen?”

“I’ll leave the line open so you can pull everything from this phone. I’ll use mine to—” He hadn’t had any signal on the way up this mountain. “How does Miguel have signal?”

Ramon had to plant a hand on his chest and breathe, feeling like he was a hundred years old all of a sudden. As if he had just run a one mile sprint or worked out harder than he had in his life. He closed his eyes, but all he saw was Zeyla lying at the bottom of the cliff.

Maizie said, “Looks like whoever owns this phone had it upgraded so that it pulls from satellite signal. You’re calling me over Wi-Fi signal.”

He lowered the phone and looked at the screen. Sure enough, Miguel had no cell signal, but he did have an internet connection that enabled Ramon to use Wi-Fi calling.

All he wanted to do was lay back on the ground and not even try to fight the exhaustion. But he couldn’t do that if he was going to find the person ultimately responsible for Zeyla’s death and bring them to justice.

He cleared his throat again. “I need you to call Amara and tell her to come to Spokane.” Zeyla’s mother would want to be here when emergency services recovered her body.

“What happened, Ramon?”

He tried to speak, but the words didn’t even make it to his mouth.

What was he supposed to say? He could barely comprehend what had happened here, let alone figure out how to explain it to someone else.

But he wasn’t going to be able to avoid the truth for long.

Kenna needed to know what had happened to her cousin—the closest thing to a sister she was probably ever going to have.

Zeyla’s mother needed to know where to find her daughter’s body.

This was the kind of thing that could tear their team apart. All of them fully aware of how much they had lost out on with Zeyla’s death. No way for them to get to know her. All that time they could’ve spent being a family, nothing but a dream now.

The phone dropped from his hands onto the dirt, and tears burned in his eyes, obscuring everything.

Almost as if trying to wash it all away.

But there was nothing that could erase what had happened.

Nothing that could change the outcome. The team would suffer the blow of losing Zeyla, and Ramon would have to walk away, unable to face them in the light of the reality of who he really was.

He grabbed the phone and ended the call to thumb through text messages, trying to locate the method Miguel had been using to communicate with whoever hired him to kill Zeyla. He swallowed against the lump in his throat and pushed through the sensation.

Whoever had paid the bill on this one and hired a killer to come after them was going to regret targeting him and his friends. Ramon found a secure messaging app buried in the menu, something completely untraceable that he had heard was a new app that a lot of black-market criminals were using now.

Miguel had only been in communication with one other person, and they hadn’t been talking long.

Ramon found images of Milo Hargrove and Zeyla Brierson—that last name wasn’t one Ramon had ever heard her use—along with instructions for Miguel to send images of their dead bodies as proof that the job was done.

All the conversation was sparse and clipped, so he knew this wasn’t someone Miguel had known well; otherwise, there would be more rapport between the two of them.

For all his faults, Miguel hadn’t worked for these people because he agreed with anything they were doing.

In fact, if Ramon had explained it, Miguel would probably have walked away, not wanting anything to do with them.

The image that the killer had sent of Milo left no doubt that the man was dead. Which confirmed that Miguel was the one who had killed the conspiracy theorist in his bunker.

The phone started to ring again, an incoming call from Maizie’s number. Ramon swiped it away and tried to figure out how he was going to find out who was behind this thread. Given the security features on this app, Maizie might not even be able to see the messages stored in it.

He sent a simple message on the thread.

It’s done.

Three dots popped up, and a second later, the response came.

Send proof.

Ramon pushed out a breath that shuddered from him.

He couldn’t deviate too far from the instructions Miguel was given, or it would be far too suspicious that someone else was using the phone.

But if he played this right, he might be able to get whoever it was on the other end to meet with him in person.

He got to his feet and went to the edge, leaning against the tree so he didn’t fall down the steep hill. Zooming in to take the picture was about one of the worst things he’d ever had to do. She still lay there, unmoving. He sniffed back the tears that gathered and sent the picture.

He followed it up with a message.

We meet in person for payment.

The response came back.

Always.

Well, at least Ramon wasn’t going to have to fight too hard to get this person to meet him face-to-face.

Unless that was the point, because whoever hired Miguel probably had no intention of paying him and only wanted to kill him so that he could never tell anyone who they were.

Which meant this entire thing could be a setup that Ramon wouldn’t be able to walk away from.

Right now, he could honestly say that he didn’t care if he lived or died. After all, what was the point in trying to prolong a life that was already miserable?

A location pin popped up in the message thread. Ramon looked up how long it would take to get there from here and responded.

One hour.

He figured the extra time wouldn’t hurt when he needed to plan what he was going to do.

Arriving somewhere early and getting the lay of the land was never a bad thing in a situation like this, and he’d given himself plenty of time to scout out the meeting spot so that he could at least try and have the upper hand.

After locating where he had dropped Miguel’s keys, Ramon glanced back over at the edge. Zeyla was still down there. But there was nothing he could do to help her. Not anymore.

He called 911 on the cell phone, and when the dispatcher answered, he asked for both Life Flight and rescue firefighters. “I saw him. This guy, he shoved a woman over the edge, and she fell down there.”

“Is she alive?” the dispatcher asked.

“I don’t—” He tried to say that he didn’t know, but the words caught in his throat and stuck there.

Ramon lowered the phone and ended the call.

He tossed the phone on the ground and walked away, leaving it so that emergency services could find the location and recover Zeyla’s body.

Maizie was already hooked into the phone, gathering all the information they would need, so there was no reason to take it with him.

He climbed into the car, opened the door, and vomited on the ground.

Before he could think twice about leaving the scene, Ramon drove away, spraying gravel at the trees around him as he turned on the rutted road and put the whole scene in his rearview.

She was gone.

And there was nothing he could do about it except find the person responsible.