INFORMANT by Payne Ava Archer

Author:Payne, Ava Archer [Payne, Ava Archer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AAP Publishing
Published: 2015-07-10T07:00:00+00:00

Day Forty-Five

Late Afternoon

It’s Tuesday, and I’m sitting alone in the basement of the J. Paul Leonard library at SFSU, searching the online archives and databases. The research I’m doing has nothing to do with any of my classes, and everything to do with Beckett. I’ve been hunched over a computer screen for so long that my back is killing me, but I have no intention of stopping until I find what I’m looking for.

I’m combing through documents and newspaper clippings more then a decade old, looking for details of an event that occurred on the opposite side of the country. After three and a half hours of intense, painstaking research, I find the proof I’m looking for in a small Miami newspaper. It doesn’t surprise me—really, the article is just confirmation of something I instinctively knew—but seeing the raw facts so impersonally printed in a newspaper column makes my breath hitch. I stare at the computer screen, my heart racing.

I read it once, and then twice. With shaking fingers, I send Jane a text: Does anybody else know?

Beckett answers immediately. Know?

About Florida.

I chew my thumbnail as I wait for his response. Beckett knows I’m intelligent. That I have a curious streak I can’t contain. That I know how to put things together. He won’t be surprised that I’ve looked into the circumstances surrounding his sister’s death. What surprises me is that his bosses at the DEA haven’t made the same connection I have.

Then again, why would they? Beckett was a high school kid at the time, living in upstate New York. Why would anyone connect him to the tragic death of an innocent bystander in a Miami dance club over a decade ago, particularly as the surname he and the victim shared is Smith.

According to the newspaper, everything Beckett told me was true. I never doubted that. It just felt incomplete. As it turns out, my hunch was correct. He left out one small detail. The dealer allegedly responsible for the violence—though never arrested and charged with the crime—was a wealthy Cuban immigrant named Miguel Diaz.

Miguel Diaz is responsible for the murder of his sister.

There’s probably official protocol in the DEA to deal with situations like this. I assume it’s expected that Beckett would remove himself from the case. Just the opposite is happening, of course. He’s digging in deeper. He specifically asked to be assigned to Diaz’s case. He recruited me to get close to Ricco. The hatred he feels for the man overrides everything else.

It tears me apart, but I understand it. If it had been Jess who was brutally shot down in that Miami nightclub, I would do everything I could to destroy the person responsible for her murder. He and I have that in common. Beckett will not stop until he’s avenged his sister’s death. Even if it costs him his job, his life… me.

So that’s where we are. Question: How do you shrug off the murder of someone you love? Answer: You can’t.

His next text confirms this.

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