Witness in Peril by Jodie Bailey

Author:Jodie Bailey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2022-01-04T23:07:43+00:00

NINE

Jacob shoved the chair away from the table and stood, ready to do battle.

But there was nothing to fight. There was only an envelope, resting in Ivy’s lap. Whatever it contained, it had stopped her cold. “Ivy, what’s wrong?”

She was silent. In the stillness that fell between them, he could hear the horses whinnying in the barn, probably protesting the change in air pressure brought on by the earlier storm.

“I don’t recognize this.” Gingerly, between two fingers, she lifted the envelope and settled it on the table between them, almost as if it burned.

Or as if she thought it might vanish into dust if she handled it too roughly.

Jacob slid his chair closer to the table and sat, eyeing the plain white business envelope. It looked too nondescript to be holding possible life-saving information. Still... “This could be what they’re looking for.”

“Or it could be more worthless stocks. Regardless, Clarissa must have put it in the file when she brought the bonds over to the office. It was on my desk, and I left the room for a few minutes while she was there to make some copies.” She shoved it closer to Jacob. “You open it.”

He did, surprised to find his own hand shook slightly. Adrenaline. Somehow, he just knew...this was the key to ending the threat to Ivy’s life.

He dumped out the contents of the envelope. There were about ten sheets of paper, folded in thirds. Some had been typed on a computer while others were handwritten on plain notebook paper. “Looks like letters.” He passed them to Ivy, not quite clear on what he legally could and couldn’t observe in her files. The last thing he wanted to do now was cross any legal lines.

She scanned the pages then sat straighter, her hope returning. “Jacob...” Her voice shook. When she finished scanning the first page, she looked up. “This can’t be real.”

“What?” Her face had gone pale, and she held the letters as though she was afraid someone would snatch them from their hands.

“These aren’t exactly letters. They’re more like journal entries and notes. Mr. Mendez was not Edward Mendez. He was Patrick Ramirez. Born in Tucson. And according to this he kept the books for a big-time loan shark in Las Vegas back in the late nineties, then testified against the guy in return for immunity. These are all things he wrote down. Stories. Bank-account numbers. Eyewitness accounts.”

“So either he ran and changed his name or WITSEC was involved.” It wasn’t such a far-fetched idea. Organized crime was woven through Las Vegas’s history. Although the city had become much more family-and tourist-friendly over the years, there were still threads of corruption and criminal activity. There was a long list of people who had traded their identities for immunity and freedom.

“If these are to be believed, then yes, although he didn’t move very far out of town. And apparently he also took several million dollars of the organization’s money with him when he got out.”

“Somebody wants that money back.

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