Page 50 of A Corruption Dark & Deadly

Annie pressed her lips together, her arms tightening across her chest at the name. “Why do you say that?” she asked him.

“Because there’s absolutely no reason why I would kill her unless I was getting revenge for you,” he said. “The evidence is weak. I know enough not to leave evidence behind and I pay my friends well enough to know if I did, they would make it disappear. But the fact that I married you and her dead body has turned up makes this all extremely suspicious.”

“What can we do?” Annie asked.

“Annie, until this blows over, your life with me is not going to be a happy one,” he told her. “This house is going to get ransacked by the cops because, even though there’s not enough evidence to arrest me, the circumstantial evidence will definitely be enough to get a warrant to search all of my homes.”

“Did you put your name on the deed?” Annie asked, raising a brow.

“What?” Jericho asked, confused by her question. “No, but that doesn’t matter. I still stay here. Bennet knows that.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Annie told him. “If it’s still Bruce’s house, they can’t just get a warrant with the same evidence they used to search your place. Maybe they’ll be able to eventually but Bennet doesn’t know if you stay here on a consistent basis or if you returned back to your penthouse. I know you’ve been doing a lot of business in the city before we got married. He might not even mention this place.”

“I don’t know,” Jericho said, placing his finger on the tip of his chin. “Bennet is thorough but he also doesn’t like innocent lives to get caught up in the crosshairs. He probably figured Gonzales was innocent, despite what she did to your parents, and decided this wasn’t what he wanted anymore.” He shook his head. “What a shame. He was my second-hand, my most loyal employee.”

“When did you kill Gonzales?” Annie asked him in a quiet voice. It wasn’t important information but she was curious as to when this happened. And a quiet, morbid part of her also wondered how it happened but she chose not to ask that.

“The night I met you,” he told her. She knew he was telling the truth. “I tracked her down to a one-bedroom apartment. No kids. No spouse. No surprise. She let me in easily. And I choked her after making her admit she killed your parents. I had Bennet dispose of her body.”

"Why did you do you that?" Annie asked, awed and slightly fearful. Not that she thought he would do anything similar to her but that he was capable of such brutality simply because someone had unknowingly hurt her. There was no way for Gonzales to have known about Annie and Bruce. All she was thinking about was herself. Did that make her a bad person? Annie couldn't say and she didn't feel comfortable judging. It did make Gonzales human. Did that mean she deserved to die?

Annie wasn't sure. She didn't think she was allowed to decide that. But staring at Jericho in front of her, it seemed he thought he could decide that. There was no regret, no doubt, about what he did. He was right and he truly believed that. Annie couldn't fault him for that, though. She knew, in his head, he was only thinking about her, about protecting her, about extracting revenge and eliminating someone who had eliminated the two most important people in her life. That was who he was. Did that make him right? No. perhaps not. But could she hold it against him? Did she want to?

"Because she took your family away from you," he told her in a soft voice. "And I loved you from the minute I saw you so I couldn't let that go. Not seeing the way you looked knowing Bruce had given up the house."

Annie clenched her jaw.

"Where do we go from here?" she asked, sliding her eyes back into his.

"Like I said," Jericho said, running his hand through his hair brown hair, "we lay low."

"And how do you suppose we do that?" Annie asked. "Do I call my job and say I'm not coming in for the foreseeable future? Do I throw away my cell phone? Do we leave the country? I've never been on the run before, Jericho. I don't know what to expect or how to handle something like this."

Jericho walked over to her and gently squeezed her arms with his hands, trying to reassure her.

"Don't worry," he told her. "I'll take care of it."

Annie's head snapped up and she stepped out of his grasp. "No," she said, shaking her head. "Not just you. We. We. You and me are a team, no matter what."

"I don't want to bring you into this. Annie," he told her. "These are decisions I made that have nothing to do with you. You shouldn't be forced to deal with them just because you married me. That isn't fair to you."

"I married you," Annie told him. "That's it, the end. Your problem is my problem and vice versa. I'm sure you have a plan in case things go wrong, don't you?"

"Well, yes," Jericho agreed with a nod. "The problem is, Bennett knows all my backup plans and probably told the cops everything."

Annie pressed her lips together. "You know," she said. "I still don't understand why Bennett would turn you in in the first place."

"Bennet is a peculiar sort of guy," Jericho said slowly. "Like me. It's why I like him so much, why I trusted him so quickly. I thought the two of us understood each other. Maybe we did." He paused, pressing his lips together, and tilted his head to the side in that awkward way he favored. "He has a riotous sense of justice, one I always related to. When he found out I killed Gonzales, he wasn't happy about it. Instead of turning me in right then, he waited, planned his escape. He built up his case, built up the evidence against me. I gave him everything he needed."

He shook his head. It was the first time Annie had ever seen Jericho's face ashen before. Even before she met him, even before they became acquainted, she had never seen him look startled or rattled or even surprised. Jericho was always confident, always certain of what he wanted and how to attain that. There was arrogance sprinkled in, however. He walked around like nothing bothered him, like nothing could touch him. And that was how he lived. Up until now, it would seem.

"What's the plan, Jericho?" she asked him, her voice firm. "I know you. I know you have some kind of plan of what to do if you were ever in this situation."

"Yeah, yeah I do," Jericho said, nodding his head. "Bennett knows all of them, though. That's the problem. I'm sure if my contact is right, the detectives already have tabs on my property down south. I'm sure they've grounded my jet. There's nothing I can do."

"There had to be something," Annie told him. "There has to be something we can do, somewhere we can go that they don't know about. We just have to think about it."

They were silent for a moment. Annie felt her mind race. This was not a good thing because when her thoughts were rushing around, it was hard to slow down and really focus on the right answer. She pressed her lips together. Bruce was so good at things like this; if he were here, he would know exactly what to do.