The Ones We Trust Read Online Free PDF Page A

of what I’ll find. What if Ben’s right? What if Maria really isn’t as innocent as she made me think?
    “You owe me.” Ben jerks his head sharply to one side, whipping his bangs off his eyes long enough to bore his gaze into mine. “You owe me everything.”
    Those last few words come with a whiptail lash, and I stand there for a moment, waiting for my skin to stop stinging, for the spots to stop dancing in my vision, for the rope to stop squeezing my heart and lungs. But his words don’t settle. The knot around my middle doesn’t loosen.
    Because, hell’s bells, Ben is right. I owe him everything.
    I sigh, but it comes out more like a groan. “I’ll call you as soon as I know something.”

5
    As soon as Ben leaves, I sit down at my desk and pull up Maria’s video, trying to ignore the shoveled-out feeling in my gut as the images light up my screen, trying to quiet the million questions that pull and tug at me, reeling me toward them with the appeal of an impending train wreck. I don’t want to see this clip. I don’t want to see it, and yet I have to look. Ben was right; if nothing else, at the very least I owe him an answer.
    I prop both feet on my chair, wrap my arms around my legs and watch from the space between my knees. Now that I’m looking at the video on a bigger screen, I see I was wrong before. The angle is a little strange, as if the camera is wedged only a few feet or so away from Maria’s face and trained up. It gives me a fish-eye view of the left side of her face, her swinging breasts in all their porn-star glory, the man’s heaving chest and his hand as it slaps, over and over and over, a red splotch onto Maria’s ass. I don’t blink, I barely breathe, and I study every pixel for clues.
    About halfway through, I drop my feet to the floor, hit Pause and zoom in on the frame. The man is middle-aged, somewhere in his mid-to-late fifties. Flabby skin over muscles fighting gravity, a few stray gray hairs on his chest. I lean in and zoom some more, see his wedding ring is a plain gold band, the watch a classic gold model, unadorned and without flash. He could be one of a million men in this town.
    I push Play and watch the rest. There’s a lot of grunting and slapping, mixed in with some dirty talk—him—and exaggerated moans—her—and then, at the very tail end of the video, when the activity crescendos into a loud and rather explosive grand finale all over Maria’s back, I see it. What I missed the first time on Ben’s tiny iPhone screen. What plunges my stomach into the crawl space under my office floor.
    Maria looks straight at the camera...and smiles.
    The empty hole in my gut fills in an instant, swelling with a churning mush. I push back from the desk with a hard shove. “Fucking hell.”
    Could Maria really be that brazen and greedy to have sex with someone, record it, then use it to squeeze some cash out of him? Could she really be so evil and coldhearted, especially after what happened with Chelsea? My nausea rises up, crawling through my stomach and strangling the calm, reasonable voice telling me surely,
surely
Maria couldn’t be that evil.
    I rewind the last ten seconds and watch them again, stopping on the exact moment when her pretty lips twist in so much more than a smile.
    They twist in a deliberate taunt.
    With her face still filling up my screen, I reach for my phone and scroll until I find the number I’m looking for, the one I haven’t dialed in almost three years.
    Floyd picks up on the second ring. At first all I hear is background noise—a shouted command, an explosion, the staccato stream of gunshots. I’d be alarmed, except I happen to know the battleground sounds come from a video game.
    “Well, well, well, if it isn’t Abigail Wolff. I thought you’d gone off and died on me,” he says in the rapid-fire Baltimorese I’d forgotten he spoke.
    I force myself to slow down long enough for small talk, then summon a tone friendly enough to smother my