It was hard to be mad at the guy. Plus Michael was hungry. Hopefully the coach would make sure that wherever they went to eat had burgers and fries.

Cleveland, Ohio
Saturday, March 16, 2:50 p.m.

Grant Masterson stood in his brother’s apartment, not understanding what he was looking at. He’d emptied the contents of the safe, laying each piece out on the dining room table.

Wesley wasn’t here, and hadn’t been in some time, if the expired milk in the fridge was any indication. It wasn’t until Grant had seen that all his brother’s suits were gone from his closet, along with his suitcases, that he’d opened the safe.

The combination hadn’t been difficult—09-29-96. Their sister’s birthday. It was almost as if Wes had set it up so that Grant could easily unlock it.

No almost about it, Grant thought grimly as he stared at the stacks of cash and piles of paper. He’d counted the cash twice, not believing the total the first time.

Five hundred thousand dollars, all in crisp one-hundred-dollar bills.

There was five hundred thousand dollars in his brother’s safe. Grant closed his eyes briefly. “What have you done, Wes?” he murmured. Because his brother had not earned this money. Not as a cop. And not from his investments, either, because Grant did his damn taxes.

Grant’s first clue that something super-illegal was going on had been the box of latex gloves that Wes had left in the very front of the safe. Hands trembling, Grant had pulled on a pair and begun sifting through his brother’s private life.

He had found a partial answer to where Wes had gotten the money in a sack that had been in a small lockbox, tucked inside the safe. That combo had also been easy—the date they’d discovered that their sister had run away.

The day Grant had lost Wes, too. First to the bottle, then to the obsession of finding their sister, and now to . . . whatever all of this was. Because the sack held a brick of something white. Heroin, he guessed.

My God, Wes. How could you? Drugs? Wes was a vice detective, for God’s sake. “What have you done?” Grant murmured again.

He needed to find out. And fast.

He pulled out a chair and sat in it heavily. Then began skimming each page in the stack. They looked like receipts, printed from a computer. Rent, utilities . . . All in the name of Blake Emerson. And all for an address in Cincinnati.

Which did not make any sense. At all. They’d both been to Cincinnati, multiple times. It was where their sister had run away from. But they’d stayed in hotels.

Who the hell was Blake Emerson? But then he saw the signature on one of the pages. It was Wes’s handwriting. What the hell?