Exposing Ethan (Cassidy Kincaid Mystery Book 4) Read online

  Exposing Ethan

  Book 4 in the Cassidy Kincaid Mystery Series

  Amy Waeschle

  Savage Creek Press

  Contents

  New to the Series?

  Also by Amy Waeschle

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Cassidy’s Crusade Teaser

  Pre-order Cassidy’s Crusade

  Acknowledgments

  Get a free short story!

  Also by Amy Waeschle

  About the Author

  BONUS SHORT STORY

  Copyright © 2020 by Amy Waeschle. All rights reserved.

  Publisher: Savage Creek Press

  Genre: Adult Mystery.

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the expressed written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  ISBN:

  Editor: Joseph Nassie

  Proofer: Melanie Austin

  Cover Design: Books Covered

  Cover photographs: © Shutterstock

  Author Photo: Josh Monthei

  New to the Series?

  Grab book 1 in the Cassidy Kincaid mystery series for FREE

  Discover the missing persons mystery that set Cassidy, a volcano scientist, down the dangerous path of amateur sleuth.

  READ BOOK 1 FOR FREE

  Also by Amy Waeschle

  Cassidy Kincaid Mystery Series:

  Rescuing Reeve

  Meet Me on the Mountain

  Finding Izzy Ford

  Exposing Ethan

  Cassidy’s Crusade (1/2021)

  Standalone Novels:

  Going Over the Falls

  Feeding the Fire

  Memoir:

  Chasing Waves, a Surfer’s Tale of Obsessive Wandering

  Short Stories:

  Swimming Lessons

  The Call of the Canyon Wren

  Father of the Bride

  One

  Cassidy swiveled on her board and paddled hard for the wave, its roar blasting her ears. But before she could drop in, another surfer appeared in her peripheral vision, stroking intently.

  “Go home, haole,” he growled.

  Cassidy gritted her teeth and scratched forward, managing to tilt into the wave as it fell away beneath her. The murderous gaze of the rival surfer blasted her like a laser as she punched to her feet and soared down the face.

  The wave drew upwards, sheeting out in a ramp of glittering, clear blue. She carved a series of turns to the wave’s end, her fingers trailing in the warm water. After, she sprinted for the channel, a smile stretching her salty cheeks.

  Some people might say she was wasting precious hours of volcano research, but after five days of sweat, broken fingernails, and squeezing every last drop of labor from her crew, including working by headlamp well into the night, hadn’t she earned this?

  Her smile faded when she noticed the soft paddle strokes of someone approaching. Surfing at this locals-only spot on Hawaii’s Kona side had been a risk, but she’d gone anyway.

  Was she about to pay for it? Had the people she’d run from only a week ago found her?

  “You’re one brave lady,” a voice said behind her.

  Cassidy wheeled around, ready to fight, but the face that greeted her nearly knocked her off her board.

  “Bruce?” Her mind went in a thousand directions at once. Was he angry? Had he come to arrest her? She cringed, remembering his latest voicemail—his ninth in five days. Quit avoiding me, Cassidy, you’re in some serious trouble. I can help, but only if you answer your goddamn phone.

  He paddled alongside her; his brown eyes sharp. “Nice wave,” he said.

  Cassidy continued paddling in silence, wondering how long he had watched her surf. They hadn’t seen each other since parting ways at the Liberia airport last winter. A strange feeling settled into her gut—a mix of worry that she’d disappointed him, fear of the trouble she was in, and something like jitters, only that made no sense.

  They reached the safety of the outside and pushed upright.

  “I thought you only body surfed?” she asked, nodding at his surfboard, a Channel Islands thruster with several ding repairs evident near the tip.

  He squinted sideways at her. “Sometimes it’s good to shake things up a bit.”

  Cassidy tried to gauge his level of fury, but his tone gave nothing away. “How did you find me?”

  “This is my turf, remember?”

  Her shoulders sagged. Deep down, she knew she couldn’t run from him forever. “Have you come to arrest me?”

  “No,” Bruce said, sounding agitated.

  A quick glance at him revealed the concern in his eyes. “I was going to call you tonight,” she lied, remembering the moment in her brother Quinn’s apartment a week ago when she realized how grave her situation had become.

  Bruce splashed a scoop of water over the front of his board. “You owe the Bureau a plane ticket.”

  Cassidy swirled her legs in the warm water. “Pete was murdered, Bruce.” Over the past five days, she’d built seismic stations and directed her field grunts to assemble this, transmit that, as lava flows gushed from the earth to destroy homes and streets. Somehow during that frantic rush to go, go, go, the reality of it had sunk in. Someone had run Pete off that strip of highway.

  “I know.”

  Cassidy took this in. Of course, he knew. Didn’t Bruce know everything?

  “He must have been about to expose someone,” Cassidy said, as a tightness pulled at her insides. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.” She had lain awake every night since, wondering if Saxon and his men were coming for her next.

  “We need you to come in and make a statement,” Bruce said.

  “I can’t,” Cassidy said, hearing the nervous hitch in her voice. “This afternoon, I fly home, then I hit the ground running.” She thought of her interview at King 5 Television to discuss volcanic hazards in less than twenty-four hours. Mount Rainier had been experiencing an increase in tremors lately, and the Sunday news program wanted answers. She was pretty sure that Mark, Pete’s best friend and a programmer at the station, had been the one to recommend her for the opportunity.

  “Look, Cassidy, you can come in voluntarily, or I can get a subpoena for a grand jury.”

  Cassidy inhaled a gulp of ocean air.

  “We need to know what you saw. It’s critical for the investigation.”

  She scraped a bump of wax from her board, wincing as it crowded painfully under her fingernail. She thought about Dutch. What had happened to him? Was he okay? Her attempts to locate him had been futile. If only she knew his real name. Saxon’s aggressive f
ace popped into her mind. This isn’t over. A shiver chilled her spine.

  “It’ll be fast. A day, maybe two.”

  “Where?” Cassidy asked, feeling resigned. There was no getting out of a grand jury testimony.

  “San Francisco.”

  Cassidy began to panic, picturing herself strapped to a chair while a room of men in suits fired off questions like darts to a target board. “Will you be there?”

  Bruce nodded. “You’re sort of my job right now.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “I know you did what you thought was right,” Bruce said, his voice softening. “But hell, Cass, that warehouse…our informant…thankfully we got lucky and no one got killed.”

  Except Lars, Cassidy wanted to say, but her mind flashed to the warehouse and the image of Izzy handcuffed to that bed while the sprinklers gushed water from the ceiling.

  Her heart twisted with regret. At least I saved them from one night of hell, she thought, cringing at the realization of what these girls were being forced to do, possibly at this very minute.

  “Did…they rescue anyone?” she asked, imagining firefighters pouring into the building, busting down doors to find scared young girls cowering on stained mattresses.

  Bruce’s face took on a pained look. “One. She was hiding inside a closet.” He crossed his arms. “There was also…evidence.”

  Cassidy remembered the instruments laid out on the table in the room where Izzy was being held, and the boisterous laughter from the men who had entered.

  “I’m guessing the bullet hole in the wall was yours?” Bruce asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “He wanted Izzy,” Cassidy said, her voice firm. “I couldn’t let him take her.”

  “We’ll need to speak with her, too.”

  Cassidy eyed him sharply. “No. Leave her alone.”

  Bruce’s jaw pulsed like the gills of a shark. “Forgive me for being so blunt, Cassidy, but this isn’t your show. Your and Izzy’s testimonies could give us the information we need to finally nail these guys.”

  He’s right, she thought as her stomach tightened further. “I don’t think you’ll locate her. Her dad can’t even find her.” She remembered Preston Ford’s stern voice over the phone line. For reasons she still did not understand, she had kept Cody’s identity a secret.

  “You want to catch one more wave?” Bruce asked, lowering to his board to paddle. “We still have a little bit of time before our flight.”

  The playful spark in his eyes filled her with relief. Even though he was furious with her—and likely the entire task force shared this sentiment—they were still friends. Speaking to the task force would be taxing, but she wasn’t going to have to do it alone.

  “Bruce,” she said as they paddled side by side toward the lineup. “What about Saxon?”

  “He’s gone into hiding.” He made a gesture with his hands. “We’ve got him on cameras entering Mexico.”

  A rush of relief flooded her, but it didn’t last. For how long would he stay away? Would they catch him when he tried to come back? “Do you think…I’m in danger?”

  Bruce glanced her way, his face pulled tight in a grimace. “As long as you’re with me, and do what I say, you’ll be safe.”

  Cassidy inhaled a steadying breath. “Then I better tell you who I called before I left.”

  Two

  “I swear I left it right here,” Cassidy said, rubbing her forehead. She scanned her desk again, zooming out to take in the two stacks of notebooks, her laptop, and the loose piles of papers on the floor. Her tired eyes were dry after the long flight to Seattle, so she blinked a few times, then tried again.

  “Where did you last have it?” Bruce asked from where he was leaning against the door jamb.

  She had expected it to feel weird, having Bruce in her house, but after the awkward moment when he stepped over the threshold passed, she discovered that it wasn’t.

  “Oh, the table, maybe,” she said, stepping past him into her kitchen. On the edge of the picnic table she used as dining room furniture she found the stack of papers hiding the notebook. “Here it is,” she said, relieved that she wasn’t losing her mind.

  On the night she’d returned from San Francisco, she’d already figured out that Pete and Lars were somehow connected. Before switching gears to depart for her field work in Hawaii, she had pounced on the box full of Pete’s notebooks. In the three hours between flights, she had steeled her courage and flipped through every single one: pocket-sized ones, full-sized ones with no lines, medium-sized ones with recycled covers, spiral-bound, book-bound, even the single sheets of 8 ½ x 11 paper folded into fourths that he used in a pinch. Seeing his tight scrawl flying across so many pages, sometimes careful, sometimes so rushed it was illegible, had cracked open another hole in her damaged heart.

  But she’d forced her way through the emotions and the result was a name: Brad Sawyer.

  Pete didn’t use a formal calendar, instead he made one out of a single 8 ½ x 11 piece of paper every Sunday and kept it in his back right pants pocket. But the notebook—spiral-bound, unlined paper, plain blue cover—contained details she recognized from the period before his death. At that time, he had been interviewing athletes for his book about near-death experiences, an idea inspired by his own brush with death in an avalanche the year before. But he also had been researching the story about the “umbrella girls” they had seen working the backroads of Sicily.

  Cassidy opened the notebook to the page containing her find and handed it to Bruce.

  Dressed in pressed khakis and a button-down blue shirt, he could be a businessman traveling home after a long week of meetings, but his athletic frame and quick eyes made her think scholar with a running habit, or personal trainer. Certainly nothing that said, “federal agent.” That’s probably why he can work undercover, she thought.

  “You called this guy?” Bruce said, looking up from the page where Pete’s handwriting scrawled meet Brad @ 10 – fish market. There were other names scattered throughout his notes, but the dates didn’t match.

  Bruce slid onto the picnic bench and flipped through the pages.

  “I’m not sure it’s important,” Cassidy said, leaning her back against the edge of the sink. “But I remember Pete was thinking about what he wanted to do next, after the book. He was still torn up about those girls he’d seen in Sicily.”

  “The ones brought in from Africa?”

  Cassidy nodded. “He couldn’t get an editor to touch that story.”

  “Smart,” Bruce said, giving her a look.

  Cassidy frowned. Bruce was probably right, but if he’d been allowed to research that story, would he have never stumbled into the one that got him killed?

  “Does his name ring a bell?”

  Cassidy closed her eyes for a moment, sifting through the fragments of conversation that still lived in her mind. So many of her memories had faded since those horrible days after Pete’s death. Plenty were lost forever, either from her dangerous escape of mixing Xanax with alcohol, or because her brain was trying to protect itself from the ache.

  She remembered an afternoon of picking blackberries, the sun hot on her shoulders while Pete shared his ideas. He had so many ideas. She had just returned from a grueling week of field work and the joy of being back home with him had created a strong memory.

  And then her stepbrother, Reeve, had visited.

  “Ugh,” Cassidy breathed, her voice shaky.

  Bruce’s eyes sharpened. “What?”

  She shook her head, willing the terrifying images of Reeve going off the rails to fade. “I just remember Pete telling me how he met that guy in San Francisco one night, with Quinn. They were out scoping the competition. He had a story he wanted help with, or something. Pete was excited.”

  “But this Brad person hasn’t called you back?”

  Cassidy shook her head.

  “What did you say in your message?” Bruce asked, leaning back, a serious glint in his eyes.

/>   “I told him my name and that I was Pete’s…” Cassidy took a breath for bravery “…fiancé.”

  Bruce groaned. “Okay, from now on, no more freelancing.” He placed his hands on his hips. “I mean it, Cassidy.”

  Cassidy hugged herself tighter and sighed. “Okay.”

  “We have no idea how deep the network goes, who we can trust.”

  “Right,” Cassidy whispered as the walls slowly pressed in on her. She glanced around her kitchen—two moving boxes still to go—the too-big couch, the empty fridge.

  Bruce stood and approached her just as she caught the tear threatening to leak from the corner of her eye. “Hey, we’re going to get these guys.”

  Cassidy nodded; the emotions she’d been bottling up threatened to break free. Since that moment in Quinn’s apartment, she had forced everything down, running to the safety and escape of her field work in Hawaii, hoping that while she was away, everything could return to normal. Calling Brad had been stupid. Why couldn’t she just leave it alone?

  Bruce touched her shoulder gently and ducked to catch her gaze. “You going to be okay tonight?” he asked.

  Cassidy swallowed the lump in her throat. “Yeah,” she replied.

  “Okay,” he said, stepping back. “I’ll pick you up for the flight at five.” Bruce returned to the table. “Can I take this?” he asked, holding up the notebook.