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stretched her emotions to a whole other level.
    She sat back down on the couch and drew her feet up underneath her. “How much have you heard about Michael’s case?”
    He moved to sit down beside her. “I know that two officers were killed in an explosion in a warehouse. One of them was your brother.”
    She fiddled with a loose thread on her hemline. “Michael and his partner, Blake Watson, had been working undercover for months, assigned to infiltrate a group suspected of dealing in arms and drugs in the area. They were making inroads, but then something went wrong. Michael’s handler got a distress signal from Michael about three in the afternoon. Thirty seconds later the building blew up. They found the remains of their bodies, but no evidence of the weapons or drugs they were there to buy.”
    “Someone found out who they really were?”
    “Presumably. The FBI was later able to match the bomb signature to a known terrorist bomb-maker. Which is why we believe Michael had stumbled onto something bigger than just a localarms dealer. So not only did someone find out who they were, they clearly didn’t want them to dig any further.”
    She leaned against the back of the couch, lips drawn tight, and let out a slow breath. “I don’t know what else you’ve heard, but there’s more to the story than just two decorated officers killed in the line of duty. While the case is still officially unsolved, Michael is suspected of being a department leak.”
    Jackson gauged her expression. Clearly there was a lot of pain wrapped up in the accusations that to her must seem like betrayal by the department. He’d heard the rumors surrounding the case but had decided to ignore the media’s version and wait until she was ready to tell him herself. “I thought everything was still inconclusive.”
    “The department knew someone was peddling lists of informants in return for large sums of cash. Some of it was intelligence gathered by Michael in several key undercover operations that had given him access to information that potentially could be worth something to the right person . . . if he’d wanted to sell it. ”
    “So things point to your brother, and he is the one blamed for the leak.”
    “They also found a laptop hidden in the apartment where he was living while undercover that contained what the department has only described as sensitive information. But evidence can be planted.”
    Jackson caught the frustration in her voice. Fear of someone’s betrayal was often harder to accept than death. He’d experienced that firsthand. He pushed back his own cloudy memories of his mother’s infidelity. “I take it you have a theory?”
    “Yes, though no one has bought into mine.”
    “What do you believe?”
    “If you go through all the evidence—and believe me, I have—there is one person who can be linked to almost every incident, but the department doesn’t agree.”
    “Who is that?”
    “Michael’s handler, Mason Taylor. I might have known Mason for a long time and thought of him once as a friend, but I knew my brother better. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Michael wasn’t the kind of man who would sell out for money.”
    He sat quietly beside her and waited for her to continue. With the department on the “other side” and her family ready for closure, there weren’t a lot of people she could turn to.
    “This list of accusations is another reason it’s been hard to let go of Michael. To listen to the rumors and the lies being spread about his character. Things that I know aren’t true.” She reached up to rub her temples. “Something about today made me relive Michael’s death all over again. I guess it’s because I’ve spent weeks on our last Jane Doe case, and all I ever came up with was a pile of dead ends with every suspect and every witness. Facing the same situation again with our latest victim just rubs it in, and reminds me of my brother’s case—another unsolved