Chapter 8

Hashtag mind blown.

Killed. Someone had killed her uncle?

Why would someone kill her uncle? According to her family, a meek, mild-mannered scientist? Had Tucker sucked the air from her lungs, she couldn’t be more breathless.

Her heart began to pound in her chest with a heavy thud. “But why? Why would someone kill him? Do you think it was the family of the man who died? Because they were angry his tests failed to catch something in your water? What the hell was in the water, anyway?”

But Tucker shook his head with a firm movement in the negative. “No. No one knew the identity of the scientist who did the tests other than the police. We did everything we could to prevent his name being released, and we took full responsibility for the illnesses and the death of that man.”

“And he died of what?” Marty asked from the couch.

Tucker’s face went grim, his eyes distant, almost sad. “A deadly bacteria. Due to his age and a heart condition, it killed him.”

Esther reached for Nina’s hand, needing something to hold to keep from trembling herself right out of her fuzzy slippers. “Then who? Why? Why would you think he was killed?”

“To shut him up,” he literally ground out, as though he were angry with her because her uncle was dead. His jaw twitched and his teeth clenched, yet still, she didn’t understand why her uncle’s death or alleged murder made a difference to Tucker if he didn’t really know him.

“Okay, enough with the small sentences, Tucker,” Marty said angrily, hopping up off the couch and throwing her finger in Tucker’s face. “Spill the whole story and spill it now. My head is killing me. I’m tired. I’m trying to merge two businesses from a goddamn phone via text message and Facebook. Stop with the song and dance and get to the fucking point!”

The last words roared from her mouth, and one of her incisors elongated, dripping with a gleaming drop of spit.

Nina, the easily ruffled, was suddenly unruffled and cool as a cucumber as she grabbed Marty around the waist to keep her from going for Tucker’s throat. “Werewolf, chill. What the fuck’s gotten into you? Nobody’s got their head on straight anymore. Wanda’s either crying about absofuckinglutely nothing or drooling while she’s passed out in a corner somewhere, and you’re either full of sage wisdom and advice or on GD fire. Your pendulum swings fucking wildly, werewolf-san. Everybody, chill the fuck out! And you, Fish-man, talk or I’ll let Blondie here loose. You do not want me to let her loose!”

Marty tried to struggle out of Nina’s grip, but Nina gave her a good shake. “Promise me you won’t eat the man, Marty. At least not until he spits out whateverthefuck the problem is.”

But Marty grabbed at Nina’s hands with angry swipes, trying to pry them from her waist, her cheeks beet red, her face furious. “Get off me, Dark One, and put me down!”

Nina pulled her close, her lips at Marty’s ear. “Not until you promise you’re going to get a grip on your shit and turn down the volume. You know I can kick your ass—don’t make me do it in front of people and embarrass you. Now…breathe, baby, or I’ll take your ass outta the game.”

Marty surrendered, her lightly tanned skin going pale as she sank back against Nina. “I’m breathing. Put me down. Please. I have a massive headache and your death-breath isn’t helping it.”

Nina nodded, seemingly not offended at all by Marty’s poke. “Better. Go get some aspirin and a cold pack and sit this one out. Maybe go find Carl and have him read you a story or something. He’s in the backyard with Mook. But we’re not going to get anywhere with everyone at each other’s throats. And that I’m the one to tell you people that should scare the fuck out of you.”

Marty shook Nina off and took her leave, her pear-scented perfume wafting to Esther’s nose as she huffed her way out the back door of the kitchen.

Nina turned to Tucker, planting her hands on her hips. “Speak. Tell us what’s going on, and tell us this fucking instant, or I swear to Jesus, I’ll make you beg for your life. If Little Fish here is in some kind of danger because someone thinks she might know something about her uncle’s death, you can’t keep hiding it—because if you want anyone in your corner, it’s us.”

Then she looked to a sleeping Wanda, sprawled out on the couch, and Marty in the backyard, massaging her temples.

“Okay. It’s good to have me in her corner. Just me. Do it. Now. Why do you suspect someone murdered Gomez?”

Tucker ran a hand through his hair again, then over his chin covered in dark stubble. “Because Gomez was accurate. He was always accurate. I can’t tell you how many times he did testing for us—how many disasters he saved us from because he was meticulous. And I don’t use that word lightly.”

Esther rocked from foot to foot, crossing her arms over her chest. “So that to you means murder? Because he made a mistake? Everyone has one to their name, Tucker. At least one.”

“No. Not because he made a mistake, but because those tests weren’t just done by him, but approved by me. Allegedly approved by me, that is. Everything about this new bottled water we’ve developed has been a disaster from the start. From the difficult location we culled it from, to the testing, to production, and whatever else came in between.”

“Swear on Mook and Marsha’s lives, if you say you culled whatever you put in the water from Atlantis, I’ll die. Right here before your eyes,” Esther threatened, and she wasn’t even joking.

Tucker actually smirked before he covered it up with another serious expression. “Not Atlantis, exactly. Australia, actually.”

Interesting… “So how do you guys manage to live with people and still be mermaids? How do you keep from being caught?”

“Have you heard of Atargatis Lake?” he asked.

“The private lake community with security guards at the gate?” She’d driven past it a million times and just assumed rich people lived in row after row of the gorgeous houses.

“That’s the one,” he confirmed, his gravelly voice low.

Her mouth fell open. “Shut up! You guys own that lake, don’t you? OMG—so everyone in that community is a mermaid? Like right here in Staten Island?”

“Named after a Goddess, and yes, right under your cute noses,” he confirmed, finally smiling again. “And we didn’t cull the water from the lake—that’s a manmade body of saltwater. It was done in Australia, taken from a reef one of our divers discovered. But regardless, it was all wrong from the word go.”

“Okay, so you’re claiming you didn’t give the green light to this water that my uncle said was good? Am I getting that right?”

“Sort of.”

“Okay, so what does ‘sort of’ mean?”

Tucker rasped a sigh, but he was finally forthcoming. “What I’ve been accused of is simple. They claim I gave the green light to the water, knowing it was bad, and sent it into production anyway because it meant millions of dollars lost if we didn’t and the risk factor was low. In fact, they have an email from me to production, stating I gave it the thumbs-up and passed off the poor results from Gomez as minimal collateral damage compared to the bigger picture. Also, there’s over a million dollars missing from H2O-Yo, and it all points to me skimming and hiding it in offshore accounts in the Caymans. But as I stand here before you, Esther, I’m telling you—I’m telling you all—I would never have endangered lives had I ever sensed even a hint of an issue. The only test results I saw said everything was a go. The water was good. And those were the tests from your uncle that I received in an email—which have mysteriously disappeared into thin air.”

His face was so sincere, his eyes boring holes into her. If he was lying, he was either the best actor ever or a total sociopath.

On impulse, Esther reached out and grabbed his wrist. She couldn’t explain why, but she believed him. “So, you think you’ve been set up?”

“That’s exactly what I think. I don’t know by whom or even why, but someone wanted me out of the company, and they did a fine job of getting me gone.”

“You got fired from your own family’s company?” she asked in disbelief.

“I didn’t just get fired from the company. I got booted out of my pod.”

There was that crazy word again. Pod, pod, pod.

Nina narrowed her gaze at him and sucked her teeth. “What you’re saying is, her uncle probably knew the water was bad and he said as much, but some greedy fuck got ahold of those tests and changed them to look like everything was okay, so you’d sign off—which you did. Shit went into production as planned, and then when that guy died and people got sick from the water, this greedy fuck showed up with the email from you and the real test results, which said the water was shit? So, like a whistleblower kind of thing?”

Tucker’s face went hard, the lines around his mouth deepening. “In a roundabout way. When my father—who’s not Poseidon, by the way, but a distant relative—and his team researched the trail of paperwork leading up to production, he found the alleged test results from Gomez, and someone anonymously sent him the email I supposedly sent to production, telling them the risks weren’t worth halting production. My father, being the man he is, honorable if not stubborn as hell, banned me from the company and the pod until further notice.”

She’d gone from outraged on his behalf to frightened in the matter of just a few minutes. “You think my uncle found out someone changed his tests, and he was going to tell you or your father, and got himself murdered because he knew the truth?”

“I absolutely do,” he said, his words tight.

Now she had to lean against the wall, bracing her body from the trembling. “That’s horrible.” Even though she hardly knew her uncle, to find he quite possibly had been killed scared the hell out of her.

Nina slapped Tucker on the back, her face full of sympathy. “Fuck, dude. That sucks. Does this mean you’re banned from the mermaid Slip ’N Slide, too? Like, do you live in this community where all you guys hang out?”

Tucker grimaced. “Fortunately, I don’t. I live closer to the office complex for obvious reasons. The gated community mostly houses married mers and families.”

Her ears perked up. So did that mean the hot fish wasn’t married?

Oh, bad, Esther. Bad! What do you care if he’s not married? Hysterical bonding is real, Esther Sanchez. You’d do well to remember that.

Still, she couldn’t help but wonder if he had a girlfriend.

But she didn’t have to ask. Nina took care of that for her. “So, no kids? No girlfriend? Wife?”

“No.”

“Good thing, seein’ as you were porking Esther with your scales at a funeral because you thought she was hot, huh?” Then Nina laughed at her joke.

But Esther wasn’t laughing. If someone had killed her uncle, if for nothing else other than the memory of her grandfather, she wanted justice. It would have killed Salvador Sanchez to think his son had been so unhappy he’d killed himself—even if the alleged suicide was over a mistake.

Someone needed to get to the bottom of this. Now.

But then she remembered Jessica. She didn’t seem upset with her brother at all. So he wasn’t totally alone. “Your sister seems supportive, though.”

Tucker gave her a glimmer of a smile then. “She is. She’s tried reasoning with my father, but if you knew Getty Pearson, you’d know once he’s made a decision, especially if it involves the company he worked day and night to grow himself, you’d know there’s no changing his mind.

Esther blew out a breath of pent-up air. “Any thoughts on a suspect? Someone who was holding a grudge? A jealous colleague who thought he should have your position?”

“I can’t think of a single person who’d want my job, or who’s openly made it clear they’d want my job. Whoever it is, they’re good at staying hidden. Of course, I’ve been locked out of all my accounts at the office, so I couldn’t dig around even if I wanted to.”

Pushing herself off the wall, she approached Tucker with a look of determination. “So, what do we have to do in order to prove my uncle was killed to cover this up and clear your name? Never mind. Let’s just do it. Let’s find out who set you up and killed my uncle.”

* * * *

Tucker watched as the women—who refused to leave Esther alone with him, or alone at all, for that matter—sat together in the dining room while a very British, very proper man named Archibald, whizzed about Esther’s kitchen, preparing a meal for everyone.

They’d invited him to stay, which was more than he deserved after not coming clean about his intentions where Esther was concerned. But that they were willing to help him because of her, brought him a strange peace.

They were an eclectic brood, this lot, but as he observed their camaraderie, he had to admire the way they worked together to help a complete stranger.

They were loud while they did it, but they were determined to figure out how to help Esther not only get her mermaid tail in order, but find out who had murdered her uncle.

And he was damned sure someone had murdered Gomez Sanchez to keep his mouth shut. He had a call logged from Gomez just before he’d supposedly killed himself. No voice mail left, just a call from him. It only strengthened Tucker’s belief that he was being set up. That had to be what happened. He refused to believe otherwise, not just because Gomez had been a trusted subcontractor for H2O for over twenty years, but because his life had gone to total shit as a result, and he wanted it back.

He wanted to get up every morning with a purpose, rather than just watch his life go down the shitter while he skimmed Netflix for the next series he could devour. There was nothing worse than empty days filled with nothingness.

If he could just get into his computer at work…but then he thought, whoever had done this surely would have covered their tracks. But he held on to the hope that maybe there was some kind of residual tech imprint, a trail he could follow that would lead to an answer.

And his father?

Damn that stubborn, difficult man and his unshakeable ethics. The moment he’d discovered Tuck had allegedly signed off on this whole mess, a mess he’d wanted nothing to do with from the start because of the risk the divers were taking to get the water, he’d gone after Tuck, balls to the wall.

There’d been no talking, no coercing, no amount of swearing to the gods he’d had nothing to do with it that could convince his father otherwise. Even his mother, Serafina, had begged his father to at least listen, but Getty dismissed them both because there was proof. Hardcore proof.

And there was proof. It was his handwriting on that production order—or someone who was really good at forging his handwriting.

But the worst was the email where it claimed he’d considered the bacterial risks in the water minimal to the profit they could make. That his father believed he’d ever allow people to consume tainted water and become collateral damage, even water that was a little tainted, blew his mind. But it also infuriated him.

He’d worked his ass off to get where he was in the company. There’d been no slack for Tuck Pearson, or his sister, for that matter. Their father demanded perfection, and he demanded they start from the bottom up.

Fresh out of college with an MBA and he’d found himself in, of all places, the mailroom. But he’d gritted his teeth, swallowed his pride, shut his yap and, in less than eight years, proven himself worthy enough to take on the role of VP of Production.

Now, at thirty-five, it had all gone to shit. But with the same kind of determination he’d used to get to where he was in the company, he’d also figure out who the fuck was framing him.

Lost in thought, he didn’t hear the doorbell ring as he sat on the couch, covered in Mooky and Marsha, who’d taken a liking to him. “At least someone still thinks I’m a good guy, eh, Mook?”

The odd combination of Doberman and wire-haired terrier looked up at him and rubbed his jaw against Tuck’s hand with affection, making him smile.

“Are you Esther Sanchez?” someone with impressive articulation asked.

He sat up straight, sliding to the end of the couch, and just as he was about to get up to see who was at the door, he heard her say, “I am. Who are you?”

“I’m Rory Shevchenko from Action News, Channel 8. Care to comment on the collusion between your uncle and the Vice President of Production at H2O-Yo, Tucker Pearson, to sell tainted water and embezzle a million dollars?”

And everything went off the rails from there.