by Toby Neal
Jake rolled his shoulders. “Can’t help my natural charm.”
The headlights caught a reflective sign marking the turn off, and Sophie pointed. “There!” Soon they were bouncing along a rutted, unlit road.
Jake tightened his hands on the wheel. “I want to park away from the house. We need to drive by it, identify it, park with our lights off and go in dark.”
Sophie nodded. They drove slowly as Jake strained to see between the thick bushes that screened the driveway coming off of the narrow road. “I don’t see any mailboxes or other number identification,” Sophie said. “but the GPS says we have arrived.”
Jake pulled the Jeep over deep onto the shoulder. Sophie took a bag of kibble out of her backpack and shared it into small piles on the back seat, leaving a fresh bowl of water for the dogs on the floor. The two animals seemed perfectly content to eat their dinner and relax together.
Jake produced a small, high beam flashlight as Sophie checked her weapon, stowed it in her cargo pocket, and produced a similar light. Jake locked the Jeep, and they headed up the road toward Chernobiac’s driveway.
Jake signaled that he would take the lead as they turned off the main road, and he was gratified when Sophie did not argue, merely falling into his shadow as they worked their way stealthily toward the house. As soon as they reached a clear area in front of the dwelling, motion detecting lights bloomed on.
Jake took cover behind a tree, and Sophie stayed glued to his side. “Let’s see what happens now.”
Jake assessed the simple wooden house, just another of so many built on the Big Island made from standard kits shipped to Hawaii. A lamp burned in an upstairs window, implying someone was home. An untrimmed yard surrounded the place, and a showy Honda street rod gleamed in an open garage on one side of the house. Jake pointed. “Seems like a pretty nice ride for a gamer dude of Chernobiac’s age,” he whispered.
“His truck was too expensive as well.” Sophie’s breath stirred the hairs near Jake’s ear and brought up goose bumps on his skin. Her body warmed his back.
No movement from the house. Eventually the light went off.
“I don’t think anyone is home, though that sensor light will out us,” Jake whispered. “But we can always pretend we’re a stranded couple in distress.” Jake reached back to take Sophie’s hand. Her fingers felt warm, slim and strong, just like the rest of her.
A rush of endorphins flooded Jake’s system.
He stood poised at the brink of danger, lawbreaking for a good cause, the woman he loved at his back, and a couple of good dogs waiting for his return.
He was a simple man, and he knew it. Jake shut his eyes for just a second, overwhelmed. So this was what happiness felt like. “Let’s do this.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Sophie held Jake’s hand and reached her other one into her cargo pocket, her fingers curling around the cool pebbled grip of her Glock. The weapon felt comforting as she ran on bent knees in Jake’s body shadow, the sensor light striking them with illumination. They reached the cover of the carport, and another beam bloomed, lighting up the back door above wooden steps rising out of the carport’s cement floor.
Jake led and they sidled along the wall to the back door, scanning for any movement. Nothing broke the silence of the night but the high-pitched calling of coqui frogs from the trees in the surrounding area.
Jake tried the back door handle. “Locked.”
Sophie felt quickly around the door jamb and under the mat, and smiled as she held up a spare key.
“I didn’t think Cypher looked that bright, and now I know he isn’t,” Jake said.
Sophie unlocked the door. She stepped inside and they left it ajar, alert as they entered for any dog or other occupant. Jake signaled for them to spread out and check the house, and she went one way as he went another. They moved quickly through the rooms to check that they were clear, reconnecting in the living room.
Sophie swung in a circle, assessing. The house was decorated with mismatched castoffs. A big screen TV took up one wall in the living room, which was fronted by a lounger with built in cup holders and a heated massage feature. Pizza boxes and takeout containers, crusty with dried leftovers, littered a coffee table.
“What are we looking for exactly?” Sophie frowned.
“Anything tying Chernobiac to the disappearances. I don’t know what that would be, but hopefully, we will recognize it when we see it.”
“He’s a gamer. Anything relevant will be on his computer, most likely.” She turned and headed for a set of stairs at the back of the building leading to the second floor. She found his computer station in a bedroom that contained nothing but the desk with his monitor and a rumpled queen-sized bed. Sophie unslung her small rucksack and dug in it for the write blocker program. She sat down and plugged it into the computer’s back port to copy Chernobiac’s hard drive. She accessed her codebreaker software on a stick drive and was working on decrypting Chernobiac’s security code when Jake rejoined her.
He held up a lumpy black plastic bag. His bulging biceps told Sophie that it was heavy. “Guess what I found in the linen closet? I think we just hit pay dirt. Literally.”
“I need a moment.” Sophie cracked the encryption and activated the write blocker. The software would make a complete copy of Chernobiac’s hard drive, but it needed fifteen minutes or more to run, depending on how much data he had. She swiveled Chernobiac’s office chair and turned back to Jake.
Her partner had set the bulky bag on the bed and untied the knot securing it. Inside, stacks of rubber-banded cash were piled like so many pairs of socks. “I’d be very interested to find out what Cypher says he did to earn all this cash.” Jake’s eyes seemed to glow with excitement. Sophie could smell it on him, a potent cologne.
“I’ll take pictures of this money, but by the time Freitan and Wong get a warrant to search the place, I feel confident that the cash will be gone.”
“Not if you text them a photo,” Jake said. “They’ll move heaven and earth to find out where this much dinero came from.”
Sophie photographed the bag of money and texted it to Freitan. She included a line of explanation: “Found this in subject’s linen closet. You might want to get a search warrant for the premises.”
“On it. Holding subject for 24 hours.” A smiley face followed. “Good job, you sexy beasts!”
Sophie decided not to mention Freitan’s joke to her partner. “They are holding Cypher for twenty-four hours. I need time for the write blocker to clone his hard drive. You might as well be thorough and search the rest of the house.”
Sophie turned back to address Cypher’s computer. She flexed her fingers over his keyboard. The keys were unpleasantly sticky.
She would be able to surf through the contents of the young man’s computer at leisure later on. To keep updated, she planted a keystroke logger program that would advise her of any new activity and send it to her in a coded message.
“I’m surprised he’s so lax with his security,” Jake said. He had returned the bag of cash to its hiding place. “You’d think the guy would be more careful with his remote location and no visible security system. I hope there’s not something we overlooked.”
“Why don’t you check?” Sophie peered at the computer screen. “The write blocker still needs another ten minutes. He has a lot of data on this unit.”
Jake disappeared. Sophie nipped into Cypher’s online activity, just to see what she could see.
As she had suspected, he was the one operating the missing persons website, though he had chosen an avatar of a blonde soccer mom to be his public admin profile. Chernobiac’s operation was crude, but clearly working well if that bag of cash and his cars were any indication . . .
Jake reappeared in the doorway. “We’ve got to go. He has a secret alarm system, and we tripped a silent alarm. I’m guessing we have minutes to move before someone gets here.”
Sophie stared at the write blocker, willing it to work faster, but it was only fifty
percent done. That would have to be good enough. She closed the program, ejected the drive, and exited his rig, shutting it down manually. She used the edge of her shirt to wipe down the keyboard and desk nearby. Jake was already doing the same with a paper towel on the other areas they’d touched.
“Stay off the road in case someone comes,” Jake said. Minutes later, they were running through the woods beside the driveway, headed back to the Jeep.
A big black SUV with mirror tinting on the windows barreled silently past them, lights off, heading toward the house. They’d left the way they came in, locking the back door, but the sensor light in the garage was still on. The responders would know someone had been there.
“I don’t think those are cops. Maybe private security.” Jake had pulled his weapon, and he reached for her hand.
His hand served no useful function so Sophie ignored it, palming her Glock as well. “How far off the road did you park the Jeep? I didn’t pay attention.”
“Not very far. Hopefully they went by too fast to notice it. I wish I’d hidden it better. That SUV has a gangster vibe.” Jake beeped open the Jeep. They jumped in, firing up the engine, as the dogs woofed a greeting.
Sophie gritted her teeth and Ginger gave a startled yelp, as Jake floored it, peeling out onto the road,. They roared down the potholed road, catching air on the dips due to the Jeep’s stiff suspension. Sophie clung to the door handle as they took a curve too fast, throwing her against the window.
Jake hung a left once they reached the main highway, continuing to break speed limits for a few more miles. He hung a left onto a tiny side road, and backed the Jeep in under some trees so they could watch the highway. He turned off the lights.
Darkness settled over them, marked by the dogs’ panting.
They were rewarded a few minutes later by the sight of the big black SUV streaking back toward Hilo. Jake craned to look after it. “Did you get a plate number?”
“No. They were moving too fast. Not that any plate on that SUV would go back to anything real.” Sophie’s heart rate was finally settling. “Speaking of, maybe we should obscure our number, too, in case they took it down when they passed us near the house.”
Sophie got out of the vehicle, scooped a couple of handfuls of handy mud from a nearby puddle, and rubbed the slurry over the rental’s license plates. She got back in the car and poured some of the dogs’ water over her hands. “I can’t wait to get a shower at the cabin.”
They drove at a much more sedate pace back toward Volcanoes National Park, just a couple of tourists in a rental Jeep. There was no telling whether that SUV was pulling the same trick they had done, and hurrying would draw attention.
Sophie liked it that Jake knew this, that he knew how to shake a tail, that he’d thought of staying off the road when they left the house. They worked so well together that they hardly needed to talk about what they were doing.
What she didn’t want to think about was another night, tossing and turning on the other side of a wall so thin that she could hear him tossing and turning, too.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Sophie set up her laptop to download and view what she had been able to capture of Cypher’s hard drive. Both dogs were up on her bed, snuggled together.
Showering off the sweat and dirt she’d picked up during the day had felt amazing, even in the tepid water and low pressure of the cabin’s inadequate shower. Sitting down in front of the computer, she felt clean and restless in fresh clothing, a towel on her head turban style.
She tried not to listen to the rush of water as Jake showered, wrestling with a mental picture of his ripped body under the stream of water, his soapy hands sliding over all those muscles . . .
She needed to focus on the data reports she was compiling on DAVID’s searches through the missing persons information. Needed. To. Focus.
The water shut off in the bathroom.
No, he wasn’t toweling off in the bathroom, filling the whole tiny closet of a space with his yummy lemony aftershave and man smell. No, he wasn’t rubbing his hair and brushing his teeth, and wrapping a towel around his waist and coming out and . . .
“Whatcha’ doin’?” Jake’s voice from the doorway made Sophie jump.
She turned.
Yes, there he was, leaning on one elbow in the doorway, with the towel wrapped around his waist and nothing on “but his birthday suit and sexy mojo,” Marcella’s voice supplied in her mind.
“Uh.” Sophie’s tongue felt thick. Off men! Totally. Forever!
“All work and no play makes Sophie . . . Sophie.” Jake ambled over and leaned over her shoulder to look at the screen. His smell surrounded her. His voice was a low rumble that scraped along her nerves. “Looks like a lot of statistics. Stats are so sexy.”
“Son of a yak! Put your clothing on, Jacob Sean Overstreet Dunn! You told me no partners with benefits!” Sophie leaned away, flapping her hands at him. “I am resisting. Resisting!”
Jake straightened up and laughed. Laughed and laughed, leaning backward. Those abs! Sophie watched the towel in fascination as it loosened, slithering toward the floor. He caught it at the last moment. “You are so damn cute I can’t stand it,” he finally said. “And you called me by my full name.”
“Son of a yak?” Sophie felt a smile tugging her lips. “It sounds better in Thai.”
“Is that what you said? No, I meant the other thing you called me.” He squatted. Now he was near her waist. Her whole body felt warm and tingly. She couldn’t look away from his eyes. Gray never looked so hot. “My. Full. Name. Say it again.” He swiveled the cheap chair to face him. Her vision was filled with him, her senses overwhelmed.
“Jacob Sean Overstreet Dunn,” she whispered. “Jake.”
“Partners with benefits it is. I can’t take this anymore.” Jake pulled her into his arms for the kiss she’d been craving since the last one.
This time, “yes” was the word she cried aloud, again and again.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The next morning Sophie sat down at her laptop, doing what she should’ve been doing last night instead of what she had ended up doing. The screen’s blue glow fell over her hands. She stared at them blankly.
She could still feel the solid warmth of Jake’s body impressed on her fingers.
Sophie couldn’t help glancing over at the bed. The dogs, ousted, lay on the braided rug under the window. Jake sprawled across the full-sized mattress, taking up the whole thing. Her gaze traveled over him, lying face down and gloriously nude, the sheets tangled at the foot of the bed. Turns out he liked to sleep naked, too.
She felt really good this morning. Weak in the knees, loose in the joints, with happy aches in between.
She’d now had two lovers.
She didn’t count Assan Ang. He had been . . . something else. A long, dark, closed chapter.
Whatever might happen in the future because of being with Jake, she wasn’t sorry. They’d both needed the release after the events of the day. And having sex with him didn’t mean she was ready to be in a relationship. Nothing had changed about that. Jake was the one who had agreed to her terms and walked through the door. Literally.
Jake rolled over, his breathing slow and deep, one arm reaching across her side of the bed, his fingers spread. Even asleep, he was looking for her. And damn, it had been as good as she imagined. Jake was a thoughtful and energetic lover, and had been determined that she would enjoy the experience.
He was nothing if not single-minded about his goals.
Tenderness bloomed, watching him, and she sucked in a breath, biting down on her lip, shutting off the emotion. He was sure to think that they were “together” now. And they weren’t.
Sophie made a cup of hot tea in the hotel carafe and refocused on the cache of data she had extracted from DAVID. She needed to get back to the computer room at Hilo PD so she could finish some of the pattern analysis she had been running.
The cabin didn’t have Wi-Fi, so her temptation to g
et into DAVID was stonewalled—but at some point, her email had kicked in, and she was able to look at her messages.
A message from the Ghost’s signature chat box awaited her.
Sophie felt a twinge as she clicked on it, unsure if her feeling was apprehension or something else.
“Thanks for the referral to this WITSEC situation, Sophie. I take it as a vote of confidence. I’ll get to work on this, and you can expect to hear back from me in a couple of days. It’s good to be in touch.”
Nothing more, thank the great Thor.
She was relieved.
Morning bloomed outside the windows, and there was work to do. She walked over and shook Jake’s shoulder, using one of Marcella’s phrases. “Rise and shine, lazybones.”
She wasn’t prepared for how quickly he reacted, grabbing her wrist and pulling her down and across him. He nuzzled her neck, and his bristly beard sent shivers down her bare skin. “I wondered if I dreamed last night. But here you are, naked in my room . . .”
“It’s my room. And . . . thank you for the good times, but we have to get to work.” Sophie extracted herself and walked with dignity to the bathroom. She locked the door so he wouldn’t join her, and took extra time washing up.
Jake needed to get the message that they’d had a “one and done,” as Marcella called it. She couldn’t let him get too attached.
The drive to Hilo Station was silent and uncomfortable. Jake kept yawning, great stretches of his jaws. Sophie would have offered to drive, but she knew he’d decline.
“I need food,” Jake said. “I’m depleted from my exertions yesterday.”
Sophie ignored his wink. “I’m amenable to a stop for breakfast.” She looked at the dogs, who had perked up at the mention of food. “We can order something for the dogs, too. I’m out of kibble.”
Sophie’s phone beeped with an incoming text, and she took it out of her pocket.
An unknown number showed. “Come to Hilo Bay Park at noon. I have important information about your mother.”