Caballo Security Box Set

by Camilla Blake

  “I need to go talk to Femi, to the people at the hotel, find out how that box got into your room.”

  “Does it have to be you?”

  “It’s my case.”

  The side door opened then, relieving me from the expectation I could hear in the little sigh that slipped from between her lips in that moment. Max came bounding in, looking like a teenager returning home from some sports practice. He was even wearing jeans and high-top sneakers.

  “How’s it going?” he asked, glancing between the two of us as he became aware of the tension that lived there.

  I grabbed his arm and pulled him back into the kitchen.

  “They ever find those two idiot bodyguards?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What about her makeup artist? They get her?”

  “Yeah. She’s at the office waiting for you.”

  I glanced at the time on the stove there in the kitchen. It was well after midnight, but I knew it was going to be a much longer night. I glanced back toward the living room.

  “Try to get her to go to bed. Tell her I’ll be back to take her to her photo shoot in the morning.”

  “No problem.”

  I was out the door before Max could leave the room, needing to put some distance between me and Eva. She was upset; I understood that. She needed someone she could trust, someone she could lean on. But that couldn’t be me.

  As I drove through the silent streets of the city I’d lived in all my life, I was transported back to a time when my life should have been more innocent, but wasn’t. My childhood was something of a joke, my parents more interested in their own selfish desires than caring for their only two children. We didn’t have grandparents, no aunts or uncles. Just our luck that we got the only set of parents in the world who were both only children, both orphaned at a fairly young age under circumstances beyond their control. And then, of course, there were the inheritances. Neither of my parents had ever wanted for anything.

  Maybe that was why it was so easy for them to abandon us. They’d never had to be responsible, never had to live up to anyone’s expectations. I asked my mother right to her face once why she’d had children at all. You know what she told me? Because it was vogue, the “in thing” to do at the time. Everyone was having babies; all her girlfriends were either pregnant or undergoing fertility treatments. She wanted to be one of the crowd.

  I guess it never occurred to her that there was more to having a child than just producing it.

  I’m grateful to have had Brock. We had nothing but each other all our childhood. Our parents didn’t even care enough to be home for holidays and birthdays. I think I spent two birthdays with my parents when I was a child, and both those just happened to correspond with some party or other event that happened to bring them home. I think my father was in a leg cast at one of those birthdays, which is probably what forced them to come home. Can’t ski on a broken leg!

  They didn’t even bother to find us good, strong names. Our names came from the fact that the doctor referred to us as Baby A and Baby B on the sonograms. They just came up with the first names they could think of that worked with those initials. How lame is that?

  But Brock… he was my best friend. I will never forgive myself for what I did to him.

  The thing is, I knew I didn’t love that girl. I wasn’t even all that interested in her. I think, now that I can look back on it with some maturity, that it was about the novelty of what she was offering me. I was a fifteen-year-old kid at the time, a kid who’d lacked even the basic parental affection that most kids take for granted. When this beautiful girl came and whispered in my ear all the things she wanted to do to me… how was I supposed to resist that?

  Marnie was… there were no words for what Marnie was. She had Brock convinced that what they shared was something close to the soulmate idea that was promoted in popular fiction, convincing him that she was the only girl he’d ever want, that she was the only girl he’d ever need. The whole time she’s telling him this, though, she was whispering in my ear, telling me all these things she could do to me, things that good girls don’t do with their boyfriend’s brother. I fell for it. Hook, line, and sinker.

  Marnie was the first girl I was with. She cast a spell on me. If I’d known what a nightmare she would drag me through, I might have gone running in the other direction. Then again, if not for Marnie, there wouldn’t be Josie. My life would not be the same without Josie.

  I dragged my fingers through my hair as I navigated the silent city streets, my thoughts doing a dance they’d done dozens of times in the past. I’d made choices, both good and bad, doing the best I thought I could. Six years in the marines. Six years in private security, four of them with Caballo. But that one mistake cheated me out of eight years with my brother. It cheated me out of the final few years of high school with my best friend; it cheated me out of college, cheated me out of dreams of going to law school. Brock stuck to the plan, but what did it do for him? Would he still have done what he did on that night if I’d been there? If I hadn’t made my choices as I’d done? Would he be a lawyer right now, arguing cases in a courtroom, instead of trying to get himself killed in foreign countries? Would he be with a woman like Eva? Would he be with Eva?

  Life is a funny thing when taken down to the minute, to the little choices we all make. If I hadn’t eaten Cheerios for breakfast, might I have been at the IHOP when it was robbed? Stupid things like that. I tried not to indulge in that kind of thought, but sometimes it was difficult.

  Like, if I hadn’t gotten my brother’s high school girlfriend pregnant when we were all fifteen, would he have run into a burning building and forever changed everyone’s life?

  Philosophical discussions had never been my forte.

  Chapter 5

  Akker

  Femi looked up when I opened the door, a rush of relief blasting through her frightened expression.

  “Oh, Akker! I’m so glad to see a familiar face! No one will tell me what the heck is going on here!”

  “They were waiting for me to arrive.” I pulled out a chair across the conference table from her, watching her face as I took a seat. I wanted to see any signs of guilt, of anger, of anything that might indicate she knew more than she was letting on. So far, I didn’t see anything. “There was an incident in Eva’s room tonight.”

  “That’s what they told me! But they wouldn’t say what happened or if Eva’s okay.”

  “Eva’s fine. She’s in a safe place.”

  Femi nodded, relief once again washing over her expression. “What happened?”

  “How long did you stay in her room after we went to the party?”

  Femi shrugged her narrow shoulders, one finger wrapping blue hair around itself as she thought about her answer. “Another fifteen minutes, I suppose. I was cleaning up my supplies.”

  “Were you downstairs the whole time?”

  “No. We did her makeup upstairs, in the master bath. I was up there.”

  “Could someone have come into the suite without you being aware of it?”

  She shook her head, frowning slightly. “I don’t think so. Why?”

  “Where did you go after you left her suite?”

  “To my room. I had room service, then I went to bed.”

  “Did you see Harry and Lloyd?”

  “Those idiots? No. I thought they’d gone to the party with the two of you.” Femi leaned forward. “Why are you asking me all these questions? I thought you and Eva were old friends.”

  “We are.” It was a white lie that she seemed to buy, just like Eva assumed everyone would. But it made me curious. “What did Eva tell you about me?”

  “Just that you were the brother of her ex-boyfriend and that the two of you ran into each other while she was out earlier. She said she’d gone driving around, checking out some of the places she spent time at when she was a kid, places they didn’t want to use for the photographs.”

  “Did she say where we met? What our relationship wa
s?”

  Femi shrugged. “We were drinking champagne.” She twirled the hair tighter around her finger. “I get a little spacey when I drink.”

  “Did you drink more after we left? Could you have been there longer than you recall?”

  “No.” She blushed, though, suggesting she wasn’t being completely honest.

  “There was a gift box on the table in the living room, near the minibar. Do you know how that happened to get there?”

  Femi shook her head, glancing around the room suddenly, like she had just become aware of the fact that she wasn’t in her hotel room, but was in a place where she might be recorded in some way.

  “Did you see the gift box? Did you see someone loitering around her room?”

  “I didn’t see anything. I just cleaned up my stuff and walked out. There could have been an elephant in the living room and I wouldn’t have noticed.” She untangled her hair from around her finger and leaned forward a little, her expression intense. “I have to be at the location at 7:00 a.m.—I need to get out of here and get some sleep!”

  “You were the last one in the hotel room, Femi. I just need to know if you saw anything.” I tilted my head slightly, trying to look as benevolent as I could. “This is about protecting Eva.”

  “She’s okay?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “Then I need to go. She’ll need me to help her with her makeup in the morning.” Femi stood, walking to the door, seemingly surprised to find it locked. “Please, I can’t lose this job!”

  There was something about her behavior that alarmed me. She was acting for all the world like a woman who knew something, someone who was trying desperately to hide something from me.

  “If you know who tried to hurt Eva, you need to tell me now, Femi.”

  She was quiet for a moment, her hand on the doorknob. “Are you even a friend of hers? Or was that a lie, too?”

  “She dated my brother. That part’s true.”

  “How well do you know her?”

  I shrugged. “Does it matter?”

  Femi turned to look at me, this new expression in her eyes, a darker look, something more intelligent than what she’d shown me previously. “Not everything Eva says is the truth. Sometimes she likes to play games. She likes to keep people on their toes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I just… Don’t believe everything Eva tells you. Things aren’t always as they appear around her.”

  “Are you suggesting that Eva put that box there herself?”

  “No. But it wouldn’t be beyond her to make up a stalker in order to get attention. Have you asked her yet what her new movie’s about? Why she’s here?”

  “I was told it had something to do with a girl going home.”

  She shook her head. “You should do more research, Mr. Bodyguard. That is what you are—right?”

  “I’m a security operative.”

  She nodded. “She’s playing you.”

  “You don’t think the stalker is real? That the text messages are real?”

  “I’m just suggesting you be careful.”

  I got up and opened the door, calling to another operative down the hall. “He’ll take you back to your hotel room. I’m sorry we had to drag you out in the middle of the night.”

  “Did you search my room?”

  The truth was that we did, which was why she’d been brought to the office. No explosives were found, nothing that might connect her to the box or what was inside. They had found a gram of coke in her makeup kit, which was probably what she was worried about. But, unless she had a partner, the search cleared her of the bombing thing.

  “Go back to the hotel, Femi. Eva can explain everything in the morning, if she so chooses.”

  She shook her head, but she didn’t have another comment. I watched her go before turning back to the table, falling into my chair to look through the preliminary report our in-house investigators had already prepared on the bomb. It was a simple construction with some sort of motion trigger. I already knew that. I wanted something on the report to tell me where it had come from and who had made it, but so far they hadn’t been able to find anything that suggested a signature. All bombers had signatures. This one would too—we just had to find it.

  With a heavy sigh and a weary scrape of my hand over my face, I gathered my things and headed out. I was not having the success I’d been hoping to have tonight.

  “Hey, Akker!” someone called as I came out of the conference room. When I turned, Cheryl, one of the investigators, was waving me over. “We might have found something.”

  I wasn’t sure if she was talking about this case, or the embezzlement case we’d been discussing this morning—just before Eva Rae saw me in the lobby and attacked. But when I walked up behind her and saw the security footage she was studying along with two gentlemen from her team, I knew this was about Eva.

  “That’s the stairwell at the hotel.”

  “And that’s your two missing security guards,” Cheryl said, tapping a finger against a corner of the screen. Sure enough, when I leaned close and studied the grainy footage, I could see two figures reclining on the steps.

  “Are they drinking? Or taking a nap?”

  “Can’t tell from this angle and there don’t seem to be any other angles.”

  “Anyone available who can go check it out?”

  “Chance is on his way, but it’ll take him a few minutes.”

  “Did the security cameras show anything else? The culprit, perhaps?”

  Cheryl pushed a button on the computer and a new bit of security-camera footage appeared. This was clearer, less grainy. In fact, it was almost crystal clear. But it was also missing fifteen minutes of time.

  “Where’s the missing time?”

  “You caught that, did you?”

  I pointed to the time stamp at the bottom of the screen. “It skips fifteen minutes almost from the moment Eva and I left.”

  “We saw that, too. You left, the bodyguards responded to something down on the other end of the hall, and then it skips. There’s nothing when it comes back—no bodyguards, no makeup artist, nothing—until you and the target return after the party.”

  As if to prove her words, Cheryl fast-forwarded through the footage, pausing at the moment Eva and I appeared, then fast-forwarded again to the moment when the bomb exploded. There was nothing visible, but the camera stuttered slightly from the concussion and Max could be seen coming out of a neighboring room.

  “Where was Max during the missing time?”

  “On a break.”

  “You’re fucking kidding me!”

  Cheryl shrugged. “He was told he could run out for a few minutes while you were gone.”

  “Did someone see him? Who knew he was there?”

  She shrugged again. “Could just be coincidence.”

  “Or it could be a leak.”

  The idea bothered me, but it wasn’t unusual, especially not in private security. The firm I worked for straight out of the marines had so much trouble with leaks that they were being sued by half a dozen clients by the time I decided I’d had enough. Private security operatives were often in it for the money and nothing more. If someone had more money to offer than the client, then they were as good as gone.

  “Ox wouldn’t allow it. Maybe it’s someone on her side.”

  “I’ll ask her.”

  I headed out, bothered by what I’d seen. If there was a leak on our side, that could spell trouble for everyone. If the leak was on her side, that could make it harder to plug up. Either way, this wasn’t good news.

  I’d intended to go straight back to the safe house, but decided to head over to the hotel instead. I wanted to talk to the bodyguards hired by Eva’s manager, find out what had drawn them to the stairwell in the first place. It looked, on the security tapes, as if they were checking something out, not looking for a place to hide. If they’d seen something, they might know the identity of our bomber.

  There
were cop cars, their lights pulsing, outside the hotel when I pulled up. I slipped in through a side door and took the service elevator, assuming the cops were after a guest who’d had one too many in the bar. To my surprise, the cops were congregated on the fifth floor, the same floor on which the bodyguards could be seen reclining in the stairwell in our security footage. Chance, one of our operatives, came over when he caught sight of me.

  “They’re dead.”

  “Who’s dead?”

  “The bodyguards. Strangled.”

  “With what?”

  Chance shrugged, but he held up his hands, implying it had been manual strangulation.

  “Someone lured them over to the stairs and strangled them with his bare hands?”

  “Looks like it.”

  My heart sank as the implications of that sank in. Two men. As slow and ridiculous as they were, the chances that someone would be able to strangle one while the other just stood there and watched were miniscule. That meant we were dealing with not one madman, but two. Maybe more. And they weren’t playing games.

  This just got a lot bigger.

  Chapter 6

  Eva

  “Turn this way, Ms. Rae!”

  I twisted at the waist, trying to keep the smile on my face cheerful and bright, but it was a struggle. I caught sight of Akker just behind the studio lights that were so hot I felt as though I was running an impossibly high temp. I could only see the outline of him, but he’d been following me around for three days. I knew what his profile looked like.

  I could hear gasps and laughter, too, from the people walking past us on the busy sidewalk. We were on location in front of the high school I’d attended as a teenager, a newly renovated section of the school that I’d not seen until today. It was located between a strip mall and a busy restaurant and, right now, it was the lunch hour. The working class in the area were either frustrated by the traffic our vehicles were impeding, or thrilled to see my face in front of the camera.

  “Can I get an autograph, Ms. Rae?” someone screamed from somewhere to my left.