I leaned down and kissed her cheek. “It was what I saw in your eyes.”
“Fear?”
“Defenselessness.”
She snuggled her body deeper into mine. “Do you know how many other kids saw what they were doing and looked the other way?”
“I can guess.”
“I never went back to that school.”
“I wondered.” I’d spent four months looking for her every day, but never saw her again until a few days ago.
“It was a Thursday. By the following Thursday, we’d moved out of our house and had gone to live with my grandfather.”
“Where did you live before you moved?”
“Not that far from here. Maybe ten or fifteen miles to the west, right off Old Austin Highway.”
“Any idea who lives in that house now?”
“None. I haven’t thought about it in years.”
I made a mental note to do a property search. Ten or fifteen miles was a big stretch. Either way, it wasn’t that far from where I found her sister on the side of the road.
I heard the phone I’d left in the office ringing. Mila started to sit up, but I tightened my hold on her waist.
“Don’t you need to get that?”
“I’ll call whoever it is back. I’m not ready to let you go yet.”
“I have a confession to make.”
I smiled. “I like confessions. Especially naughty ones.” When she pinched my hand and squirmed against me, I held my breath, willing my cock to ignore her ass grinding against it. I was unsuccessful.
When she spoke again, it was in a whisper. “I’ve never done this, Decker.”
“What haven’t you done, baby?”
“This. Any of it.” She sighed, turned to her side, and nestled against me. “I worried that I would never be able to let someone touch me the way you do.”
I let her words sink in. She said never, but she didn’t say again. Did that mean that before her attack, she’d never been intimate with a man? She was seventeen when it happened, and while that wasn’t necessarily the norm these days, it certainly wasn’t unheard of for a woman or a man to still be a virgin at that age.
“I wish you’d say something.”
I put my fingers on her chin and tilted her head so I could look into her eyes. “Whatever happened or didn’t happen before this, doesn’t matter to me. The only concern I have is that you feel comfortable with me, want me, want to see where this thing between us goes. I’m in it for the long haul, Mila. I know that might be overwhelming for you, but I believe our souls connected the day our eyes met in the school hallway.”
“I feel the same way.”
I heard the phone in the office ring again. It stopped and within a minute, started again. Someone was obviously anxious to reach me.
“I better see who’s calling.” Mila sat up and moved so I could. “We aren’t done talking about this, though. Okay?”
She smiled. “Okay.”
I hurried into the office but didn’t catch the call in time. When I checked the call log, I saw that I’d missed one call from Rile, and two from the man researching Adler Livingston’s travel history.
I returned Rile’s call first.
“What’s up?”
“I’ve been able to confirm that Judd Knight filed for divorce from his wife before his daughter was even released from the hospital. It would be helpful to review her records.”
While my specialty was developing systems to securely protect and safeguard both real property and information, to be able to keep people out, I also needed to be an expert on how they got in. Hacking into something like medical records was child’s play compared to the hostile governments and terrorist organizations I’d had to find my way into.
“I’ll see what I can find out.”
“Casper is on standby. Have you reviewed her dossier?”
“I have more important things on my mind, Rile. If you want to work with her, then do it. You don’t need my okay.”
I didn’t catch whatever the man murmured before ending the call, and I didn’t give a shit. If Casper had a role to play in this investigation, so be it. If not, why was Rile wasting time talking about her?
I placed the next call. “Trip, what have you got for me?”
“I know you were looking for travel in the last seventy-two hours, but Adler Livingston is a frequent flier between Boston and DFW. As far as your specific question, he flew in and out of Austin on Tuesday. On Wednesday, he flew in from Boston for a second time. There’s no record of him traveling out of Texas yesterday or so far today.”
“That takes care of where he is now. Go back to the frequent flier thing you said.”
“He’s been flying between Logan and DFW on a weekly basis since January. Sometimes flying in and out the same day or within twenty-four hours. Prior to January, it was more infrequent, but it looks like it started up just about a year ago.”
“Was he traveling alone or with someone?”
“Alone.”
“Always DFW?”
“Mainly, but there were two trips to Austin.”
I walked out of the office and into the living room where Mila still sat. “When?”
“One, back in March, and then last week.”
“Any other travel?”
“Negative.”
“Thanks, Trip. I owe you one.”
“You owe me a helluva lot more than one, but don’t worry, Decker. Someday, I’ll start collecting.”
I chuckled and ended the call. I sat down next to Mila. “Did you say Adler traveled on business?”
“Yes, but I don’t know anything about it. I’d say that he didn’t talk about it, but the truth is, I didn’t ask.”
I scrubbed my face with my hand and then told Mila everything Trip had told me. She stood and paced, hands on hips.
“Tell me what you’re thinking, sweetheart.”
“At the moment?”
I nodded.
“I need to pound keys.”
I cocked my head.
“Play the piano. It’s my stress relief.”
“Are you serious?”
She stopped pacing and glared at me. “Are you making fun of me?”
I held up both hands. “Not at all. If you really need to take your frustration out on a piano, I know where you can do it.”
“Where?”
“The main house.”
“I’m serious about this, Decker. I feel like I’m about to crawl out of my skin.”
I stood and walked over to her, taking her hands in mine. “Remember this morning when I told you that riding out is my therapy? I get it. If you need to pound keys or whatever it was you said, I can make that happen. Let’s go.”
We were partway to the main house when Mila brought up what I’d learned about Adler’s recent travels.
“Why was he traveling to Texas?”
“I don’t know, but as soon as that sweet tush of yours is planted in front of the piano, I intend to figure it out.” I also intended to look into Marshall Livingston’s recent travels. And, I still needed to hack into Sybil’s medical records to see if there was anything unusual about her surgery or hospital stay.
“Do you remember at which hospital Sybil had her surgery?”
“St. David’s Children’s Hospital.”
I nodded. That wasn’t far from the ranch and the only one in the vicinity of Austin, so it made sense that’s where her parents would’ve taken her.
The piano was probably horribly out of tune since no one had played it since Quint’s mother died years and years ago. I knew that neither Quint nor his sister ever learned. Mila didn’t seem to mind, though, when I escorted her to the library that was toward the back of the house.
“You can close the door,” she said when I walked out of the room. I looked over at her before I did, and she was already mesmerized by the instrument.
“If you need me…” I began, but it was pointless; I doubted she heard a word I said. I
was partway down the hall when I heard her start to play.
Rile met me when I came into the kitchen. “Where are Edge and Grinder?” I asked.
“Grinder is looking deeper into Judson Knight’s association with Marshall Livingston. Edge is on his way to Bluebell Creek.”
23
Adler
“I won’t be able to get back in there until later tonight. I’ve already had one neighbor approach me and tell me how sorry she was to hear that Sybil died. She said she knew we were friends, and that she’d pray for me,” I told my father.
“It has to be there,” he murmured, sounding like he was talking to himself and hadn’t heard a word I said.
“I don’t understand, Dad. I thought you’d arranged to meet Sybil.”
“Judd Knight must’ve gotten to her first.”
“Jesus. Do you think he killed her for it?”
“Fucking focus, Adler! Do you fucking understand what’s on the line here? Those documents prove that I was the original applicant on the patents that Knighthawk’s technology is based on. Billions of dollars are at stake.”
I let out a deep breath. Was a woman’s life worth that? I supposed to my father, it might be. And what kind of man would that make him? “What am I looking for specifically?”
“A flash drive.”
24
Decker
“It’s kind of like that social media platform that two college students claim to have invented in their dorm room. Twenty years later, only one of them is a billionaire,” said Grinder, briefing Rile and me on what he’d learned about Judd Knight and Marshall Livingston. “Knighthawk made its money in inductive wireless technology.”
“What is that?” asked Rile.
Grinder looked at me. “You’re the techno-wizard.”
“It transmits data by way of magnetic induction, which is one of two fields that comprise a radio signal. Electric is the other field. It relies on a coiled transmitter that delivers the magnetic induction signal which is then picked up by another device. So essentially, data, audio, and voice transfer from one device to another. It’s more secure than the better-known transmission methodologies.”
“What do you use?” Grinder asked.
“You mean, what do we use.” said Rile.
“We use Burns Butler’s radio technology, which is like ultra-wideband in that it uses a very low energy level for short-range, high-bandwidth communications over a large portion of the radio spectrum. Except with Burns’ UWB, the baseline pulses are sent directly from a device’s antenna. Its signal strength can infiltrate walls, the ground, and even the human body.”
I knew it was unlikely Rile or Grinder had any real idea what I was talking about. It didn’t matter; it was why they wanted me to be a partner in their firm in the first place.
While it was Burns who had come up with the original idea, he and I developed the technology together. I was also the one who’d ramped it up, or as Burns liked to say, “added the turbocharger.”
When we leased our version of UWB to the US government, it was without my add-ons. That, we kept for ourselves. However, given Burns insisted that my name be on several of the original patents, that deal had made me a very wealthy man.
“Knighthawk is solely owned by Judson Knight. He never took it public,” said Grinder. “Which also means he figured out a way to cut Livingston out in the early stages.”
“What’s it worth?” Rile asked me.
“Initially, millions, but Knighthawk didn’t stop there. They took that one piece and applied the technology to nearly every smart device in existence.”
“So billions?” asked Grinder.
“At least.”
Rile turned to me. “What have you been able to determine about the timing of the divorce filing?”
I told him there was nothing in Sybil Knight’s medical history, specifically her surgery, that gave me any clue as to why Judd had filed for divorce. I’d been able to confirm the date of her surgery and the date of the filing, and either Judd had one helluva heartless attorney, which was likely, or something had happened in that four-day period of time that set him off.
“I also reviewed the court documents. It doesn’t appear that Judd was ever required to pay alimony or child support.” No wonder Mila didn’t want anything to do with him. Cheap-ass sonuvabitch didn’t even want to give her anything so she could go to college.
“The next million-, or billion-, dollar question is whether the Marshall who attacked Mila and Marshall Livingston are one and the same?”
The only thing that made sense to me was that they were two different people. If that was the case, there was a good chance Judd had killed Mila’s attacker. Otherwise, nothing he’d done that night made any sense.
My phone vibrated with a message from Edge. Look who I found, it said. The next message was a photo of Adler Livingston. Before I could ask any questions, Edge called.
“Talked to a neighbor who said ‘that man has been hanging around again.’ Her exact next words were, ‘he didn’t seem that upset, given how good of friends he and that poor girl were.’ She’s the one that took the photo.”
“Where is he now?”
“A couple of cars ahead of me.”
“Stay on him, Edge.”
Somehow Adler and Marshall Livingston, Judd Knight, and Sybil were connected, and it got her killed. But who’d killed her, and why?
What had made Judd divorce his wife so abruptly right around the time of Sybil’s surgery?
My cell rang, and I saw Trip was calling back. I didn’t know where or how this guy got his information, but he sure was quick about it.
“What have you got for me?” I asked.
“No commercial travel information on Marshall Livingston. He flies private.”
“His own plane?”
“My guess, although it’s registered to a shell LLC.”
“What kind of data can you get me on it?”
“Manifests are on their way to you now.”
“Again, I owe you.”
Trip laughed. “I’m getting around to asking you for something.”
“What’s that?”
“When I’m ready, I’ll let you know.”
When I checked the time, I was surprised to see that almost an hour had passed since I led Mila to the piano. I could still hear her pounding keys, as she put it.
Knowing she used it for stress relief made me anxious to saddle Ike up again and ride out.
I opened my laptop and perused Marshall Livingston’s flight manifests. Unlike Adler, he hadn’t spent any time in Texas at all.
I walked down the hallway and eased the library door open. Mila looked up and stopped playing.
“I wanted to let you know that I’m headed to the barn.”
She stood.
“You can keep playing.”
“No, I need to stop. My shoulders are starting to ache. Plus, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to go with you.”
“Wouldn’t mind at all.” I sent a message to Boon, letting him know we were on our way out. By the time we got to the barn, both horses were saddled up and ready to go.
“Feel any better?” I asked once we were out on the open range.
“Yes and no. I vacillate.”
“That’s to be expected.” So did I, to be honest. There was something obvious I was overlooking. I just needed to stop trying so hard, and it would come to me. I took a deep breath, trying to figure out the best way to tell Mila that Edge had located Adler, and what the neighbor had said about him and Sybil.
“I’ve been thinking about Adler—”
“I have something to tell you.”
Mila pulled Sage to a stop. “What?”
I dismounted and held onto Ike’s reins. Mila did the same. “Let’s walk.”
“Decker? Whatever it is, just say it.”
“Adler and Sybil knew each other. That’s where he was, at her house. A neighbor told Edge he’d been there before.”
&n
bsp; “That’s why he was traveling back and forth to Texas? To see my sister?”
“So it seems.”
“Why?”
“I don’t have the answer to that question yet, but I’m working on it.”
When Mila stopped walking, I did too. Her fists were clenched, and she had a look on her face that I hadn’t seen before.
“Is my whole fucking life a lie? Is there anyone I can trust? Jesus.”
I took one of her hands in mine. “You know the answer to your second question, Mila. You’ve got me. You can trust me.”
“I know. I mean, I think I know. I also thought I could trust Adler. I thought he was my only real friend in Boston. Now I find out that he’s a goddamn psycho who’s been…what? Was he having sex with her?”
“I can’t answer that particular question either.”
She huffed and pulled her hand away. I stepped closer and put my arm around her waist.
“Don’t doubt me, Mila. I’m the real deal here.”
She rested her forehead against my chest. “I know, and I’m sorry I said that. I’ve never felt so confused.”
“Need to pound some more keys?”
“No, but can we ride?”
“Absolutely.”
We rode hard for fifteen or twenty minutes. Ike and I could’ve kept going, Sage too, but Mila was showing signs of fatigue. I had no idea how long it had been since she rode, but it was more difficult than people thought; the rider did as much work as the horse.
Once we slowed to a walk, something from the medical reports I’d read flashed in my mind. Blood. Sybil had needed a blood transfusion. God, it was so obvious.
“Do you know your blood type?”
“I don’t even want to know why you’re asking me that question. But, yeah. A-positive.”
“We need to head back.”
25
Mila
I hadn’t known Decker long, but I doubted there were many occasions when he didn’t take care of his own horse after riding out. I heard him apologize to Boon, who in turn, told him that he had plenty of ranch hands standing around with little to do.
Decked (The Invincibles Book 1) Page 11