by Layla Reyne
“Smart,” Hawes said. “You couldn’t save Ro, but you could save the other girl.”
“Izzy was recruiting me. She gave me a purpose.” He gently pushed Hawes up, wanting to see his face for this part, or rather, wanting Hawes to see his. This was too important. “Which is why I can’t let her killer go. I couldn’t avenge Ro’s death, but I can avenge Izzy’s. I have to.”
Hawes stiffened in his arms one second and vaulted out of them the next, rocketing off the chaise like he’d been burned. Chris caught his wrist before he could shut down and put Chris out of reach again. “Hey, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” Hawes cast his gaze down, then at the bookcase, then out the window. Anywhere but at Chris.
Not nothing. Chris ran a thumb over the inside of Hawes’s wrist, the racing pulse point there thrumming under his fingertip. “You’ve known all along that finding Izzy’s killer is my primary mission. The ATF has me on the explosives, but I won’t drop this until I find out what really happened to my partner. I wanted you to understand why it matters.”
“I did. I do.” Hawes swallowed hard but still wouldn’t look at him. “It matters to me too,” he said, barely a whisper.
Chris believed him. The changes Hawes had made in the organization since the night of Izzy’s death were proof. So why wasn’t he proud of them? Why did he always tense when Chris brought up finding her killer? Unless he knew more than he was letting on, in which case… “Who are you protect—”
Noise from outside cut off Chris’s words. Louder than the usual critters, but not so loud that it would wake the neighbors. If both he and Hawes weren’t trained as they were, they may not have heard it either. But they were, and they did.
Chris cursed. “My gun’s in the safe.” He started to let go of Hawes’s hand, to head for his bedroom safe, or if there wasn’t enough time, to the kitchen knives, but Hawes reversed their grip, grasping his wrist and halting him mid-stride.
“Hold a second,” he whispered, on alert but not tensed to battle-ready. Before Chris could ask what he was on about, a set of knocks rapped below the window. Hawes’s form relaxed, and he dropped Chris’s hand. “I invited them.” He crossed to the back door as footsteps started up the stairs. He opened the door, and Holt and Helena entered, Lily in her aunt’s arms for a change.
Chris thought to object—they all knew where he lived now—but Holt had figured that much out already and given Hawes the address. At least Hawes had invited them, unlike at Hawes’s condo, where they barged in unannounced on the regular. A heads-up would have been nice, but Chris hadn’t given Hawes a chance, having jumped right into the history lesson.
On cue, the baby in Helena’s arms wailed her disapproval of the rising sun, and Chris couldn’t help but smile. “You got a microwave in this place?” Helena asked. “Bottle time.”
Chris held an arm out toward the kitchen, and the troop of Madigans made themselves at home. Holt set up at the bar, computer open, Hawes got another pot of coffee brewing, and Helena dug a bottle out of the baby bag and stuck the bottle in the microwave.
That done, she rotated and leaned back against the counter, surveying the space. “Nice place, Mr. Hair.”
“Glad it meets your approval.” He circled the end of the island, opened the junk drawer, and fished out a folded Post-it. He slid it across the bar to Holt. “In case you need the wireless password.”
Holt’s tired, dark eyes flicked from the faded neon slip of paper, to the drawer Chris had pulled it from, to Chris. He looked more like himself again, albeit still weary. “I wouldn’t connect to your system.” He withdrew a hot spot from the baby bag and plugged it into the laptop. “I’m not an idiot.”
The snarky judgment made Chris laugh. “Of course not.” Ice broken, he lowered his voice and said to Holt, “You didn’t tell him about Ro.” He was sure Holt must have turned up that info in his revised search.
Holt’s eyes tracked to his daughter, to Chris, then back to the screen. “Not my story to tell.”
“Thank you.” Smiling, Chris moved the rest of the way around the island to the fridge and pulled out the creamer, readying it for when Hawes passed out steaming mugs of coffee.
Holt gulped back half of his, then spun his laptop around so they could all see the screen. “This was the tip we received this morning.”
Chris scalded his throat in his haste to swallow. “What tip?”
Hawes gestured at the screen. “This is why I invited them here.”
Chris leaned forward and read the email. “The seller made contact…” He looked over his shoulder at Helena. “With you?”
“With me.” Her expression was deadly serious, even as she fed Lily her bottle and patted her bottom. “They’re offering me a chance to buy back the explosives.”
Chris shifted his gaze to Hawes. “Why are you bringing this to me now?”
“We kept you on the sidelines yesterday,” Hawes said. “That was a mistake, and it almost didn’t work out. We need to coordinate. I won’t have those explosives loose in my city.”
“So your play worked,” Chris said, satisfied that their interests were aligned. “They’re on the defensive and trying to pick off the pass.”
Hawes sipped from his mug. “Likely.”
“Could this be Amelia?”
“Possibly,” Holt answered. “She knows how to disguise the IP address. But we told Brax not to give her access to a computer.”
“I called him,” Helena told them. “Confirmed it. No access to any mobile devices either.”
“So she told someone how to do this, then,” Chris said. “Or they have another hacker, and this plan was on her flash drive. Any luck there yet?”
Holt shook his head.
“But she can vet the tip,” Hawes said. “She can tell us if this was part of the plan, fallback or otherwise.”
Or lead Hawes right where her faction wanted him. “It’s a trap,” Chris said.
“That’s what I told him,” Helena said, and Holt nodded too.
Hawes finished his mug and set it in the sink. “We all agree on that point. Now, how do we turn the trap back around on them? Because I am done with this shit.”
Chris tilted his head toward the study, and the lot of them followed him in. Helena whistled low and handed Lily off to Holt, who grumbled under his breath about “too much fucking paper.” Chris chuckled as he walked over to the org chart. “They’ve wiped out your lieutenants, and two of your soldiers are in custody.”
“They?” Hawes said, hip against the desk, arms folded over his chest.
“One of them.” Chris pointed at the layer of captains.
Hawes shook his head. “We don’t think so. Alibis check out. Half aren’t even here. They’re out on contracts.”
Chris rested a hand next to the X adjacent to the chart. “Then someone out here.”
“The competition,” Helena said. “We were thinking that already.”
The reason they’d set up the trap at the building yesterday.
“Three of which are gone,” Holt added.
“I have my ideas,” Hawes said, then glanced at Helena. “We need to talk to Rose. There could be older players we’re not familiar with who are looking to exploit the perceived power vacuum.”
“Get a list from her, and then I can see if they crossed paths with…” Holt’s words drifted off, and he stared out the front window, holding Lily closer.
It had been a nice reprieve—the siblings firing on all cylinders, a sight and process that fascinated Chris—until reality reentered the picture. Hawes moved to his brother’s side and squeezed his arm.
“Be sure you look back three years,” Chris said, keeping them focused. “To the night—”
Hawes’s gaze shot to him, but it was Helena who spoke. “To the night your partner died.”
“Was murdered.” Three pale faces stared back at him as he rapped his knuckles against the wall between the X and the org chart. “I’d bet my badge that this person, whoev
er they are, was responsible for Izzy’s death.”
“And what are you going to do to them?” Hawes said.
“Find out who they are, and then we spring the trap.”
An awkward few seconds of silence followed before Lily broke it with a wail. “We need to get her home for a nap,” Holt said.
Helena kicked into action, moving back into the kitchen to pack up their bags, Holt on her heels. Hawes, however, stood frozen, gaze whipping back and forth between the wall of crime scene photos and his siblings. Was he imagining them there? Or himself? They’d all been in the line of fire this past week, intentionally and not.
“Hey,” Chris said softly, stepping close and cupping Hawes’s cheek. He waited for blue eyes to meet his, then rested their foreheads together. “We won’t let anything happen to them. And I won’t let anything happen to you.”
“Thank you.” He leaned forward and captured Chris’s mouth, stealing his breath and heart in a stunning kiss, one that said more than their words or previous kisses ever had, including a confounding trace of goodbye.
Chapter Twelve
Up early owing to his overnight and morning visitors, Chris beat most of the agents and staff into the office. All but one. Light shined from under the partially closed war-room door, and strains of The Grateful Dead floated out into the otherwise quiet space. Of course Wheeler had pulled an all-nighter. Chris didn’t expect anything less from him.
He didn’t, however, expect the decent choice in music from someone so uptight. Nor did he expect to push the door the rest of the way open and find the other agent facedown on his files, asleep. Coat, tie, and vest folded neatly over one of the other chairs, Wheeler had his wrinkled dress sleeves rolled up and his head pillowed on his folded arms. He continued to snore lightly, undisturbed by Chris’s entrance. For Wheeler to be that dead to the world, he’d probably only recently fallen asleep. Chris surveyed the rest of the room, confirming his suspicion. Wheeler had been at this all night from the impressive look of it. The whiteboard of notes behind him was impossibly more packed with sharp, slanted scribble, and at the other end of the room, the flip board was now covered in photos, plans, and notes from yesterday’s scene.
Chris skirted behind Wheeler, turning down the music and flicking the coffee maker on as he walked to the other end of the room. He stood before the board, arms crossed, examining what Wheeler had pieced together. Building schematics. Before and after shots of the buyer rooms and the destroyed ventilation unit on the roof above them, where the explosion had originated. Charred remains of the three buyers. The trigger device in the stairwell. The heat signatures showing the path Hawes had run, room to room, killing his targets. Ferrying bids, as far as Wheeler knew. Surveillance photos from the hour time window before and after the explosion, a red circle drawn on two of them—by Wheeler, Chris presumed—around the head of a man Chris didn’t recognize. Hawes with his head held high as he entered the building, then with his face covered in soot and a child in his arms as he later emerged next to Kane.
A chill snaked up Chris’s spine, as he was reminded again of how close he’d come to losing everything he’d worked on for the past three years and everything he’d found the past week.
As the scent of stale coffee began to waft around him, Chris rested back against the table, examining the evidence from a thirty-five-thousand-foot level. Trying to assess how and when the seller had infiltrated and set the explosives. On the schematics, another red circle was drawn over a set of sub-sidewalk basement doors and a red line led from there to a utility closet inside the building. Right next to the north stairwell. Could that be the access route they were looking for? Was the man in the photos the person who traveled the path?
Per the debrief yesterday, Jax was gathering surveillance from the time period between when the Madigans had posted the auction ad to the time of the blast. The ATM had only been clicked on that afternoon, but there were traffic cams and other sources they could maybe pull useful footage from. Get a lock on who had come and gone from the building. Had the stranger been there another time? Chris withdrew his phone, snapped pictures of the photos and the schematics, and shot them off with a text to Kane and Jax, suggesting they refocus their surveillance backtrack to the indicated location with an eye for this person.
“I’m sorry about yesterday.”
Chris dropped his phone into his pocket and rotated toward the voice.
Upright, Wheeler scrubbed both hands over his face and into his hair, doing a terrible job of taming it. “You were right. We could have lost agents, but I was too busy trying to get the bust to end all busts.” He slumped back in the chair and dropped his hands into his lap. “I wasn’t going about it the right way.”
Add another check in the impressed column. An agent who could admit when he was wrong, who could adjust and learn, was a valuable asset. Chris mentally added two checks, since Wheeler was also taking on more of the blame than he deserved in this case. But he couldn’t tell him that.
“It happens,” he said instead. “And we didn’t lose any agents.”
“We’re still waiting on an ID on the third body.”
Chris couldn’t tell him who that was either, not without letting on the full truth of yesterday’s incident. “But all our agents and all of Kane’s officers are accounted for, yes?”
“Yes, thankfully. We assume it was another buyer, given the location. We’ll see who else turns up in the surveillance. Match it against dental, if we can salvage that much.”
“ME say how long?”
“Couple days, if there are dental records.”
Not likely. He needed to get that ID to Wheeler some other way before it served as another point of distraction. Or led Wheeler somewhere Chris didn’t want him to go. “Pull the resident records,” Chris said. “Let’s see if there was anyone already in the building who could be a buyer.”
“We already did that,” Wheeler said. “Before the bust.”
“Check it against aliases.” He tapped the photos of the stranger. “And against this guy you circled. Do we know who he is?”
Wheeler shook his head. “No, but other than general databases, I didn’t have much to go on other than my gut, which tells me he might be one of the heat signatures in the north stairwell just before the explosion.”
“You might be right. Let’s see if he’s a resident or connected to one.”
Wheeler held his gaze, searching, and Chris worried he’d given away too much, but then Wheeler leaned forward and opened his laptop, shooting off an email. While he did that, Chris filled a mug, set the coffee next to Wheeler, then rounded the table to sit across from him.
“Thank you,” Wheeler said before taking a sip and grimacing. “I thought y’all were supposed to have good coffee in this town.”
It was the first slip of Southern accent Chris had detected from the Georgia-born agent, and the twangy word, along with the observation, made him chuckle. “Have you been in many ATF offices that have good coffee?”
“Touché.”
“You want good coffee, raid the FBI’s stash. The SAC is a coffee snob.”
“Good to know.” He took another long swallow, face pinching slightly less this time, then lowered the mug, hands still wrapped around it. His gaze drifted to the Madigan org chart. “You know these people better than anyone. I should have listened to you.” Then drifted back to Chris. “The explosives are our objective.”
Assured of Wheeler’s redirected focus, Chris withdrew the piece of paper from his inner coat pocket and slid it across the table. “You’ll have another chance. Friday.”
Wheeler’s eyes grew wide as he read the email to Helena. “How did you get this?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
Skeptical brown eyes shot to his. “Perri…”
“Do you want to secure the explosives?”
Their stare-down lasted a good ten seconds before Wheeler finally nodded. Chris slowly let his held breath out through his nose.
&nb
sp; “Good,” he said. “You’re going to spec out this strike. We don’t know where yet, rolling location, so it’s going to be complicated. We need to consider all possible locations and have contingencies ready. I’ll coordinate with the Madigans.” His eyes flickered to the picture of Hawes and back. Wheeler nodded again. “And I’ll add what I know to the mission planning, after I vet the tip.”
“Vet it with whom?” Wheeler asked.
“Amelia Madigan.”
By the time Chris made it to SFPD headquarters, Kane was well on his way to pacing a hole through the floor outside the interrogation rooms. Tie askew, top button of his dress shirt undone, bags under his eyes, and deep creases at the corners of his drawn mouth, the chief looked to be living the longest twenty-four hours—longest two weeks—of his life. Chris was sure it was nothing compared to Kane’s time in the military, but family had a way of complicating matters.
“The arraignment?” Chris asked, worried something else had gone off the rails. Seemed to be their luck lately.
Kane paused in his circuit and ran a hand over his head. “As well as it could go. Bail denied. Flight risk.”
“I’m sure all those pictures of her at the offshore bank helped.”
“That and a slush fund north of ten million that Holt found last night.”
That explained why Hawes’s brother had seemed both more engaged and more worn down this morning. He’d had a successful hack and found the last thing he’d wanted.
“Any luck tracing the funds?”
Kane resumed his pacing. “He’s working on it.”
Chris leaned against the wall, out of his way. “Amelia still tight-lipped?”
“Relatively.”