“We should also go get a sample from those fire sites,” Romero murmured. “If we can manage to get something back to Sparks, he might be able to tell us what sort of accelerant was used.”
“Maybe,” Yates murmured. “Tasha thinks law enforcement is involved.” Yates turned and looked at Romero. “And you getting called back to active duty doesn’t seem coincidental either. You’ve poked your nose into this and they want you out of the way.”
“Who would have that kind of power?” Tasha asked in a hushed tone of voice. “You’re not just talking about a few dirty cops here. You’re talking about people within the military chain of command too. Just someone who has the power to lean on someone else.”
Romero made a low noise in his throat. “Cassidy and I speculated in Richmond that the men who were taking these women knew who they were. It was as if they had the demographics on each target.”
“Which means they knew that Rachel was Trapp’s sister,” Cassidy added. “What are the chances that your lieutenant pissed off some of the wrong people and this is the retribution?”
Yates looked at Romero. Their gazes met and held. Yates already knew that neither of them was aware of anything that would make Trapp this sort of target, but that didn’t mean the reason didn’t exist.
TASHA GLANCED FROM one SEAL to the other. “What aren’t you saying?” she asked slowly.
She tried to read Yates’s face, but as always it was an impenetrable mask that showed her nothing. The man had a poker face that could have likely won him one of those insane television pro championships.
“I need to talk to my father,” Yates said suddenly.
Tasha stared in shock, blinking owlishly and trying to find something to say in response. Finally it was Romero who actually spoke. It was obvious that Yates’s announcement had caught his fellow SEAL completely by surprise.
“Yates,” Romero said gruffly. “Are you sure that’s necessary?”
“My father works at the Pentagon. He knows things that would never be shared with the public.” Yates was already steeling himself for the encounter. Tasha could tell. His jaw was set and his eyes were hard.
Cassidy shifted, looking uncomfortable. “Should someone go with you?”
“That wouldn’t go over well,” Yates said with a dark chuckle. “Let’s just say that my father is about as secretive as they come. Not to mention the whole thing about looking down on anyone who isn’t trying to scramble his way up the political ladder.”
“Sounds like a real charmer,” Tasha said with a smile. She needed to lighten the mood. She wanted Yates to know that no matter what his asshole father said or did, or what the man thought, life was going to go on and Yates would be just fine.
“He’s about as charming as Hitler.” Yates laughed bitterly. “Although I think Hitler probably cared more about his followers than my father cares about the American public.”
“That’s harsh,” Romero told him. “Just remember, if the guy wants to play ball and share information, then that’s great. If not, fuck him. We’re doing just fine without his inside track. We’ll continue to figure things out as we go.”
Yates shoved his hand back over his hair. Tasha noticed that the close-cropped blond hair was getting longer. Soon she would actually be able to feel it between her fingers when she touched his head. The thought was almost surreal. It was hard to wrap her mind around the notion that this man was hers. He was sexy and powerful, and completely alpha in nature. Yet he was also kind and incredibly loving in bed. He’d shared more of himself with her between those sheets than she had ever expected from anyone she’d been with. It had been a revelation, and she didn’t want it to go away now.
“All right.” Yates’s voice brought Tasha back to the present moment. He gave her an odd look, and she wondered if he could read her thoughts. She wouldn’t have been surprised. A tiny smile touched the corner of his mouth, but then it was gone and they were right back to business. Yates gestured to Romero. “I want the three of you to go back to the boat and the apartment. See if you can get a sample of the rubble, preferably something charred. We need something to send to Sparks for him to be able to identify what the accelerant was.”
Romero put a hand over his cargo pocket. “Please keep in touch, Yates. I hate it when you go radio silence.”
“Oh believe me, I’ll let you know when I’m fully eviscerated,” Yates ground out. “Hopefully I’ll at least get some information for my pain.”
Chapter Eighteen
“Ambassador Trafalgar is a busy man. I’ll have to see if he has time to squeeze in an extra appointment.”
Beckin Yates glanced up at the snooty aide who had given the announcement that Yates’s father would probably never deign to meet with him now. It was more likely that Ambassador Trafalgar would never stoop so low as to see his son at all.
The aide was a supercilious man in his late twenties who probably had a poli-sci degree and an ego the size of Georgetown University. Yates would have bet good money that the aide thought he was somehow better than this ragged man dressed in jeans and a T-shirt with his old flannel shirt thrown over the top. The preppy aide wore impeccably tailored khakis and a polo shirt that was meant to look casual but didn’t.
The aide looked down his nose at Yates. “What is your connection to the ambassador?”
“I’m an old acquaintance.” It was all the connection Yates was willing to give. “Tell him that Sergeant Yates is here to see him.”
“Sergeant?” The aide cocked his head, probably trying to imagine reasons why Yates wouldn’t show up in uniform to see such an important personage.
“Yes. I’m active duty Navy.” Yates wanted put his fist in this asshole’s face. What was already an uncomfortable situation was being made much, much worse by all this political pandering.
“I’ll speak with him.” The aide gave a long-suffering sigh. “But be aware that you’ll probably have to make an appointment.”
Okay. Yates was willing to play. “And how long might that take?”
“We’re scheduling appointments four weeks out.”
Yates snorted, not even bothering to hide his caustic derision. “Just go tell the high and mighty ambassador that Sergeant Yates is here. Now.”
The aide flounced away, turning on his heel and giving Yates such a look of superiority that it was actually tempting to shove his family connection, his real rank, and maybe even the huge dripping helping of awards on Yates’s uniform into the little man’s face.
But that wouldn’t have solved anything. Not really.
Yates walked away from the aide’s little desk full of carefully ordered stacks of files and phone messages. He looked out at the view from the window of his father’s Pentagon office. During the attacks on the Pentagon in 2001, Yates knew his father had been out of the country at the time and had been spared any injury due to the terrorist attack. Yates remembered wondering about his father’s safety, but he had been deep into his training at that time, trying to make it into the SEAL program, and attempting to forget that his father had already disowned him.
IT FELT SO very odd to be standing next to the ruins of Johnny Dean’s apartment building. Tasha had been there a few times before when she’d been cursed with the necessity of working with the man on something or another.
“You okay?” Cassidy touched Tasha’s arm. “This must be really weird for you.”
“I suppose so.” Tasha cocked her head. “I just can’t believe the fire department took so long to get here.”
Romero’s sharp, dark gaze focused on Tasha. “I had that thought when Yates and I were going back in after that old lady. There weren’t any sirens until we were already on our way back out.”
“There’s a fire station less than half a mile away.” Tasha made a vague gesture to her right. “A few blocks that way.”
“You think someone told them that there would be a fire, and that they should maybe”—Cassidy looked at a loss—“take their time?”
/> “Either that or it was the worst example of emergency response ever,” Romero muttered. “Of course, we should stop being surprised when stuff like that happens. In fact, I’m starting to think that we should just expect it to happen like that. We might avoid some mental gymnastics that way.”
“So,” Tasha said brusquely. “How do we take a sample for your explosives guy?”
“Let’s see if we can find where the fire started.” Romero began gingerly picking his way through the rubble.
Cassidy glanced around. The neighborhood was quiet even though it was well into mid-morning already. She looked uneasy. “Should we be doing this? I mean, is it legal to pick through the rubble like this? Isn’t it scavenging or disturbing a crime scene or something?”
Tasha snorted. “You would have to be assuming that the police or the fire department would rule this a suspicious fire. My bet is that they’ve already ruled it accidental. A great tragedy, you know, but still just a freak accident.”
“Exactly.” Romero squatted in what was probably the general vicinity of Johnny Dean’s living room. “So the fact that I’m going to take a soil and rubble sample right here where I think the blaze started should be nothing more than some weirdo doing a science project.”
“Wow.” Cassidy squatted down beside him. “Wait.” She pointed to something in particular. “Is that…?”
“Yeah. It’s a fuel can.” Romero took a long swab from his pocket and ran it around the inside of the burnt can’s spout. “So let’s just have a look at what might have been in this strangely convenient source of fuel.”
“Would Johnny Dean have that in his house?” Cassidy wanted to know.
Tasha shrugged, still trying to wrap her mind around the notion of Johnny being dead. “He was certainly sleazy enough to be setting fires for money, or something equally underhanded.”
“The only way we’ll know is if Sparks connects one thing to another. When fuels burn they leave behind very specific traces of their ingredients.” Romero carefully placed the swab in a baggie and put it back in his pocket.
“Then I guess we need to get to the boat and see if we can find something that will help your guy make a connection,” Tasha said eagerly.
“The boat will be a little harder for the cops to pretend away,” Romero pointed out.
Tasha nodded. “Yeah, that happens when there’s a dead body involved.”
YATES HAD TO admit to a great dose of amusement when the aide came bustling back out of the ambassador’s office. The snooty little bastard was shooting surreptitious glances at Yates, probably trying to figure out why the ambassador had agreed to see this raggedy man on such short notice and without an appointment.
“You may go right in,” the aide muttered.
“I’m sorry.” Yates was unable to resist needling the man a little bit. “What did you say?”
“I said you can go right in.” The aide stood ramrod straight and pointed to the ambassador’s door. “But you already knew that. Didn’t you.”
“No.”
Yates didn’t say anything else. He didn’t offer to clear up the mystery. Let the little ass worry it over in his mind, or ask the ambassador himself. Yates suspected that the aide was a bit frightened of his employer. It was a good instinct. The ambassador would have eviscerated the man—literally and figuratively—if it meant getting ahead.
Shoving the door open, Yates stalked into his father’s office and let the heavy wood door slam closed behind him. “Hello, Father.”
“Breckin.”
Yates had taken his mother’s last name when he entered the Navy. He knew his father hadn’t cared, considering the man had been ashamed of Yates’s choice anyway. “I won’t waste any time on pleasantries,” Yates muttered. “Let me just get to the point.”
“All right.”
The ambassador was standing behind his heavy, ornate desk. The office actually looked like a slightly less rounded version of the Oval Office itself. Yates did not think this was unintentional. The good ambassador was very likely never going to see the inside of that presidential office in any capacity other than the one he was currently in, but that didn’t mean his aspirations weren’t right up there in the stratosphere.
But this was no time to give his father a psych eval. Yates got back to the moment at hand. “There is a large underground ring of human traffickers working several cities on the East Coast. I know of at least four cities, and I can tell you that this has been going on for several years. My commanding officer’s younger sister was taken two weeks ago in Richmond. I have a private investigator who has four missing persons cases here in the DC area that also match Rachel’s case. I want to know what you know, and why this thing seems to be protected by law enforcement all the way up to the federal level.”
The ambassador sat down in his seat. Actually, “sank down” would be a more accurate description. He placed his hands flat on the desk and exhaled long and slow. “I suppose it would very likely be pointless to ask you to just drop this impromptu investigation of yours and forget about it?”
“Forget about it?” Yates scoffed. “We’re talking about a young woman who has been like a younger sister to my SEAL team for years. We’ve watched her grow up. No. I’m not going to just leave her to be shipped overseas like some inanimate cargo.”
“Then there are a few things you should know.” The ambassador rubbed his face and sighed. “The first being that you and your friends are already on a very exclusive watch list.”
TASHA KNEW THERE was something wrong almost as soon as they parked at the dock and got out of the generic dark sedan that Romero was driving. There were cop cars everywhere. In fact, the place was crawling with local law enforcement.
“Apparently they aren’t going to try and ignore the body,” Tasha muttered to Cassidy and Romero.
Cassidy cocked her head to one side. “So what would be their angle then? If we have to assume that this was planned, what was the end game?”
“Obviously they never intended to let Yates get ahold of the evidence he found in Dean’s apartment,” Romero commented.
Tasha started to get a really bad feeling in her belly. “I think we should go.”
“I need to get a sample,” Romero muttered. “It’s important if we’re going to try and tie these two crime scenes together.”
“Then go get your sample,” Cassidy suggested. “You’re a SEAL, right? Try a water approach.”
Romero grunted. “I like how you make that sound so easy, even though I have no gear.”
“You’re creative.” Cassidy kissed his cheek. “You’ll think of something.”
“And you two will…?” Romero asked, stringing the sentence out and looking almost as if he were afraid to ask.
“We’ll keep ourselves busy,” Cassidy assured him.
Tasha watched a pair of detectives and two uniformed officers peel away from the knot of investigators swarming the scene. “I don’t think we’re going to have trouble with that. Romero, if you’re going to go, you’d better get out of here. Now.”
Romero slunk away, heading back around the truck and disappearing completely, as though he were nothing more than smoke. Tasha took a deep breath. Yep. One of the uniforms was the desk sergeant. What was his name? Gorman! That was it. Tasha didn’t have to guess to know this was going to get ugly fast.
“Tasha Campbell?” One of the detectives held up his badge.
“Yes?” Tasha fished in her pocket and pulled out her PI license. “That would be me. Can I help you gentlemen with anything?”
“Can you tell us where your colleague Johnny Dean is?” The investigator’s mouth turned up on one side. Why? Was he actually smirking at her? The ass!
Tasha decided to play ball. “I’ve been looking for him myself. I think we have a few cases that overlap, and I was hoping to talk to him about that. But I went to his apartment this morning and it was burned to the ground.” Tasha opened her eyes wide and tried not to sound too sarcastic. “Then I c
ome here and his boat is the same way. It’s very much like someone wanted him dead, don’t you think?”
“Tasha Campbell, you’re under arrest!” Gorman was the one who said this with glee.
Tasha refused to give him the reaction he wanted. “For what?”
“For the murder of Johnny Dean,” Gorman finished with relish.
Chapter Nineteen
Tasha paced back and forth in her tiny little holding cell. This was stupid. It was a waste of time. Although, if she managed to be smart, she might be able to use her temporary incarceration to some sort of advantage. And she was determined that it was going to be temporary.
The cell was cold. If she hadn’t known better she might actually believe that the cops were freezing her out on purpose. It sure felt that way. Hell, it was so cold in here that the walls were covered in a fine mist of droplets. It was miserable.
Tasha sank down onto the narrow little bunk and put her head in her hands. She thought of Yates. Or rather, she thought of Breckin. He was such a surprise. He’d certainly taken her totally by surprise. She’d never expected to fall in love with someone. Especially someone like that, who practically reeked of danger. He was not the safe, sedate guy she had once pictured herself settling down with.
“I would be bored,” she whispered. “If my guy was an accountant I’d want to gouge my eyes out in less than a week.”
The sound of her own voice was loud in the close space. There was a slight echo. She let her head rest against the hard cinderblock wall and stared up at the ceiling. There was a grate up there. She was just beginning to wonder if she might be able to contrive some way to escape through the thing when she realized that the fine mist coating the walls was coming out of that grate.
Tasha stood up. Her heart kicked into high gear, and she realized that she was in much bigger trouble than she’d originally thought. This was not about some bogus murder charge. They hadn’t even gone through the whole process of booking her officially. She’d thought at first that it was just an oversight, probably because Sergeant Gorman hated her so much and wanted to slow up her due process on purpose. Now Tasha realized there was a lot more to it than that.
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