by Pamela Clare
Celina let him take the bottle out of her hand. She wiped her lips, rubbed her eyes. It felt weird using her left hand for everything. “You ever see Nightmare on Elm Street?”
“I don’t watch horror movies, but I know what it’s about.”
“This is like the Emilio version.” Celina slid down in the bed. “I close my eyes, the slasher comes after me.”
Cooper’s next words hit her hard. “I won’t let him get you, Celina.”
He looked worried, tired, burned out. His stubble was filling in; he’d have a beard in another day. What would happen in that time? If he stayed with her, would he be the next one to disappear? To die?
She shook her head. “You’re not responsible for me. You can’t protect me.”
He placed his hands on the bed rails and leaned over her. “I want you to take the medicine the doctor ordered.” When she started to protest, he stopped her. “A half dose of what he ordered if that makes you feel more in control, but you need to sleep. You can’t help me catch Emilio if you’re sleep deprived. I need you well rested and ready to go. I’ll be right in that chair,” he motioned to the chair in the corner. “I won’t let Emilio get you.”
He stared at her and Celina felt that familiar heat flowing between them.
“I promise,” he added.
Her heart beat a crazy little rhythm. Her left hand reached up and touched his face. The stubble tickled her palm. “You’re unbelievable,” she murmured, loving him for his courage and his strength. “But, if anything happens to me, you have to promise me you will not feel responsible.”
She saw something shift in his eyes. Saw them soften. “I can’t promise that.”
“Then no deal.” She dropped her hand, forced her voice, her demeanor to channel the Terminator. “No morphine, no drugs, no sleep. The next time you turn your back, I disappear, and I handle Emilio alone. I will not let you put your life in danger or make you responsible for mine.”
Cooper shoved off the bed, crossed his arms over his chest. She knew he purposely towered over her in an effort to intimidate her. “You drive a hard bargain, kid.”
Celina turned her head away, focused on the wall. She was too tired to fight with him over the moniker. She hoped he didn’t call her bluff. Walking out of the hospital and going after Emilio on her own was out of the question at the moment. She couldn’t even sit up without getting dizzy.
“All right,” Cooper said, his acquiescence a bit too easy, too tidy. Celina knew he was cutting her slack. “I promise. Now will you take your medicine?”
Celina turned her face back to him. “A half dose, like you suggested, but just this once.”
Cooper smiled at her as he pushed the call button. The nurse returned and two minutes later, the morphine was spreading through her veins, the warmth it brought with it easing the aches and pains and forcing her to relax. Cooper pulled up the chair next to her bed, sat watching her.
“At least I got in a few good jabs.”
“Mary did, too, at the safe house. Guy’s got to be feeling a little pain tonight as well.”
“Have they found anything out about Chief Forester?” she asked, stifling a yawn.
Cooper shook his head. “Crime scene techs will turn up something. Don’t worry.”
She moved her arm pillow to the left side, turned her body toward Cooper and scrunched up in a fetal position. Laying her injured wrist on the pillow, she used her left hand to tug the hospital blanket over her shoulder. “How did he get Forester out of the room?”
They both knew who ‘he’ was. “Did you look through your overnight bag to see if anything was missing?”
“My cell phone,” she told him. “I had it next to me in bed when I went to sleep in case you called with news. It was gone when I woke up, but it’s probably lost in the sheets.” She suddenly straightened and pushed up on her elbow. “But what if he’s got my cell phone? He’s got my family and friends, all their phone numbers. He can find them, Cooper.”
“I’ll put Thomas on it.” Cooper pushed her gently back down as he went to the door. Sticking his head out, he called for Thomas.
Celina mentally groaned at the thought of another of her SCVC teammates seeing her lying in a hospital bed looking the way she did, but her concern over her family’s safety trumped her ego. She gave Thomas the names of everyone in her cell phone’s address book and as many numbers as she could remember off the top of her head. Maybe it was the morphine, or maybe it was the fact that she had set up most of her family and her closest friends in speed dial, but she found she couldn’t remember many. As Thomas left to go to work on notifying everyone, Celina closed her eyes. “I want protection for my parents.”
“Dupé will agree, I’m sure,” he said. He held her good hand, and as she drifted off to sleep, she heard him on his cell phone ordering security agents to be sent to guard each of her brothers and their families as well.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Sara Rios felt Cooper Harris’s eyes on her. She was standing in the bathroom of Celina’s hospital room giving him, Thomas Hawkins, Nelson Sanchez, and Mitch Holton an update on her hunt for Emilio Londano.
All of their gazes rested heavily on her, but Cooper’s eyes were especially intense. He was sizing her up from the tip of her head to the soles of her shoes. He was pissed and scared and it was pure, raw emotion keeping him standing. As much as his posture—head and shoulders thrown back, arms crossed—screamed top dog, leader of the pack, his eyes told her he was second-guessing himself. While it wasn’t her job to reassure him, she wanted to anyway. She liked him. He reminded her of another alpha male she just happened to be married to.
“Emilio and his partner are traveling under false ID’s,” she told the mix of agents in a quiet voice. Celina was sleeping, hence the meeting in the bathroom. “They used a private jet, registered to Ernesto Gonzales to fly to a private airstrip outside of Des Moines, and a similar one here in California. Flight plans were filed. Records on the Cardinal show the pilot goes by Adelie Hemingway. That name is real, but the man we traced it to is a victim of identity theft. The real Adelie is a produce manager in Bangor, Maine, and has no experience as a pilot. He had no idea his name and social security number had been stolen.”
“Emilio’s used the Ernesto alias before,” Mitch Holton said, “in Dallas, 2008.”
The others nodded. Emilio’s empire had stretched into Texas and as far as Miami, his aliases as well. Sara had seen the twenty-six page database Holton had developed in 2009, and added to since cross-referencing Emilio’s extensive and artistic aliases with his business deals.
“He’s been able to move as fast as you,” Sara said to Cooper. “You broadcasted you were bringing Celina back to L.A., but how did he find her at the hotel so quickly? He didn’t buy my impersonation, obviously, and found her within twenty-four hours of her touching down.” She glanced at the men forming a loose half-moon in front of her. It was a good thing the bathroom accommodated wheelchairs or they would have been shoulder to shoulder. “My guess is Emilio’s got a tracking unit on her.”
“A tracking device?” Thomas looked frustrated. “Couldn’t be. Emilio, or whoever that was in the hotel room, didn’t have physical contact with her until four a.m. this morning.”
“Her bag? Her bra?” Sara shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t know, but there’s something like six-hundred hotels and motels between L.A. and San Diego. There’s no way Emilio or anyone else could have found her at the Quality Inn in Carlsbad in under a day of landing at a desert airstrip fifty miles away unless someone told him she was there, which means we’ve got a leak on our team, or he’s got her bugged.”
Cooper continued to stare at her with his intense gaze. The wheels in his head were laying thick rubber on the roadmap of his brain. A leak or a bug. No safe houses, Lana had said, hence the hotel. “No one on my taskforce is a snitch. For the rest of the FBI, I can’t vouch.” He motioned at Thomas. “Get Celina’s camera bag.”
Sara saw lig
ht bulbs click on over the other men’s heads and they exchanged nods. “She never goes anywhere without her camera,” Mitch told Sara.
Thomas scooted out of the room, and a second later, returned with a black backpack. Cooper unzipped the main compartment and began handing the camera body and lenses out to Thomas. He, in turn, began an assembly line, passing the equipment to Nelson. Nelson handed the camera body to Mitch, who began an intense scan of it, opening flaps, looking through the eyepiece.
Cooper handed Sara several cords, a set of batteries, a memory chip. Grabbing a clean white towel, Sara spread it on the floor and laid out her treasure. “I used to work for another government agency,” she said, checking the ends of the cords and the battery charger’s internal workings. “GPS and other bugs can be microscopic and created to look just like ordinary, everyday objects. It could be her hairbrush, her glasses, her ink pen.”
Nelson handed her the two lenses in his hands. She gave them a cursory glance, laid them on the towel. Cooper was running his hands inside the backpack’s pockets. He withdrew a set of pictures from the outside pocket and went still, looking at the top photo.
Sara couldn’t read the expression that passed over his face, but she was willing to bet the photo tapped a distant memory. One he’d forgotten until that moment.
He shoved the photos into Thomas’s hands without looking at the rest and went back to rummaging in the backpack.
“Still,” Thomas said, flipping casually through the photos, “how could Emilio have tagged her camera? She’s always got it with her.” He handed the photos off to Nelson, and said to Cooper, “Did she have her camera at the office after the Jagger take-down?”
Cooper paused in his search, scanning his brain. “That was the day she quit. I was there when she stormed out. This backpack was on her, so yes, she had it at work that day.”
He turned the bag over, ran his hands over the handle at the top, the padded straps. Found nothing. “Emilio could have tagged her while she was undercover. She took a lot of photos of him while they were together.”
Sara scanned the bag, her eyes stopping on the small plastic feet on the bottom. “Check the feet.”
Cooper flipped the bag over. The second foot held what looked like a miniature watch battery in its hollow belly. Cooper held it up to the bathroom light. “I’ll be damned,” he said.
Mitch took it, turned it over in his palm. “Low-tech, but reliable. Gives off a pulse, like an alarm to a base unit once the unit’s within a thirty- to fifty-mile radius.”
“But how—when—did he plant it?” Thomas demanded. Sara could see he liked puzzles as much as she did.
“He switched places with Enrique on Monday afternoon.” Creating a timeline might be the thread to unravel the mystery. “He didn’t make contact with Celina until Wednesday night.”
“Technically, it was Thursday morning,” Thomas interrupted her.
Normally, she was the one hung up on technicalities. In her previous life as a CIA operative and counterterrorism expert, technicalities had been her specialty. Sara smiled at him. “You’re right, Thomas. Thursday morning at approximately…” She looked at Cooper. “Five? Six a.m.?”
He gave her a curt nod. “Around then, yes.”
From the way he bristled, she was treading on dangerously thin ice, but it was important to get a few details about that morning from the one person who was there beside Celina. “Can you tell me what happened, time-wise,” she emphasized, “from the point you went downstairs and outside until Celina ran out, claiming Emilio was at the apartment?”
Cooper’s eyes hardened, but Sara saw the wheels turning again. The look he gave her would have made most men shrink, but Sara didn’t cower. She’d spent quite a bit of time with strong-willed and overbearing men. Underneath the Brawny-tough exterior they projected sat the heart of a teddy bear.
Cooper took his time before answering. “Emilio had access to her apartment for at least three or four minutes from the time she ran out to warn me until I got her back upstairs. It’s possible he tagged her then.”
“This tracking unit”—Mitch held it up—“could have been planted before Celina even bagged Emilio. The battery is a simple watch battery. It could transmit for a year or more before running out of power. Most likely, he or Valquis inserted it while Celina played Londano’s girlfriend. He would have wanted to keep tabs on her, and this was a way to supplement direct surveillance.”
“Get her other stuff,” Cooper said.
Thomas slipped out and returned with Celina’s overnight bag. The assembly line took place once more; the contents of the bag removed, Cooper handing the more private items—bras and panties—to Sara to examine while maintaining his stiff, professional demeanor.
The other three men seemed less interested in appearing professional. They ogled openly at the sheer fabrics, the detailed lace, until Cooper cleared his throat. In the intense glare of his eyes, each man was sentenced and found guilty. Eyes dropped in shame as they held out their hands and shuffled Celina’s clothes, toothbrush, toiletries bag, and hairbrush down the assembly line, ending in a pile at Nelson’s feet on a second white bath towel. The bag itself was examined thoroughly, but this time they came up empty.
Sara grabbed her tote bag hanging by its strap on the hook on the door. “I brought you footage from the security cameras at the hotel.” Turning on a tablet computer, she moved in between Thomas and Nelson so everyone could get a view of the screen. As Sara held the tablet with her left hand, she used the touchscreen with her right. An image of their man, his signature cap covering his head, appeared.
“This is our perp entering through a staff entrance.” The next scene showed him exiting an elevator, cap still on, but also wearing a white apron. He was pushing a large rolling bin used for laundry.
“The hallway Celina and Forester’s room was on was not straight. The angles of the hotel were created to maximize their ocean views so each hallway was architecturally built to accommodate the U-shape of the building. Three rooms on each floor in the curve jutted backwards toward the east, because of the shape, but also because of the increased depth of the interior walls for support. The cameras in these hallways show the elevator on one end and the stairs on the other, but parts of the hall itself go out of view.”
On the computer screen, the man followed Sara’s commentary like an actor taking directions. Off the elevator with the laundry bin. Disappearing off camera. Reappearing in the next shot. “We never see him at Celina’s room, but my guess is her chief ended up in that laundry bin. He may have stepped out to grab something from the vending machines or to check in with the security personnel.”
“Shit,” Thomas said under his breath.
Cooper shook his head. “He wouldn’t have left Celina alone.”
Sara reached for anything pertinent. “Unless, maybe he heard something in the hallway and went to investigate?” Footage from the parking lot appeared on screen. “This is behind the hotel on the east side near the staff entrance. The camera’s mounted on a light pole, twenty feet up to avoid tampering, so the view is wide-angle and doesn’t help with IDing our man.”
The perp pushed the bin out the door. Another man appeared, seemingly out of the shadows. His head was covered with a hooded sweatshirt. Baggy jeans added to the overall disguise. It was hard to tell whether he was fat or just layered.
“You’ll find this interesting,” Sara said, using a finger to point to the men. The hooded man looked in the bin, shook his head, brought a hand out of his sweatshirt’s front pocket and motioned. “They seem to be arguing.”
The man in the cap threw up his hands but then the two pushed the cart to an old car partially obscured by the building. Only the hooded man was still on camera. The trunk lid went up and the hooded man bent over, strained to pull something out of the bin and set it in the trunk. The lid went down. Hooded man gestured with his hands again and cap man came back into view, pushing the cart quickly to the entrance. He swiped a key c
ard across the lock and was in.
The scene switched back to the inside of the hotel. Cap man followed his previous pattern. Off the elevator but without a laundry bin this time. On the wall below the camera, he set off the fire alarm, then hurried down the hallway, disappearing from view.
“At this point, he let himself into Celina’s room, accosted her, and left via the balcony. There are no cameras in the courtyard except one in the pool area. He never shows up on that one.”
“Someone want to tell me what you’re all doing in my bathroom?”
Celina stood in the doorway. She was cradling her right arm with her left as she noted the assortment of her belongings lying in piles on the bathroom floor. The half-moons under her eyes were dark, and her hair needed brushing. Her skin was slightly ashen and she seemed younger without her makeup.
And when Celina gave each of them a questioning eyebrow raise, Sara saw the haunted look she’d once seen in her own eyes. A look that came with age and extreme circumstances.
Handing her tablet to Mitch, Sara knelt down and scooped up Celina’s jeans and folded them, putting them back into her overnight bag. She’d already repacked her personal items, thank goodness. “I apologize for the invasion of privacy. We found a tracking device in your computer bag.” She glanced up at Celina as she re-rolled a shirt. “That’s how Emilio found you so quickly here in Carlsbad.”
“You should be in bed,” Cooper said. Not a request, but not exactly a demand either. Sara admired his restraint. She could tell by his posture and the set of his jaw that he wanted to reach out and grab Celina. Steady her as she now leaned on the doorframe for balance. Sara wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d scooped up Celina and deposited her back into bed like a child.
“Where’s your IV?” Thomas asked.
“I don’t need it.” Celina raised her chin a notch. She knelt and picked up her toiletries bag from the floor with her left hand. “I’m feeling a lot better.”