“It’s not his, he doesn’t know how it got there, and I believe him. But I can’t get involved—SAPD will cut me off because they know Nate’s a friend.” As he navigated lunchtime traffic, he told her briefly about the history with Eric Butcher and why SAPD wanted to play this one by the book. “One problem: Sean Rogan has been arrested for murder in Houston and Lucy and Sean need Nate’s help.”
“Wow. What can I do? Tell me—anything. Lucy is a goddess in my book, anything you need.”
“We play by the rules—but find the line and ride it hard. I need everything you can get about this bust. You’re friends with Zach Charles at the FBI?”
“Two peas,” she said.
“See what you can get from him, on the q.t. I want to know how the FBI is handling this. I’m pretty certain they’ll keep Nate from being booked, but there’s going to be an investigation. And second, I need everything we can get on the drugs themselves. Tests, exact quantity, packaging, I want to know where they came from. Photos—I know these people, and virtually every gang running around town has a signature. The fact that the sergeant on scene isn’t bringing in Jerry Fielding—who knows more in his little finger about the San Antonio drug trade than any other SAPD cop—tells me this is personal. Whether it’s personal against Nate, or it’s personal against the FBI because of the Butcher bust, I need to know.”
“I’m on it.”
“Keep this between you and me for now, okay? Just until I know what’s going on. And watch your back.”
“Sir?”
“Don’t do that.”
“Okay, can I speak my mind?”
That made him smile. “You always do.”
“So you basically told me that Sean is in jail for murder, Nate is being questioned in a major drug bust, and then to watch my back. What else is going on? You think this is all related, don’t you?”
“Could be.”
She snorted.
“Okay, yes. Something fucked is going on. I can’t wrap my head around what it is, though. Sean’s brother went missing in Mexico while tracking human traffickers. Is that also connected? Nicole Rollins is dead, and this isn’t her game play. She killed when you got in her way, but she wasn’t an idiot. She wouldn’t plan this elaborate takedown unless there was something much bigger on the table. Yet Nicole’s half sister, Elise Hunt, is crazy, smart, shrewd, and stupid all at the same time. You need to read her file, get up to speed. But she’s only eighteen. Could she pull something like this off? She’d need a lot of help. I don’t see it.”
“You don’t see it, but you hear the song.”
He had no idea what she meant.
“Your instincts, right? You don’t see her involvement, but you can’t shake the feeling that she’s behind this.”
“Exactly,” he said. “I have sources I can tap.”
“Look, boss, if you’re worried about me, I don’t even know these people. I wasn’t even here when this all went down. You should be worried about you. You’re the one who needs backup.”
“I’m coming into the office now. I’m fifteen minutes out because I forgot about the damn construction on the 410. See what you can learn before I get there.”
“I’m on it.”
* * *
Aggie Jensen immediately called Zach Charles on his cell phone. They’d become friendly because even though she was a sworn agent and Zach was an analyst, she’d taken on primarily an analyst role and they’d worked together multiple times. It didn’t bother Aggie, to be honest. She liked being in the field, but she loved working with data. Technology was her playground. And when she was in the field in the tactical truck, it was the best of both worlds—being in the middle of action while monitoring the command center.
She’d wanted to be in the Dallas resident office—also an offshoot of the Houston DEA division—because the only thing she didn’t like about San Antonio was that she was four hours from her family. But after eighteen months here, she realized that this was the best thing she could have done. For the first time she was truly on her own. She had a big family—big enough to populate a small town when she counted her aunts, uncles, and cousins—and she’d never been without friends and family to back her up. And while she missed her kin, she’d found a place here. She’d earned her stripes, so to speak. Everything she earned was because she did a damn good job. No one owed anything to her dad or brothers or her uncle, the congressman. Only Brad knew about her uncle Bill, and he agreed to keep it to himself.
Her war hero dad and his three brothers and two sisters, and the collective twenty-three kids they had between them, all with amazing jobs and many with clout, none of that mattered here in San Antonio. All that mattered was her own hard work and skill. That the boss trusted her so much and gave her so many opportunities to succeed meant everything to her. She would not let him down.
“Aggie?” Zach said. “I’m kind of in the middle of something, but is this important?”
“My boss wants to help Nate.”
“Hold on.”
She heard movement, then a door close. “What do you know?” Zach said, his voice quiet.
She told him the basics of what Brad had told her, then said, “He thinks he can trace the drugs, find out who’s behind it.”
“SAPD won’t let our people anywhere near the case.”
“Has Nate been arrested?”
“No. The ASAC and Rachel are both with him now talking to the assistant chief of police. They’re working out something, but I don’t know the details. No one is back, no one is returning calls or texts, and I have a bad feeling. With Lucy out—oh.”
“I know about Sean.”
He sighed in relief. “I don’t know what I can do. I doubt they’ll let us within a hundred yards of this case. They’d reach out to your office first.”
“They haven’t, nor have they pulled in Narcotics and Vice, which seems odd.”
“You said it yourself, it’s about that fucking prick Eric Butcher.”
She’d never heard Zach swear before.
“SAPD knows that Brad and Nate are tight, they’re not going to share anything. Where can we get the forensics report? Anything you can get, but Brad specifically asked for photos.”
Silence.
She feared he was going to tell her he couldn’t help. “Zach?”
“I know how to get them. I’ll call you.” He hung up and Aggie released her breath.
She could get them, too, if she violated federal law and hacked into the police database, but Brad said everything up to the line, and she knew what she could and could not legally do. Zach had far more contacts than she did, so she was happy he was going to help.
She turned back to her computer and ran through the rumor mill, as she called it—virtually every piece of information that agents collected was put into a closed database. Dealers, alliances, who was dating who, family connections, who was arrested, who was released, how they connected to other players on the street, international contacts, gang relationships, anything that might be useful when they had a big case. They tracked arrests and detainments outside of their jurisdiction as well, because it might connect to one of their cases. Any chatter also went into the database, rumors ranked by veracity. Most agents didn’t know how to pull out any data in a relevant way. Raw information was confusing to most people, but Aggie saw patterns where most people saw chaos and knew how to pull out what she needed.
She went with the assumption that someone had planted the drugs on Nate. She liked Nate a lot, he had a good rep among people she respected. Didn’t mean he couldn’t be corrupt, but if Brad had such faith in his integrity that was good enough for Aggie.
If someone planted the drugs on Nate, why sixteen kilos? Maybe a baggie wouldn’t be enough to get him in trouble, but a kilo stuffed in the glove box would cause him problems. But then he might find it …
Under the truck liner, Brad had told her. That meant someone had access to Nate’s vehicle. It wouldn’t take much time to pop the
liner and plant the coke, but they’d need at least five or ten minutes uninterrupted. Where did he live? Was his truck accessible to the public? She really wanted to talk to him, that would help her find out when and where the drugs were most likely planted. Maybe there were surveillance tapes, something to look at. A potential witness.
But the big question was, who would be willing to give up sixteen kilos of coke to frame a cop when one kilo would be more than sufficient? It had to be someone with access. Someone who could afford to lose a quarter million in gross profit.
No one wanted to lose a quarter million dollars …
Brad was right—if they could see how it was packaged and test the drugs, they might be able to trace it. They could find usable prints. With SAPD taking lead, she wouldn’t be able to get those reports.
Aggie skimmed through the rumor mill, figuring that the drugs were planted within the last week. That might be a faulty assumption, but Brad had hinted that this could be connected to Sean’s arrest, so Aggie was confident in her theory.
And then she saw it.
A rumor, nothing provable, but it was so unusual that it jumped out at her.
Ten days ago, in Travis County, just outside Austin, a drug house was hit by a rival gang. The sheriff’s office responded, found no one, and had no probable cause to search because the neighbor who called it in said the shots came from the property, not the house. She also said that everyone left quickly. The lease was in the name of Rosa Merides. She was the mother to known gang members, Raul “Blackie” Merides and his brother Stuart “Smidge” Merides, whose father had done two stints in prison before being killed in a prison fight. By the time they had a warrant to search, the residents still hadn’t returned, and a possible crime scene was contaminated by bleach. No drugs were found.
Three days later, a man was admitted to a San Antonio hospital with an infection from a gunshot wound. He refused to talk. The police were called—SAPD—but no one had made the connection with the call in Travis County from three days earlier. Two completely different jurisdictions, but if Aggie had seen this earlier, she would have been suspicious.
The police had the bullet that the hospital extracted from the victim, Malcolm “Mitts” Vasquez, thirty-one, of San Antonio. He was released and ordered to come to a court hearing—scheduled for yesterday—but he’d never shown up and a bench warrant had been issued. He had a record—including time served for drug possession and intent to sell—but had been clean for a couple of years. Until now.
She made a note of his last known address and associates, and when she read his file learned he ran around with the Saints back in the day. The gang had more or less disbanded, but the nearly defunct Saints had been rivals of the Merides gang. The connection was as clear as day. The Saints had hit the Merides house, Vasquez was shot.
She didn’t have a ballistics report, but that would be easy to get. They also might not have had a chance to test ballistics yet. They were running a two-to-three-week backlog if it wasn’t a priority case. Even then, they’d be at least a week out.
This might not be related to the drugs in Nate Dunning’s truck, but it was an outlier and it landed in her time window. Brad had taught her how to think like a criminal, and if she were a gangbanger who wanted to plant drugs on a federal agent, she wouldn’t use her own stash—she’d steal it from someone else. Especially if by stealing it she’d cause trouble for people she didn’t like, trouble that would benefit her.
She jotted down her notes and ran to Brad’s office.
He wasn’t there.
She glanced at her watch. He’d said fifteen minutes—sure, the construction could have delayed him longer—but it had been more than forty minutes since she got off the phone with him.
She called his cell phone.
It went straight to voice mail.
She tracked down Brad’s administrative assistant. “Rena, I need to ping Brad, he’s not answering.”
Rena Abrams eyed her suspiciously. It was an unusual request, though not unheard of. Aggie often tracked agents when they were working, especially during a dangerous op. She could have done it herself, but she was trying to go through channels after being hand-slapped a few times for cutting corners.
“I’ll take the heat if he gets mad, but he was supposed to be here, and he might be investigating something hot.”
Rena didn’t say anything, but she turned to her computer and started clicking. She frowned. Clicked again. Then she said, “His phone is not responding, it’s off. But the last ping showed him a block away, on Desert Sands.”
That was the back road into the DEA office, which was a nondescript building they shared with the sheriff’s narcotics division. It wasn’t a secret location, but it was tucked away without signage.
“I don’t know what’s going on, I need you to raise the threat level.”
“I need to talk to the SSA. If Donnelly is really in trouble—”
“I’ll talk to him,” Aggie said. Brad’s second in charge was Martin Salter, a quiet agent who looked intimidating, but was soft-spoken.
Martin was in his office. She explained what was going on as calmly as possible. Fortunately, Martin was sharp. He pulled his gun from his drawer and called two agents to accompany them. Even though the ping came from a block and a half away, they drove in a tactical truck to the location.
Brad’s car was parked at an angle on the side of the road. It had a flat tire and the airbag had been deployed.
Why hadn’t he called?
Martin said, “Proceed with caution.”
The two agents approached the car and Aggie stayed back with Martin, watching the surroundings. She noticed that there was a security camera on the corner of a small, fenced utility building.
One of the agents retrieved a phone from the ground. It had been smashed. It looked intentional, as if someone slammed their heel into it.
The other agent said, “Salter, sir, this tire was shot out. There’s a small amount of blood in the car and Donnelly’s service weapon is under the vehicle.”
Salter immediately ordered them all to get in the truck in case there was a sniper. Aggie didn’t point out that if it was a trap, they’d already had several minutes to get off a shot. Whoever had shot out Brad’s tire was long gone.
But Aggie knew exactly what had happened. Someone had taken Brad Donnelly.
Chapter Ten
OUTSIDE SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
Elise Hunt was lying out by the pool drinking champagne—not because she liked it all that much, but because it said something to anyone who watched her.
A woman in charge.
A free woman.
A kick-ass woman who doesn’t fail and if you fail she’ll eat your balls for lunch.
She smiled, sipped the champagne. The heat of the afternoon sun made her sweat, but it felt amazing. She was free. Twenty-two months, two weeks in that fucking jail—juvenile detention—and she wanted to just shoot the bitch who put her there.
Fucking FBI Agent Lucy Kincaid.
Killing her would be so much fun, and Elise was all about fun. But she had to wait.
She hated waiting. Waiting was not fun.
Putting Lucy’s asshole husband in jail was fun. He’d stolen her money and played them all for fools. Well, he hadn’t fooled Elise, but everyone else didn’t realize how smart he was.
Planting drugs on that hunky, sulking FBI agent was fun.
Torturing the man who killed her sister was fun.
She had to admit, when she could sit still long enough to contemplate all the possibilities, that her daddy was right. Revenge was fun, but if you didn’t get anything out of it, it was a waste of time and resources.
She’d visited her dad first thing when she got out of juvie. The government even paid for her airline ticket to Los Angeles, and she’d sweet-talked the dorky clerk into upgrading her to first class.
“We can kill them, and they’re dead, but we won’t have what we need,” her father had told her.
“They should be dead. They killed Nicole and Tobias.” Elise didn’t care much about her aunt Margaret—Margaret was mean to her and she killed her mom, even though her mom was crazy—and Joseph, Nicole’s fuck-buddy, was a thorn in her side and he hated Toby. Elise liked Toby. He was fun and had great ideas.
“They damaged our operation, but they don’t know everything I know. Elise, I need you to do exactly what I say, understand?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“Don’t mouth off to me.”
“I’m not.”
And what could he do about it? He was still in prison, and she was sitting here free talking to him. She could walk out and never come back.
She’d thought about it, the walking out and never looking back part, for a long time. Especially when Daddy said she couldn’t kill Lucy Kincaid, the cop who could read her mind. She’d thought about not doing everything he wanted because it was a lot of work and she couldn’t kill Lucy.
But he was her daddy, and he was her only family, and she wanted to prove to him—and to dead Nicole—that she was smarter and better than all of them.
She wasn’t dead, was she? She was free, wasn’t she?
“Do you understand the plan, Elise?”
“Yes.”
“When you leave here, there can be no deviations. I need to trust you.”
“You can, Daddy. Didn’t I do everything that Toby told me to do? Everything! And it wasn’t me who screwed up.”
“You’ve always been a good soldier.”
She wasn’t a soldier. She was a leader. Toby always told her that she was smart enough to be in charge someday.
But she liked that her daddy trusted her. Without her, none of his plans could work. Without her, he would be in prison for the rest of his life.
She didn’t want to be alone. She missed Toby more than anyone. At least Daddy loved Toby like she did.
“So what is the rule, Elise? You have to tell me you understand.”
“I can’t kill Lucy Kincaid. Yada yada.”
“You need to take this seriously. I’m getting out of this place, and I have to know that you know that Kincaid’s safety is a deal breaker. You touch her, I’ll lose everything. We’ll both be dead.”
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