Chapter 26
Chapter
Twenty-Six
ALPHABET
The safehouse was decent. Not our best, but far from our worst. Suburban, quiet, middle-of-the-road in that Virginia cookie-cutter way, with just enough space to spread out and not feel boxed in while also close enough to the neighbors that screaming would draw attention.
Which was great—unless you needed to do something messy. That made this a base of operations only. If we had to take prisoners or wage a war, we’d need to move. Still, we could do worse—at least they got food delivery here.
Speaking of which…
Me: Get pizza. Do we know Gracie’s favorite? Maybe grab some cinnamon roll stuffs or the pretzel bread sticks.
Lunchbox: She okay?
Me: She will be. Mild panic attack. Hit her with inhaler, and hydration. She’s showering. She needs food and comfort.
Voodoo: Check her pulse 30 minutes post shower, and keep it easy. This isn’t her first one…
No, it wasn’t. But it was her worst, at least in my opinion.
Me: We have her. Goblin has her.
Of all of the backup we had on this mission, Goblin was the best.
Lunchbox: We’ll be there in under an hour. Two more stops. Make it 90 to get the pizza.
It was growing dark outside, so that would work. Between the time change and the flight, we’d spent most of the day in the air. For once, I was glad that flying east cost us time. It meant it was too late to dive in to that meeting immediately and gave her time to recover.
I set up in the dining room, which we were absolutely not using to eat.
The big, cheap table gave me space to fan out my gear.
Three laptops, each running off separate VPNs, one hardline connected through a buried signal repeater out back.
Took me thirty minutes to get everything linked up and encrypted, and another five to push the deadbolt firewall layers I liked to have humming in the background while I poked around places I had no business being.
Bones hovered just long enough to install a few hidden cameras inside and out, check the windows, the basement egress, and stash a gun behind the pantry shelving.
We had motion alerts set, two separate wireless feeds, and a panic protocol if anything went sideways.
Goblin wandered through once, gave me a sniff like he needed to confirm I was still doing my job, then plopped himself under the table near my feet.
He was loyal. Probably smarter than half the analysts I used to work with, too.
The shower turned on upstairs. Grace. She hadn’t said much since the panic attack, but the shell-shocked look in her eyes had eased. Some. She was quiet, but not numb. Alert, but not twitchy.
Still—every sound from up there? Pretty sure all three of us clocked it. Not because we didn’t trust her. Because we did.
“She’s not gonna break,” Bones said behind me as he came in, tracking snow onto the floor. “But she’s carrying more weight than she knows.”
“Yeah,” I murmured, not looking up from my screen. “She’ll keep walking with the knife in her gut until someone tells her to sit down.”
He grunted in agreement, then stepped around the table and crouched beside me. I angled the second laptop toward him. “Wanna help?”
“Depends on what I’m helping with,” he said, but his fingers were already flying over the keys, pulling up one of the dummy profiles we’d created.
“We got into Sinclair’s firm’s client portal using an old vendor login. Real estate partner in Colorado forgot to update his security after he quit. System still thinks he’s on the payroll.”
Bones snorted. “Rookie mistake.”
“Yeah, well, thank God for that. I’m in. Now I need to drill down into Sinclair’s schedule—meetings, hearings, conference calls, anything the firm tracks.”
I leaned forward and typed in a secondary search on the third laptop.
“While you do that, I’m scanning the firm’s internal calendar and building access logs.
If we can confirm what days Sinclair actually shows up to the office versus the bullshit he inputs in his calendar?
We can start planning around where to intercept him. ”
“Cornering a lawyer,” Bones said. “I like this job more and more.” The lack of humor in his voice decried that statement, but I got it.
“Not just any lawyer. The lawyer.” The tone of my voice flattened, the weight of it pressing down behind my ribs. I kept my hands moving. Click. Scroll. Query. Execute.
I needed the rhythm. The focus. Because if I thought too long about the fact that Grace’s sister worked for this guy, and the more we looked, the more it seemed like he was involved, the more I thought about just scratching him off.
The trash didn’t always take itself out, sometimes you had to burn it.
“Don’t forget to breathe,” Bones said without looking up.
“Don’t forget I can erase your entire financial footprint if you piss me off,” I shot back.
He smirked. “That’s adorable.”
Goblin huffed like he agreed with him. Little traitor.
“Okay,” I muttered, refocusing. “Sinclair logs into the firm’s internal system most mornings between eight fifteen and eight thirty.
Same IP. Home office—Georgetown area. He doesn’t use the building keycard until around ten.
That lines up with the data I’m seeing on the security logs.
So either he works from home part of the morning, or he’s lying about it entirely. ”
“He got court any of those days?”
“Only Wednesday,” I said, tapping a key to bring the docket onto the second screen. “Circuit court, family law case. Weird.”
“Why weird?”
“He doesn’t usually handle these types, he’s more corporate schmooze than family defender.”
Then again, maybe his client was one of his corporate schmoozes.
“He’s the rep on record, though,” I continued “That means he has to show up.”
“Where?” Bones asked.
“Alexandria Courthouse. Eleven a.m.” I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “That’s our window. Midweek, tight security at the courthouse, but he’ll have to park nearby. If we wanted to spook him into a mistake—”
“We don’t spook,” Bones interrupted, his voice low. “We don’t warn. We watch. We wait. Public confrontation is going to be far safer than one in his office. Once we’ve got him, then we send her in to see him.”
I leaned back and blew out a slow breath. “Then we watch. And wait. Wednesday’s our best shot. Unless we get lucky and he walks into a bar alone.”
“He’s not the bar type.”
“Yeah,” I said. “He’s the suit who pours himself a double of whiskey in his home office after gaslighting his client into thinking she’s safe.”
Bones didn’t argue. Just went quiet. The kind of quiet that meant his brain was already cycling through scenarios and backups and the best way to apply just enough pressure to make a man crack.
The shower stopped upstairs. We both went still for a half-second. Goblin’s ears perked up, but he didn’t move from under the table. Then we heard the creak of the bathroom door and her footsteps padding softly down the hallway toward the guest room.
We didn’t say anything, but I felt Bones’ tension ease by degrees.
“Let me know if she comes down,” I said. “I want her to see this. Not all of it, but enough to know we’re not shooting blind anymore.”
“I’ll bring her a cup of tea,” Bones said, standing and cracking his neck. “She likes the honey vanilla one.”
I nodded, not remotely tackling the comment of Bones making her tea. It was absolutely cute, but right now, she needed and deserved the care. “I’ll make the maps. You run through the intel on his schedule and once we brief her, we’ll let Gracie decide how she wants to do her approach.”
Bones looked at me for a beat. “You sure?”
“No.” I tapped the keyboard again and brought up Sinclair’s personal calendar—the one he hadn’t shared with the firm, but which was syncing in the background through his assistant’s device. “But she needs to be part of it.” She needed to be the one to break him even if it broke her.
She’d already broken once today.
And still? She got up.
Which meant when it was time—when we had this bastard in our sights—Grace would be the one to confront him. The shock of the meeting might do exactly what we wanted it to do and jar a confession out of him.
Liars often needed time to perfect the lie, rock them enough and the truth could be shaken free.
If he was involved…
Then we’d bury him.
By the time Lunchbox and Voodoo made it to the house with supplies—food, clothing, and electronics along with weapons—Gracie had come back down, showered and in better spirits. She was still paler than I’d like. The surprise on her face when Bones brought her the cup of tea almost made me laugh.
Her soft thank you, though, that was the kind of thing that wrapped a noose around me and yanked tight. The three of us worked, Gracie reading the reports we’d put together, Bones pulling more on Sinclair and his partners, as well as his senior associates.
It wasn’t quite a boutique firm, but it was definitely one where the partners made the decisions and the people at the bottom were the ones left doing all the heavy lifting. I was right about his corporate leanings. He handled a lot of foreign trade negotiations, acquisitions, and mergers.
In no way was he a family attorney, that made me dig into the person he was representing in the Alexandria Family Court. His client was a man named Emanuel Mendoza—no photos were handy, no social media footprint, and no associated corporation.
Who the fuck was Emanuel Mendoza? The more I dug, the less I found and that just about set off every alarm I had. I was still chewing over that when we took a break from the computers to eat the pizza and get the debrief from Lunchbox and Voodoo.
They were pretty succinct in their summation of the firm, its security, and access. “It’s not the easiest place to penetrate,” Lunchbox said as he added another slice of pizza to Gracie’s plate before he took a bite of his own.
She’d gone for the straight pineapple pizza, no meat, no veggies. Just cheese and fruit.
I kind of liked it.
They brought two large versions of it—one with a hand-tossed crust and the other thin. She preferred the thin, I took the hand-tossed.
“So,” Lunchbox said when they finished going over everything they’d picked up. “What is the plan?”
As a group, we all looked at Bones. He grunted then downed an entire bottle of water before he rose to get a beer. He brought back five bottles and opened one after the other for us. When he handed one to Grace, she gave it the most inelegant little sniff before knocking back a long drink.
Amusement curled through me. She loved to yank his chain and she was so damn good at it.
Good for him. Good for all of us really.
Bones actually slept more these days. Lunchbox had gotten more creative in not only his cooking but his explosives.
Voodoo had relaxed for the first time in—forever really.
As for me?
Gracie made me smile. She also made me want to put down a lot of assholes so she never had to deal with them again. Unfortunately, the world tended to frown on the eliminate the problem at the root theory. Still…
We had been cleaning up a lot over the past several months. That we let O’Rourke go… Well, I was still mulling on that one too. “Before I forget, I got an update on O’Rourke.” It had come in thirty minutes earlier, but I was a little too focused on Mendoza to worry about that asshole.
“If he’s not wearing a toe tag somewhere,” Voodoo said. “We can skip that briefing.”
A flicker of a smile over Lunchbox’s face, but there was no mistaking the tension that tightened his eyes. Bones merely glanced at me. “Do we care?”
“Probably not, but in the interests of keeping us all aware, he’s surfaced at a golf resort outside of San Diego. The broken leg is definitely slowing him down.” The walk out of the desert on that broken leg probably hadn’t been fun either.
Not that any of us cared when we dropped his ass off in the middle of nowhere, about three miles from no one gives a fuck and ten miles from anywhere Google maps had pictures. Not killing him was the only favor he’d earned by helping us get Bones back.
“Anyone of note at that resort?” Bones asked.
“No one we care about. But I have a program running to flag the people checking in and out, running it against a list of known problems. We’ll see what we see.”
One nod. “Then leave it for now. If he sticks his head out again, we’ll blow it off. If he keeps his distance, he can keep his skull.”
Gracie grimaced, but she didn’t look green.
“Now,” Bones continued. “Here is what we know and what we need to decide so we can go forward…”