Chapter 5 #2
Acer smirked at Dane and they followed Gable through the living room to a room off a sizable corridor. The place had to be over three-thousand square feet of prime Boston real estate.
“I think Harvey made up for whatever he lacked in social skills with a shit load of money.”
“Copy that.” Acer looked around the study as they all stood in the middle of a library that looked like it was something from the set of Downton Abbey.
“See what I mean?” Gable said.
Dane scanned the space, hitting all the likely spots where a computer might be kept. No computer. But there was a printer or scanner sitting on a handsome book case in a back corner behind the desk.
Dane knew the place had been carefully searched.
Dust had been disturbed on the windowsills and the desktop wiped clean.
Acer checked for prints and found none in the usual places, desk and kitchen drawer handles, refrigerator door, bathroom door knob, etc.
The only set of prints Acer found was on the toilet flusher handle.
This told Dane the prints had been wiped by someone other than the cleaning lady.
He’d check with Penny later to confirm the last time the place had been cleaned. But the absence of prints, along with the absence of computers, told Dane the ATF had been here and gone.
That was fast—too damn fast. Even for a highly placed ATF man looking out for his poor little sister.
“This was a bust. I got nothing to work with. Guess I’m going home,” Acer said. They were leaving the condo. Gable looked crestfallen.
“You’re not off the hook yet, Acer baby. Come back to the island with us. We have something there for you to look at.”
Dane figured Cap’s tech people would need help with the encrypted chip he found, but he didn’t mention specifics in front of Gable. He only trusted the man to keep a secret so far.
The existence of that chip was the only thing they had right now that Del didn’t know about.
And if Del was as guilty in this somehow as Dane suspected, then they’d need to keep it a secret. At least until they found out what was on it.
*****
Cap arrived by seven p.m. but Acer had already broken out the bottle of tequila. Acer and Shana sat at the table and Dane opened the door to let Cap in.
“Since when do you lock your door?”
“Since I wanted to slow the ATF agents down when they stage their raid.”
“You’re not paranoid.”
“You’re not sarcastic.”
Acer got up from his chair and raised his glass. “How the hell are you, Cap?”
“Acer.” He nodded and went over to the table.
He pulled the desktop computer that always sat there in front of Acer.
The computer looked like a museum piece dating back to the eighties, but it had state-of-the-art cybersecurity on the inside.
Acer had installed it for Beachcomber Investigations and kept it updated for them, remotely most of the time.
“I have something for you to look at,” Cap said. “Decipher for us. There’s a fee in it for you.”
“Hell, you know I’ll do it for free for family.” Acer sat back down and took the microchip Cap handed him. “Besides, you know I don’t do official police business, right?”
Cap nodded and folded his arms across his blue striped polo shirt.
Dane watched Acer give it a cursory examination and then plug it in the micro-USB port.
“Can I get you a jigger of Patron while we’re waiting for the magic to happen?” The question was academic. Dane poured a double measure into a tumbler and handed it to Cap.
Before they finished their drinks, Acer threw up his hands as if he were a referee declaring a touchdown.
“We made it into the end zone.”
Shana leaned in for a closer look at the screen.
“Is that it? These five pictures?”
“That’s all I could find and if I couldn’t find it, it’s not there. A few pics of some guys on a yacht in some harbor.”
Dane walked over to stand behind Acer and Shana and leaned over to see what he’d found. Cap followed. Dane looked at the computer screen and recognized that the yacht was in Vineyard Haven Yacht Club.
Then he looked more closely at the shot in the upper right corner of the screen and pointed at it.
“Enlarge this one.”
Acer tapped a few keys and enlarged the photo to full screen size, eliminating the others from view.
As Dane lifted his glass to take a sip of tequila, he took more closely at the screen to identify the man facing the camera.
“It’s Del.”
He shot the rest of the tequila to the back of his throat.
Cap shouldered him aside to have a look, then heaved a sigh. Dane assumed it was a sigh of defeat.
Shana came over with the bottle of tequila in hand and leaned in. She had the best eyes of all of them, being the youngest. By a long shot.
“Well, damn,” she said. She took a swig straight from the bottle. Dane took the bottle from her after that.
“What do you suppose this photo means to Delbert, Mr. All-Powerful-ATF Man?”
“You drunk already, girlie?”
“I mean besides the obvious—that he’s guilty as hell.”
“We’ll know that as soon as we ID the other guy in this picture,” Dane said. “Any idea, Cap?”
Acer got up from his spot in front of the screen and let Cap sit down to get a closer look.
He took the bottle of tequila from Dane and went in search of a glass.
Dane ought to be dismayed that even Acer had politer drinking habits than his girl.
Shana. He didn’t care. Because he could think the words she’s mine and mean it.
Cap spoke up.
“I know whose damn yacht this is, and who the man is.” He scowled.
A dirty cop. Had to be. Cap hated that there was even such a thing as dirty cops. Never liked finding bad seeds in law enforcement, and they’d found more than their share.
Dane was never surprised. In fact, he knew he had a natural wariness bordering on suspicion of every law enforcement type he’d ever met.
Maybe it was because he’d spent a few years in Chicago working undercover.
The swift memory of Elena passed through him leaving a wake of turmoil with its unruly mix of bittersweet pain and joy.
He gazed at Shana. He didn’t want to say what he was thinking but he did.
“Looks like you’re going to play a special role in this one.”
She stared back at him, then eyed the bottle of tequila and nodded. She didn’t pick up the bottle that Acer had left in front of her as if whatever she thought was too sobering.
Whatever so-called tests for him had come before this, they’d all gone out the window. The real test for Dane now was to see if he could stand watching Shana play the role of seductress to a murderer. Yet again.
And after Dane had already poisoned that well.
This time he needed to allow her to do her job without interfering and, more importantly, without imploding from the pain and pressure and breaking off their relationship. Yet. Again.
*****
Her heart hammered. She needed to do it.
It wasn’t the danger involved in seducing a killer that scared her.
It was Dane. It was her fear of him going cold again if she were in too much danger, if he couldn’t stand the pain of losing control of someone he loved, couldn’t stand testing his ability to protect her and keep her safe. Like he wanted to for his mother.
But they had both lost his mother. They’d both failed to protect her. She felt the stab in her chest through her ribs below her heart as if the knife were real.
Dane put an arm around her and violently pulled her to him.
“We can find another way to come up with evidence.” Cap was the picture of a determined boy scout.
Acer said, “There must be a backup drive in another location or on the cloud. I bet Lake had a third-party service for security purposes to keep a copy of everything.”
Cap nodded. “You’re right. If Harvey were going to blow the whistle he wouldn’t be meeting someone in that pit. He’d have turned the chip and whatever other information he had over to the police.”
“Unless he didn’t have enough,” Shana said. “Maybe Harvey was trying to get more evidence to turn him in. Maybe he wanted Del to prove his innocence. After all, that picture could have been innocent. Could have been Del working undercover.”
“Until Harvey showed up dead,” Acer said. “Now maybe he figures that his brother-in-law wasn’t innocent.”
Acer was good at playing devil’s advocate and it always made Dane’s jaw tic.
“Either way,” Cap said, “there might or might not be more information somewhere and we need to find it.”
“Acer and I will see what we can do about finding his file backup service,” Dane said, “But we’re screwed if what we needed was in the safety deposit box.”
“Damn. Why the hell else would he have a safety deposit box except to hide secrets?” Shana said.
“Del has the contents now and no way is he going to share what he found,” Cap said. “I’ll ask. But if Del is as guilty as we think he is, we’ll be lucky if he doesn’t destroy whatever he found.”
“That’s where I come in,” Shana said.
“He’s onto you, Shana.” Cap said. “He’ll never bite.”
“Sure he will,” Dane said.
Shana couldn’t believe he’d said the brave words. Too much déjà vu.
“I’ll need to be devious. Lucky for me I have a partner whose middle name is Devious.”
The others would get the hint. They were not stupid men.
Cap snorted. “I thought your middle name was Lucky.” He picked up his Statie hat and headed for the door.
Acer said, “Dane is chock full of crap and middle names.” He took his glass and the bottle of tequila and went into the guest bedroom, shutting the door behind him.
Dane looked at Shana. “Was it something I said?”
She smiled an invitation and led him to their bedroom.
His heart pounded, but this time he wasn’t sure if it was fear driving the beast as much as lust and longing and need.
In this moment, as he closed the door behind them, he couldn’t help what it was, couldn’t change it or stop it. Didn’t want to.