Chapter 11 #2
“Understood, sir.” He thanked him again for the offer, then arranged with his secretary for a call on Friday.
When he hung up, it was to the whoosh of blood in his ears, held at bay somehow during that brief yet momentous conversation.
This was not a decision he’d anticipated having to confront so soon.
Mel had vaguely hinted at it on the plane ride back—had she known?
—but he’d not known of the opening, hadn’t even contemplated it in the current political climate.
Truth be told, if he could have any position, it would be the one Bowers held, here in San Francisco with his friends and family and Gravity.
But that position wasn’t open and even if it were, would staying here put all those people and things he valued most in more danger?
“We’re ready.”
Turning, Nic found Lauren waiting in the doorway. “She’s here?”
“Holding Room Two.”
With a witness in holding and Cam on a clock that could stop at any minute, a decision, much less deliberation, on San Diego would have to wait. He had to focus on the here and now.
Taking a deep breath, he grabbed the folder again and followed Lauren across the FBI bullpen, sparsely populated at the lunch hour. She handed him a comm device that she would use to feed him analytics from the room’s biometric equipment. “You sleep any last night?” she asked, glaring up at him.
“Not much.” He tucked the comm in his ear.
“You?” he asked her back as she trudged into the observation room.
She looked as tired as he felt, now helping on this matter, digging into Vaughn, and covering who knew how many other cases.
She was FBI-San Francisco’s best hacker, a top-notch analyst, and more than capable in the field. Great for job security; hell on sleep.
“Nada.” She returned with two coffees, a third visible on her desk in the room. “That’s why God invented Starbucks.”
“I don’t think it was God who did this,” Nic said, claiming one of the cups. “More like the devil.”
She shrugged. “On zero hours of sleep, I’m not choosey.”
Nic nodded at the other cup in her hand. “Who’s that one for?”
“Becca.” She waited for Nic to tuck his folder under his arm before handing it to him. “I guarantee she hasn’t had good coffee since you put her behind bars. It’ll grease the wheels a bit, hopefully.”
“Good thinking.” She wasn’t a crack analyst for nothing. “All right, let’s do this.”
Nic pushed the door open, revealing Rebecca Wright sitting on the other side of the table, looking radically different from the heist crew ringleader he and Cam had busted.
Maybe it was realizing she’d been played by her client on that job.
Or maybe it was the orange jumpsuit versus her leather boots and bustier.
But sitting there, purple streaks gone from her limp black hair, sans makeup, in an oversized jumpsuit and with one hand chained to the desk, she looked far removed from criminal mastermind and far younger than her thirty-one years.
But her dark eyes still spit fire and cased every corner of the room and everything in it, including him. Assessing, needing to be in control, no matter how tiny the confines. “Well, if it isn’t the attorney my girl picked over me.”
“She picked her sister over you.”
Becca tried to hide her flinch, but Nic saw it and the monitors read it, Lauren reporting so in his ear. It was a good test, if unplanned.
“Your ex and her sister are doing well.” Nic pushed a cup toward her. “If that matters to you.”
She took a dainty sip, pretending like it was any other coffee. “I realize I might not have treated her well.”
“Sucks being betrayed, doesn’t it?”
Becca took a longer swallow, unable to fight the flutter of her eyelids. “What would you know about betrayal?”
“More than you think,” he answered, and ignored the intrigued flare of her eyes. “We’re not here to talk about that.”
“Why did you spring me from the joint? I know it was for more than just good coffee.”
Sitting back, he crossed one leg over the other, hands in his lap, giving her as much space as the room allowed. “You went missing when you were fourteen.”
Her movements were measured as she set the cup down without answering.
“There’s a missing persons report filed with the Boston PD.”
“You act like this is news,” Becca replied. “I had a record. It must have been in my file.”
“It was, but we weren’t focused on it. We need to know more about it now.”
Forearms on the table, she wrapped her hands around her cup. Nic was surprised the cap hadn’t popped off already. “Why?” she asked. “What’s happened?”
“Why do you care?”
She clammed up again, hiding behind another sip. She was clearly holding something back, but the coffee hadn’t been enough to secure her cooperation.
“She wants to play,” Lauren said. “Let her.”
He needed to tell her more, but how much more before he risked compromising an active investigation?
But it wasn’t really. And it had been a while since she’d worked a job.
Her brain used to regularly put pieces together much the same way his and Cam’s did, just on the other side of the law.
Lauren was right. He had to offer Becca a chance to solve the puzzle too.
“We’re working a case.” He withdrew a stack of pictures from the folder and spread them out on the table. “Eight missing girls over twenty years in Boston and the surrounding areas. All of them bear a striking resemblance to you.”
She looked at each picture, then back to him. “What’s it matter to you?”
He slid the last picture out of the file, a pen rolling out with it. “This is Agent Byrne’s sister. She’s been missing for twenty years.”
“So Hot Stuff really was from Boston? I didn’t know if that accent was real or his cover.”
“Southie, born and bred,” Nic said. “You’re from a few neighborhoods over but you have no accent.”
“Because I trained myself not to use it.”
Nic startled at the full-blast Boston drawl. Not exactly like Cam’s but close.
“We’re not all lucky enough to be born in accent-free California,” Becca said, cutting through his shock.
She reached for the pen and Nic tensed, ready to draw his sidearm if she tried to use the pen as a weapon.
She put it in her mouth instead, speaking around it.
“Trick for enunciating words and masking an accent.”
“Why’d you need that trick?”
She dropped the pen out of her mouth, pushed the photos aside, and pulled the missing persons report toward her. “I wasn’t taken. I left.”
Not surprising, seeing as she was sitting here before him and there were no follow-ups or charges related to the old missing persons report. Nic, however, continued to push, searching for any connection, no matter how tenuous. “Who were you running from?”
She tapped the “Filers” box with the pen. “Them. My parents.”
Nic drank his coffee, waiting her out. He’d had enough experience with witnesses to recognize Becca was ready to tell this story. She’d started down the road and couldn’t turn back, but she had to go at her own pace. And Nic had to let her.
“I wasn’t the easiest kid,” she said after another minute.
“I would have never guessed.”
She glared at him over the rim of her cup. “I came out to them as bisexual when I was twelve. One of my uncles thought that meant I was a slut—that he had free access—and my parents let it happen.”
Nic raged internally at the abuser and the enablers. All too common a scenario he saw in his work and in his own past.
“After two years,” Becca said. “I was done.”
“How’d you get out?”
“I was already into some shit. Friend of a friend introduced me to their crew. They took me in.”
“Just like that?”
“I’d already been told I was a slut. An abomination. I did what I had to.”
“I was told I was weak.” Self-esteem trampled by his father, would Nic have done the same if he hadn’t already known the love of a good man? Of a good woman who’d put herself on the line for him? If he hadn’t passed that enlistment office every day?
“So you ran off and became Captain America?”
He chuckled at the too-apt description and at the memory from the other night that flitted through his mind, of Cam in a Captain America T-shirt.
“Coming out to a big family like mine,” Becca said, “did not go well.”
“Mine was small but I ran away too.” He wasn’t given a choice to return home. Not that Becca should have, given the toxic environment she described. That toxicity had rooted itself deep, affecting her relationships. “The way you treated your girlfriend—”
“Was wrong,” she acknowledged. “I fell into the trap of the abused becoming the abuser. Betrayal and jail have made me see that clearly. And I regret it, more than she’ll ever know.”
“I’ll see what I can do about moving you somewhere more comfortable if you give me the names of the crew members who took you in.”
“I already told you I wasn’t kidnapped.”
He gave her a significant glance, one outcast to another. “You’d be surprised the connections we find sometimes.”