Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
ELI
Iexpected Sylvie to start chattering as we pulled onto the highway, the road stretching before us into the darkness. It was three hours and change to Knoxville—plenty of time to exchange life stories if I was inclined, which I wasn’t.
But Sylvie didn’t talk. She took off her hoodie and rolled it into a ball. Tucking it between her shoulder and the window, she snuggled in and seemed to fall asleep.
Why was I the tiniest bit annoyed by that?
I didn’t know. That was the conundrum of Sylvie Calloway.
I didn’t want a partner. I didn’t want to babysit some podcaster.
I wanted to find Silas. And yeah, I wanted to know what had happened to Emily Shaw—mostly because she was tied to Silas, but also because Sylvie was right. The case was weird.
Emily Shaw had been a single woman who worked from home in data analysis.
If she’d lived in D.C., I might have raised an eyebrow, but Knoxville wasn’t a hotbed of intrigue.
And while the car bomb was interesting, the way the case had been buried so quickly left me with too many questions.
I understood why Sylvie hadn’t been able to walk away, even before her van had exploded.
So, yeah, I was invested on a couple of levels.
But it didn’t mean I wanted a civilian glued to my side.
I glanced over, watching the intermittent light slide across her cheeks.
Her hair was tightly braided, her clothes dark.
She might be a civilian, but—and this was the part I was fighting—I liked her.
Fuck. I was trying not to, but I couldn’t help it.
She was smart, she was persistent, she was intelligent enough to be scared and to accept our help, but also brave enough not to let the fear hold her back.
I didn’t want to admire Sylvie Calloway.
I did not want to like her. I definitely didn’t want to keep noticing how pink her lips were or the way she filled out that T-shirt and jeans.
This wasn’t the time for me to break the rules about having sex with a client—never mind that Sylvie wasn’t a client.
It was effectively the same relationship.
She needed protection and help, and I was the person playing that role.
Whoever was after her was a pro. Which meant I—we—had to be careful.
This wasn’t a game, and I was aware that while Sylvie saw us as partners, a big part of my job was to keep her alive. I wasn’t going to fuck that up. If I thought too much about her lips or how much I liked her laugh, I was going to get distracted.
The price of that distraction could be Sylvie’s life. Not a great way to pay her back for thinking she was smart and hot and funny. Our need for answers was the only thing tying us together. And the best place to start was the cold storage building.
Sylvie slept for almost three hours. After my initial annoyance, I found I didn’t mind.
I liked the quiet, hearing her soft breaths beside me, knowing she was getting some rest. While she’d napped that afternoon, I suspected she’d slept very lightly after she’d gone to bed.
Considering that I’d been almost silent going down the hall, she must have been awake and listening for me.
It was a level of moxie I admired.
Regardless, she needed her sleep, given what she’d been through in the last twenty-four hours.
We were half an hour outside Knoxville when she stirred, lifting her head and blinking, her eyes widening as she caught the sign on the side of the highway.
“Oh man, I’m sorry. I thought I’d close my eyes for a minute and then wake up and offer to drive the second half.”
I felt the smile curl my mouth. “You’re not driving.”
“I can drive an SUV,” she said with affront. “This thing isn’t as big as my van.”
“I’m sure you can,” I said. “You’re still not driving.”
“Why? Because I don’t have a penis?”
“No, because this is my vehicle and nobody drives my vehicle but me.”
“Okay, crazy,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t mind being chauffeured around. I was just trying to be nice. So, when we get there, how are we breaking in?”
I couldn’t help liking how her brain went straight to breaking and entering without objection. “You usually throw in a little B and E when you’re investigating a case?”
“No,” Sylvie said. “I usually talk to people and do a lot of research. But you know”—she eyed my all-black attire—“you don’t look dressed for a stakeout.”
I rolled my eyes and laughed. She wasn’t wrong. “What do you know about stakeouts?”
“Everything I’ve seen on TV,” she said. “You should have, like, a bag of chips, and look really bored.”
“We’re just going to check it out. If we decide that it’s worth trying to get in and retrieve some of the evidence, we’ll send back a team specifically for that purpose. You and I are there to take a look at the building, the environment.”
“We’re going to case the joint,” she said.
“You really do watch too much TV,” I said, holding back another laugh.
“Not as much as I used to. But yeah, probably. So, we’re going to check it out. Take notes on security cameras and guards and stuff like that?”
“Stuff like that,” I agreed.
“Does Sinclair Security usually break into police evidence storage?” she asked.
I didn’t grace that with a response.
“And how do you know the evidence from Emily Shaw’s crime scene is at this location?”
Now we were getting into information Sylvie didn’t need. I shook my head.
“Come on, Eli. I signed an NDA.” She reached across the console and poked me in the arm.
“Yeah, which means you can’t talk about the things you know. It doesn’t mean you need to know everything.” I slid her a sideways glance, trying not to enjoy the disgruntled look on her face, her brows drawn together, her teeth sunk into her lower lip.
Sylvie let out a harrumph and crossed her arms over her chest. I was sure it wasn’t supposed to be adorable, but it was.
I still wasn’t going to tell her that Maddox and Emmett had done a little hacking and followed the chain of custody on the evidence, especially since Cooper wouldn’t be thrilled to know what they’d done.
The people at Sinclair Security weren’t Boy Scouts, but they were a hell of a lot more by-the-book than we were.
In general, that wasn’t a problem. I didn’t mind coloring inside the lines most of the time.
Frankly, working on cases that were a little less sketchy was fine with me.
I didn’t have a death wish. I liked my work, but when you were willing to push the limits, you attracted clients with more complex problems—things that, when I was a little younger, felt like a fun challenge.
And now? Now I wasn’t sure how long I wanted to take unnecessary risks.
In this case, all bets were off. This was about Silas, not a client. And if he needed help, I was willing to take any risk necessary.
I followed the directions on my nav to an area outside the city that looked like a rough mix of commercial and industrial—warehouses, storage units, nondescript concrete block buildings surrounded by chain-link fences. In the middle of the night, everything was dark and quiet.
Exactly how I wanted it.
I dimmed the lights on the SUV and turned off the main road, winding my way through back streets I’d memorized before we left Atlanta, to pull along the back of the one-story rectangular concrete building that served as cold storage for the police department.
Cold storage was so named because it held things that were accessed so infrequently that they didn’t need to be easy to get to.
I was expecting low security, and so far, that was what we found.
The building was surrounded by a chain-link fence a few feet taller than me, with angled barbed wire at the top. Dim lights glowed at the corners of the building, leaving great pools of shadows everywhere else. I pulled out my phone and took some pictures through the car window.
“I need to get more than this,” I said and opened my door. When Sylvie moved to follow—as I’d known she would—I said, “Pull your hood up all the way to hide your hair and face.”
She did as I said, easing open her door and closing it almost silently. She joined me at the side of the car, watching in silence as I took pictures, staying beside me as I walked to the far corner of the building and took a few more.
I hadn’t spotted a surveillance camera, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one. These days, they were so easy to hide, but the place had a neglected air to it. If you’d told me the chain-link fence and the locks on the doors were the sum of their security, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
I wondered what Sylvie was thinking, but she stayed silent as promised, not getting in my way, not causing any trouble.
It was hard to stay irritated at her just for existing.
I might not want a partner, especially a civilian whose job it was to make entertainment out of cases like this, but if I had to have somebody stuck at my side, Sylvie was a pretty good option.
“Hey,” she said under her breath, and lifted her chin at the far corner of the building.
I followed her eyes to see a shadow separate itself from the pool of darkness between the two security lights, creeping along the wall of the building, and stopping at a side door.
Sylvie drew in a sharp breath but didn’t say anything.
Neither did I. We watched in silence as he pulled out what looked like a screwdriver and went to work on the door.
One very long minute later, I heard a grind of metal on metal, and the door swung open. The figure crept inside. I waited, braced for an alarm. There was nothing but silence.
They’d either successfully disarmed the security system, or they didn’t realize there might be a silent alarm.
“What do we do?” Sylvie breathed, her voice so low it was almost inaudible.
I shook my head. “We wait.”