Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
ELI
“Don’t,” I said, as out of the corner of my eye I caught Sylvie’s finger moving toward the power button on the phone. I plucked it from her hands and slid it into the pocket of my shirt.
She glared at me, her eyes just shadowed in the dark car, but her annoyance clear. “Hey, I’m the one who almost died to get that.”
I expected a flippant response to roll off my tongue, but instead I felt my jaw tighten, my gaze narrowing on the road ahead. She wasn’t exaggerating. She had almost died for that phone.
“Don’t remind me,” I finally managed to say. “You should have left it.”
“Maybe,” she agreed, “but if I had, we would have lost everything. Now at least we have the phone. People live their whole lives on their phones. It’s probably more valuable than the laptop or the tablet.
If we’re trying to figure out what she was doing before she died and who she was talking to, this could be our best bet. ”
I gave a sharp nod of my head, my throat still tight. I barely knew Sylvie Calloway. I’d started out annoyed with the idea of a civilian tagging along, or, God forbid, getting out her microphone and trying to turn my investigation into an episode of her podcast.
But I’d already learned that wasn’t Sylvie. She cared. Too much. The idea that she’d almost gotten herself killed dug at me. And that itself was out of the norm.
I worked in a dangerous business. These days, more of it was spent sitting in front of a computer than people might think.
Tracking, gathering evidence—so much of it was digital.
But generally, when a case came to a point, things got hazardous.
It had never bothered me. It was part of why I liked the job—the adrenaline, the rush, the life-or-death stakes, narrowing things down until they were simple. I enjoyed the challenge.
But this was different. I’d been in tight spots, plenty of them.
And it wasn’t that Sylvie was a woman, because I’d seen Wren, Shade, and Miranda almost bite it more than once.
But yeah, it shook me up, as much as any of my team members, who were as good as my family, would leave me shaken if they almost got killed.
It was part of the business. We knew what we were doing; we knew the risks we were taking.
Sylvie didn’t know. She wasn’t trained, which made all of this fucking reckless and irresponsible.
But it was more than that. Something about seeing her perched on the edge of those shelves, doggedly trying to get to the contents of the evidence box while that timer ticked down…
I hated everything about how close we’d come.
“Don’t fucking do that again,” I said, flicking my gaze over to her.
“It’s okay, Eli.” Her tone was soft, almost like she was placating me. Trying to make me feel better.
She didn’t get it. “It’s not. It was a big fucking bomb. The building is gone.”
“I know it is,” she said.
“There’s no point going to all this trouble to try to get your life back if you’re just going to get yourself blown up,” I said.
Sylvie sighed. “Yeah, I know. I just?—”
I needed her to understand. “If I tell you to run,” I said, “you run. Got it?” In my peripheral vision, she gave a sharp nod. “Otherwise, I’ll talk to Cooper about making different arrangements.”
“You can’t do that,” Sylvie said, and this time her tone had an edge.
I’d finally gotten through, so I pushed. “The hell I can’t. I’m not going to watch you get yourself killed. Emily Shaw is dead, Sylvie. None of those answers are going to bring her back to life, and they won’t save you if you get yourself killed while we’re trying to find out what happened to her.”
She huffed out a breath. “I know. I know. Look, I’m not used to this.
Investigating murder in my own non-law enforcement way, sure.
Talking to people, asking questions. Maybe I’ve met a few who gave me a bad feeling, but I’ve never actually been in danger before.
Sorry if my meter for serious shit is a little off. ”
Huh. She got it more than I thought she did. That was exactly what I needed her to admit.
I let out my own huff of breath. “Yeah, well, you need to recalibrate. Set it to extremely fucking hazardous. Because so far, everything about this case fits that description.”
She stayed quiet for a beat, and I glanced over. She was staring out the passenger window, her eyebrows drawn together, her mouth in a slight downturn. It wasn’t an unhappy expression exactly. More like she was processing. The only noise was the sound of our tires on the road.
“You never said why Sinclair Security is interested in Emily Shaw,” she finally said, breaking the silence.
I’d known this was coming. “No, I didn’t,” I agreed.
She let out that harrumphing sound I found cute and crossed her arms over her chest, leaning into the corner of her seat so she could face me a little across the dark vehicle.
“What if I tell you it’s confidential?”
She rolled her eyes. “I signed an NDA.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m going to tell you everything.”
“Is it for a client,” she pushed, “or is it personal?”
I wasn’t answering that one. Not yet. Maybe never.
The truth was, there were moments when it felt like I’d known Sylvie for years.
But she’d blown into my life less than twenty-four hours ago.
I didn’t have a good enough read on her to know whether I could trust her.
And our search for Silas was none of her business.
“I’m asking,” she said, “because I can’t help but notice that you almost got yourself blown up too.”
She had a point. “True,” I agreed, “but of the two of us, I was prepared to run. You were the one who wouldn’t leave the evidence behind.”
“I’m not apologizing for that,” she said. “Because again, I’m alive, in one piece, sitting here, and we have Emily Shaw’s phone.”
I couldn’t argue with that. And I knew if it had been anyone else on my team sitting beside me, the argument wouldn’t even have occurred to me. My unsettled feeling didn’t feel logical; this wasn’t my head telling me Sylvie had fucked up. This was my gut talking.
“You could have died,” I said again, not liking the cold weight of fear in my chest.
“Stop reminding me.” She looked out the window. After another long sigh, she said, “You’re right. I get that I should have run when you said run. Also, I’m not sorry, because we needed that phone.”
“What if there’s nothing on it?” I couldn’t seem to let it go.
Another thing I didn’t understand—I was nagging at her like she was a teenager who hadn’t put her laundry in the hamper. It was over. Done. She understood. I’d made my case. It wasn’t like me to drag shit out. But I kept seeing her on that shelf, the timer ticking down, and I couldn’t drop it.
“Maybe there’s not,” she said. “Maybe she was the only person on the planet who didn’t live their life on her phone.
I guess we’ll find out.” She leaned forward a little bit to pin her eyes on the phone in the chest pocket of my shirt.
“Are you going to crack into it, or are you going to give it to your guys? Maddox and…what’s his name? ”
“Emmett,” I said. “And if it was anything else, I might take a crack at it. But this is all we have. We can’t afford for me to fuck it up, so I’ll give it to the best. Their boss, Lucas, is as good as the two of them.
Maybe better. Between those three, if there’s anything to find in the phone, they’ll find it. ”
“What do we do now?” She shifted in her seat, resting her cheek against the headrest.
“We drive back to Atlanta and get some sleep. It’ll be dawn by the time we get there.”
“I don’t want to waste a whole day sleeping.”
“It’s not a waste,” I said. “How many hours of sleep have you gotten since your van blew up?”
Sylvie started to shrug, then stopped and stared up at the roof of the car before saying slowly, “I took a nap yesterday for a few hours.”
“I know you weren’t sleeping when you went to bed,” I said, “because you heard me in the hall. You slept in the car tonight, but?—”
She shook her head. “Not really.”
“Then you need some sleep. Like a solid eight to twelve hours.”
“And what are you going to do while I’m sleeping? Also sleep?”
“Maybe. Depends on how I feel when we get back. I could use a few hours.” Not as many as Sylvie needed, but I knew what she was getting at. No one was leaving her out of the action.
“Obviously,” she said. “But I thought you were Superman.” She smirked at me, and I didn’t fight the cocky grin that spread across my face.
“I’ve learned to rest when I can,” I said. “And unless someone else plants a bomb on us in the next twenty-four hours, I think we can take a break long enough to get some food and some sleep.”
“Okay,” Sylvie said. “I’m not going to fight you on that. I’m exhausted to the bone.”
“I bet,” I murmured. It had been a while since I’d seen someone take so many punches without going down. If anyone needed some restorative sleep and a few good meals, it was her.
“Then what?”
I was getting used to the way she pushed. Sylvie Calloway would never be satisfied with simple answers or excuses.
“I have some ideas,” I said. “I need to hit the office and talk to my team. Here’s what’s going to happen—we get back, we both get some rest. You can work on setting up that laptop.
It has a VPN, so if you go on the internet, you won’t be traceable geographically to Atlanta.
But I wouldn’t communicate with anyone.”
“Can I log into my email, socials, and stuff?” She asked, one eyebrow raised, her eyes distant, as if she was working through her next moves as she waited for my answer.
I debated that. My gut wanted her off the radar completely.
But she’d already gone to talk to the police.
There hadn’t been a good way out of that.
So, whoever tried to kill her almost certainly knew she wasn’t dead.
And if they couldn’t trace her to a specific address, did it matter if she checked her email or socials?
I couldn’t think of a reason why, and considering how little we had to go on, I answered her honestly.
“I don’t like the idea of using you as bait.
I’d like you to keep your footprint as small as possible.
Even if whoever did this can’t track you to your exact location, you’re giving them information by moving around online through your own accounts.
Being so obviously alive might encourage them to try again. ”
“On the other hand, we’re a little short on leads,” she said. “Unless that phone has a treasure trove.”
I thought about the way Maddox had said Emily Shaw’s information had appeared curated. Anyone with the chops to do that probably wasn’t careless with their phone.
“I’ll keep all that in mind,” she said, which I knew meant she’d be checking her email and her socials.
Smart for the case, but I still didn’t like it. “I have some ideas of where we go next, but I need a few hours in the office before I’m ready to talk about it.”
That was mostly true. I had some thoughts I wanted to run by Ryder. Questions for Maddox.
I expected Sylvie to press, but she let it go. I glanced over to see if she was asleep, but her eyes were alert, watching the road as we drove through the night.
“Tell me about the case,” I said. “The one where the police used you.”
“They didn’t use me. You make it sound bad,” she said. “I was there. I was going to do what I was going to do. And they needed the help.”
“Fine,” I agreed, though I didn’t like the idea of the police putting Sylvie in the way of a killer. What we were doing wasn’t far off, but it wasn’t exactly the same either. “Tell me.”
And she did, her clear, warm voice filling my SUV as she told me of a girl—fifteen, pretty, good student, lots of friends—and the boy who decided she belonged to him. I heard in Sylvie’s voice the passion for justice, her anger that this girl had lost her life so young.
I wondered what her podcast was like, because I kind of got it. It wasn’t my thing to listen to people talk for hours on end. But Sylvie’s voice, the way she told the girl’s story—this wasn’t about clicks or sponsors for her. Or if it was, only a little. This was about justice.
In my business, things were rarely black or white.
We didn’t work in service of finding right from wrong.
We worked for clients. Sometimes, nobody on a job was the good guy.
Sometimes, the answers to our questions were all bad.
But all of us liked it when things were a little more clear-cut.
And I could see why this kind of work would attract somebody as fierce as Sylvie Calloway.
She went on to tell me about the case that had gotten her obsessed in the first place—the waitress who disappeared.
“We still haven’t found whoever killed her,” Sylvie said, “though some tips came in to the detective on the case after the season of the podcast aired.”
“What do you think happened?” I asked.
She let out a long sigh. “I think it was a crime of opportunity. I think whoever did it wasn’t local. I think she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And those—those cases are really hard, unless you have DNA.”
“And do they?”
“Some,” she said, “but the evidence wasn’t handled correctly.
It happens more than it should. Not bad cops, necessarily, just…
there’s a lot of evidence, a lot of storage issues.
” She shrugged. “The system’s not perfect.
Genetic genealogy is doing a lot these days.
People have been caught from DNA that was stored in the seventies, so there’s hope, I think, with some of these cases.
It’s just a waiting game. Eventually, we’ll get answers.
But so far, for Carol Stevens, we’re still waiting. ”
“So that was it?” I asked, expecting it when her eyebrows flew up in surprise.
“What do you mean, that was it?”
I wasn’t trying to minimize Carol Stevens’s story, but I had a feeling there was something deeper that drove Sylvie.
I couldn’t help thinking of my own reasons, but Sylvie had mentioned her parents, and the tone left me thinking all was well there.
So, what was it? I wanted to know, and we were stuck in this car with plenty of time to kill.
“Carol Stevens put you on the path of looking for answers for murdered women.”
Sylvie nodded. “She did.”
“What got you interested in cases like Carol Stevens’s in the first place?” I pushed.