Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Kenna laid two slices of cheese on one sandwich and one on the other, both of them on top of a mountain of turkey. Lettuce, and then the other slice of bread. “Here.” She laid the plate in front of Ramon but didn’t sit.
He had his own laptop open on the table, and hers was backed up against the window. The feed on the screen was from Jax’s lapel camera so they could watch the whole scene at the doctor’s office.
“You really think this is going to work?” She sipped from her can of caffeine-free soda.
“Zeyla comes up with pretty good plans. I don’t always agree with her methods, but you can’t deny the results.” Ramon clicked the mouse, then continued typing. “There’s nothing on this Simon Newton guy who was a soldier, and in his afterlife evidently decided to be a killer for Dominatus.”
“He really died in action?” Around the same time Megan’s boyfriend had, which was interesting. Her gaze, and her attention, drifted to Jax. She didn’t want to be there; she wanted to be here. She wanted him here, but also she wanted to solve the case.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t have both without outsourcing the legwork.
Ramon didn’t lift his gaze from his computer. “I’m guessing no, he isn’t dead. Since he’s still running around being a murdering psycho.”
On the screen of Kenna’s laptop, Jax parked the car.
“How long do we have?” he asked Zeyla.
“Fifteen minutes,” she answered.
“Let’s go.”
Ramon glanced at her screen, then back at what he was doing. Jax and Zeyla couldn’t hear them, and Kenna didn’t want to distract them with a phone call. It was enough to watch what they were doing so she knew they were safe while she stayed here.
Meanwhile, she wanted some progress on this hunt. “What the police got back was DNA on file for an army private Simon Newton.”
Simon says.
Just thinking it made her want to shudder.
Ramon stared at the screen. “Maizie can’t dig into it because they’ll know we’re onto them.”
On the screen, Jax told the receptionist that Kenna Banbury was there for her appointment.
Which only made her wonder if that ruse was even going to work.
After all, it wasn’t like she’d go see a doctor under her real name.
Was Dominatus or whoever the target was right now actually going to fall for this?
Jax and Zeyla went to sit in the waiting area.
She looked at Ramon. “I want to know if there’s a connection between Simon Newton and the other army guy we know who was killed in action. Mitch Caudelle. And Carl Allerton.”
Ramon lifted his gaze from the laptop to look at her. “You think there’s a connection?”
“It happened around the same time. Maybe they were deployed together?” Kenna shrugged. “Simon might’ve killed Mitch and faked his own death, or the whole group was declared dead and Major General Schnell recruited his own hit squad.”
“You think Mitch is alive as well?”
“I have no idea,” Kenna said. “But it’s worth figuring out.”
“I’ll have Stairns dig into it. He still has some military connections he can ask.” Ramon typed rapidly on the keyboard.
“It’s been a long time since he served.” Was he really going to be able to get them information? Though, maybe that was better than Maizie trying to hack secure government servers that were also possibly controlled by Dominatus.
Ramon shrugged. “He wants something to do so he can feel involved.”
On her laptop, a nurse walked Zeyla and Jax through a doorway into a long hall and had Zeyla record her weight before she took them to a room. Kenna tuned out the blood pressure reading and the initial questions about how things were going, and what the reason for their visit was.
She did want to get an ultrasound. Who didn’t need the reassurance that everything was all right?
But she regularly felt the baby kicking around, and she felt fine.
Keeping active, sleeping well, eating nutritious food, and drinking plenty of water counted for a whole lot in the vein of healthy living.
There were always factors that couldn’t be accounted for, but she’d just never had that many health problems. The few times they’d taken her blood pressure on the platform, during her captivity, it had gone from being on the low end to being normal, not even the usual higher reading that pregnancy brought.
Or the raised pressure that would result from being kidnapped and subject to experiments.
Maybe it was a function of her birth and her connection to the Dominatus breeding program that gave her the blessing of good health. But she wasn’t going to thank them for it.
“If you want to see a doctor and get checked out for real,” Ramon said, “your mom can make that happen.”
“She isn’t my mom.”
“Your aunt. Whatever. Amara is determined to be this baby’s grandma. Might as well take her on as your mom. Unless you have a better offer?”
“There’s a whole lot of water under that bridge.” Apparently, the water ran through a storage unit she hadn’t known existed that was full of baby stuff. “She’s still part of my life.”
Ramon stretched his arms above his head. “You don’t get to turn this back on me and tell me to go find a family, because I’m working on taking my own advice. But I don’t think you should discount the people around you. They care about you.”
“I know that.” She sipped from her can and watched Zeyla pace the small doctor’s office room from the vantage point of Jax’s lapel camera. “I’m not ruling it out.”
“You’re also not letting them in.”
“I’ve done a lot of work to deal with what happened. Most of it in the last week. Give me a second to get my footing back on the right track.”
“She’s here for you.”
Kenna glanced at him. “In the sense that she’s not actually here, right?”
“You know Amara. She’s a behind-the-scenes person.” Ramon smiled. “I wanna see Zeyla being an aunty, though. Because that’s gonna be hilarious.”
“I know who to call if someone needs to pace up and down with the baby in the small hours of the morning.”
Ramon chuckled. “She has a good heart. She’s just never lived a life where she babysat, or had friends who have siblings, or ever had a mother in the traditional sense.
Amara made sure she was alive, and in return got another foot soldier for her war.
Once the fight is over, they can both learn how to be family in the sense you and I know. ”
“Do we?” Kenna shrugged. “I have no idea what I’m doing. What I am doing, I’m probably doing wrong.”
“Says who?”
“Someone. Somewhere,” Kenna said. “But it’s my life, and I get to live it how I want.”
“Let’s find a door to knock on so we can inform Dominatus of that fact. Make sure they understand they’re going to leave you guys and the baby alone.” He put extra emphasis on that last word.
“Thanks.” She took a bite of her sandwich, even though she wasn’t that hungry. She probably wouldn’t have an appetite until—
The door to the medical office opened, and a doctor in slacks and a buttoned shirt came in, stethoscope around his neck but no lab coat.
“You know what?” Zeyla turned to him. “I actually changed my mind.”
Jax stood. “What’s that?”
“I don’t wanna have this visit today.” She rushed past the doctor. “Sorry for wasting your time.”
He sputtered, but Zeyla was already out the door.
Kenna sat at the RV dinette table so she could see the image more closely. It wobbled as Jax followed Zeyla down the hall toward an illuminated EXIT sign.
“What is it?” he asked her.
“I got a weird vibe before he even came in. Something isn’t right.”
“So you bail on the mission? I thought you wanted to get kidnapped.”
Kenna frowned at their conversation.
Zeyla pushed on the bar across the door, and the screen washed with bright sunlight as they stepped outside. “Who knows what’s going to draw them out—”
“FBI! Freeze!”
Jax and Zeyla pulled up short, surrounded by agents with weapons pointed squarely at them. Zeyla glanced at Jax. “See what I mean? Not right.”
“Stand down!” Special Agent Herron walked between two agents, approaching them. She eyed Zeyla. “Another lookalike?”
Zeyla tugged off the wig to reveal her hair pinned back underneath, holding the fake Kenna-do up with her hands. “I wasn’t even pretending that hard. Why are you guys here?”
Ramon reached over and hit the mute button on the laptop. “You can hear about how they talked their way out of that later. I have something.”
Kenna tore her attention from the screen, at least assured that Jax was safe for the moment. The agents with their weapons were standing down. Realizing that whatever the reason they’d shown up was done now. Likely they were there to round up another of the lawyers, but this operation was a bust.
“What do you have?” Kenna asked. If he told her fast, she could listen to the conversation after.
“The unit Mitch Caudelle was in is the same as Simon Newton. There were three other guys in their team, and they weren’t anything special on paper.
No secret assignments. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Just a fire team or whatever they call them.
At least according to what Stairns’ contact was able to dig up, they were just average grunts who did what they were told. ”
The nature of which always depended on who was giving the orders.
“Just because there’s nothing overly suspicious about it doesn’t mean that’s the truth,” Kenna said. “It isn’t like covert ops is listed as that in their records.” She snuck a glance at Jax and Zeyla and saw they were still in conversation with the special agent.
They’d tried to draw out Dominatus and wound up facing the taskforce hunting the lawyers.
Whatever Zeyla’s plan had been aiming at, Kenna guessed it wasn’t that.
“I say we track down the other three guys and find out what they’re up to.”
Kenna looked from the laptop screen to Ramon. “Get a psychological profile as well. Because if they’re anything like Simon or Mitch we need to get them on the radar of local police wherever we find them.”
Ramon nodded. “On it.”
Kenna pushed out a long breath, the baby kicking against her abdomen. Her husband on the laptop screen, facing down a crowd of FBI agents who all wanted answers. She wouldn’t be surprised if they were arrested. Or at least taken to the FBI office for questioning.
Talk your way out of it and come home. She switched to prayer, asking God that they would find favor rather than sitting here and willing them to make it for themselves.
She worked through all the things they had leads on, and all the possible options in front of them.
If they could follow a supposedly dead soldier into a secret base, that was a big win.
Coming back out alive would be another story.
It seemed as if they had a nascent idea forming. The beginning of a plan.
Kenna slid over her phone and decided to take Ramon’s advice.
She called her mom.
When Amara picked up, Kenna said, “I have an idea.”