Chapter 27
Zane
Lucas froze, his deadly stare focused on Mom.
I halted mid-stride.
Mom stood her ground. “We use plates and silverware in this house, young man.”
The room went silent, everyone waiting breathlessly to see what would come next. No man in this room was brave enough to challenge Lucas, but my mom had just called him out.
She put a fresh pancake on his plate. “Try again.” She added a syrupy, “Please.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Lucas answered. “I’ll remember that.”
Crisis averted. I could breathe again.
“And we sit at the table,” Terry joked. That earned a snicker or two.
Lucas took the chair next to Yates, who seemed oblivious and kept eating. “These are great. I’ll take another.”
I finally relaxed when Lucas cut a piece and declared the food excellent.
The furtive looks around the room reverted to the unspoken question—why was the stranger here?
After all our appetites had been quenched, Lucas stood. “Mrs. M, that was a great breakfast. Now, with your leave, we have work to do. Jordy, let’s set up in the living room.”
Mom nodded her acknowledgment. “Anytime, young man.”
The group filed in after Jordy, bringing chairs with them from the kitchen area.
I stayed behind for a moment with Mom.
Peyton clung to my side. “That was scary.”
I nodded and then confronted my mother. “That was my boss you whacked,” I whispered. I couldn’t believe she’d done that.
“It don’t matter. Nobody eats with their fingers in my kitchen.”
I shook my head. I might be renting the house, but when she was cooking, it became her kitchen.
Mom pointed out the window to the backyard. “Your bird feeder is empty.”
“Later.” I had more pressing things than that.
“Sure. Let the poor birds starve.” Mom scoffed.
“They won’t starve. I’ll get to it.”
She huffed, but took off her apron, picked up her purse, and marched to the living room. “It was nice meeting you all. I’ll be on my way so you can have your secret agent meeting.”
A chorus of goodbyes followed.
“Love you.” I kissed her goodbye, and Peyton and I joined the others in the living room as the door closed behind her.
Jordy fiddled with his computer and connected to my television, posting a surveillance photo on the screen.
Lucas stood. “Jordy has been running searches for our guy based on what little we know about him—”
“That’s not him,” Peyton said, pointing at the screen.
“I understand,” Lucas answered. “Jordy will go through that in a moment, but first, I want to discuss another item. Most of you know I’ve been wanting to expand our operations.”
Peyton returned her hand to mine, and I squeezed back. “Patience,” I whispered.
My eyes swung to Yates. How was taking him on as a client expanding our operation?
Yates’s expression didn’t give anything away.
Lucas’s hand swung to Yates. “I’d like to introduce Yates Sinclair.”
True to her unfiltered form, Grace was the first to gasp. “The billionaire?”
Yates raised a hand. “Just Yates is fine.”
Serena waved. “Hi, Yates.”
“Hello, Serena,” he replied.
Duke wrapped an arm around his woman, maybe to hold her down. “You know him?”
“He and my dad have done some business,” she answered.
Yates nodded.
Other jaws just dropped open.
Peyton’s grip on me tightened. She was apprehensive.
After a second, Lucas continued. “We are here to welcome Yates into the Hawk family. He is the cousin we never knew we had.”
Cousin? I was slack-jawed because it didn’t compute. It took an aunt or an uncle to have a cousin, and Lucas had neither.
A quick check of Jordy and Duke’s faces confirmed they already knew about this guy, so the obvious questions about his lineage had to have been asked.
Yates explained, “I was adopted, and in looking for my birth parents and the rest of my family, we…” He motioned between himself and Lucas. “…discovered through DNA that my mother was Lucas’s mother’s sister, his aunt.”
It still didn’t explain how nobody had ever mentioned the aunt, but DNA evidence cinched it. I could relax that this wasn’t some weird misunderstanding.
“You should all welcome Yates into our group. He refuses to change his name, but he’s a Hawk now.”
That drew laughter from the crowd, and Peyton pulled her hand from mine to wipe it on her jeans.
“Names aside,” Yates said. “We are of the same blood, and I’m happy to call Lucas, Jordy, Duke, Bret, Emily, and Alice, all family.”
“You forgot Mom and Dad,” Duke prodded.
“Yes, Aunt Carol and Uncle Henry as well,” Yates amended.
“With that out of the way,” Lucas said. “There is another item. Yates has a small corporate cybersecurity group that we are going to merge into Hawk. So, we’ll be in business together as well.”
Change could be unsettling, but I didn’t detect any concerned faces among the group.
Yates looked around the room. “I happen to think corporate cybersecurity is a lucrative opportunity, and I don’t have the time or expertise to manage it properly. It deserves the attention Lucas and Jordy can give it, and it augments Hawk’s other capabilities.”
Jordy beamed and buffed his nails against his shirt.
The doorbell rang again, and I rushed to get the door.
A rideshare car left the curb as I opened the door.
The man with the suitcases and battered leather briefcase looked every bit the grizzled detective from a TV series.
He was partially balding, his hair a mixture of the original red and some gray, a paunch around the middle, a badge clipped to his belt, and a bulge beneath his rumpled suit that said he liked an old-style shoulder holster for his weapon.
“Sergeant James O’Connor, Boston Homicide,” the man said jovially, shoving his hand forward. “Mr. Hawk?”
I shook with him. “Zane March. I work for Hawk. Lucas is inside.” I stepped aside for him.
“March. You were on the call. Primary protection, he said. Mind if I park these here?” he asked, leaning his suitcases against the wall.
“Sure thing. This way.” Inside, I introduced him to the group. “This is Sergeant Detective James O’Connor.”
“Jimmie, or hey you, works for me,” O’Connor said.
One by one, the people around the circle gave their names.
O’Connor waved. “Without my notepad, there’s no way I’m passing the name test today.” That got a few kind giggles.
“We expected one of your detectives,” Lucas noted with a slight squint to his eyes. The sergeant had said as much on the call.
“I decided to come because this case is personal to me. My ex-wife was his third victim.”
Winston frowned. “You can’t—”
O’Connor’s hand shot up. “Hold on. We stayed on the right side of the ethical line here. My team and I caught the first case, and then the second with the obvious similarities. But another team handled the investigation of my Nancy’s murder, not me.”
Constance nodded.
“When the fourth body dropped, and then the fifth, the chief thought it best that my team continued chasing this guy. I mean, I’m the most motivated man on the whole force to nail this asshole.”
“Did you bring the file?” Lucas asked, getting right to the meat of the matter.
“Sure tried,” O’Connor said. “I’ve got two suitcases full of case files.”
Duke chuckled. “You could have brought an electronic copy.”
“That’s not the way my department operates.” O’Connor shrugged. “Maybe you guys will see something these old eyes missed.”
I went back to my place next to Peyton.
“Sergeant, take a seat,” Lucas suggested. “We’re about to go over how we can catch your strangler.”
O’Connor sat in an empty chair.
Lucas waved at the TV. “Okay, Jordy, run us through what you’ve been up to.”
Since we’d moved on to Jordy’s work, it seemed Pete wasn’t joining us, which I considered a shame. I made a mental note to stop in to see him as soon as I had some time. He was at a stage where being alone wasn’t the healthiest thing for him.
Jordy tapped his laptop, and the TV shifted to image after image. “This is a sample of what I’ve got so far.” They were mostly face-on shots.
“You’re going too fast,” Peyton said.
“These aren’t the real images,” Jordy said. “They’re training images for the algorithm.”
My angel slumped back.
Lucas held up a hand and smiled. “Peyton, we need everyone in the field to understand how this works, if we’re going to catch him. Let Jordy explain.”
She nodded.
“Normal facial recognition works on distances and angles between points in facial geometry, which can be extracted from various perspectives, but for this dude, all we have to go on is a difference in iris color. Most of the cameras around don’t get face-on shots close enough to see a bi-color difference. ATM cameras are an exception.”
O’Connor raised a hand. “Sorry to come in on this late, but what’s this about eye color?”
“That’s the target’s most identifying feature,” I answered. “One blue eye, one brown.”
“And it’s rare enough to be useful in locating him,” Jordy added.
O’Connor shook his head. “Where’d you get that? We don’t have that.”
Peyton spoke up. “I saw him, clear as day.”
O’Connor’s eyes widened. “Ms. Clarke, the witness?”
Peyton nodded.
Noting the bewilderment around the room, Lucas spoke up. “Yes. Ms. Leighton Clarke, the witness you didn’t believe.”
O’Connor rubbed the back of his neck. “Ms. Clarke, my sincerest apologies for the way you were treated. Trust me, I want to catch this monster as much as you do.”
Peyton shrank back against me. “Just catch him and cut his nuts off.”
The crowd laughed.
“That’s the plan,” O’Connor boomed. “However, I’m not allowed to agree with the surgical part of that request.”
“Let’s get back to the task at hand,” Yates said. “There have to be other cameras besides ATMs we can use.”
“There are,” Jordy agreed. “But not a lot. I’m working to map them now, but it’s time-consuming, and like I said, there aren’t a lot of good ones.”
“So we wait for a hit and scoop the bastard up,” Terry said.
Winston nodded in agreement. “We just need to have people distributed around so somebody can get to the location quickly.”
“That’s the general idea,” Lucas said.
“What if he isn’t using ATMs?” Terry asked.