THIRTEEN #2
Caryssa carefully kept her gaze forward when all she wanted was to turn and stare into his eyes.
And feel his mouth on hers.
She polished off half of the sandwich and reached for her coffee. It had gone cold long ago, but she didn’t mind cold coffee. As she reached for the other half of her sandwich, O leaned back in his chair with a smug expression. He laced his fingers behind his head and stared at the screen.
On it was a name and a military service photo.
“Navy.” O sounded pleased with himself. “Petty Officer Danny Ruiz.”
Rorke was already on the phone with Blackout command, and Caryssa listened to a side of a conversation that slowly made her hopes sink.
Ruiz wasn’t stateside at the time that bomb was mailed. He was out of country on a cruise ship, four days into his honeymoon, with about two hundred witnesses and a paper trail a mile long.
Rorke cut the call. “It’s not him.”
“I’ll send the name and image to Doyle. See if he can get a match. But…” She trailed off, lost in thought.
It didn’t track. Nothing made sense in this entire thread of false identifications. Then she realized no one else had pointed it out.
“That’s two now,” she said slowly. “Ruiz, tied to the bomb. And the sailor whose ID got pinned to the Antonio’s shooting—the one they cleared after Phillip’s murder.”
She pulled both images onto the screen and studied them side by side.
“Two real servicemen whose identities ended up attached to crimes they had nothing to do with. But what if he didn’t just steal their names?”
Rorke’s attention sharpened.
“What if he chose them because he knew what they looked like?” She pointed between the photographs. “He finds someone with the same general build, similar features. Changes the hair, adds facial hair, whatever gets him close enough. Then bad surveillance footage does the rest.”
Rorke leaned closer to the screen. “You think whoever’s behind this knew the originals?”
“I think we need to find out.” Caryssa sat back. “If he served with Ruiz and this sailor, even briefly, that gives us a point of intersection.”
“Boot camp. Duty stations. Deployments,” Rorke said.
“Training assignments,” Rivers added slowly. “Temporary duty. Anywhere their records overlap with the same person.”
“That’s not a quick search,” O added.
“No. It’s slow and ugly, and it’s going to eat a full day at minimum.” She was ready to dive in, but just then her computer pinged at that moment with several incoming messages from Doyle. She set aside her sandwich and opened the first attachment.
Ruiz on his wedding day.
She pulled the post office image beside it. The resemblance was close enough to fool most people at a glance.
Nobody in this room was most people.
“He’s not as muscular in the post office shot,” she said. “Not even close.”
“And he has a scar.” Reid leaned in, his scent hitting her before he pointed above Ruiz’s eyebrow. “In the wedding photo.”
“You’re right.”
“O,” Cannon said.
Already moving, O pulled up every image of Ruiz he could find. His military ID showed no scar and a leaner build. The changes had come later.
Just as Reid had changed in the years they’d been apart, filling out through the shoulders and chest—
Caryssa dragged her attention back to the screen.
O brought up Ruiz’s medical history. The eyebrow injury had happened two years into his service.
Cannon folded his arms. “So the man at the post office was made to resemble an earlier version of Ruiz.”
Caryssa was already reaching for her whiteboard. “Yes. And that tells us whoever chose Ruiz had only an old photo of him to copy.”
She faced her board. “What do we know about our guy? He doesn’t care if he’s recognized.
Uses lookalikes. He has access to old photos of at least two Navy personnel—and men who look close enough to pass as their doubles.
” She paused, tapping the end of the marker thoughtfully against the board.
“He’s not hiding his face. That either means he’s arrogant…
or he doesn’t think it matters if we see him. ”
“Because we’re not seeing him,” Reid said. “We’re seeing somebody else’s identity.”
Caryssa poised the marker over the board. “O, any chance the footage was altered? Another face laid over his?”
“It’s possible. I’ll check.”
“Or he’s finding men who already look close enough.” She tapped Ruiz’s old military photo. “The world is full of doppelg?ngers. Find the right one, make a few changes, and bad surveillance footage does the rest.”
She stared at the two versions of Ruiz.
“But whoever chose him was working from this.” She tapped the older photo again. “Not the man Ruiz is now. He didn’t know about the extra muscle or the scar.”
Her marker moved across the board.
“And we saw the same thing with the man blamed for Phillip’s murder.”
There it was.
“Both identities belong to former military. Both were copied from older versions of the men.” She turned toward Rorke. “We need to find where their service histories intersect. Whoever’s doing this may have known them then.”
She looked up and caught Reid watching her, unmistakable pride in his expression.
She made herself look away, shaken by it.
He wasn’t jumping in to take over the way so many men in her career had, unable to sit back and let a woman run the show. Reid let her shine.
Emotion bloomed in her chest and spread lower into her stomach. She filed the feeling away to examine later because right now the case needed her more than her heart did.
She blinked down at the board. “We’re missing one person.”
Rorke looked over.
“The voice.” She tapped the notes from her interviews with Stina and Jolie. “Both women heard him at Antonio’s. Neither could identify him, but they remembered the voice. Bill’s phone connects him to the same restaurant.”
“You think Bill was the man they heard?”
“Maybe. Or Bill knew him.” She looked between the two sets of notes. “Either way, Doyle sent me here because of that connection, and we still haven’t explained it.”
Everyone fell silent as they processed this.
She pointed to the board again. “We also need concrete evidence that Bill was around Echo during the time between when the team deployed and Cannon’s team arrived to empty the armory.”
Cannon shook his head. “We already went down that road. No cameras on base, and nothing usable from the streets around it.”
Rorke sat forward. “There might be another way.”
Cannon looked at him.
“Pentagon imagery.”
“What imagery?”
Rorke paused. “Satellite surveillance. There’s an archived feed on certain military assets.”
Cannon’s expression hardened. “Echo?”
“Among others.”
“And you knew about this?”
“Oh.” Rorke glanced around the table. “You must not have clearance for it.”
The room went dead silent. Rorke taking a jab at their commanding officer was one thing. Cannon not firing back was another.
She slanted a look at Reid, who appeared just as stunned as she felt. O’s fingers froze on the keyboard.
Whatever was going on between Cannon and Rorke was big. But bigger was the fact that her case was finally fleshing out, built out of so many small fragments. Stolen faces and erased footage and a sailor on his honeymoon who had no idea his identity had been borrowed for a crime.
Even though the room was edged with tension, she felt the old, familiar hum under her skin, the one she got right before a case blew open.
But when that happened, her job here would end.
That meant her time with Reid would end too.