Chapter 25
TWENTY-FIVE
Colin made waffles.
Not just waffles—chocolate-chip waffles with powdered sugar and sliced strawberries and a side of perfectly cooked bacon.
Arden brought Juni back at eight-thirty, still in her pajamas, Camo escorting her. She took one look at the kitchen, said “Waffles!” with a volume that should have been illegal before nine a.m., and climbed into her chair without breaking stride.
“I promise I fed her breakfast already,” Arden said, laughing.
Maren laughed. “She always has room for waffles. Stay for breakfast?” she asked as casually as she could.
But Arden was no dummy. She took one look at Maren and Colin. “Thank you, but I have a ton of chores to do back home.”
Yup. The knowing smile Arden gave her told Maren they weren’t fooling her.
Damn, and I spent so long trying to fix my sex hair.
After Arden left, Maren stood in the kitchen doorway in Colin’s flannel shirt and her own tee and jeans, coffee in both hands, watching the two of them. Colin slid a plate in front of Juni, who immediately began arranging her strawberries in a pattern that required serious concentration.
It was watching Colin tousle Juni’s hair without even thinking about it that got her.
This, Maren thought. This is what it’s supposed to look like.
Colin glanced up and caught her watching. He walked toward her and paused at her side.
“Sit down, babe,” he said quietly in her ear. “Yours is almost ready.” He continued into the kitchen.
After she got the shivers under control, she took a seat at the table.
Maren was on her second waffle and Juni was explaining at length how Camo was two dogs in one because he was a chimera, when Colin’s phone buzzed beside his plate. As he picked it up, Maren felt the air go tense.
“Boss.” He paused. “Yeah.” Another pause, longer. “How long ago?” His gaze moved to Maren. “Give me twenty minutes.”
He set the phone down slowly, shattering Maren’s illusion that everything was fine, this was normal and wonderful and would continue.
Juni looked up from her mostly empty plate, sensing something in the air. “Is everything okay?”
Colin looked at Maren for a moment. Then at Juni.
“Hey, Bug. How would you like to go back to Aunt Arden’s for the day? I bet Camo misses you already.”
Juni’s smile was ever so slightly hesitant. “Okay.” She looked at Maren.
Maren’s stomach dropped. “You can help Aunt Arden with the alpacas and feed the barn cats.”
Juni brightened. “Camo hates the barn cats.” She launched into a story about how they disappeared whenever he came into the barn but he barked at the air anyway. Her voice was far away as Maren’s gaze locked with Colin’s.
“Why don’t you go brush your teeth and then I’ll help you change your clothes, sweetie. By the time you’re done, Aunt Arden should be here.”
“Okay.” Juni jumped down from her chair and ran for the bathroom.
“Kyle needs us at Watchdog,” Colin said the moment she was out of earshot.
Us.
Not me. Not I’ll be back in a couple hours.
Us.
“Why?”
“Elissa found your mystery man.”
Maren had been in Watchdog’s buildings a few times—the lobby, the kennels, and a back office where Nettie had transformed her into someone unrecognizable.
But she’d never sat in this conference room.
It wasn’t the one near the front where she imagined they met with new clients.
This one was tucked away, soundproofed—she was sure of it—and no windows.
The room screamed top secret information discussed here.
Kyle was at the head of the table, Lachlan to his left, Gina standing against the back wall.
Flint was there with his computer and Elissa was on a screen this time instead of just over a speakerphone.
She was exactly how Maren had pictured her—blonde, tanned, with eyes that shone with intelligence and mischief equally.
But she looked like she’d been up all night, which she probably had been.
Charlie and Mac sat across from each other.
Charlie gave her a warm, sympathetic smile and Maren was grateful for it.
Mac had cut his time off short, and Maren was grateful for that, too.
Colin pulled out a chair for Maren and sat beside her. He pressed his knee against hers under the table, a quiet reassurance that he had her back.
But by now, she knew every person in this room did, too. She felt it down in her bones. And she was filled with love and gratitude.
“Elissa,” Kyle said. “Go ahead.”
“First, I’d say it’s nice to put a face to the super awesome woman we’re helping out,” Elissa said, “but I’ve been looking at your sister’s photos and you are absolutely identical. Anyway, welcome to the family, Maren.”
Maren swallowed around a lump in her throat. “Thanks, Elissa. That means a lot.” She gave her a soft smile that Elissa returned.
“All right, now down to business.” Elissa’s face disappeared as she shared her screen.
She opened a file and the photo of a man came up, one that looked like it had been taken for an ID badge.
He had neatly trimmed dark hair, olive skin, and the barest five-o’clock shadow.
He looked like he was in his late forties, maybe early fifties judging by the gray hairs threading the dark.
He was handsome, his eyes steady and faintly kind.
“Raymond Castillo.” Elissa’s voice held a degree of sadness.
“He was a John Doe brought in to the San Diego County Medical Examiner’s office yesterday morning.
Signs of blunt force trauma. The official ruling is acute opioid toxicity, manner of death accidental.
He…” Elissa paused, and Maren could hear her swallow hard. “He’s been dead for a while.”
Maren covered her mouth and blinked back tears.
Elissa cleared her throat. “He was found in an abandoned building by some urb-exers—”
“Urb-exers?” Lachlan asked.
“Sorry, urban explorers. People who sneak into abandoned buildings and explore them like caves. A couple of guys in their early twenties were recording themselves inside an abandoned department store in a sketchy neighborhood, when they smelled something super wrong. Sorry, again.”
Elissa continued. “John Doe’s dental records pinged a database and he was ID’ed as Raymond “Ray” Castillo.
He wasn’t with LRH. He’s a former NCIS special agent.
Disciplinary actions were taken against him—coincidentally, yeah, not—around the same time that Mira was killed, followed by an ugly dismissal from the agency, the details of which are pretty buried, surprise.
The ME’s office already closed the case, which is pretty damned quick if you ask me. Nobody pushed back.”
“Because nobody ‘cared’ to push back,” Gina said, sarcasm lacing her voice.
“Right.” Elissa sounded bitter. “Until I went looking.”
Maren stared at the face on the screen. Ray Castillo. The man on the recording. Your sister was brave and she loved you and her daughter more than anything… I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything. His voice was burned into her brain. She felt like she knew him.
Had he been dead before she’d ever heard his voice?
“They staged it carefully,” Colin said. It wasn’t a question.
“Sure did,” Flint confirmed. “Whoever did this knows how a scene gets read and what gets glossed over. The opioids in his system were consistent with the narrative they built around him. A disgraced agent takes up a drug habit, frequents a bad part of town to get his fix. His wallet’s gone, so the beating’s chalked up to a mugging or a deal gone wrong. ” He paused. “This wasn’t improvised.”
Maren thought about Mira, about her ‘accident.’
“Can we take it to the police?” she asked. She already knew the answer.
Gina approached the table. “Here’s the problem.
We can’t prove murder. The staging is clean enough that any challenge gets written off, at best. At worst, we tip our hand to someone who’s trying to get to you and has demonstrated they are not squeamish about removing problems.” She held Maren’s gaze.
“If we go to official channels now, we warn them we’re on to them, and we put an even bigger bullseye on your back. ”
Maren nodded. She’d expected that. It still landed like a fist.
“There’s more,” Elissa said.
Ray disappeared as she pulled up another file. Another photograph, but this time not an ID or anything official-looking. A company event; holiday party, maybe, or a birthday. People in business casual, drinks in hand, wearing the telltale stiff smiles of colleagues pretending to like each other.
And there was Mira.
Not the Mira that Maren had last seen—tired and stressed, evasive and short-tempered, all things that Maren had chalked up to an overworked new mom with a stressful job.
This was a younger Mira not long after she’d been hired by LRH, laughing at something just off camera, one hand touching the arm of the woman beside her, comfortable in her own skin, lighting up the room.
Maren didn’t know a single other person in the photo.
The part of her life she never shared.
But knowing it and seeing it were different things entirely, and the gap between them turned Maren’s grief to rage. Not at Mira. At the people who had taken all of this from her. From Juni. From Sean. From everyone in this room.
She kept her face blank but she was shaking. She felt the side of Colin’s knee press against hers. He was clocking every little thing about her and telling her I’m here for you.
Elissa’s face appeared on the screen again. “We’re trying to identify everyone in all the work photos we have of Mira, going back to the beginning. Anyone she worked with even remotely at LRH. We’re going to keep pulling. Flint and I have two threads that are starting to converge.”
“I want everyone in this room to understand what we’re risking and why,” Kyle said. “Maren’s getting briefed on everything.” He paused. “She’s family. She gets answers.”
Maren exhaled.
Colin’s knee pressed against hers. Still here.
“Tell me everything,” she said.
Elissa walked her through it. Some things she knew about her sister, some things she didn’t, thanks to her sister’s clearance level.
Mira had been at LRH Defense Systems for three years.
Naval weapons procurement—contracts, compliance, the kind of mid-level position that puts you in rooms where decisions are made without putting your name on anything important.
The job looked ordinary from the outside. Maren had thought it was ordinary. She’d sat across from her sister at holidays and listened to her complain about the commute and the parking and the vending machine that stole money and never had the right chips anyway.
“She came to NCIS two years into her job,” Elissa said. “What they call self-initiated contact. She’d found something and she knew what it was and she knew she needed help. That takes nerve.”
“She had nerve,” Maren said quietly. “She had more nerve than anyone I’ve ever known. I’m the quiet, boring one.” She scoffed. “Well, until recently.”
Elissa gave her a sympathetic smile before going on.
“Like I said, Raymond Castillo’s files were buried deep, but I did manage to poke around some.
Ray was her handler. They worked together for approximately fourteen months before she died.
” Elissa paused. “He was good at his job, good at handling Mira. I read some of his notes. He really did want to keep her as safe as he could. Especially once she had Juniper. She was the one who insisted on staying longer with LRH.”
Mira’s voice filled Maren’s head. Just a little longer. I almost had everything.
“The staged accident,” Lachlan said.
“Yeah, Boss, getting to it. The investigation into Mira’s death was opened and closed in eleven days. The lead investigator retired six months later. Two witnesses who initially reported the vehicle that hit her changed their statements.”
“I remember that,” Maren said. “When I asked about it, I was told that witnesses do it all the time once they realize they didn’t see what they thought they saw.”
Elissa smirked. “Just for funsies, I checked out their financial situations shortly after that and both seemed to have come into some money.” She rolled her eyes. “The hit-and-run case went cold, and so did the NCIS investigation into LRH. Shortly after that, Ray was out on his ass.
“He’s spent all this time fighting the allegations,” she went on.
“He never stopped working the case, either, even if it was just from an armchair. He must have found something, because he was actually starting to get somewhere with clearing his name. He realized his life was in danger, so he made the recording that got sent to you after they captured him. He was trying to reach you directly—to get you and Juni to Lyons before anything happened to him.” She paused. “He ran out of time.”
Ray had been alive when Maren crossed the Nevada border with Juni asleep in the back seat. He’d been alive when they stopped for pancakes in Grand Junction, when Juni saw snow for the first time, when Maren finally let herself breathe in the Watchdog parking lot.
He’d been alive and they’d been hurting him all that time. Because of her.
He didn’t tell them where he sent me.
She didn’t know how she knew that either, but she did. She knew the man who’d made that recording, who’d spent years keeping a dead woman’s promise, had not told them anything.
They killed him anyway.