Chapter 17
Barry was still stuck on the no sex thing, but that was a matter for another time. Mac was probably feeling vulnerable about finding out his true motivation for being on the island, so she was trying to safeguard herself. He would break through those barriers.
The first way to do that was to show her the research he had already done.
Show her how committed he was to helping her.
“When I was looking around the hotel yesterday, a woman that works there said Miles had been advised to build on the north side of the island, but he’d built in the current location despite all the warning of storms on this side. ”
“That’s true. This side takes the brunt of the weather.
It’s a terrible spot for a hotel, but it opened job opportunities for many of the locals, so no one questioned it.
” Mac looked thoughtful for moment before her eyes widened.
“Wait, what do you mean, walking around the hotel? You were actually inside?” she asked, sounding surprised.
Barry grinned. Mac had yet to realize what he was capable of. Soon she would learn. Even Emma didn’t know the full extent of his skills. “I was.”
“How?”
“I snuck in.” Though it hadn’t been all the hard to get into the building. It was only getting close to Miles that had been the challenge. Miles didn’t seem to care much about the security of his building so much as himself.
“How?” she repeated.
Barry wasn’t going to get stuck on the particulars. “The how isn’t important, but I put a bug in Annabelle’s bag. I listened to her having an argument with Miles about the hotel costing money to keep fixing with no income coming in.”
“I personally have never been there, but from what I hear, it’s nowhere near ready for its opening in a few months.”
“No, when I was there, the electrical wasn’t functional in half of the building. The power kept going out, and they’ve already replaced the roof and several windows. The painting was only completed on a few floors.”
“So, the answer to the sharks disappearing isn’t in the hotel.”
“Well, there aren’t any answers in the water either.”
“I found the chum.” Mac reared back, looking miffed. “And the bottom trawling marks.”
“But there is no way to track that to anyone.” Or was there? “How many fishermen are on the island?”
“Hundreds.” Mac grimaced. Barry concurred.
“Not a way to track that.”
“I had an idea about that,” Mac said, looking eager. It was cute how excited she looked about this investigative work. He was sure it was only because it was for her sharks. If she had to do it in the middle of the desert for terrorists, she would likely have a different reaction.
“What’s that?” He was all ears for suggestions.
“We know where they are chumming; we can do like a stake out and watch for the boat to come in.”
“We could, but we have no idea when or how often those waters get watched.” It could have been a one-time thing, and they would be watching the water for no reason when their focus could be elsewhere, but he didn’t want to tell Mac that. “I can put a camera up so it alerts when there is movement.”
“It goes off, and we can catch them in the act.” She balled up her fist and swung it in front of her chest as she looked animated at the thought of putting Miles behind bars.
It was a nice thought, but Miles was careful. He wouldn’t do any of the dirty work himself, simply hire people. There was also the chance no one would show up in that area again. They needed quicker results. “I have an idea, but you’re not going to like it.”
Mac looked apprehensive. “What?”
“I need to ask Miss Delaney out.” Saying her first name would only make it sound more personal, and he had no interest in Annabelle.
Mac blinked slowly as if she were having a hard time following. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I need to ask Miles’s secretary out.”
Her eyebrows pulled together in confusion. “And how would that help us?”
“She knows everything about Miles. I heard her say that she knew him before he was rich. If anyone knows all of his secrets, it’s her.”
Confusion morphed to anger. He didn’t like the idea any better, but it was the only other way to learn about what Miles was up to. Annabelle knew everything about Miles. She had the answers, and he was sure he could sweet talk them out of her. “And you plan to pump her for information.”
The thought made him shudder. The only one he wanted to pump was Mac, but she had taken that option off of the table—temporarily. “No, but she always has her phone on her. Data is stored in there. I need to get close to her to download it.”
“Really?” Mac asked, staring at him in disbelief.
“I swear I have no other interest in her.” He held his hands up in surrender.
Mac tossed her hair over her shoulder, looking bored. “I don’t care. Screw her brains out. It makes no difference to me.”
Barry didn’t believe her nonchalance for a second. “You’re jealous.”
Mac scowled at him; her eyes narrowed into slits. “No, I am not.”
“Admit it.”
“No.”
“Admit it.”
“No. As you’ve said, you’re not involved, so it’s not like its cheating.” She shrugged her shoulders with her nose in the air and a look of indifference.
“I wouldn’t sleep with her for answers.” It was true he wasn’t in a relationship, but it would feel like cheating on Mac. No; there was another way to get answers. “I have a device that when close to theirs can download information.”
“If you can do that, why do you need to date her?”
“So, I can learn what she knows. She may know more than what’s in her phone.”
“Fine, knock yourself out. Date the secretary.”
“It’s one dinner, not dating.” Mac was jealous whether she wanted to admit it or not. He liked that. No woman had ever been jealous for him before. He liked that it was Mac because he knew he would be jealous if a man started sniffing around her.
“Whatever, maybe I’ll check Miles out. See if I can pump him for information.”
“You will stay away from Miles Banks,” Barry warned, pointing a finger at her.
“But if he can tell me—”
“I said no,” Barry cut her off. “I will handle him.”
“So, what am I supposed to do while you’re busy with the secretary?”
“Continue your research. Look for any other explanation.”
“I’ve already told you I’ve been through everything. The trackers started going dead after he showed up.”
“And the batteries couldn’t just die?”
“Not these ones. Plus, we’ve never located any of them. Some are supposed to fall off, and we can retrieve it to go through the data, but these just go dead and disappear.” If he didn’t believe her words, she’d show him.
Mac set her laptop on his desk and opened her tracker app as she took a seat in the vacant chair.
“These are all the active trackers we have on sharks right now. They are catalogued by the type of tracker and the shark it’s connected to.
” Mac moved the mouse over to one of the trackers.
“This one was on one of our juvenile black-tip reef sharks. We tagged him at the beginning of the season with a tracker that falls off after a couple of weeks.”
Barry came up next to her and bent forward to look at the screen. He could have stood anywhere else and seen it, but he liked being close to her. “What kind of data can you get in a couple of weeks?”
Mac sat ramrod straight in her seat. She was well aware of his presence but was trying to ignore him.
“Lots. Where they go, how deep they go, what their patterns are. If other sharks are tagged, if they are in groups together or loners. By learning their habits, we can learn more about them to keep them safe and away from fisherman and the public. What?” Mac asked when Barry just stared at her.
“You really do love sharks.” He wasn’t being cynical just loved her enthusiasm. He had never met someone before with such passion for a subject.
“I do.” She felt no shame in her passion for sharks and wanting to preserve them.
“Why?” Barry wanted to understand her and where this love of sharks had come from because honestly, he had a hard time seeing loving something grey with black dead eyes and sharp-ass teeth.
“I find them fascinating and vastly misunderstood thanks to movies. People think they are mindless killing machines, like zombies, that just eat everything that crosses their path, and they couldn’t be more wrong.
They are highly intelligent and adaptive.
They are lethal predators that should be respected and protected.
They are top of the food chain and what keeps the ecosystem in check.
Without them, the ocean would be devastated. ”
He was not about to admit that’s what he’d thought of them. The one time he had jokingly offered to beat up the shark that bit her, she had become fiercely protective of the thing.
They stared intently at each other, and Mac found herself leaning toward him, like a moth to a flame.
Mac suddenly averted her gaze and pulled away.
She was the one who’d put the halt on their lovemaking, she’d better stick to the agreement she’d started.
“Anyway, his tracker suddenly went dead one day. I looked up his last known location, and it was at that spot by the hotel. Another shark, the same thing. That’s when I became suspicious of Miles. After that, more trackers went dead.”
“And there is no way to track them anymore?”
Didn’t he think she would have tried that already? “No, it’s like they got turned off. If the sharks were killed, the tracker would show it’s not moving, and I could locate it by the tracker, but everything is gone. Completely vanished.”
Barry grimaced before he asked, “Don’t hate me for asking, but is it possible it fell off and got smashed?”
“I couldn’t hate you for asking.” Mac smiled.
Some of his questions could be annoying, but he was still learning.
She was willing to let it slide. “There is that possibility, and if it were only one tag, I might think that, but eight tags have gone dark. And several of those were permanent trackers that are screwed into their fins. There is no way for them to come off unless something destroyed their fin. But again, we should be able to find the tracker. It should give off a signal, but there is nothing. Within a few months of the sharks disappearing and Miles moving in, he bought the water rights there and banned us from researching there.”
“Have the other researchers in the area had the same experience?”
“They have, but they aren’t willing to consider nefarious means for their disappearance.” The fools, they’d rather blame weather and other phenomenon rather than a person for the shark disappearances.
Barry looked just as baffled as she was. “How do they account for the sharks and trackers disappearing?”
“They are too deep in the ocean to get a signal, or they migrated too far away.” There were other theories, but she wasn’t going to bore him with all of them.
“Is it possible?”
“Too deep, yes. The trackers are only meant to go a few hundred feet deep. The ocean is miles deep. But for eight trackers to have the same defect is unheard of.”
“Are all the trackers the same brand?”
“No,” she replied, looking confused by such a question. “Why?”
“It could be a manufacturer defect.”
Her eyes widened in understanding. “No, they are different. Some are prototypes that just came out at the time, and others have been around for years. There is no pattern.”
“Can you show me the trackers for all of the sharks that went missing?”
That was easy enough. Mac typed on her laptop for a few moments.
Barry shifted next to her so they were pressed side to side with his hand resting on the back of her chair.
Barry wasn’t touching her but very close.
He could practically feel the heat radiating from her body.
He could smell her tropical shampoo. Barry felt Mac stiffen beside him, but she kept her focus on the screen and not her proximity to Barry.
“So, these are the sharks before the trackers went dead.” She pointed to the different colored dotted lines.
“Each tracker was color-coded on the computer to help differentiate which shark was which. If you clicked on each dot, a small window would pop up and give information about the shark. The species, date of tagging, and size so if they recaptured it again, they could add more data. They all follow similar patterns of movement. Following fish along the coast and different waterways, but then they all seem to find their way to that coast.”
“What is so special about it?” Why were sharks drawn to that one particular area?
“It’s isolated from people; the waters are rougher, so not many boaters go out there.
The fish love it, so for sharks, it’s a buffet.
” Mac turned her head to look at him. Their lips were only separated by a few inches.
Her gaze rose to meet his. Barry could see her pupils were dilated, her breathing deepening.
She was just as affected by their close proximity as he was.
“They are simple creatures and know where an easy meal is, so they return to that spot year after year, remembering it.”
Barry shifted his focus from her beautiful eyes to the screen and its colorful dots as if the answers would suddenly appear. “So, the question remains, what’s so important to Miles that’s there?”
Mac’s eyebrows bunched together, creating a furrow he wanted to smooth out with his thumb. “You think it’s the ocean and not the land the hotel is on?”
Barry wasn’t so certain. The hotel would give him privacy to use the ocean coast, but right now, he had more questions than answers. “It may be both, but I won’t know until I can get close to Miles and find out what he’s doing.”
“You mean we,” Mac interjected. “This is my research, my sharks. I will not be left out of the loop.” Mac took a deep breath like she was trying to calm herself.
“Barry, you may be more experienced in this line of work with investigating, so I won’t tell you how to do it, but I refuse to be left out. We’re partners.”
Barry agreed. He may be more experienced when it came to investigating, but she knew sharks. A knowledge he knew next to nothing about. He would need her help with this case. “Yes, partners.”
Mac beamed as if he had just handed her the moon, and he felt his heart melt and his insides flutter. No woman had ever looked at him like that before. He was dangerously close to getting attached to this woman. If he wasn’t careful, he could fall in love with her.