Chapter 4
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Two weeks later
Houston, Texas
Kathryn Scarlett had barely noticed when the last of her staff left hours ago. Her attention had been focused on the strange USB drive and the odd photograph that had consumed her for the past two days. When she looked up to stretch the cramp from her tense neck muscles, it was almost midnight.
“Give it up, Scarlett,” she said aloud. “You’re getting nowhere. Go home.”
Scarlett Investigations was located in a quiet section of Houston, where her business was known to law enforcement and allowed to operate under the radar. Her clients, some of them less than savory, came and went without attracting undue attention. Police rarely bothered to circle the block.
Which meant the neighborhood was far from safe and personal security was Scarlett’s responsibility. No problem.
To protect her staff, she’d built a secure garage onto the back of the old brick building. Reinforced vehicle gate, biometric access on the interior door, motion sensors, and cameras that recorded around the clock.
Clients and guests parked on the street out front and entered through the secured lobby.
Any security breach triggered a silent alarm to a private firm that guaranteed armed response in under ninety seconds.
All of which meant she never thought twice about personal safety here, for employees, clients, or visitors. Even late at night. And Scarlett could take care of herself.
She gathered her things and walked through to the garage, as she’d done hundreds of times before. Tonight, her mind was elsewhere.
Scarlett’s reserved parking space was close to the door. She scanned the garage, just in case, but saw no other vehicles. Her armored SUV was waiting patiently where she’d parked it.
She opened the door and tossed her bag onto the passenger seat.
Something scraped along the wall near the roll-up exit door.
She turned fast. A man wearing dark clothes pushed away from the left wall near the storage shelves, a messenger bag across his chest, almost totally concealed by the shadows.
No one should be inside this garage. The biometric locks, the cameras, the motion sensors, the armed response. All of it was designed to prevent exactly this.
And yet here he was.
Already moving toward her but staying in the shadows.
Scarlett pulled her weapon from her shoulder holster and leveled it at his chest. “Stop.”
He stopped. Fixed gaze stayed on hers, steady, measuring.
“On your knees.”
He didn’t move.
“I said on your knees.”
His right hand opened. Something small and dark dropped to the concrete and bounced.
Scarlett recognized it. She threw herself sideways and squeezed her eyes shut half a moment before the flashbang detonated.
White light burned through her eyelids and the bang hammered her eardrums. Her eyes watered and her ears rang. She kept her grip on the pistol and braced herself against the SUV.
She counted to three and opened her eyes. The garage was a wash of afterimages.
He had used those three seconds. He was at the open driver’s side door.
She raised the pistol, but her vision was a smear of light and shadow. She blinked hard, trying to clear the afterimages.
By the time her vision sharpened, he was already in the driver’s seat. Which was when she noticed he was wearing small goggles. Probably ear protection, too. He’d come prepared.
He hit the SUV’s start button. The fob in her bag on the passenger seat was close enough. The engine turned over.
He threw the SUV into reverse and punched the accelerator. The vehicle lurched backward. The roll-up door recognized the transponder and began to rise.
The SUV shot under the rising door and into the alley. He shifted into drive, turned the wheel, and floored it moving forward. The engine roared through the gears and faded into the night.
Scarlett stood in the garage with the pistol at her side, ears ringing, eyes still burning from the flash. The steel mesh roll-up door hummed and began to descend on its timer.
She holstered her weapon and went straight back into the building. He wouldn’t get far.
First, she went into her private bathroom and splashed cool water to flush her eyes. After several minutes, the burning had stopped and her vision cleared. She patted her face dry.
At her desk, she opened the laptop and located her phone. The blue dot was moving east on Navigation Boulevard, about six miles away. Which was a reasonable place to ditch a stolen vehicle.
She watched the locator for two minutes. It stopped. Sat still for thirty seconds. Then the signal went dark. He’d found the phone and killed it.
Scarlett switched to her SUV’s vehicle locator. The SUV was stationary on a side street off Navigation. She pushed the remote disable button. The engine died.
He wasn’t going anywhere else in her vehicle.
She remote-wiped the phone and disconnected it from the provider’s service. Then she pulled a new one from her storage cabinet, powered it on, and restored all data from the encrypted backup.
Then she went to her private bathroom. Her eyes were bloodshot from the flash. Her ears were still ringing. A bruise was forming on her hip where she’d thrown herself sideways. Her hair was wrecked.
Her expression was furious.
She changed into jeans, a cotton sweater, and sneakers. She slipped her shoulder holster on and covered it with a brown leather blazer. She transferred the USB drive and the photograph to the blazer pockets.
She dialed Flint’s number on the new phone.
He picked up on the second ring. Wide awake. “What’s wrong?”
“We need to talk. I’ll be there in about forty minutes.”
“I’ll be here.”
She returned to the garage with an evidence bag and found the spot behind the storage shelves where the intruder had been hiding. She crouched down and studied the area.
Scuff marks on the concrete showed where he’d shifted his weight several times. A faint outline in the dust marked where he’d leaned his back against the wall. He’d been here awhile.
“So you snuck in when one of us drove into or out of the garage door. Did whatever you came to do. Then tucked yourself behind the shelving waiting for a chance to leave,” she said aloud.
Patient. Prepared. Low-tech. Why? What was he looking for? Did he find it?
The spent flashbang casing was on the concrete near the SUV’s parking space. A man who carries a flashbang into a burglary is not an ordinary thief. She bagged it.
The casing was unmarked. No manufacturer’s stamp, no lot number. Either he’d filed the markings off, or he’d sourced it from somewhere that didn’t identify in the first place.
She retrieved the security camera footage from the garage system and forwarded it to an encrypted server. Then she pulled the lobby cameras, the hallway cameras, and the rear stairwell footage and forwarded those too.
If he’d been inside the building before he ended up in the garage, one of the cameras would have captured his image.
She pulled up the building’s electronic access logs and scrolled through the day’s entries. Fourteen people had entered and exited through the lobby, but he wouldn’t have gotten past the security desk.
Twelve vehicles had used the garage. Any one of those entries could have been his opportunity. She saved the logs and added them to the encrypted server.
Scarlett ordered a car from her usual car service. The driver arrived in eight minutes.
“Navigation Boulevard,” she said, giving him the exact address.
The streets were quiet. Houston at midnight was a different city than the one that choked on its own traffic. The driver didn’t talk, which suited Scarlett fine. The ringing in her ears was fading. The after images were gone. Her vision was clear again.
She directed the driver to the side street where her armored SUV sat at an angle against the curb, exactly where she expected it to be.
“I’ll get out here,” she said to the driver.
“You sure? This place looks sketchy,” he replied.
“Yeah, thanks. I’ll be okay.”
He pulled over and she stepped out onto the sidewalk. She waited until he pulled away and approached the vehicle with her hand on her holster.
She cleared the interior with a small flashlight. Front seat, back seat, cargo area. The thief had vanished.
She checked underneath the vehicle and popped the hood but saw nothing out of place.
Scarlett climbed in and restarted the engine. Her bag was still on the passenger seat. Her phone was gone. Wallet untouched. Cash, cards, ID all in place.
He’d taken the phone and left everything else.
She rolled out of the side street and turned toward Flint’s home in the historic district.
Houston’s skyline glowed against the dark sky.
As always, Shaw Tower dominated everything around it, eighty stories of bronze glass lit from within even at this hour.
The disruption in her world had resettled.
She ran through the night’s events as she drove.
The thief stripped clean of anything traceable before entering her building but carried a flashbang.
He wore tactical glasses and ear protection because he’d planned for the possibility of using the device in a confined space.
He came to steal something specific and probably found it, given how he protected that messenger bag.
She’d need to go through every room in the building tomorrow, every file cabinet, every safe, every storage closet, and figure out what was missing. Perhaps that would tell her what he’d stolen and why he’d taken it.
The evidence she’d gathered would have his DNA all over it. Finding a match shouldn’t be too difficult. This guy had quite a bit of tactical training. Which suggested military or law enforcement. All of which had robust DNA databases she could access one way or another.
Which left the matter of her garage. He’d found a security gap she hadn’t anticipated. She’d close that gap by the afternoon, even if she had to rebuild the entire system herself.
The ringing in her ears had faded to almost nothing. She flexed her hands on the steering wheel. Her hip ached. Her eyes still felt dry and gritty from the flash. Minor inconveniences. She’d felt worse after a hard run.
Scarlett pulled into Flint’s neighborhood. Houses were old on this block and the trees were older. His bungalow sat halfway down the block, modest and unremarkable. Stockade fence around the back, detached garage on the alley. Nothing had been disturbed as far as she could tell.
A light burned in the front room. The kitchen was lit in the back.
Scarlett parked at the curb, grabbed her bag, and walked to the front door.