Chapter 6
Leland pulled into the parking garage, grabbed his travel mug, and headed inside. The familiar rhythm of the office surrounded him immediately. Phones rang. Printers hummed. The scent of fresh coffee drifted from the break room.
Greta looked up from behind the reception desk, one hand covering her headset microphone. “Dev just went in,” she said. “They’re about to start.”
“Thanks.”
She flashed him a smile before returning to whatever crisis she was currently preventing.
Greta ran the office with quiet efficiency and the patience of a saint. New clients, payroll, scheduling, vendor disputes, personnel headaches—she managed the place as effectively as Dev managed investigations. Which made the contrast between office Greta and club Greta no less startling.
At Devil’s Pointe, she became softer. More yielding. The submissive side of herself she shared only with Michael and a trusted circle of friends.
The choice had always fascinated him. Like most strong women in the lifestyle, she wasn’t pretending at either role. She simply allowed herself different freedoms in different places.
Leland headed deeper into the suite, past the glass-walled command center manned 24/7. Lorenzo Clement sat at the controls, which was surprising. He was one of their best skip tracers and hated being confined to monitoring as much as the rest of them.
He stuck his head in the door. “Hey, Ren. What did you do to piss Dev off?”
“Nothing,” he grunted, without taking his eyes off the screen. “I got ‘volunteered’ for a few shifts while Russ is on vacation. How do you not know that? Didn’t he ask you?”
“Nope. First I’ve heard of it.”
“Great. You can pick up some of mine. I got four days in solitary confinement.”
“Gotta go. Meeting started,” Leland said, backing out of the doorway.
“Hit me up when you’re done.”
“Right…” Leland drawled, already in the hallway, the door nearly shut.
“Hale…”
Striding toward the conference room, he heard Ren’s voice through the glass, repeating his name.
He didn’t stop and felt no guilt. As Dev’s first hire and unofficial second-in-command, he had seniority.
They had started out with a couple of tables and chairs with free-standing monitors.
Now the command center occupied a huge space in the middle of the office and looked like a military operation.
He had done more than his fair share of drudgery shifts during the first few years.
It was someone else’s turn: new guys with fresh eyes.
Russell on vacation. Go figure.
Time off was a foreign concept. Leland couldn’t remember the last time he’d taken more than a long weekend.
Vacation meant downtime, quiet, and way too much opportunity for his brain to wander into territory he preferred to avoid.
And it sounded too much like the last forty-eight hours, which had felt endless.
Leland frowned. Maybe he needed to pick up extra assignments on weekends.
Out-of-town skip traces. Surveillance shifts.
Hell, he’d volunteer for VIP protection details, which he despised.
Anything that kept his mind occupied. Because lately, his thoughts had developed an irritating tendency to loop to the same place.
Julia.
Not that he was thinking about her, exactly. She kept showing up uninvited. Her gentle laugh surfacing at inconvenient moments. A flash of blue eyes when he was trying to concentrate. The memory of her sighing softly into his mouth when he kissed her.
Not thinking about her?
“Yeah, buddy,” he muttered under his breath. “Keep telling yourself that.”
This was precisely the problem. He’d spent years cultivating self-discipline, iron-fisted control, and laser focus. Now, all of that was being undermined by a sweet little blonde submissive who had moved into his head without permission and was living there rent-free.
The hum of conversation carried from the conference room ahead. The message Dev had sent referenced a new high-priority case.
That was exactly what he needed. A problem to solve. Something in his head besides his own thoughts.
He slowed at the open door. The team had already gathered.
Dev stood at the front near the smart screen. Alec sat at the table with a file open in front of him. Rhys and Gaby occupied their usual seats.
Callan was halfway through a muffin with his face in his laptop.
Jesse sipped from a ceramic coffee mug, his second, judging from the empty Starbucks cup beside him.
Business as usual.
The last to arrive, Leland pulled out the only remaining chair and sat down. For the first time all morning, his mind settled.
“Morning,” Dev said as he closed the conference room door. He wasn’t one to waste time and got right to it. “We’ve got a referral. Came in through a PI I know in South Miami. Missing person.”
Alec straightened slightly. “Why isn’t it with MPD?”
“They had it. Ran the initial canvass. None of the leads panned out. No known enemies. No meaningful follow-up. Then it went cold.”
“Typical,” Alec muttered.
“Why am I not surprised,” Gaby added, not looking up.
They’d both worked for Miami PD. Alec left after ten years, done with the politics and corruption.
Gaby’s tenure had been much shorter. Her reasons for leaving stemmed from the same issues, except hers turned personal when her sister went missing and they handed the case to the feds with barely a glance.
Evidently, things hadn’t changed.
Dev opened the file and pushed a photo toward the center. A young woman. Pretty, not flashy or overdone, with clear eyes and an easy smile. It was the kind of face that blended into a crowd unless you were looking for it. A face forgotten too easily.
Leland glanced at it. She was someone’s daughter, a sister, a friend.
Now vanished. These cases were always emotionally draining.
Especially cold ones that rarely had a happy ending.
They seemed to be their bread and butter these days.
What he wouldn’t give for a straightforward celebrity protection case.
Even if they were all entitled pains in his ass.
“Anna Bellamy, twenty-nine. Lived alone, worked two jobs,” Dev began.
“No steady boyfriend. Small social circle. Her parents had her late in life. They’re retired and are her only family.
They drained their retirement accounts to hire someone to find her.
” He paused, letting that sink in, knowing it would get a reaction, and it did.
Leland leaned back slightly. “Let me guess. They’re bankrupting themselves because the professionals paid to find her gave up?”
Dev’s gaze cut to him. “That’s the working theory.”
Alec’s mouth tightened.
“Why do I feel like I’ve lived this recently?” Gaby asked dryly, but the slight quiver in her voice gave her away. Rhys shifted. Leland saw him squeeze her knee under the table. Her trauma was still fresh.
“We’ll understand if you need to bow out of this one,” Leland suggested.
Gaby shook her head. “I’m okay. Knowing what Anna’s parents are going through makes me want to find her even more.”
She was tough. Leland admired that. Their only female operative, Gaby was still green, and as soon as she came on board, had been through a trial by fire. He was damn glad she had Rhys’s support and the entire D&A team behind her.
“I assume this is pro bono?” he asked.
“You assume right,” Dev replied.
Leland didn’t disagree. They had expanded rapidly, with a second office opened last year.
Their reputation spoke for itself, and their backlog of wealthy clients and government contracts made it possible for them to help the people who really needed their skills but could never afford D&A’s hourly rate plus expenses.
“Last seen?” Alec asked.
“Leaving work,” Dev said. “Didn’t make it home.”
“No witnesses?”
“None that held up.”
“How cold are we talking?” Leland asked.
“Six months.”
Rhys set the tablet down. “How does something like this just stop?”
Alec gave a humorless huff. “Overworked detectives, too many cases, not enough pressure from above. You know how it goes.”
Gaby stared at Anna’s photo a moment longer. “Long enough for the case to stop mattering to everyone except the people who loved her,” she said quietly.
The room went still.
“You know what the worst part is?” Gaby continued. “By now, her parents have probably memorized every excuse they gave her. Detective reassigned. Waiting on leads. We’re doing everything we can.” Her laugh held no humor. “After a while, they all start sounding the same.”
Beside her, Rhys’s expression hardened.
Unsurprising. They had all watched Gaby go through it with her sister. The desperation. The exhaustion. The fear she tried to hide when the leads dried up and the waiting became its own kind of torture. They’d found Natalie alive. But not everyone got that ending.
Dev quietly cleared his throat. “We’re not letting that happen.”
They were good. Some said the best in the state. But cases where leads had grown cold or were buried in the passage of time could be a bitch. Still, no one questioned his resolve.
“Callan’s been pulling what he can,” he continued. “Public records, traffic cams, anything not locked behind a badge. He flagged it this morning.”
Alec reached for the file. “I’ll request everything MPD has,” he said. “Full case file, notes, interviews. If there’s anything they missed—”
“They did,” Gaby said flatly.
Nobody argued.
“You’re primary,” Dev told Alec. “Stay on MPD. Push if you have to.”
“I still have a few contacts there,” Alec said. “Hopefully, it won’t come to that.”
Gaby picked up Anna’s photo, studying it more closely. “She doesn’t scream high risk,” she said. “No obvious flags.”
“Doesn’t mean she wasn’t vulnerable,” Dev replied.
“No,” Gaby said quietly. “It doesn’t.”
Leland tracked the details the way he always did, looking for threads, for angles, and gaps. Nothing obvious jumped out yet. Just another woman who’d slipped through cracks that should never have existed in the first place.
“Any indication she might’ve crossed paths with álvarez?” Gaby asked, glancing up.
The mention of his name drained any sense of ease from the room. Recent memory. Ugly and still unfinished.
They were still getting requests from the international task force to follow up on leads stateside. They had no idea how many girls were trafficked, and probably never would.
Dev shook his head. “She doesn’t fit the profile.”
Alec nodded. “álvarez liked them young.”
Anna was almost thirty. Gaby’s age. She said, dry as ever, “So, basically ancient.”
Alec snorted.
Rhys brought her hand to his lips. “My old lady,” he murmured. “We can grow gray together.”
Gaby shot him a look. “You first.” But there was no actual heat in the comment as her fingers laced through his.
The tension in the room eased. Not gone but manageable.
Dev brought them back. “This isn’t álvarez,” he said. “But it’s something. And I don’t like how it was handled.”
Leland didn’t either. Cases didn’t stall without reason.
“Callan stays on data,” Dev continued, moving on to assignments. “He’s digging into anything that connects—work, routine, social overlap.”
“I’ll start building out her network,” Gaby said. She’d been working closely with Rhys long enough now to think like a profiler. “Friends, coworkers, anyone she interacted with regularly.”
Rhys gave a small nod. “Patterns show up in the margins. Start there.”
Dev’s gaze shifted to Leland. “Stay flexible. We may need to pull you in once we see what this turns into.”
Leland inclined his head. “Understood.”
The meeting broke after that. Chairs shifted, everyone moving with purpose.
He reached for the file.
“Drop that by my office when you’re done with it,” Alec said before he walked out.
Leland nodded vaguely as he studied Anna Bellamy’s photo. She had the kind of profile predators noticed. Pretty. Living on her own. Late-night shifts. Limited support system.
Familiar in ways he didn’t like.
He slid the photo into the folder and snapped it shut. He had been seeing Julia in every blonde lately. This wasn’t about her. Thank God.