CHAPTER THREE
“Do you guys know if Wes and Kyla are on their way?” Lennox asked, leaning back against the counter in his kitchen, a mug of coffee in hand.
Colt glanced up from the cream cheese he was spreading on his bagel. With his perpetually tousled dark blond hair and California tan, he always looked like he’d just spent the day surfing. “Wes sent me a text right before we got here to say that Kyla is checking on some stuff so they’re running a few minutes late.”
“Hopefully, she found something,” Darwin Sutton, another one of their SEAL Teammates, said as he sipped his coffee. Tall with brown eyes and dark hair, he’d only recently started working with their platoon but was already one of the guys.
Lennox silently agreed. He’d called Colt last night after Talia had gone to bed, wanting to fill him in on what had happened after he’d left the party. He’d also asked if his buddy had any ideas how to find Anna. Colt had promised to make some calls, saying he had a few ideas. A couple hours later, he’d called back saying that Kyla Wells had agreed to help.
Kyla was the girlfriend of another one of their Teammates, Wes Marshall, and worked as a senior analyst for the Office of Naval Intelligence. Of course, the reason Navy Intel had hired someone so young and right out of college was because Kyla was also a scary good hacker and had been since she was fourteen. With her help, things were definitely looking up.
“Mind if I join you?” a soft voice asked from outside the kitchen.
Lennox looked over to see Talia standing there in her pajamas looking like the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, her long dark hair down around her shoulders. She still seemed tired but not nearly as exhausted as last night.
“Of course.” He pushed away from the counter, motioning her in. “I hope we didn’t wake you.”
“You didn’t,” Talia said, glancing at Colt and Darwin as she walked over to grab a mug out of the cabinet. “I was already up. I didn’t sleep very well last night.”
“You should have woken me up,” Lennox said. “I could have made you more hot cocoa and we could have hung out and talked some more.”
Over by the table, Colt snorted as he set his plate down. “You definitely should have taken Lennox up on that offer. Boring women until they fall asleep is one of his better-known talents.”
Lennox shot daggers at his friend, but Talia only laughed.
“If I’d known that, I would have,” she said, dark eyes dancing as she glanced at Lennox while pouring coffee into the mug. “I could have used the rest.”
Since Talia had already met Colt before, Lennox took a moment to introduce Darwin before telling her to help herself to whatever she wanted to eat.
“Do you guys always get together for breakfast?” she asked, glancing over the fresh-baked bagels Colt had brought with him.
“They didn’t come over specifically for breakfast,” Lennox explained. “They’re here to help us figure out what happened to Anna.”
Talia abandoned the box of bagels to stare at Colt and Darwin in surprise. “Seriously? You guys are willing to do that for me?”
Colt grinned. “Of course, we are. We’re SEALs. Helping people in trouble is sort of our thing.”
That was true enough, Lennox thought. This time was different though. This time, the person in trouble was a woman whom he cared about. The thought that they might fail and she could be in danger because of it suddenly made it hard to breathe.
Before he could say anything, the doorbell rang. Probably Wes and Kyla. Lennox set his mug on the counter and went to let them in.
“Talia, this is Wes, another one of my Teammates, and his girlfriend, Kyla,” Lennox introduced. “She works for Naval Intelligence and is the one we’re hoping can help figure out what happened with Anna.”
Wes and Kyla shook hands with Talia, who seemed to be getting a little overwhelmed with all the help showing up at 0600 hours in the morning.
“I remember seeing the two of you at the party at the Rybak manor a few weeks ago, but we didn’t get a chance to talk,” Talia said.
Kyla smiled. “You looked like you had your hands full with Maria and all her friends. That many kids would terrify me.”
Talia laughed. “You get used to it.”
While Wes got himself and Kyla coffee, she pulled her laptop out of the messenger bag on her shoulder and set it on the counter.
“Colt already told me what happened last night as well as about the people talking to Anna’s employer and some of the others,” Kyla said, glancing at Talia as her computer booted up. “There’s definitely something fishy going on, especially when you consider the fact that Detective Green’s report—which I pulled off the SDPD database—didn’t include anything about your suspicions. He wrote it up as a simple attempted mugging.”
Talia made a face. “I knew he was giving me the brush-off last night, dammit.”
“I would have spent more time digging into Green, but I wanted to focus on your friend, Anna, instead,” Kyla said, pausing to thank Wes as he placed a mug of coffee on the counter beside her before taking a sip. “The first thing I did was see if someone had bought a plane ticket for your friend.” She started pulling up various documents and web pages on her laptop as she spoke. “It didn’t take long to find out that John Fredrickson had indeed purchased a ticket from San Diego to Santa Cruz, with a Delta flight connecting to a Columbian airline called Avianca in Bogota. It wasn’t difficult after that to confirm that Anna was on the flight.”
Talia’s beautiful eyes filled with disbelief as she let out a heavy sigh. “I can’t believe it. Anna did go back home without telling me.”
“Not necessarily,” Kyla said without looking up from her computer. “Just because someone was in Anna’s seat doesn’t mean it was her. That’s where you come in.”
As Lennox and the other guys crowded around Kyla with Talia, she started opening multiple video clips that looked like they were from various cameras in the San Diego International Airport.
“Does being in Naval Intelligence get you access to the airport cameras?” Talia asked curiously, leaning forward to look at the images arrayed in front of her.
“No, but I’ve never let something like that stop me before,” Kyla said casually. “So, this first clip correlates to the time frame Anna supposedly checked in for the flight, at least according to Delta Airlines’ computer system. I need you to look at the people at the counter and see if you recognize any of them.”
Talia leaned closer to the monitor, and Lennox heard her take a breath when a short woman with dark hair in a pony-tail stepped up to the counter.
“That could be her,” Talia murmured, tilting her head to the side as if that would help give her a better angle. “The hair is right. And the height too. Even the clothes look like something Anna owns. But I can’t see her face enough to know for sure.”
Lennox frowned. “Is it just me or is that woman purposely keeping her face down so the camera behind the counter can’t get a clear shot?”
“It sure seems that way,” Darwin agreed. “She’s being pretty blatant too. Kyla, do you have any other shots of this woman?”
Kyla didn’t answer, instead tapping on the laptop’s mouse pad. “This is a shot in the international concourse outside the bookstore where Anna’s credit card was used to buy a romance novel, a bottle of water, and a snack bar.”
“And you’re sure it’s Anna’s credit card?” Colt asked.
“It’s hers. No doubt about it,” Kyla said.
On the laptop, the video showed the same dark-haired woman walking out of the airport bookstore rolling a small carry-on bag. But once again, it was impossible to see her face.
Darwin folded his arms. “Either this woman is extremely lucky or she knows exactly where every camera in the airport is positioned.”
Lennox was thinking the same thing.
“This is the shot from the jetway as Anna’s ticket was scanned,” Kyla said, clicking to yet another video clip. “It’s the last shot I can connect directly to her.”
Lennox was about to declare the clip another failure until the woman leaned forward to tuck her ticket stub into the front pocket of her roll-on bag. When she stood up, her face was partially obscured by her pony-tail, but then she brushed it back just a little, revealing her face to the jetway camera for a split second.
“Can you go back and freeze the image right there?” Lennox asked urgently. “Just as she brushed her hair back.”
Kyla played around with the footage for a few seconds until she froze it right where Lennox requested. Lennox stared at the image then looked at Talia. “Is it her?”
She studied the monitor for a moment before shaking her head. “No. I’m sure of it. It’s like she’s a doppelganger, but it’s definitely not Anna.”
“That answers one question, but poses a lot of others,” Darwin said. “Like who is this woman taking Anna’s place and how did she get Anna’s credit card? Did Fredrickson realize he was buying a plane ticket for a decoy? Does this have something to do with what Anna overheard with her employer, and most importantly, where is Anna now?”
“Is she even still alive or have they killed her already?” Talia asked worriedly.
“We’ll assume she’s alive until we know for sure one way or another,” Lennox said firmly.
They spent the next few minutes brainstorming the answers to those questions—or more precisely, how they could find those answers. In the end, they realized they had very few options. They simply didn’t know enough yet.
“Can’t we take this video clip to Detective Green?” Talia asked. “I mean, doesn’t this prove that I was right about Anna being in trouble? He might not be great at his job, but even he isn’t clueless enough to ignore this, right?”
Kyla took another sip of coffee then let out a sigh. “I’d agree if it wasn’t for the fact that we should probably consider Detective Green a suspect in all this. The way he was so quick to dismiss your concerns and sanitize the police report is suspicious at best.”
Talia’s shoulders sagged a little at that, but she nodded. “As wild as it is to think a cop with the San Diego Police Department might be involved with whatever’s going on, I see your point. So, if we don’t involve the cops, what can we do?”
“Quite a few things,” Kyla said. “Step one, I start digging into Anna’s background and see if she was involved in anything that could explain why she’s missing. Step two, I’ll begin a state-wide facial recognition scan for her. Maybe we’ll get lucky with that. Third, I’ll look into Detective Green and the Fredrickson family to see if I can find a connection between them. Finally, I’ll snoop around the families the other au pairs work for to see if you ladies were right and there is something nefarious going on.”
Talia stood there looking stunned. Lennox couldn’t blame her. Kyla had just volunteered to mount a huge investigation on their behalf, based on little more than a whiff of suspicion.
“Naval Intelligence would do all of that for me?” Talia finally asked in amazement.
“No,” Kyla said, turning to her with a smile. “But I will. And that’s the only thing that matters.”
Talia’s eyes misted with tears, and she blinked them away, leaning forward to hug Kyla. “Thank you.”
“While you’re doing all this digging, what can the rest of us do to help?” Lennox asked.
Kyla looked at him, then Wes, and finally at Darwin and Colt. “You guys have the most important job—keeping Talia safe. Because until we figure out why that man came after her last night, we have to assume he’s going to do it again.”