Chapter Seven #2
Javi glanced at his watch to check the time.
Based on the time and how willing the agents would be to blow through the speed limits on their way back to town, he had roughly an hour before he had to intercept Joel’s husband.
Not a lot of time, but the window they were working with was narrow.
He’d at least be able to look for anything out of character.
The forty-eight hours before SSA Joel walked out of her life were fiscally unremarkable.
No large withdrawals or deposits. No out-of-character purchases. Nothing out of place.
It would have been easy to pinpoint, too.
SSA Joel was a creature of habit. The move to Plenty hadn’t changed that.
The first gas station she’d filled up at was the gas station she always filled up at.
Her groceries were delivered. At least twice a week she ordered takeout from one of three restaurants in a two-mile radius of the Airbnb.
Anyone else’s file and Javi would have considered the consistency suspicious, but it fit Joel. She’d been the same in Phoenix. Javi remembered working late with her, and she’d always ordered the same meatball sub from the same sandwich shop. They’d known her phone number.
The thought skipped through Javi’s head in passing. It was just a relevant detail to the case.
He almost got away without the familiar pang of guilt/grief/shame that the memory was due. Luckily for him, his mind filled in the details he needed to make it hurt, with the sharp sensory recall of sauce and sourdough on the tongue of the man Javi shouldn’t have been kissing.
It had been Eric who kissed him, Javi recalled.
It had been unexpected, an impulse born of opportunity as Joel stepped outside to check in with Kincaid about their relief.
The excuse tried to pull itself up into the light.
Javi shoved it ruthlessly back down under the surface. That wasn’t the point.
Eric, a mob accountant who’d had a crisis of conscience after his father’s death, had been within his rights to kiss whoever he’d wanted. It was Javi who’d had a professional code of conduct and duty of care.
So it wasn’t about who’d kissed who first. It wasn’t even about Kincaid, who should have known better than to see that brief moment of connection as an opportunity rather than a slip.
It was that Javi was a man who liked to make excuses, and that led to a bloody operating theatre, guilt, and a career hanging by a thread.
The guilt kept him on the straight and narrow. It wasn’t a punishment, it was a boundary.
And one, Javi reminded himself as he glanced at his watch, that had done its job. So there was no need to wallow. He definitely didn’t have the time for it. Joel’s financials had seemed promising, but since they’d turned out to be a dead end—
Javi stopped mid-irritated swipe to close the file on his tablet as something caught his eye.
Verizon. $14.99.
It was just outside of the forty-eight-hour window Javi had imposed on his review of the files. Mostly for convenience, partially because Joel’s disappearance didn’t have any of the telltale markers of premeditation. Someone would have marked it eventually, but he’d almost missed it.
Something told him that would have mattered.
Unhelpfully, though, not why.
Javi grimaced and rubbed his thumb on the tense spot between his eyebrows. He had a personal line, so did Joel. Why was that…
Because Javi recalled abruptly, his introduction to doing Joel’s scutwork had started with reviewing the office personnel files. Including updating her details once she’d officially onboarded in the suboffice. Her personal line was on her husband’s T-Mobile family plan.
This wasn’t it.
Javi tapped the charge to pull up the details. His phone buzzed with an incoming call in his pocket, the plastic rattling against his hipbone as he ran his eye down the information. He stifled an exasperated curse—they had to arrive now—as he fished the phone out.
“Merlo,” he said shortly.
The charge was a direct debit. It came out once a month and had been set up…eight years ago.
“We’re just pulling in to the Center now,” the agent told him. Javi glanced up to confirm that and saw the navy blue Dodge stop at the curb outside the front door. “Should we let him go on in?”
“Wait,” Javi said. His voice sounded impatient, harsher than he’d meant. “I want to talk to him on his own first. I’ll be with you in a minute.”
Eight years. That was before Phoenix.
Why would Joel keep a secret phone line for that long? It didn’t track. She wasn’t the type to move in the shadows. If she was going to, she’d have logged it beforehand.
The unhappy cough on the other end of the line reminded him that he had other things that needed his attention.
“He’s not going to be happy,” the agent said. “He wants to see his daughter.”
“And he will,” Javi said. “Tell him I want to fill him in on what’s happened before he sees her. She doesn’t need to be upset about the details. Stall.”
He hung up.
The last four digits of the number were marked down neatly on the screen. Despite Javi racking his brain, they weren’t familiar. On the other hand, he’d not remembered if Joel had a stepchild or a dog. He wasn’t going to recall a number…
But maybe it hadn’t been a secret eight years ago.
Javi grabbed a pen and wrote the four numbers on the back of his hand before he locked his tablet.
He called through to Sue as he got out of the car, closed the door, and locked it.
Ahead of him, he saw the agents get out of the Dodge and try to reason with the stocky, bearded man they’d been driving.
“Sue,” Javi said abruptly as she answered the phone. He didn’t have time for niceties and…best not to draw attention to the fact she was talking to him. “Can you check Joel’s old personnel files for me?”
There was a pause. Javi waited to see if whatever had made her give him the files was enough to make her play along now. He heard the brisk click of keys.
“How far back?” Sue asked. She didn’t whisper, but she did keep her voice aggressively casual. “Her last posting was LA, but that was only for—”
“Eight years.”
“I can do that,” Sue said. “What am I looking for?”
“Did she have a personal number recorded?” Javi asked as he glanced both ways before crossing the road.
He had about thirty seconds to finish the call before he’d need to speak to Joel’s agitated partner.
A black Merc slowed down to let him jog over the last stretch of tarmac.
Javi lifted his hand to thank them and then read the number off the back of his hand. “It would end in…2841.”
Sue made a “working on it” noise in the back of her throat as she typed and then paused.
“No,” she said.
Javi broke stride briefly, just before he stepped onto the curb, as he absorbed the frustration of that. Another dead end? That was—
“She did have a UC number on file that ended in that,” Sue went on. “Is that any good?”
Javi skinned his lips back from his teeth in satisfaction. “Yeah,” he said. “That is. Can you put an expedited request for the carrier records for the number through to Verizon?”
“I mean, I can,” Sue said. “Are you sure there’s any point? The number was marked as out of commission five years ago.”
“Good to know,” Javi said. “Get me the records anyhow?”
Sue made the audible equivalent of a shrug. “OK,” she said. “At least no one else will be looking for them.”
She hung up. Javi slid the phone back into his pocket as he reached the agents arguing with Joel’s husband.
“Out of my fucking way,” Clyde Limehouse—flight marshal, twice divorced and currently in officially disclosed couple’s therapy with Joel, based on Javi’s earlier background check—snapped as he tried to push between the two LA agents. “I want to see my kid, and I want to see her now.”
The older agent backed off a step. “Sir,” he said pleasantly, leaving his younger partner to try and block the doors. “I think you need to calm down before we get inside. Your daughter has already had a really upsetting day, and she doesn’t need—”
“Mr. Limehouse,” Javi interrupted as he reached them. “Your daughter is safe and sound. Just let me fill you in on what’s been going on before you speak to her, OK?”
Clyde turned and glared at Javi.
“Have you found my wife?” he asked.
“Not yet,” Javi said. “But the full force of the FBI is on—”
“Then what are you looking so fucking happy about?” Clyde demanded.
Javi felt the muscles around his mouth tighten. Somewhere in the back of his head the ghost of his grandmother hissed at him to “fix his face.” He supposed he should have taken the time to school the satisfaction of being right off his face.
“I just—”
“Wait,” Clyde said, his eyes narrowing into a squint. He pointed at Javi. “You’re Merlo, right?”
“I…SA Javier Merlo,” Javi confirmed. He reached for his badge out of habit, but Clyde had already curled his lip in a sneer.
“That answers that question then, doesn’t it?” he said. “You didn’t want Tracy here, and now she isn’t. Looks like a good day to be you, huh?”
Yeah. This had gotten off to a good start.