Chapter 11
“When you finish in the restroom, I’ll be in Cannon’s office a little further down the hall. It has his name on it.”
“All right.”
Nahla quickly went into the restroom, handled her business, then washed her hands. She looked in the mirror as she dried them. Cannon had sent her and Capri down the hall so that he could talk to their surprise visitor alone.
Nahla couldn’t say that she didn’t want to know more about Cannon’s connection to this Mace person.
All she had managed to gather so far was that he had been in the Marines with Cannon, but they had to have been close before that, because he knew Capri well enough to say that she had grown up.
Capri said Mace was Cannon’s oldest friend, but he was probably his only friend.
Cannon didn’t seem like the friendly type, and in the month that they had spent together, the only people he ever talked to or spent time with were his sister and his grandmother.
He seemed genuinely happy to see Mace, but Nahla saw something in his eyes that she had only seen once before—the day she asked him about the Marines at the gun range.
Cannon was carrying some major pain from his time in the Marines, and she wished he trusted her enough to put some of that weight on her.
With a sigh, she left the restroom. She was about to join Capri in Cannon’s office, but she paused when she realized Mace’s and Cannon’s voices were carrying down the hall.
Mace was speaking.
“I’on know everything that happened when you left, because they were real discreet about it, but I know Ox was involved in whatever went down.
I know that it’s because of him that you shut down on me, and I know it was bad.
It had to be for you to feel like you couldn’t come to me with it.
For you to feel like I wouldn’t have had your back. ”
Feeling terrible for eavesdropping on her man, she quickly tiptoed down the hall until she found his office. Capri was sitting on the window ledge, scrolling through her phone, so Nahla took a seat in one of the chairs in front of Cannon’s desk.
As soon as she sat, Capri started venting about how annoying her brother was for not immediately hiring Mace.
According to her, they really needed more staff, and Mace was the best option.
Capri seemed to think they could really trust him, and she hated that her brother was so opposed to more manpower.
Nahla listened to her and contributed to the conversation haphazardly, but her mind was really on what she couldn’t help but overhear in the hallway.
Cannon didn’t want to talk about his past, because it was riddled with betrayal from someone he apparently trusted.
Her heart ached for him because she knew firsthand how he protected the people he cared about.
He didn’t deserve disloyalty. The part of the conversation she heard didn’t give her much, but she was going to tuck the name Ox in the back of her brain and ensure that she was paying full attention the next time she heard it.
Both women’s eyes flew to Cannon the moment he entered the office . . . alone. His jaw was tight, and his eyes were unreadable as he walked over to where Nahla sat and extended a hand toward her. She accepted it and stood, and Cannon surprised her by taking her seat and pulling her down on his lap.
He must have given up trying to keep the developments in their relationship a secret, since Capri had called them out on it. Capri must have been too preoccupied with Mace’s visit to even worry about witnessing their first public display of affection.
“Where is Mace?” Capri asked as Cannon wrapped his arms around Nahla.
Without hesitation, Cannon replied.
“Gone.”
Capri kissed her teeth. In a whining tone, she asked, “But why, Cannon? We could really use him. Especially since you two have been booed up all month. Mace could be undercover, in Lyle, seeing what these people are up to, or—”
“Cap,” Cannon said calmly. She didn’t let that stop her rant.
“What? Y’all just reunited after forever, and you just sent him away? You’re not—”
“Cap,” Cannon repeated. This time, his tone held a slight warning.
Capri stopped talking but rolled her eyes hard and folded her arms.
Nahla shifted her body slightly so that she could see Cannon’s face. She wasn’t sure what she expected him to look like after his talk with Mace, but he didn’t look like the man she’d been shacked up with for the last month or so.
Underneath his silence and calm, there was that same heir of lethality that she sensed the day he took down those men in the hotel parking lot. The same danger she sensed in him when he showed up at her home unannounced and turned her world upside down.
“You okay?” she asked in a low tone.
She noticed his eyes soften at her words, and that helped her breathe a little easier. Cannon kissed her lips and nodded.
“I’m good. Let’s work.”
With that, he helped Nahla to her feet then stood and went to sit at his desk. Positioned behind him were two wall-length bookcases with all types of stuff on them—unopened laptops, an array of flashlights, multiple labeled binders, books, cameras, and more.
Nahla watched as he turned toward his shelves and stared.
After seconds passed, he grabbed one of the brand-new computers.
He removed the device and its attachments from the box.
He worked silently to set it up before saying to Nahla, “Let me see your laptop, La.” She went into her bag, retrieved it, and walked it over to him.
He instructed her to open her email account, and as she did so, he pulled a hard drive from his desk drawer and plugged it into the laptop he had just opened.
Once Nahla had her email open, Cannon retrieved the encrypted email and downloaded its attachments to the hard drive.
He then removed the hard drive and scooted her computer out of the way.
She watched as he installed the hard drive into his new laptop and opened the attachments.
Once he was done, he said, “Aight, this device has no internet or Bluetooth connections and no cloud syncing. Just in case this email is just a trap to gain access to you, we’re protected.
This computer is secure and untraceable, so we can safely review the contents of this email on it.
“Okay,” Nahla said.
Capri just rolled her eyes and made her way behind the desk so that she could see too.
Once the attachments were fully downloaded, several folders appeared. Cannon opened up the first one, and they all scanned it. Silently. After a couple of minutes, he turned in his desk chair, causing both women to take a step back. He grabbed two more laptop boxes and got more hard drives.
“What are you doing now?” Capri asked.
“Working,” was all he said. Nahla and Capri just watched as he unpacked each device. He moved methodically and efficiently. It definitely didn’t seem like his first time doing all this.
Within minutes, he had the laptops arranged across his desk.
“This looks like a command center,” Nahla said, looking slightly bewildered.
Capri laughed. “It kind of is.”
“Aight,” Cannon said, ignoring them both. “There’s a lot to go through, so I divided the files between us. Pull up those chairs and choose a laptop.”
As they did that, Cannon pulled out a few notebooks and pens.
“With each of us working on different sets of files, we’ll cover more ground, quicker. As you go through each file, write the file name and a summary of what’s in the folder. By the time we’re done, we’ll have a catalog of everything in these files and know what we need to examine more closely.”
“You know what would help us ‘cover ground’? A fourth set of hands,” Capri said sarcastically.
Cannon ignored her.
She huffed and dramatically leaned toward her computer screen.
The room settled into a comfortable silence—all that could be heard was the sound of pens moving across paper and the clicking of computer keys.
Occasionally, Nahla would notice something that was familiar or that raised flags.
“If you see anything with the initials A-H or T-H, could you flag it?”
She had found two files already with those initials, and she had a feeling they stood for Anita and Theodore Howard, two of her strongest sources.
As they worked, there was no tension or arguing, just an efficient rhythm.
She knew this wasn’t the first work session like this that Cannon and Capri had together, but their fast-paced, quiet urgency was something she was used to in her line of work, and the three of them gelled well together. She felt like part of the team.
About thirty minutes in, something on Nahla’s screen made her pause.
A ledger.
There were rows and rows of numbers. On the document was a name that she’d seen before . . . in a document she received months ago. It was before Cannon came into her life, and because it didn’t connect to anything else she had uncovered at the time, she disregarded it.
“Cannon,” she said, still staring at her screen.
“Wassup?”
“A few weeks after I started digging into this story, I received a weird email that I wrote off as unimportant. It was about the arrest of Darius Laston. He had been arrested for breaking and entering but had gotten off shortly after, due to faulty evidence.
“He was a Caucasian man who worked at the Lyle Public Library, and I assumed that someone close to him sent the information to me so that I could shed light on his wrongful arrest.
“I dismissed it because I was so caught up with my current research, and he had beaten his charges, but it looks like whoever sent me that might have been trying to tell me something else. Look.”
Both Cannon and Capri huddled around Nahla as she pointed at her screen.
“Darius Laston is who prepared this ledger, and according to the letterhead, this is a Blue Stone Holdings document. His name and this company being on the same document can’t be a coincidence. This is the name of the LLC that Deputy Allen’s wife owns.
“Every property that’s been seized traces back to that LLC.”
“Wait,” Capri said suddenly. She rushed back to her own workspace and picked up her notebook. After scanning the page for a few seconds, she retrieved her laptop and opened up a specific file before turning the screen so that they could see.
“The name Darius Laston is on this document, also. It’s another ledger, but it has some weird codes I don’t understand. Either way, though, Laston seems to be a large piece in this puzzle.”
“Hold on,” Cannon said, moving to Capri’s laptop.
The information on the ledger was very similar to Nahla’s, but there was an additional column on it with strange abbreviations. As Cannon continued to study it, understanding washed over him.
“These aren’t codes. They’re signatures.”
“How do you know that?” Capri asked.
Cannon hesitated for a moment, then said, “We used something similar when I was in the Marines.” He didn’t elaborate further. Nahla noticed him tense.
Reaching over his sister, Cannon scrolled down a little bit. At the bottom of the document, there was the name of a contractor: Barrett Performance Solutions.
Nahla read the business name out loud, then said, “I’ve never heard of it.”
“Me either,” Capri said.
Cannon said nothing. Nahla glanced at him. “Have you?”
Without looking at her, he shook his head once. “Nah.”
She said, “Okay, so I guess we can flag these two files and keep searching.”
They all did just that, but it took Nahla a minute to refocus.
Nahla frowned. She didn’t have any prior knowledge of how Cannon acted when he was lying, but his entire demeanor shifted when he read that name. She felt like he was holding something back, but decided not to push the issue.
Not just yet anyway.
She tucked Barrett Performance Solutions right beside the name Ox, in the back of her mind, and kept working.