Chapter 39
R ian Nolan greeted them as they stepped off the elevator onto the ICU floor.
He embraced Gabriel in one of those man hugs that included backslapping—albeit very subdued—then turned to her.
His gaze skimmed the minor injuries on her cheek, then drifted down to her rebandaged hands, something Gabriel had insisted on before leaving the resort.
“Agent Parks,” he said.
“Not an agent anymore,” she replied. “Just Callie.”
Rian flickered his gaze to Gabriel, who nodded. “Callie then.”
“How’s Joe?” she asked. The two brothers had similar athletic builds, but that’s where the familial resemblance stopped. While Joe had dark hair, dark eyes, and a slightly round face, Rian was blond and blue-eyed with classically handsome features.
“The doctors are optimistic. The shot missed his heart by two inches, but it shattered his shoulder blade, and the fragments did additional damage,” Rian answered. “He’s still in ICU.”
“Is there anything we can do?” Callie asked.
Rian blinked, then turned a wry gaze on her. “I think you’re already doing it. I have a private waiting room. Why don’t we wait there?” he said before turning and heading toward two swinging doors.
Gabriel gestured her forward, falling in step behind her.
After checking in at the nurses’ station, Rian led them down another hallway and into a room.
Stepping inside, she quickly swept her eyes over the space.
A comfortable-looking chair sat in one corner, a loveseat against a wall with a blanket folded at the end and pillow sitting on top, a table big enough to seat four in the middle, and a single large window looking out over the real Las Vegas.
Not the Strip, but a part of town where residents lived.
“Coffee?” Rian asked, moving to a single-cup maker sitting on a small counter opposite the loveseat.
When both she and Gabriel shook their heads, his gaze fell, and he took two audible breaths before looking up.
The pain and fear in his expression was so real that any lingering doubts about his character—not that there had been many—vanished.
“Time to talk about the elephant in the room?” he asked, a sad smile tugging up the right side of his mouth.
“Only if you’re ready,” Gabriel answered.
His eyes darted to her and held. She counted to six before he spoke. “Yes,” he said on an exhale. “I’m ready. My dad needs to be stopped. I want this all stopped. I want my life—my wife —back.”
She held his gaze, then nodded. “Let’s get started.”
They each took seats at the table, and she pulled out her phone.
“I’m going to call Sabina Warwick, at HICC, to listen in.
Leo Gallardo will likely join as well.” Rian nodded, and she dialed the number.
Sabina picked up immediately, and after a little shuffling, she and Leo settled in for the conversation.
“First,” Sabina started, “how’s your brother, Mr. Nolan?”
“Call me Rian, please. He’s out of surgery but still critical.”
“We’re sending an operative down to watch over him. I hope you don’t mind,” Sabina said, surprising Callie.
Judging by the way Rian blinked and took a few seconds to process what she said, Sabina had surprised him, too. “Thank you,” he replied, his voice cracking. “I’d planned to do it myself, but since my father manages security for the company, I don’t trust any of them anymore.”
“Do you know where your father is?” Callie asked.
Rian shook his head. “No. He told me yesterday afternoon that he was heading to Seoul for a couple of meetings. But it’s possible he never left the country.”
“We’ll look into that,” Leo replied.
“Can you walk us through what you know?” Callie asked.
Rian met her gaze, the dark circles under his eyes making them appear an even brighter blue than they were.
He nodded. “It’s not as much as I should know. Christ, he’s bribing officials around the world, might even have been responsible for the bomb in Paris that Laura overheard him talking about, and I can’t find anything that’s concrete enough to nail him.”
“You sent us the emails,” Sabina pointed out, her matter-of-fact delivery probably doing more to assuage his frustration than any attempts at reassurance.
“And the bank accounts have proven very helpful. We’re still pulling at the threads of the conversations you provided, but we’re hopeful there, too.
When put together with the notes and information from Liza Lightfoot and our own work, it won’t be long before we have a case to drop in the FBI’s lap. ”
“And the DOJ,” Leo added.
Rian looked to her, and she nodded.
He took a deep breath, then scraped his hands over his face and through his hair.
“I do have one more thing.” He reached into his pocket and set a phone on the table.
“I managed to clone his phone before he left yesterday. Joe sent both of us a picture of the three of you.” He nodded to her and Gabriel.
“I knew it was only a matter of time before he did something drastic. And he’s a creature of habit when it comes to his trips.
He has his assistant pack his bags, and a car picks him up at work.
But before he leaves, he always showers and shaves in the bathroom attached to his office.
I made a point to stick close to him, and when he got ready to leave yesterday, I cloned his phone. ”
“We are monitoring his device already,” Leo said, almost apologetically.
“His primary device,” Rian said. “He has a second one. I didn’t mention it in the card I sent or the drop files I provided as I had no other information about it at the time—no number or carrier or anything.
It’s the same make and model as his work phone, so I always assumed he just had the one.
But I stopped by his house four months ago, he was on the phone, relaxing by his pool.
When he finished the call, he set the device down, and before the screen went dark, I noticed the image.
Although it’s the same as the one on his primary phone, the color was different.
Both are calla lilies, but the one on his main phone is yellow, and the one I saw that day was orange.
” He paused, then ran his hand through his hair again.
“It seems like something I should have thought of earlier. That he’d have more than one phone. ”
“Hindsight and all that,” Sabina said, dismissing his regret. “So, when he went to take his shower and shave, you cloned the secondary device?”
“When I figured out that he had two devices, I picked up an extra myself in case I had the chance?—”
“No one ever commented on you suddenly carrying two phones?” Callie asked.
He shrugged. “My assistant asked. I told her I needed to draw a line between personal and professional, so I’d picked up a personal phone.
She didn’t seem to question it, and while she’s not a gossip, if anyone else mentioned it to her, she’d relay the story I gave her.
” Callie nodded. “But when it came to actually cloning my dad’s second phone, the situation was never right,” he continued.
“Not until yesterday. It wasn’t hard to figure out his code, his mother’s birthday.
He hated her and using that date would be a perfect ‘fuck you’ every time he used it to do his dirty work.
A childish one.” He ended the thought by lifting his hands in a “whatever” gesture.
“Have you looked through it?” Callie asked.
Rian shook his head. “I’m very good at business, but not tech.
The cloning was as far as I got, thanks to YouTube.
I wasn’t sure if he’d be able to tell if I logged on or opened files or if maybe he had one of those programs that would wipe the entire phone if I did something wrong.
” His gaze lingered on the device. “I have no idea what you’ll find on there. Maybe nothing.”
“But maybe something,” Sabina said. “Ben will reach Vegas in about an hour,” Sabina said, referring to the operative Callie had seen her first time at HICC.
The scary-looking one. “Callie and Philly, you can take his SUV and drive it back to Mystery Lake with the phone. We’d send the plane for you, but it’s doing another pickup today.
And Ava can’t fly her helicopter for obvious reasons.
The next commercial flight from Vegas isn’t until tonight. You’ll get here faster driving.”
She glanced at Gabriel, who shrugged. He didn’t seem to mind that she preferred driving, so a road trip was no hardship. Maybe he’d buy the snacks again.
“We’ll return our rental, then meet him back here,” Callie said. “But before we leave, what more can you tell us?” she asked Rian.
He spent the next thirty minutes recounting what Laura had overheard, how it confirmed his suspicions that something wasn’t right, then walked them through the information he’d sent them via the file drop link.
Both she and Sabina asked the occasional question—mostly to clarify but also to get a sense of his thought process.
By the time they wrapped up, Rian looked as if he’d aged a few years.
Fatigue and disillusionment would do that to a person.
She and Gabriel said their goodbyes, then headed to the airport to drop the car off.
An hour later, they returned to the hospital and grabbed the keys to the HICC SUV, a bag of snacks in hand.
Ben didn’t say a word to either of them but did give them a nod before heading back inside to watch over Joe.
“Ready to head home?” she asked Gabriel. She paused, frowned, then smiled. She and Gabriel hadn’t talked about a future, but Mystery Lake was now home. She had a job she could do from there—one she liked. And Gabriel had set down his roots in the community.
“We have one more stop to make,” Gabriel replied as they walked toward the SUV.
“Where’s that?” she asked, hitting the Unlock button. Three cars up, a huge black Escalade with tinted windows beeped. The car seemed a bit of an overkill, but in Vegas, with the number of rich and famous who visited, it wasn’t even close to being the only one like it in the parking lot.
“Here,” Gabriel said, handing over his phone when they reached the car.
She took his device and glanced at the site on the screen—a local wedding chapel four miles away. Her heart climbed into her throat, and she froze.
“Calypso.”
She kept her eyes fixed on the screen.
“You have to look at me at some point, Callie,” Gabriel said.
At the warm humor in his voice, breath flooded her lungs again.
She hesitated before lifting her gaze to his.
Their eyes held, a single suspended moment, then movement pulled her attention to his hands and the small box he held.
Inside sat a diamond bezel set in platinum surrounded by several smaller ones in the shape of a kite.
Next to it were two platinum bands, one shaped to fit around the point of the engagement ring and the other a simple thick band.
She stared, her heart in her throat, before jerking her eyes back to his. “How…when…how?”
He grinned. That familiar, adorable, mischievous grin that made her feel special, made her feel as if the two of them had their own secret, their own world, even if only for a moment.
“I found them online while we were driving to Vegas this morning and had the store deliver them to Rian at the hospital. He passed it off as we were leaving.”
She couldn’t help the smile tugging at her lips. “You’re a little crazy, you know.”
He cocked his head and smiled back. “Yeah, but you love me, and I love you, and we spent almost twenty years apart. I’m not going to risk that again.
” His smile faded a touch, and a flash of vulnerability passed over his expression.
“What do you say, Calypso Jane Parks, are we getting hitched this morning?”