THIRTEEN
Rivers meant to keep his eyes on his own work. That lasted about four seconds with Caryssa in the room.
The team had settled around the war room table with the loose rhythm that followed breakfast most mornings when they weren’t called out on an op.
Younger sprawled in his chair, looking uninvested in the task Cannon gave him.
Rome and Rorke argued over whose turn it was to make a new pot of coffee, and O was already three cameras deep into whatever footage he’d pulled overnight.
Townie and Cannon were at the head of the table sorting through a stack of printouts before the meeting was actually called to order.
Rivers was supposed to be working on the supply list, but instead he used the lull to watch Caryssa.
Her gaze was fixed on her laptop, her spine straight. Her hair was pulled back in a silver clip that made his fingers itch to loosen it and let her silky locks spill into his hands.
He watched the small furrow between her brows deepen as something on the screen didn’t sit right in her mind. She still chewed her lip when she was concentrating, and his stomach tingled at seeing the habit she’d never been able to kick.
Her phone buzzed, and she picked it up, looking straight at Cannon. “My boss, Doyle, is requesting a video conference.”
Cannon gave the go-ahead.
Doyle’s voice cut through the low murmur of the room, businesslike, impatient in the specific way of a man who’d been waiting on an update longer than he wanted to admit. “Lane, tell me you’ve got something for me on Bill.”
“I’ve given you all I know during our check-ins, but I’ll recap.
” She pulled her laptop around so the camera caught her screen.
“We recovered two laptops out of his Portland office. There’s a whole second business running underneath the legitimate one.
Shell companies, off-book deliveries, the works. ”
“And the bomb?”
“Components are being run against known inventory now.” She glanced toward O, who gave a small nod without looking up from his screen.
“Good.” Doyle’s expression shifted, softer for a second before he masked it. “I promised you an update on the agent who was guarding Stina Velez. Nothing new to report.”
She grimaced.
Rivers caught the expression—there and gone so fast that he would have missed it if he’d blinked. But he knew Caryssa, and her shoulders had definitely drawn inward and her jaw tensed momentarily at the mention of the agent.
She fixed her attention on the screen, leaning in with intent. She scrolled with more focus than the moment probably called for, and Rivers couldn’t stop the question burning on his tongue.
“Did you know him?”
She didn’t look up immediately, but when she did, she bit down on her lip again before answering. “Yeah. I did.”
Her reaction was enough to send an ugly, unwelcome stab through Rivers’s chest. Maybe know him meant beyond work.
Maybe, in the years of her life after Rivers vanished, she’d found a person worth caring about.
He had no right to feel anything about the matter. He only hoped to protect everyone and hadn’t thought more about what happened to those he left behind. Now questions were circling his mind, which he pushed them away for later, when they were alone.
She gave Doyle her attention. “Thanks for the update. Now, about the files I sent you this morning. There are payment records for hotel stays cross-referenced against a download from the travel booking app with the actual itineraries. The two don’t match.”
“I’m listening,” Doyle said.
Now they were all paying attention.
“Some of his trips in the travel app never show up in the company books. No payments, no record—nothing tying them to the business at all.”
“So he paid for those trips some other way.”
She drew in a deep breath, back to her usual professional self. “Or someone else did.”
Doyle crossed his arms and gave a slow nod. “Good. Keep working it.” He looked to Cannon. “Keep me updated of any new developments.”
Cannon nodded in return. “Will do.”
After the screen went blank, they all returned to their tasks. Rivers focused on the inventory list but he needed to actually inspect some of the stores in person, especially his medical supplies.
He stole a glance at Caryssa. She was concentrating again, nibbling her lip, and just the sight of her made him want to grab her and drag her to his bed.
“Rorke.” Cannon’s gruff voice cut off that idea completely.
Rorke looked up with a twist of his lips that put the whole room on edge. “Cannon.”
Their CO gave him a long, loaded look. “What do you have on the base footage? Anything stand out about Bill’s delivery routes?”
“The cameras go dark before he hits any of our gates. That’s normal since there are no cameras on bases. The last known view is fairly old. It came from street camera footage a month before Echo’s last deployment. Bill was the driver.”
“Any passengers?”
“Negative.”
“You check the cars around him?”
“No one tailing the truck.”
Cannon nodded once, already moving on. “And the bomb. Any new developments on who sent it?”
“Still tracing it back to where it was originally shipped.”
“Keep at it.”
This time Rorke returned Cannon’s same flat look, charged with an undercurrent that had the whole team waiting for an explosion.
“Everybody get to work,” Cannon snapped.
Rivers pushed away from the table before he received his own loaded look. “I’m going to inventory the medical bay.”
Rome stood next. “I’ve got the weapons locker.”
Several others followed Rivers, scattering in the direction of their assignments. As he walked out, he sent one last glance at Caryssa over his shoulder. Her fingers were glued to her keyboard and she had her face turned aside, preventing him from reading her face.
He walked to the medical bay slower than he needed to, replaying the flinch he’d seen and her response when he asked if she knew the agent. Everything added up to a story he had no right to feel jealous about but couldn’t stop constructing anyway.
He wanted to know what that agent meant to her. Whether that grimace had been grief for a colleague or grief for…more.
He pushed through the medical bay door and started pulling supplies off shelves without really seeing them, sinking into the mundane motion of counting and sorting while his head kept circling the same unanswerable question.
Later, he told himself again, firmer this time. When it was just the two of them.
* * * * *
Caryssa had cracked entire federal cases faster than she was uncovering the identity of whoever had been pulling Bill’s strings.
She sat elbow to elbow with Rorke, two screens between them. They’d been scrubbing through hours of pulled footage. At this point, she’d looked through so many frames of trucks rolling through streets that they were all blurring together.
But it was apparent by the third hour that a pattern was starting to emerge.
Caryssa and Rorke built two timelines—Bill’s delivery runs and every known appearance of a weapon stolen from Echo. When they laid one over the other, things became clearer.
Bill passed through an area. Days or weeks later, some of the weapons surfaced nearby.
They worked backward through the rest of his routes, and the correlations kept coming.
“There.” Rorke tapped the screen again, freezing another frame. “Same truck. The shipment ID number doesn’t correspond to any order in the books.”
“Adding it to the list.” Caryssa copied the information from the shipping manifest taken from the Portland office files.
The door opened, and Reid came in balancing a plate stacked with sandwiches. He set them on the table in front of their computers without ceremony.
Rorke didn’t look away from his screen as he scooped one up. “Thanks, bro.”
Caryssa finished typing the string of characters before settling her attention on the food. She offered Reid a smile. “Thanks.”
“I figured you two lost track of time. You worked straight through lunch.”
“We did,” Rorke said around a mouthful of deli meat and cheese.
Reid leaned a hip against the table, close enough to her that she felt the warmth of him. “How’s it looking?”
“Getting there.” Her response surprised even her—the case had a shape now. Finally.
She picked up half of a sandwich and brought it to her lips. When she saw her favorite—turkey and American cheese with mustard—her gaze flew to Reid’s.
The corners of his hard lips twitched into a knowing smile.
With Rorke sitting inches away, she couldn’t tell Reid how she hadn’t even been able to eat her favorite sandwich after his death. Blinking fast against the sting of tears in her eyes, she ducked her head and took a hesitant bite.
The flavors were nothing special. Just ordinary turkey, cheese and mustard. But to her, they were gourmet and made with so much care—love, even—that those tears threatened to fall.
She quickly chewed, keeping her eyes downcast.
A second later, Rorke went rigid beside her. “Got him.”
“Got who?” Reid straightened to loom behind them so he could see both their screens.
“The guy who dropped the package bomb.” Rorke was already pushing the video clip forward and zooming in.
Reid made a noise in his throat. “Face is clean enough to run.”
“We need O.”
“You mean Oliver?”
They shook their heads.
“Orion?” Caryssa gave the guys a hopeful look, but they both shook their heads again.
Reid strode to the door and called for O. Just hearing his deep voice echoing through the base made her skin prickle. She’d gone years hearing his rumbling tone reverberating through her dreams, only to wake and be smacked all over again by the fact that he was gone.
She stared at him in the doorway, his broad shoulders almost as wide as the frame, and she was shocked anew that he was alive.
O appeared almost instantly behind him, and Rorke showed him the footage without a word.
One look and O motioned Rorke out of the chair, taking his place beside Caryssa. His fingers flew over the keyboard.
She should have been watching the screen.
Instead, she felt Reid watching her.