He touched her arm, “This is putting a kink in a lot of things, but we’ll figure it out after we get Amber.”
She groaned, a raw sound from deep inside. “What is wrong with me? Here I am worrying about my job when Amber could be…” Her voice cracked.
“Your sister is going to be okay.” He hit his speed dial for Caleb. “And I have faith that you will be, too.”
His twin answered on the first ring, and Malachi put him on speaker. “I found something interesting. It’s not much, but it could lead us to the big fish in this situation.”
“What?” he and Mia asked at the same time, then shared a grin.
“The guy who stabbed Marcher, Han Beak?”
Mia hadn’t heard that conversation. She held up her hands at him in question. He raised a finger to let her know he’d catch her up later. “What about him?”
Caleb cleared his throat. “His real identity is Hun Baek. Baek is a Korean surname and he simply switched the letters up. Guess who he used to work for?”
The lightbulb went on in Malachi’s brain. “Tell me it’s Komosu.”
“Bingo.” He heard Caleb shifting around, papers shuffling. “Still working on that timeline, bro, but we’re onto something. Oh, and that other thing?”
“Yeah?”
“King’s girlfriend used to be Beak’s.”
“What? That doesn’t make sense.”
“She visited him before he killed Marcher.”
The gang world was small, when you got right down to it, and Malachi felt that tiny buzz under his shoulder blades. “What do you want to bet she’s not King’s?” Malachi theorized. “I bet he’s holding her as collateral.”
Mia looked lost and gestured at him impatiently. “I don’t understand any of this.”
He hadn’t found that thread he’d been searching for exactly, but he knew they were getting close, all the moving parts were going to come together. He needed to talk to Coop, get that timeline nailed down.
First he needed a shower and more caffeine. “Does Joe still have all that stuff at his house?”
“You mean the wigs and shit?”
“Yeah.”
“Far as I know, why? You’re not thinking about going undercover are you?”
“Not my speed.” Malachi eyed Mia. “But we do need a disguise.”
Thirteen
The morning fog along the coast enveloped Malachi’s truck. Ronni had brought it by to exchange for her car, and now Mia, Malachi, and Ladybug were on their way north to Joe and Sam’s house in Carlsbad.
Mia felt disheartened that they hadn’t found Amber, and a phone call with her parents, who were now in town, had made her feel worse.
There was no comforting her mother, who’d cried through the whole thing, while Mia’s dad had raged in the background about why this was happening to their family.
He hated politics, couldn’t believe his eldest daughter had chosen that path. He and Amber were like night and day, always butting heads, but Mia knew their father loved them to the bottom of his soul.
Malachi had told her he was convinced he was onto something. He laid out his ideas as they drove. “When a gang’s leadership is decimated like Quattro’s, it leaves a void.” He shifted into another lane, passing a slow moving vehicle. “Criminals don’t like those. In general, they are opportunists, and although none of them have quite the right combination of resources and leadership to fully take over Marcher’s place, they all want one thing.”
Ahead, dark clouds hung over the interstate. “Power,” Mia guessed.
He nodded. “It’s likely Jam King has been waiting for the right moment to take out Damon and claim his empire. But he got tripped up when Marcher went after you, and that bubble burst. Marcher wanted control of the highest office in the city—the mayor’s—but he didn’t have any dirt to make your sister bend to his will. She wouldn’t be blackmailed, but he’d grown so egotistical, he thought he could kidnap you and force her to cave in to his demands.”
