“I don’t want anyone but you, never have and never will.”
He kissed her and they made out for a few minutes, the sound of their happy children in the background. She wanted more kids, and Cooper wanted her to be happy. He worried his job wasn’t conducive to family life, but they’d made it work so far, and hell, you only lived once, right?
His cell rang and Celina broke away. She was breathing heavy and her eyes were dark chocolate. “Duty calls.”
Before he could argue, she slipped from him, dropping a kiss on his forehead. Her hips swayed as he watched, taunting him in her skin tight yoga pants. “But we’ll pick this up again later,” she said over her shoulder with a wink.
He grinned, watching her until she disappeared.
It was Thomas on the phone.
“Tell me you got something,” Cooper said.
“I’ve talked to a dozen snitches and tried everything I know to uncover a lead. I’ve got nada. It doesn’t add up, Coop. Not the mayor’s kidnapping, not Mia’s last year either. It’s like a maze and we can see all these different paths, but we can’t see the center. A huge chunk of this puzzle is hidden. The leads we have are slim or utter dead ends, yet they are all connected to these two sisters.”
Cooper shoved the plate out of the way. “We just have to hope the SWAT team finds Amber and arrests those responsible.”
A long silence descended, and Cooper could hear the cogs in Thomas’s brain turning. He hadn’t been the same since his last undercover mission. He’d been held against his will and tortured nearly to the brink of death. He’d lost his lighthearted banter, and never spouted movie quotes anymore. Cooper suspected he was taking this case more personally than most because it hit close to home. “Damon Marcher was a businessman,” Thomas said. “What made him step down from that loft, where he never got his hands dirty, to torture Mia Livingston? It’s out of character.”
Cooper turned the beer bottle in circles. “He wanted to force the mayor’s hand, show her he had power over her.”
“A blackmailer like him doesn’t turn to kidnapping without a strong motive. Marcher always stayed behind the scenes, a puppet master. Surely there were more effective ways to put pressure on the mayor without putting himself under fire.”
“I get that, but unless this line of analysis is going to help us locate her, you might as well stop spinning your wheels.”
“Noted, but…”
Cooper waited, taking a drink. When Thomas didn’t continue, he prompted him. “Spit it out, Mann. But what?”
“Nothing. Just thinking of ways to find her.”
“And?”
“In the video, the guy told Mia he’d come back for her. She could be the thread that leads to the center of the maze.”
Cooper had come from the DEA. Some days, he thought about going back. Problem was, he loved the SCVC Taskforce, and while drug dealers tended to be easier to understand, and therefore flush out, these types of cases challenged him and his team to go deeper. “Dupé will never go for using her as a lure. Keep at it with your connections. Someone has to know something. Meantime, I have another idea. Remember when Bianca was with us? Her friend, what was his name? He had that software program that could figure out random connections between people.”
“Emit Petit?”
“That’s him. Maybe she can feed all these random names, dates, and places into that program to get something more solid for us.”
The sound of an engine could be heard in the background. Thomas was heading somewhere. “Worth a try. Just remember, she’s Beatrice now.”
An NSA brainiac who’d once been part of his team, she had changed her identity and relocated to the East Coast after an assassin had come after her. She hadn’t, however, gone into hiding. In fact, she and her husband, Cal, had started a security business, hiring former SEALs who struggled to find jobs aligned with their skill set. Rumor had it their teams also performed certain paramilitary missions, serving up justice wherever they went. “Has Ronni gone through the mayor’s correspondence?”
“Still working on it. By the way, sounds like the mayor had the city council in an uproar about a hiring vacancy for the finance department. That woman who was embezzling and got sent to jail last year—they’ve never filled that position because the mayor won’t sign off on who the council wants. Pissed them off, I guess, but doesn’t seem like a reason to have her taken, does it?”
Thomas was thinking outside the box, toying with other possibilities besides the former Quattro Gang looking for revenge. It was definitely a good idea, but city council members seemed an unlikely lot to have done this.
Cooper hated politics, and couldn’t imagine holding office. Even Dupé’s position was rife with drama and malcontents. He checked his watch. “Let me get this call into Bian—I mean,Beatrice—and then we’ll walk through everything at the office. Tell Bobby and the others to meet us there, and include the Cahills.”
“What about Mia?”
Cooper thought about it. “I’m sure she’s with Malachi, so we don’t have much choice, although Sam is pretty sure he took the bait. They’re probably checking the spot the SWAT team is raiding soon.”
“Cahill will be pissed if he realizes you kept him busy chasing his tail.”
Cooper leaned back and smiled. “He should’ve followed my orders yesterday, and I know he’ll defy any others I give him. That location is solid and itisa possibility Amber is there. A slim one, I know, but I couldn’t simply hand him the address—Dupé would kill me if he found out. It was the best I could do to send him and Mia in that direction.”
