33. Tulsa

33

"Don't go in hard," Emmy Black said. "Just knock on the door."

Was she actually serious? It sure seemed like she was, although sometimes it was hard to tell from a distance. She was still on the jet with Ryder, and her irritation at being sidelined came through loud and clear.

"If she's colluding with Mark Antony, knocking would give her time to warn him."

"She isn't colluding. The hotel staff say she was a devoted mom? Fifty bucks says he took the kid."

"You mean as leverage?"

"Easiest way to get her to cooperate."

"We ran the probabilities on that and concluded it was a less likely scenario than bribery."

It was too much of a risk. The police might be lackadaisical when it came to tracking down missing women, but a kid was different. News stories, AMBER alerts, the works.

"Oh, really? Probabilities? You mean you shoehorned the parameters from this case into some program based on a CIA war game simulation, and it suggested bribery was the best option? I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you."

"It's a reasonable assumption."

"For your team, maybe."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You have guardrails. Not many, and they're pretty loose, but they're there. You still work for Uncle Sam. The powers that be will give you as many planes, trains, and automobiles as you want, plus enough slush-fund cash to buy a small country, but there's no way they'd ever sanction you taking a child as a bargaining chip, especially on American soil. Put your computer away, go out to the street, and ask a mom what she'd do if someone took her kid. The answer will be ‘anything.'"

And this was why I wasn't sure if I liked her. Emmy Black lacked tact. Then again, so did I, so I doubted she was fond of me either.

"If you're wrong, that could jeopardise Luna's safety."

"And if you go in hard and Mark Antony's close by with the kid, that puts everyone in danger."

Curiosity got the better of me. "If you needed leverage, would you take the kid?"

She pondered for a moment. "Probably not. But I have a contractor with the morals of a street rat, and she definitely would."

"And you'd condone it?"

"Not entirely."

"So you don't have control over your own team?"

"I'm results-driven, and I prefer not to micromanage."

"And yet here you are…"

A shrug. "Here I am telling you that you'll make a bad situation worse by scaring an already traumatised woman."

Ryder opened his mouth to say something, and Emmy must have kicked him under the table because he closed it again. Beside me, Priest chuckled.

"What's it to be, Miss Teen Tulsa?"

Ryder wasn't the only one getting kicked. "Don't call me that."

And it was Miss Teen Splendor Tulsa. Miss Teen was a whole other pageant. And it wasn't as if I'd wanted to prance around a stage in swimwear—my dad had recruited me to help with a sting operation because the FBI was a little short of twelve-year-old girls and I was a late developer.

What would my dad have said today?

He'd always been an advocate of the softly-softly approach, at least until it had cost him his life. I'd toughened up after his passing. Built a hard shell around myself and pushed everyone away. But ultimately, I just couldn't get over the way the FBI had handled his death—the blame-shifting and the meaningless platitudes. Something inside me broke. Then I screwed up an op, quit the Bureau, ended a relationship that was way past its sell-by date, and applied for a job mucking out horses before Priest showed up on my doorstep and told me not to be so fucking stupid.

Now I had a new family, but I couldn't forget my old one entirely.

Dad would have told me to knock on the door.

"Fine, we'll do it Emmy's way."

She had the grace not to look smug. No, she just nodded once and said, "Good luck."

On this job, we'd need it.

Human: one. Computer: nil. Thank fuck Dusk was with us because empathy wasn't one of my strong points. I freely admitted that.

Nola Jiminez had opened the door of her walk-up apartment half a second after I knocked, phone in her hand. She'd been waiting, and her tear-streaked cheeks told me Emmy had been absolutely right. Unfortunately. It would have been easier if she was wrong because now we had a missing kid as well as a missing pop star.

"We should call the FBI," I said. "This is their wheelhouse."

"No police. No police!"

"The FBI isn't a police force. It's a national security?—"

Dusk shushed me with a hand. "Why don't you want us to call the police?"

"H-h-he said not to. That things would be difficult for Kobie if I do."

"Things would be difficult?"

"That's what he said."

"And what do you think he meant by it?"

She shuddered. "It was his tone of voice… He said he was looking after Kobie, but he needed me to do him a favour before Kobie came back home. And he warned me not to call the cops." Nola choked out a sob. "So I did it. I did everything he asked. What else was I supposed to do?"

There was a seventy-five percent chance the boy was dead already, but I figured Dusk wouldn't thank me for pointing that out. Priest didn't say anything either. He was standing by the door of the tiny apartment, and between the earpiece and the camera disguised as a button on one of those Hawaiian shirts he always wore, I knew Emmy was in the room with us too. I'd once asked him why he chose the hideous shirts because he scrubbed up okay when he made the effort, and he'd told me that if the shirt was memorable, his face wasn't.

And it worked. The man was a ghost. Even his many, many ex-wives couldn't pick him out of a lineup. No, seriously. Last month, we'd run into lucky number seven at the Nebula, and there'd been no flicker of recognition whatsoever. Guess she'd spent more time looking at his dick.

"How did he get in touch with you?"

Luckily, Nola Jiminez was talking to us. We'd told her we were part of the security team from the hotel.

"He c-c-called me."

Forget the gun, I should have brought tissues.

"Did you see the number on the screen?"

"It was Kobie's phone."

Kobie was six years old. When I was six, I'd had a pony and a healthy disrespect for mortality, not a phone. But if Nola left her kid alone regularly, then it made sense that she'd want to check in with him.

"Can you give us his number?"

She read it out in a shaky voice, and I sent it to Echo with a message: Track this.

"Let's start at the beginning—tell us everything that happened," Dusk said. "When did you realise Kobie was missing?"

"When I got the call. I was leaving work, and the phone rang as I got to the bus stop. There was a p-p-picture."

"We're going to need to see that."

I stepped forward to look at Nola's phone, and there he was, strapped into the back seat of a car, looking confused.

"Did you recognise the voice?"

"It was muffled. Maybe I heard it before, but I don't know."

"How about the vehicle?"

She shook her head. "But I guess…I guess it could be the one he made me put Ms. Maara into. It was silver."

That would be another job for Echo.

Emmy spoke in my ear. "Send me that picture. Our investigators can find the make and model."

Okay, there were advantages of working with a bigger team. Usually, our little unit—we'd been nicknamed the Choir—did its own legwork. We had a reasonable degree of autonomy, but with that freedom came a certain amount of isolation. We couldn't simply call in more manpower to assist because officially, we didn't exist. Although we did get to use the facilities at various military bases—runways, ranges, that type of thing. It wasn't practical to park experimental drones at Casa del Gato.

"Did you make a note of the licence plate?"

"No, no. I was just trying to… She was heavy, you know?"

"How did you get Ms. Maara into the vehicle?"

I suspected we already knew the answer, but I wanted to confirm.

"When he took Kobie, he left a bottle on the table. He said I needed to put the powder onto her food and wait until she fell asleep, then bring her to the fire exit in a cart at nine a.m. He was waiting there."

"What happened to the dog?"

"The dog? It was sleeping too. And I didn't…I didn't know what to do, so I put it with Ms. Maara."

"Do you always work on the twelfth floor?"

"The tenth through the twelfth."

The motherfucker had been all over the hotel. He knew Luna's schedule, he understood men were banned from her suite, and he'd disabled the alarm on the fire door. Smart but unnoticeable.

"Who was watching Kobie at the time of the abduction?"

Nola's hesitation was an answer in itself.

"He was here by himself," I said. A statement.

Sheesh, we didn't need tissues; we needed a mop.

"My sitter got taken away by ICE last week, and…and I didn't know what else to do. Nobody else could look after him, and I had to pay the rent, and the utilities, and the groceries. It was just temporary, I swear. I didn't think…I d-d-didn't think…"

Dusk gave her shoulders a comforting squeeze. "We'll get him back."

No promises on whether he'd be breathing or not.

"Who did you tell that Kobie was home alone?"

"Nobody!"

"Okay, did you tell anyone that you were having trouble with your sitter?"

"Maybe a couple of people. I was asking to see if they knew anyone else who could watch him."

"We're going to need names."

"Lucia and, uh, Ellen."

"Surnames?"

"Lucia Joaquin. And Ellen, I don't know her last name, but she has two little girls."

"Which department does she work in?"

"Housekeeping," she said.

"When and where did this conversation take place?"

"Waiting in line in the cafeteria," Nola said. "It was last Saturday, and we were on a break."

"Did you notice anyone else listening?"

"No." A sob burst out of her. "I don't know anything." But I did. I knew that the man behind Luna's abduction had been in the cafeteria at the Nile Palace last Saturday. And that he hadn't been working when— "Wait. Wait, there was a guy. He said something like, ‘My mom never used to hire a sitter, and I turned out okay.'"

"Do you know his name?"

"No, but I've seen him around. I think he's on the security team."

"Describe him."

"He was big."

"Big as in tall, or big as in heavy?"

"Both, but not fat." She turned to point at Priest. "Like that."

Priest was six feet one and weighed one-eighty. Even his stupid shirts couldn't hide the strength in his shoulders, and when he took the shirt off… That was probably why so many dumb women were willing to get hitched three hours after meeting him. If our suspect had that kind of muscle, he must spend time working out. Priest did two sets of twenty pull-ups every day before breakfast.

"So he went to the gym a lot?"

She thought for a moment. "Not so much muscles. Just…about the same size."

"Hair colour?" I asked.

"Brown. Not real light, and not real dark either."

"Skin colour?"

"White."

"Glasses?"

"I don't think so."

"Any jewellery?"

"I don't remember."

Echo would be able to narrow down the employees working a particular shift, and hopefully, Romeo would know the size of his employees.

"You worked the day shift last Saturday?"

Nola nodded. "I work the third shift Monday through Thursday, and the first shift on Saturdays. I like to be there when Kobie gets home from school, and his dad used to watch him on Saturdays before…before…"

"Before he went to prison. Yeah, yeah, we know."

Dusk shot me a look. What was that supposed to mean? Oh, right. Tact.

She took over again. "We're going to show you some names. Can you tell me if any of them look familiar? Have you spent time with any of these people?"

It was the list of missing control centre employees. Nola read through it carefully, but she was shaking her head by the end.

"No, I don't recognise any of them."

Now Priest had a question, which meant Emmy had asked it. "Did you notice anyone spending too much time on the twelfth floor? Any member of the hotel staff?"

Another shake of the head. Dusk could stick around in case the kidnapper called again, but it was time for me to head back to the Nile Palace.

"I need a list of everyone who worked the seven-to-three shift last Saturday," I told Echo through the phone as I hurtled along the streets of Vegas. "Can you get it? We're looking for a big guy."

"My size, but not so muscular," Priest added from the passenger seat.

"I can get it, but the personnel records don't include physical attributes."

"Is Monroe there?"

"No, Romeo Serafini escorted him out after I found Monroe's login was used to change the data retention parameters in the security system."

"Fuck. So he's dirty?"

"Not necessarily. I'd say there's an equal possibility that he's just incompetent. He's the head of security, and his password was the name of his cat, five characters, all lowercase. Nacho. It should be illegal."

"Calling a cat Nacho?"

"No, using such a shitty password. Anyhow, Romeo took Monroe away, and I haven't seen him since. You want me to send Chase to look?"

"I'll try calling first. I'm nearly there in any case."

Romeo answered with his usual charm on the second ring. "Now what do you want?"

"Don't drop Monroe in Lake Mead. We might need him."

"I wasn't planning to. With the way the waters are receding, Lake Mead is a terrible place to dump bodies. Lake Tahoe works much better. Or the forest around Cedar City if you don't feel like taking a long drive."

"I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that."

"What, you're going to claim you're whiter than white?"

Romeo wasn't certain exactly how I spent my time, and that was the way I wanted it to stay. He thought I worked for Eagle Investigations, which officially, I did. It was a front company we used to cover our tracks if the need arose. When Romeo had questioned my presence at the beginning of this job, I'd just told him Eagle was subcontracting for Blackwood.

"Not at all, but you need to treat your staff better."

Romeo sighed through the phone. "Are you planning to give me another lecture on business practices?"

"Yes, but only because you need it. If a waitress is worried about missing a shift because she won't make the rent, you're not paying her enough. And while you're at it, a cost-effective childcare option wouldn't be a bad idea."

When a friend of Echo's took over day-to-day operations at the Nebula, the first thing he'd done was start a company crèche. Staff retention was excellent, and happy staff made happy customers, apparently.

"I'll take that on board."

"Don't give me that corporate bullshit."

He lowered his voice. "Why? What are you going to do about it?"

"You don't want to find out."

"Maybe I do."

Priest chuckled.

"Fuck you," I told Romeo.

"I'm sure I can find a slot in my schedule for that."

This man made me want to throw things. Preferably him. Off a cliff. We'd first met a year and a half ago when he tried to poach Suzi Quade from the Nebula. She'd all but signed the contract to perform there for a month when Jezebel got wind of the fact that Romeo had arranged a tête-à-tête with her manager. I'd agreed to take one for the team and stop it, which had involved fucking Romeo Serafini into exhaustion, winding his fancy watch back two hours, setting his phone to Honolulu time, and high-fiving Jez when he slept right through the meeting.

The two of us had been indulging in occasional hate sex ever since. Me and Romeo, not me and Jez. Every few months, I'd stagger out of his bed bruised, pissed off, and annoyingly satisfied, swearing I wouldn't go back for more, but my inner masochist still hadn't gotten the message.

"Great, how about we take a nice trip to Lake Tahoe?" I swerved around a Prius with Washington plates driving slowly in the passing lane. Fucking tourists. "I'll be in your office in ten minutes, and I need Monroe there. We're looking for a big guy on the security team. Echo will have a list of names for you."

"And what will you have for me?"

"A right hook."