Chapter Two

Mia tried to speak, but her throat had clamped shut. Heck, her entire body had, and that’s why it took her a while to process what Angel had just said.

“No,” she repeated. “You didn’t murder him?”

“I didn’t,” Angel stated, and she didn’t think it was her imagination that he was dealing with as much shock as she was.

Because he’d thought she had killed Kenton.

“Oh, God,” Mia muttered. The babbling habit erupted again, and she just kept repeating it like a mantra.

She hoisted herself on the console between the seats and threw her arms around Angel. She wanted to spew out words that matched the flood of relief inside her, but all she could do was hold him. And tremble.

And cry.

Crap, she was crying. She’d never been much of a crier, but apparently, that was how her body was choosing to react to this stew of emotions that had been pent up inside her for nearly twenty years.

She wasn’t exactly sure how long the hugging went on, but Mia soon became aware that Angel wasn’t hugging her back. And he also wasn’t expressing any signs of relief.

“We didn’t kill him,” Mia spelled out, pulling back to meet his gaze.

Oh, even now those drown-in-me brown eyes got to her. Of course, pretty much everything about Angel got to her.

And now she knew he hadn’t killed for her.

Angel hadn’t gone to Kenton’s room and beaten the jerk to death for attacking her.

But then she stopped her mental dance party, stopped crying, too, and let the rest of that sink in.

It didn’t sink in well.

“Your hat was in Kenton’s room,” she said, her voice a raspy whisper. “The one with the Spurs logo that you wore nearly every day.”

She saw the split-second of confusion in his eyes. “My hat went missing, but I didn’t leave it in Kenton’s room.” He paused a heartbeat. “I found your pocket knife in there and took it.”

“You…found it there?” she finally managed to get out. “It was there and you took it?”

He gave a double nod.

Mia had wondered what’d happened to it, and she had no idea how it’d gotten in Kenton’s room. After that sank in, it didn’t take her long to realize what Angel would have thought when he saw the knife and the blood.

That she had been the one to murder Kenton.

She hadn’t, but she couldn’t fault him for coming to that conclusion. Her knife. The blood. No Kenton. She’d considered the same thing about Angel when she’d seen his hat.

“Was there a body when you went in his room?” she asked, and because she was feeling a little awkward about practically being on his lap, she moved back to the passenger’s seat.

He shook his head once again. “What about you?”

“No. Not there. I took your hat, cut it up and went to that storm drain by the park and dropped it in, piece by piece. I’d planned on cleaning up the blood, but I needed to…compose myself first. By the time I got back to the house, someone else had already done the clean-up.”

“Shit,” he spat out. Then, he groaned, and even though he didn’t say a word, he suddenly sounded and looked very much like the cop he’d once been.

Angel glanced back at the camera on the gate. “Put on your seatbelt,” he instructed. Yeah, he still had that cop vibe. “Let’s go for a drive so we can talk. Once we’re done, I’ll bring you back here to get your car.”

“Does Ruby Maverick use lip readers or high-penetration listening devices?” she asked. And it wasn’t a joke. From everything she’d heard, Maverick Ops had a lot of tech bells and whistles, along with experts in nearly every field possible.

“No, but Ruby’s not an idiot so if she sees our expressions, she’ll know something’s wrong,” he spelled out as he drove away. “I’d rather not involve her in this yet. Not until I can figure out what’s going on.”

Mia agreed because there was so much to figure out. Well, one huge thing anyway. Who had murdered Kenton, and who had seemingly tried to set up Angel and her?

Because it was a set-up.

That was flashing like a neon sign in her mind. No way had his hat and her pocketknife gotten into Kenton’s room by accident. There were other flashes, too. Of that night. Of the absolute terror she’d felt when she had seen all that blood and Angel’s hat.

“Danno,” Angel said, yanking her out of those memories. It took her a moment to realize he wasn’t talking to her but to some kind of device in the van. “Search for any info on foster parents, Melanie and RJ Matthews and Kenton Barker. Time perimeter—nineteen years, eight months ago. Run background checks on all parties connected to them and then display on dash as the info comes in.”

“Danno?” she asked, but she waved that off. “Is this the AI app that Ruby’s techs created for all her operatives?”

“It is,” he verified.

There was no need for him to spell out why Angel had given the app that name. Hawaii 5-0 had been one of his favorite shows. Also no need for him to explain what the app could do. The likely answer was pretty much everything that AI could do and then some. She’d heard that Ruby’s techs had managed to link the AI apps with thousands of databases, including traffic and security camera feed.

Despite the troubling subject Angel and she had to discuss, Mia felt a fan girl type of moment over finally being able to see the app in action. It was like having a ticket to a techie Super Bowl.

“Tell me about what happened in those hours before you went into Kenton’s room?” Angel said.

That put a quick end to the fan-girl giddiness, and the images of that night returned with a vengeance. Then again, those images were never far from the forefront of her mind anyway.

She gathered her breath because she was going to need it. “After Kenton tried to assault me…” But that was as far as she got before Angel interrupted.

“He didn’t try. He succeeded . You had bruises on your face and arms,” he spat out. Oh, there was anger in his voice even now. His temper had been much, much worse on the night of the attack.

She nodded, conceding that he had a point, and she gave him the nutshell of events. “Kenton tried to convince me that he was the guy for me by groping me and trying to push me into my bedroom. I’m sure he had all sorts of quick, nasty things planned for me, but Melanie saw what was happening, and she stopped him. She hit him upside the head with a handheld vacuum that she’d just finished using. Kenton cursed us both and ran off.”

Even now, she could recall Melanie taking her into the kitchen afterwards to check her bruises and try to calm her down. Much calming down had been required since Mia had practically been hysterical.

If that attack had happened today, Mia knew how to defend herself. However, back then, she hadn’t had the strength. Kenton wasn’t a big guy and probably only outweighed her by twenty pounds or so, but he’d been damn strong. And she hadn’t been able to get to her pocketknife in time or she would have used it to get him to stop.

“Was Kenton bleeding from where Melanie hit him?” he asked, probably knowing it wouldn’t account for all the blood that had been in Kenton’s room. But Angel likely wanted to know if it’d contributed to it.

“He was bleeding,” she verified. “Not a lot, but he seemed dazed for a couple of seconds. Then, the anger came, and I thought he was going to try to punch us or something. He didn’t, probably because Melanie was holding up that vacuum cleaner as if it were a billy club.”

Mia was thankful for that. Thankful, too, that Melanie hadn’t been larger than her. Melanie was closer to Kenton’s own size so he might have thought twice about going up against someone he couldn’t overpower.

“After a little while, maybe a half hour, I went up the street to the library,” she went on. “And I stayed there in the cookbook section until it was closing time. That would have been about four hours after the attack.” Mia paused and needed another deep breath. “I nearly called you. But I knew when I told you what’d happen that you would confront Kenton.”

“Damn right I would have,” he snarled.

And that anger proved her point.

“I was afraid you’d kill Kenton and then be arrested for murder,” Mia explained. “So, after the library closed, I went back to the foster house. Birdie was there, and she told me you’d gotten back from football practice and that’d you had gone to kick Kenton’s ass.”

At the mention of the woman’s name, her photo popped on the dash screen. Birdie Cowan. Once they’d been foster sisters and good friends, but Mia realized she hadn’t seen or heard from Birdie in nearly eighteen years, since they’d left foster care when they had both graduated from high school.

“I went looking for you but couldn’t find you,” Mia said, going back to her account of that night. “You were gone. No one knew where you were.”

“I was looking for you,” he muttered, adding some profanity to that. But she didn’t think he was cursing her but rather their current situation. “The first place I checked was Kenton’s room, thinking that he might have…taken you.” The muscles stirred in his jaw. “He wasn’t there. No one was. And at that time, there was no blood.”

She nodded and watched as other photos began to appear on the dash. Their foster parents, RJ and Melanie. A picture of Presley Nolan, Angel’s best friend and now a fellow operative at Maverick Ops. Another picture of his other foster brother, Jace Malley, who’d already turned eighteen and left the foster home by the time of the incident.

And then the picture of Kenton popped up.

Even now, seeing his face filled her with a sense of dread and snapped her back into a nightmare that she wished she could forget.

“So, what did you do after you saw I wasn’t in Kenton’s room?” she asked. “You went looking for him?”

“No,” he was quick to say. “I continued searching for you.”

He, too, was glancing at the screen, and when a report started to load, Angel pulled into the parking lot of a donut shop. He didn’t say anything else until he’d stopped.

“During the course of the time I was searching for you, I went into Kenton’s room twice,” Angel spelled out. “The first time, there was blood and your knife. The second time, it had been cleaned up. In between all of those two visits, I continued to search for you.”

She took a moment to process that and wished she had the timeline all written out. The foster house was big, one of those old Victorian mansions with lots of halls and more than a dozen small rooms. Still, it seemed like really bad luck that she hadn’t literally run into Angel that night.

Or into Kenton’s killer.

But maybe she had. Because it really sank in then. And she shifted her attention back to the dash.

“Someone in the foster house killed Kenton and disposed of his body,” she muttered.

Angel murmured in agreement. “And since we can rule out the two of us, that leaves them.” He pointed to the now thumbnail photos. RJ, Melanie, Birdie. “And him.”

He flicked his finger across the dash, bringing up the picture that Danno had just loaded. Dwight Barker, Kenton’s father. She remembered him visiting the foster home several times, and the man had given her the creeps, though she couldn’t say exactly why. And she had no idea why Kenton wasn’t living with him but had instead ended up in foster care.

While she was still studying Dwight’s photo and trying to figure out if he played into this, Angel’s phone rang, and she saw a familiar name on the screen.

Presley.

“Did you let him know about the body?” Angel asked her.

“God, no,” she was quick to say. “It was hard enough telling you.”

He muttered something she didn’t catch and answered the call. “Mia’s with me,” Angel said. “And you’re on speaker.”

“Mia’s with you,” Presley said, and then he sighed. “She told you they found the body.”

“Yeah,” Angel muttered. “How did you learn about it?”

“Blind luck. I was having lunch with one of the CSIs from my latest mission, and he got a call when I was about to dig into my fully loaded nachos. Gotta say, hearing about it and seeing the pictures didn’t help my appetite.”

“Pictures?” Angel questioned. “As in plural?”

“Uh huh,” Presley agreed. “But I got better than that. I’m sending you actual feed of what’s going on at the site. It’s from a news media drone that I tapped into. Where are you?” he tacked onto that.

“Parking lot of that donut shop about a mile from Maverick Ops headquarters. I pulled over so I could read the reports that I had Danno generate.”

“I’ll want to read those, too. Send me a copy. And my advice—don’t go anywhere near the dump site.”

Angel huffed. “I didn’t kill Kenton. And neither did Mia.”

Silence for a long time. Hell’s bells, did everyone think she was guilty?

“Wish I’d known this twenty years ago,” Presley muttered.

“And so say all of us,” Mia muttered right back.

“Okay,” Presley went on a second later. “Let me see if I can get any updates, and I’ll get back to you.” With that, he ended the call.

The photos and reports dissolved from the dash screen, and in its place, Mia saw the live feed from the drone. It was an aerial view of the CSIs and responders on the scene. They were already in the process of moving the remains.

“What will happen to the bones?” she asked Angel.

“They’ll be examined by the ME first and then by a forensic anthropologist who’ll try to determine time and cause of death. Ruby has a good one on tap, but I don’t want to draw her or Maverick Ops into this.”

This .

For such a little word, it packed a punch. Because once Kenton was IDed, Angel, Presley, RJ, Melanie, and Birdie would all be questioned.

And maybe one of them would be arrested.

All these years, she’d stayed silent so she could keep Angel out of jail, and it might happen anyway.

“We need to find the killer,” she heard herself say.

“We do.” Angel’s response was so fast that it let her know he’d already come to the same conclusion.

And that meant getting info fast. “I want to look at those reports,” Mia insisted. “Can Danno split-screen them with the live feed?”

“He can.” And Angel gave the voice command to make that happen.

Mia didn’t even have time to start reading though because her tablet dinged. Not the sound of an incoming call, but rather a different kind of sound that put her on full alert.

“It’s my security system,” she muttered, using the tablet to access the cameras she had on her front and back doors.

The footage quickly appeared, and while it was grainy, she could still see something she didn’t want to see. Someone wearing a hoodie was at her back door.

And he was breaking into her house.

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