Chapter 36

“Danny? Honey, what are you still doing up?”

Danny Giancarelli looked up from his laptop and managed a smile for his sleepy-eyed wife despite the headache pounding directly in the center of his forehead. She wore a ratty USMC T-shirt from his military days, which he’d given her before his deployment. Leah said she’d worn it to bed every night for the entire year that he was gone, and even now, all these years later, it was still her favorite nightshirt. His, too. She’d been wearing it the day he’d arrived home when he, knowing without a doubt at the ripe old age of twenty that she was the woman for him, popped the question. She’d worn it on their wedding night, and it was sexier than any of the lingerie her girlfriends had bought her for her bridal shower. She’d also worn it the night they’d made their first baby and every subsequent baby after that.

And it still looked sexy as sin on her.

“Come here.” He held out a hand, his wedding band glinting in the soft glow of his desk lamp. When she set her hand in his and he pulled her onto his lap for a kiss, he thought, not for the first time, that he was the luckiest man alive.

Leah drew back and soothed her thumb down the crease between his brows. He’d been noticing more and more of those creases in the mornings when he gazed into the mirror to shave—around his eyes, his mouth, his forehead. He looked more like his father every freakin’ day. Luckily, he hadn’t started losing his hair yet like Pop, but it still made him feel old, especially when his wife was as hot at twenty-nine as she’d been at eighteen.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Is the Patterson case bothering you?”

“No.”

One brow arched the way it did when the kids told a lie, and she gave him a dubious expression.

“Yeah, okay,” he admitted, “it’s bugging me.”

His last case, a local hostage situation involving a girl named Sylvia Patterson and her ex-boyfriend, hadn’t had the same happily-ever-after as the Van Amee case, ending in a murder-suicide.

“But not how you’re thinking,” he added. “I did everything in my power to save that girl. It wasn’t enough, but that’s part of the job. You accept it and move on. You have to, or you’d drive yourself insane with guilt.”

“Like Marcus did,” Leah said.

“Yeah, like Marcus.”

“I can’t believe he finally called.” She hesitated and rolled her lower lip through her teeth. “How is he?”

Danny lifted a shoulder. “I don’t know. He’s… Marcus, you know?”

If anyone knew Marcus as well as he did, it was Leah. The three of them had grown up together, running wild on the beaches of Southern California.

She laughed softly. “Still hiding behind that slick charm of his?”

“Like nothing ever happened.”

“Does Regina know he’s back? I’m meeting her for brunch on Friday, and I don’t want to say anything if she doesn’t know.”

“I mean, she’s his mom. I’m pretty sure she’s known exactly where he’s been hiding these last two years, so I would assume she also knows he’s decided to rejoin society.”

Another beat of hesitation.

“Danny,” she said with a sigh and gathered his hands into hers. “I know you love him. I do, too. But… let’s not tell the kids he’s back until we’re sure he’s sticking around. It broke their hearts last time he disappeared.”

“Yeah, agreed.” The image of their twins, teary-eyed and clutching the stuffed surfboards Marcus sent them on their birthday, was forever imprinted in his mind. The boys hadn’t wanted gifts. They’d wanted to see their favorite honorary uncle, and he hadn’t shown up. “I don’t want to hurt them like that again.”

“Okay.” Leah kissed his knuckles then released his hands. “So, if it’s not the Patterson case bothering you, why are you sitting here in the middle of the night, looking up”—she leaned over to get a peek at his computer screen—”whatever it is you’re looking up. Is that in Spanish?”

“Yeah.”

She blinked. “When did you learn to speak Spanish?”

“I can’t speak it,” he said. “I can read it okay, enough to get the gist, anyway.”

“Huh. Just when I think you can’t surprise me anymore. What are you reading about?”

He hesitated for a heartbeat before answering, “The EPC.”

She huffed out a surprised breath. “That’s what you’re still hung up on? I thought the Van Amee case was one of your success stories.”

Not really his. It was Gabe’s, Marcus’s, and the rest of their team’s. If it wasn’t for them, he had no doubt Bryson Van Amee would be dead, and Jacinto Rivera and Rorro Salazar would be in the wind somewhere, millions of dollars richer. Okay, technically Rorro was still in the wind, but the little shit wasn’t considered much of a threat since the supposed brains of the operation, Jacinto, was dead.

Except, Jacinto wasn’t known to have brains, was he?

Man, his head hurt.

Danny shut the laptop with a slap of his palm and rubbed his temple.

“Honey,” Leah soothed and laid her head on his shoulder. She smelled good, like her favorite raspberry body wash. “Let it go. That case was a win. I don’t understand why you’re stillobsessing over it a month later. This isn’t like you.”

“God, Lee, I know. But the whole thing stinks, and I can’t figure out where the smell is coming from.”

“Okay.” She scooted off his lap, grabbed the ottoman from in front of his easy chair across the room, and sat on it cross-legged so that she faced him. “Maybe you need a fresh nose.”

Danny smiled. “Have I shown you lately how much I love you?”

“No, but we can get to that later.” She gestured a c’mon motion with her hand. “Lay it out for me, G-man.”

“All right.” He opened the laptop and called up the Word file he’d been keeping since the end of the hostage situation. Then he laid it all out for her. Everything from the abduction of Bryson Van Amee in front of his apartment right on through to the rescue by Gabe and his men.

“Everything we know about Jacinto Rivera says he was a thug, plain and simple,” he told her. “He wasn’t smart. He couldn’t have masterminded something as sophisticated as rigging a limo with ether gas to knock Bryson unconscious. Someone had to have been pulling his strings, but according to the website I was reading, the EPC has denounced Jacinto for the ransom attempt and claims no responsibility.”

Which was not their modus operandi. And that was bugging him.

“They like people to know they are capable of snatching anybody from anywhere,” he continued. “Angel Rivera likes propagating that reputation, but yesterday, again, according to that site, he publicly disowned his remaining family.”

“Wait, wait.” Leah raised her hands to stop him. “‘His remaining family.’ Are you sure that’s what it said? You didn’t mistranslate?”

He opened the laptop, called up the website from the browser’s history, and reread the paragraph. “No, that’s exactly what it says.”

“Well, that’s an odd choice of words, don’t you think? I mean, wasn’t Jacinto his only brother?”

“Yeah, he was. Maybe it’s a cultural thing?” Danny mulled it over for a second, spinning his wedding band around on his finger. “No, wait, I think there was a sister…” He called up another file and scanned over the information. “Claudia Rivera. She’s been missing for ten years, presumed dead.”

Leah opened her mouth but froze before uttering a sound, and her eyes went huge behind her glasses. She scrambled off the ottoman and out of the room.

“Uh, Lee?”

She came back, flipping through an old baby name book they’d bought five years ago when they discovered they were expecting the twins.

“Jesus, you still have that thing?”

“It’s fun to look at. Besides,” she said and sent him a sly sideways smile. “You never know when we might need it again.”

“Oh, no.” He held up his hands. “We agreed to stop at three.”

“Actually, it was two, and the third was a surprise. I’m not entirely against a fourth, but it’ll have to be before I turn thirty-five.” With that, she turned her full attention to the book, leaving him sitting there catching flies with his mouth.

“Lee, c’mon, I’m getting too old to do the whole newborn thing again. The twins practically killed us, remember? You can’tdrop that bomb on me and expect?—”

She slapped the book down in front of him and pointed to a name. “Look. I found your bad smell.”

He picked up the book. Read the passage once. Twice. And—holy shit. He suddenly saw the whole case in a new light. “Yeah, baby, I think you did.”