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Chapter Nine
Jo
“This just doesn’t makeany sense,” I grumble, peering at a half-dozen screens. A noise at the door alerts me, and I look up to see Mo walking in through the door to my surveillance room. She remained in the garage after we arrived home at my request, performing routine checks of the cars and external security footage while Quinn and I came inside to see what other intimate footage may have been swiped. I love Mo like family, but that doesn’t mean I want her to see me getting railed against the wall.
Now she steps inside the room and Quinn’s accusatory words bait me. Stop relying on your data. My data says that Mo’s one of the most trustworthy people on my small staff, so does my gut…but she’s also been my closest confidante and primary bodyguard for years, now. Could she have betrayed me?
“Where’s Quinn?” she asks, scanning the room and apparently oblivious to my suspicions. She’s changed out of her zoot suit and donned her standard attire of sleek black pants and a black knit top. I think about the small man in the ski mask, and my worries mount. I’d assumed it was a man, but Mo is strong, tough and wiry—and not voluptuously built. Could she pass as a man in a ski mask?
“In the library with Mary,” I say. “Doc’s on his way.” It won’t do me any good to lie. Quinn’s clearly visible on one of the screens, watched over by my housekeeper whom I rousted from her quarters to babysit the clearly woozy Quinn. The housekeeper and her handyman husband are the only two employees in the brownstone, holdovers from when my father held this house, and I’ve known them all my lives. I don’t keep full-time security other than Mo. That’s why I have my million-dollar system, and I like my privacy. Now I’m beginning to rethink that plan.
I’m beginning to rethink a lot of things.
“He hurt bad?”
I shake my head. “Not from the looks of it, but there was something on the knife, we think. Low-grade tranquilizer of some kind. We’ll run a tox screen with the on-call since he refuses to leave the house.”
“I don’t blame him. This bastard is a sneaky little fuck. I hope Quinn caps his ass.”
That doesn’t sound like a wise comment, if Mo is the mole, but I don’t know what to believe anymore. “The attacker could be a female,” I offer.
“Could. Doesn’t have the hips of most females though, while his shoulders are the biggest thing on him. Which isn’t saying much.” Mo’s gaze is jumping from screen to screen as she tracks the guy’s movements through the house, and I see what she means. Quinn’s assailant moves like a man, not a woman, but Mo sounds credibly perplexed as she stares at him. “This guy is a tiny fuck, isn’t he,” she mutters. “How’d he get around, the ductwork?”
I snort. “Well, if he climbed to the roof and came in through an upper window, maybe one we don’t have wired up, he could have worked his way through the attic. Nothing up there but storage, and we don’t pick him up until here.” I gesture to one of the screens on the top row and Mo’s gaze settles on it. The timestamp indicates we were already in the house at that point, and I reconsider Mo’s involvement. If she were in cahoots with the mole, she wouldn’t have set him in motion while we were onsite, she would have told him to hang tight, wait until the coast was clear. I might never have seen this footage if I hadn’t had a reason to look at the upper floors.
I breathe a tiny sigh of relief. Mo can’t be involved. But if she isn’t…who is? There’s never been a scrap of video content physically removed from my servers before the sex footage. And Quinn’s right, this place is locked down tight. I look around the room, and as always, it’s pristine. Who could have gotten in—and then gotten out again?
I switch the cameras to the lower floors, more for due diligence than curiosity—then frown. There’s no sign of the guy on the first floor, where the computer room is. It’s like he was never here at all.
My head starts to pound. Could tonight’s intruder seriously have no connection to the mole? Is that even possible?
No…no. It can’t be a coincidence.
“I’m going to go do a search of the upper floors, see if he got sloppy,” Mo says. “Is Geno awake?”
“Mary’s with Quinn, so maybe,” I say, gesturing to the screen that shows the library. A man in a suit is there now, with a briefcase. The on-call doc for the Alliance, since my on-call insisted on calling him in instead of tending to Quinn himself. Regardless who treats him, if Quinn was poisoned, we’ll know it pretty quickly. “While you’re at it, take one of the laptops that’s patched into the data analysis, and hand it off to Quinn.”
“Will do,” Mo says. She exits, and I watch her go on the screens, something about our conversation nagging at me. What did she say that made my nerves prickle with awareness, like some clue I missed? I glance at the data analysis and scowl—there are no hits yet among the enforcers who have a match for our small mystery man’s gait and size and gestures. There needs to be a hit for any of this to make sense!
I lean back in my chair, letting my gaze roam around the room again as my mind works furiously. There’s only one way into this room, and it’s a pass-coded door. There are no windows of any kind. The room is kept refrigerated through a complex air conditioning system that I updated a year ago at considerable cost. That upgrade required all sorts of permits given the age of the building. It’d been a nightmare install, down to the large vent that even now is keeping the room and its delicate servers positively arctic, but Mary’s husband Geno had been a lifesaver, producing all the old architectural drawings to show what could be altered where, to accommodate the new equipment…
I stiffen, calling up the image of the old, wiry handyman, white-haired and fit, whose boundless energy and larger than life personality always drew attention away from his diminutive stature. How’d he get around, the ductwork?
“No…” I whisper, sitting up straight. I whip my attention back to the servers—
And never see the blow coming until the metal club connects with my temple, and everything goes black.
