“Do I have twenty-five minutes so Bella and I can run over?”
“I’ll give you thirty-five if you’ll arrive in a better mood,” Pasco said.
“Smartass. I’ll be there in twenty-five, and I’ll still be pissy.”
I hung up and looked back at Cami, curled on to her side in the middle of my bed. For such a small woman, shewas quite the bed hog. And I didn’t mind one bit. If Ididtake the ten extra minutes, I could crawl back under the covers and wake her.
No, that wasn’t fair. At least one of us should be able to enjoy sleeping in on Saturday morning. I quietly pulled out running clothes and dressed, then took Bella downstairs for her breakfast. While she ate, I drank a glass of water, stuffed a power bar into my pocket, and jotted off a note to Cami telling her about my unexpected meeting. I promised to be back in plenty of time to take her to the clinic for her afternoon shift. I also included some suggestions for what we could do if I got back early.
Less than ten minutes after Pasco had so rudely woken me, Bella and I were trotting along the path through the woods. She still wasn’t cleared to go on a full-out run, so I kept the pace easy but invigorating. I was in a slightly better mood by the time I reached HQ.
I took Bella to the kitchen for a bowl of water and poured myself a cup of coffee. She had a drink, then curled onto the dog bed that Wheeler had bought for her. I was about to go searching for Pasco, but he found me first.
“Hey Rogers.” He slid into one of the kitchen chairs and set an e-tablet on the table in front of him. “Have a seat.”
“Shit.” I sank down into a chair. “Is someone dead?” It was a legitimate question in our line of work.
He shook his head. “Nothing like that. But it’s not good news.”
I took a sip of coffee, realized I’d left it black and bitter, and winced. But something about Pasco’s demeanor made me hesitant to get up and go to the fridge for milk. “You’re freaking me out, man.”
“Sorry.” He clasped his hands together and leaned forward. “Rogers, if an agent has information pertinent to anongoing HEAT investigation, they’re obligated to inform the agency.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Did you bring me in here at zero dark thirty for a review of the training manual?”
“Sorry,” he said again, and now he was starting to piss me off. Again. He seemed to realize it, because he talked faster. “Look, I can understand you might get distracted, especially when you’re in a new relationship. I just want to make sure that’s what this is, and not that you’re intentionally withholding information.”
I sat back in my chair, stunned. “The fuck are you blathering about, Pasco?”
His eyes went wide. “You seriously don’t know?”
I stopped being pissed off and started being concerned. “I seriously don’t know. Please enlighten me.”
“You haven’t seen this?” He tapped a button on the e-tablet and shoved it across the table at me.
I stared down at the screen at what looked like text messages to Cami. “What am I looking at?” I asked, but even as I said the words, my brain was solving the puzzle. “These are from Riker.”
“We were already monitoring his cell phone,” Pasco said, “and a few days ago, I traced a burner phone to him as well. Last night around six p.m., he used the burner to send those to Cami.”
“1800 hours,” I growled. We used military time at HEAT and civilians like Pasco sometimes slipped. I’d never once gotten angry about it before now. But of course, Pasco wasn’t the problem. “At 1800, I was manning the grill. Cami was talking to her sister on the phone.”
“The messages must have come in while she was on her call.”
I looked up at him. “Well, that explains it. She probablymissed them. I need to get back to her in case she sees them this morning and?—”
“Rogers, she saw the messages.” Pasco reached over and scrolled the tablet screen. “She responded back five minutes later. Which means?—”
“I know what it means.” Except it couldn’t really mean she was hiding things, keeping secrets from me, after I’d done so much to be able to share mine with her.
“Is there any chance she’s still in touch with Riker?” Pasco asked. “Other than these messages, I mean.”
“What, working with him?” My ire flew back to the forefront. “Not a fucking chance. Besides, does her response make it sound like they’re besties?”
“It doesn’t. But why wouldn’t she have told you?”
Well, that was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it? “You said yourself, people get distracted. I’m very distracting.”
I was grasping at straws. She’d had plenty of opportunities to tell me the truth. I’d even asked her if something was wrong. And then she’d lied to my face.
