Page 57 of Deep Cover

After the screen went blank, they all returned to their tasks. Rivers focused on the inventory list but he needed to actually inspect some of the stores in person, especially his medical supplies.

He stole a glance at Caryssa. She was concentrating again, nibbling her lip, and just the sight of her made him want to grab her and drag her to his bed.

“Rorke.” Cannon’s gruff voice cut off that idea completely.

Rorke looked up with a twist of his lips that put the whole room on edge. “Cannon.”

Their CO gave him a long, loaded look. “What do you have on the base footage? Anything stand out about Bill’s delivery routes?”

“The cameras go dark before he hits any of our gates. That’s normal since there are no cameras on bases. The last known view is fairly old. It came from street camera footage a month before Echo’s last deployment. Bill was the driver.”

“Any passengers?”

“Negative.”

“You check the cars around him?”

“No one tailing the truck.”

Cannon nodded once, already moving on. “And the bomb. Any new developments on who sent it?”

“Still tracing it back to where it was originally shipped.”

“Keep at it.”

This time Rorke returned Cannon’s same flat look, charged with an undercurrent that had the whole team waiting for an explosion.

“Everybody get to work,” Cannon snapped.

Rivers pushed away from the table before he received his own loaded look. “I’m going to inventory the medical bay.”

Rome stood next. “I’ve got the weapons locker.”

Several others followed Rivers, scattering in the direction of their assignments. As he walked out, he sent one last glance at Caryssa over his shoulder. Her fingers were glued to her keyboard and she had her face turned aside, preventing him from reading her face.

He walked to the medical bay slower than he needed to, replaying the flinch he’d seen and her response when he asked if she knew the agent. Everything added up to a story he had no right to feel jealous about but couldn’t stop constructing anyway.

He wanted to know what that agent meant to her. Whether that grimace had been grief for a colleague or grief for…more.

He pushed through the medical bay door and started pulling supplies off shelves without really seeing them, sinking into the mundane motion of counting and sorting while his head kept circling the same unanswerable question.

Later, he told himself again, firmer this time. When it was just the two of them.

* * * * *

Caryssa had cracked entire federal cases faster than she was uncovering the identity of whoever had been pulling Bill’s strings.

She sat elbow to elbow with Rorke, two screens between them. They’d been scrubbing through hours of pulled footage. At this point, she’d looked through so many frames of trucks rolling through streets that they were all blurring together.

But it was apparent by the third hour that a pattern was starting to emerge.

Caryssa and Rorke built two timelines—Bill’s delivery runs and every known appearance of a weapon stolen from Echo. When they laid one over the other, things became clearer.

Bill passed through an area. Days or weeks later, some of the weapons surfaced nearby.

They worked backward through the rest of his routes, and the correlations kept coming.

“There.” Rorke tapped the screen again, freezing another frame. “Same truck. The shipment ID number doesn’t correspond to any order in the books.”