Page 60 of Deep Cover

Caryssa was already reaching for her whiteboard. “Yes. And that tells us whoever chose Ruiz had only an old photo of him to copy.”

She faced her board. “What do we know about our guy? He doesn’t care if he’s recognized. Uses lookalikes. He has access to old photos of at least two Navy personnel—and men who look close enough to pass as their doubles.” She paused, tapping the end of the marker thoughtfully against the board. “He’s not hiding his face. That either means he’s arrogant…or he doesn’t think it matters if we see him.”

“Because we’re not seeing him,” Reid said. “We’re seeing somebody else’s identity.”

Caryssa poised the marker over the board. “O, any chance the footage was altered? Another face laid over his?”

“It’s possible. I’ll check.”

“Or he’s finding men who already look close enough.” She tapped Ruiz’s old military photo. “The world is full of doppelgängers. Find the right one, make a few changes, and bad surveillance footage does the rest.”

She stared at the two versions of Ruiz.

“But whoever chose him was working from this.” She tapped the older photo again. “Not the man Ruiz is now. He didn’t know about the extra muscle or the scar.”

Her marker moved across the board.

“And we saw the same thing with the man blamed for Phillip’s murder.”

There it was.

“Both identities belong to former military. Both were copied from older versions of the men.” She turned toward Rorke. “We need to find where their service histories intersect. Whoever’s doing this may have known them then.”

She looked up and caught Reid watching her, unmistakable pride in his expression.

She made herself look away, shaken by it.

He wasn’t jumping in to take over the way so many men in her career had, unable to sit back and let a woman run the show. Reid let her shine.

Emotion bloomed in her chest and spread lower into her stomach. She filed the feeling away to examine later because right now the case needed her more than her heart did.

She blinked down at the board. “We’re missing one person.”

Rorke looked over.

“The voice.” She tapped the notes from her interviews with Stina and Jolie. “Both women heard him at Antonio’s. Neither could identify him, but they remembered the voice. Bill’s phone connects him to the same restaurant.”

“You think Bill was the man they heard?”

“Maybe. Or Bill knew him.” She looked between the two sets of notes. “Either way, Doyle sent me here because of that connection, and we still haven’t explained it.”

Everyone fell silent as they processed this.

She pointed to the board again. “We also need concrete evidence that Bill was around Echo during the time between when the team deployed and Cannon’s team arrived to empty the armory.”

Cannon shook his head. “We already went down that road. No cameras on base, and nothing usable from the streets around it.”

Rorke sat forward. “There might be another way.”

Cannon looked at him.

“Pentagon imagery.”

“What imagery?”

Rorke paused. “Satellite surveillance. There’s an archived feed on certain military assets.”

Cannon’s expression hardened. “Echo?”