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“I know you won’t, and that’s not just because you’re one of the best-trained agents I’ve got.” Cap eased back in his chair, his irritation melding into a thoughtful expression. “You know, I’ve seen other PSI staff go off the deep end during cases for all sorts of reasons, but I never thought you’d be one of them. Guess you’re human, after all.”
“Don’t let it get around,” I muttered, scowling. “And I’m not off the deep end. I know exactly what I’m doing.”
“Famous last words,” came the laconic reply. “Okay, here’s what’s going to happen. Kythe will send you the compiled list of pickup truck owners we’ve photographed coming in and out of HEG over the past few days. You can start profiling—”
“Wait,” I said, as twin levels of confusion and tension sprinted inside me, with no clear winner in sight. “The list of pickup owners isn’t from HEG’s roster of members? That would be a more complete overview, rather than just taking photos of random trucks going in and out of HEG.”
“Yeah, no shit, but when asked for the roster of official members, HEG told us to go jump.”
Fuck. “You’re kidding.”
“I’m not known as a kidder.”
“Eden’s safety is at stake here.”
“You think we didn’t tell them that? I even got on the horn and spoke directly to her old man and explained the situation. He said he was sorry beyond words—direct quote right there—but that the privacy of HEG’s members was sacrosanct. Funny how that slippery fuck likes to pull out religious-sounding words when describing HEG’s rules he arbitrarily pulls out of his ass, don’t you think?”
“It’s because he thinks his word is equal to that of God’s, and it pretty much is when he’s in his own little kingdom.” But my response was absent as new possibilities began to take shape in my head. And the shape I was seeing was so damn ugly I could only hope I was wrong. “When did you speak to Tru Steadfast?”
“Day before yesterday. Right after we just missed the perp at the restaurant.”
“And the next morning Eden’s so-called brother from another mother, Kelsey Crosby, shows up to get a front-row view of what’s being installed in her house.”
Cap frowned. “Crosby? HEG’s lawyer? You think he’s involved?”
“I think that after you talked with Truman Steadfast, Tru called on his lapdog Crosby to see what was happening with his daughter. Crosby and Eden had their heads together talking up a storm yesterday in her dining room… which I believe was already wired with camera and sound at that point, yes?”
“It’d be unethical to eavesdrop on our client, but when she talks to someone at HEG—and we suspect her attacker is from HEG—all bets are off. Find out what Crosby had to say,” Cap decided, then glanced at Mary Jane when she came in with a couple mugs of coffee. “And keep me updated on the profiles you make of the pickup owners.”
I nodded and left before anything more could be said, because what I had to do next fell into the category of “Whatever Cap didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.”
The communications hub was at the center of PSI, so it took me a minute to navigate there. I wasn’t sure who was in that early, but I lucked out. I hit the door at a good clip and watched with great satisfaction as my target, seated in a swivel chair in front of a wall of active monitors, hopped to his feet like he’d been fucking launched.
“You can’t lay a finger on me,” Kythe announced, as if the words had been bottled up inside him just waiting to come out. One glance at the bank of monitors showed me a view of the hall outside, so I knew in that moment Kythe had seen my approach and realized he was in a world of trouble.Good. “You’ll get yourself fired.”
“You’re not as indispensable as you think, Kythe,” I said softly, not stopping my roll. The fear in his eyes made my whole damn morning. “A profiler like me, with my track record, is worth their weight in gold, dumbass. But you? Asshole hackers are a dime a dozen. The reason Cap hired you was because you were here in Chicago. That’s all. You’re not special. You never have been, never will be, and that’s why you act out—you keep trying to prove that you’re the shit, when really you’re just a legend in your own mind.” When I reached him, I grabbed him by the lapels of the flannel shirt he wore over a Tetris T-shirt and backed him up into a wall. Jesus, even his clothes were a cliché. “You keep trying to prove your amazingness to me, because deep down you’ve known from the beginning that I see the real you, and what I see is that you’re a fuckingnothing, dickhead. A zero. And just like every other zero in the world, you do all you can to fuck up other people’s lives just so you can feel elevated. Well, guess what, zero? Your shit way of elevating yourself is about to bite you in the ass. And I won’t even have to lay a finger on you to make it happen.” With that, I let him go.
He semi-slumped against the wall like he’d just managed to make his knees work. “What are you going to do?”
The fear in his voice was a goddamn delight. “You mean right now? This very fucking minute? Right now I’m going to tell you to put your ass in that chair and pull up the video and audio from the Steadfast home yesterday. Dining room, about half past eleven in the morning. We need to know what Eden’s guest said to her. Then I need you to send me the list you’ve compiled of pickup truck owners so I can get to work on creating profiles.”
He stumbled over his own feet, he moved so fast to get in his chair. “I meant, what are you going to do tome?”
“You already did it to yourself, asshole, in the worst possible way. Focus,” I admonished when he opened up his noise hole to tell me shit that didn’t matter. By the end of the day, this idiot child would be long gone. “Steadfast home. Dining room. Eleven-thirty AM. Go.”
Within about a minute the footage was up and spilling across a monitor directly in front of me. Eden was as steadfast as her name in her determination to stick with PSI, and clearly her confidence in our ability to protect her was rock-solid. But she was too close to Kels to see what I saw—a man trying to pry her away from the life she’d struggled so hard to build, because that was what his master wanted.
Then my ears pricked up at Crosby’s next words.
“He could find outeverything. Everything about your dad, HEG… Shit, he could find out aboutyou. Can’t you see that?”
What the hell was that about?
One thing was certain. Kelsey Crosby obviously had a leash around his neck, and the person yanking at the other end of it was Truman Steadfast. I had hope that Eden could see it—she’d called Crosby out on how he knew all about her so-called private conversation with her father—but it was clear she still trusted the man she calledbrother.
“Clip this video from the moment Kelsey Crosby shows up to the point he leaves, and send it to Cap. I want him to hear Eden’s theory that there might be two stalkers instead of one.” I turned it all over in my head, trying to make the pieces fit. One thing was certain—there was a shit-ton of things I needed to know before I made my next move. “But before you do that, I need you to do a search on a murder-suicide approximately twenty years ago in or around Gobbler Gulch, Kentucky. Victim was a female, probably in her late twenties or early thirties. She would have left behind a daughter, age eight.”
Kythe glanced nervously at his keyboard. “It’ll take some time—”
