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Luke
“If we can control the press conference venue and have eyes on all points of entry, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.” Seated at PSI’s main conference table with Steele, Nix and me, Cap glanced down at the notes he’d taken, clearly looking for chinks in the proverbial armor. “I want at least two egress plans within the hour, Steele. We’ll then need to drill the protectee on what those plans are, since she’s going to be basically on her own up on a dais during the presser. I want her to know where to go should there be a need for her to evac ASAP.” He glanced over at Steele seated to his left. “Do we have a floorplan yet for the area where the hospital wants to hold this presser?”
Steele nodded. “I just received it, so as soon as I can I’ll send it on to you and the rest of the team. I did take a quick glance at it before coming in here. Not surprisingly, the venue’s on the ground floor, with lots of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking some sort of courtyard area that can be accessed from the hospital’s southern parking lot. Not great, but we’ve covered worse.”
“When is this presser scheduled?”
“Noon tomorrow.” Steele glanced at his phone just to make sure. “We’ve already coordinated with the hospital’s security staff. I’ve been assured they’ll bring in more bodies to patrol the location, and they’re allowing us access to their CCTV for that area and all the parking lots. We should be ready to go.”
“Famous last words.” I couldn’t have stopped the phrase from coming out of my mouth if my life depended on it, but I didn’t give a shit. “Eden is going to be up there in front of the whole world, poking a rabid bear with a short stick, and no one’s going to be within twenty feet of her. That’s a recipe for disaster if I’ve ever heard one.”
Cap, the fucker, didn’t even bother to look my way. “At this point, you all need to know that Mary Jane had a little chat with Cobee Bruno. Remember, he’s the head groundskeeper at HEG who turned up having a bunch of BB pellets lodged in a neat little grouping under his skin.”
“At the back of his neck, which he claimed he did to himself while loading a BB gun.” Nix didn’t bother to hide his grin. “A real brain trust, he is.”
Cap lifted a brow in acknowledgment. “Brain trust or not, Mary Jane managed to wheedle some fun facts out of him. For starters, Bruno sees Tru Steadfast as a surrogate father, in much the same way that Kelsey Crosby views Tru. According to Bruno, he followed Steadfast’s orders to stalk Eden Steadfast, quote,for the greater good.”
Steele’s brows shot up. “How’d she manage that?”
Cap allowed a faint, proud-papa smile. “Cornered him at his place and told him he had a choice—talk to her, a private-sector security agent, or the cops once she turned his ass in. He made the right decision.”
“For the greater good?” I repeated, frowning as I turned that unusual phrase over in my head. “What did Cobee Bruno mean by that?”
“Apparently that’s an exact quote from Tru Steadfast, and Bruno didn’t ask what Daddy Dearest meant at the time. Which underscores what you said, Steele—Bruno’s not all that bright. He wasn’t even sure how to scare his target, so Steadfast literally gave him step-by-step instructions on how to do it.”
“Scaring his own daughter,” Nix muttered, shaking his head in a disgust I could relate to. “What a piece of shit.”
Cap nodded. Clearly he could relate as well. “Bruno was fine with bringing a daily dose of terror into Eden Steadfast’s life, until one night she fought back by putting a bunch of pellets in his hide.”
“At this point, I feel we should all take a moment to tip our hat in solemn respect for Eden Steadfast’s sharpshooting abilities,” Steele put in, raising his hand. “It’s hard to get a grouping on anything when you’re running, but she hit this guy in the same area four times while full-tilt sprinting down a driveway in nothing but pajamas. If Echo ever gets on the DL list, we should hire her as a backup sniper.”
“She might be a dead-eye, but she’s incapable of shooting actual bullets at another human being,” I said, smiling faintly. “But give her a BB gun with a velocity of seven-hundred feet-per-second or greater, and watch the hell out.”
“Because our protectee is an excellent shot, what happened after Bruno slashed her tires was just like what Luke suspected,” Cap drawled, giving me a nod. “That was the moment when Cobee Bruno realized Eden Steadfast was way too dangerous to fuck around with, so he jumped ship.”
“That was a month and a half ago.” Nix leaned his forearms on the table, as if getting closer to Cap would somehow make him understand things better. “If Bruno hasn’t been stalking Eden all this time, who has?”
“That’s the million-dollar question.” Cap adjusted his horn-rimmed glasses and flipped a page on his notebook. “According to Mary Jane, Bruno felt bad about letting the old man down, so he did what any boneheaded idiot would do, and told the entire groundskeeping staff about his sad situation. It seems he got it into his head that if he could find a volunteer to replace him as our protectee’s stalker, he wouldn’t be letting his great lord and savior, Tru Steadfast, down. Sadly for us, no one showed any interest in being Creeper 2.0, or at least they didn’t step forward at that point. But someone obviously did take Bruno up on the offer. We just don’t know who.”
Like Nix, I leaned forward. “How many people are on the groundskeeping staff?”
“Thirty-five, including everyone who maintains the teen shelters in the surrounding states. Also of note, every single one of these employees came to HEG through the New Hope Teen Shelter system. And lastly, just to ruin your day, every single one of these workers have access to a fleet of dark pickup trucks HEG provides for its groundskeeping staff.”
“Fuck,” I muttered, trying not to lock my jaw in frustration. “There goes my work on the profiles for all the pickup truck owners affiliated with HEG. It could be any one of those employees.”
Cap nodded. “Not only have we handed this information over to the police, I’ve also put some of our tech guys onto the task of cross-referencing those names with the times when we know Eden and her father were harassed here in Chicago, as well as finding out which of these people owns a pickup truck or had access to one. Of course we’re down one hacker,” he added with a meaningful glance at me, “and he happened to be the best at mining information, so we’re moving much more slowly on that than usual.”
“We’re better off without Crichton,” Steele put in when I refused to rise to the bait. “He was a disruptive prick from the get-go. I’m glad he’s gone.”
“Same,” Nix said, raising his hand. “The way he kept trying to shit on various members of the team, Luke in particular, was pure dumbassery. Our job is hard enough without someone tearing into team unity.”
Swear to Christ, I loved my team.
Cap tilted his head in acknowledgment. “We still have a couple techs available to us, so hopefully we can narrow our list of thirty-five suspects down to that one person who drives a pickup and was in town during the times the Steadfasts were harassed.”
“Do our tech guys understand we’re on a serious time-crunch here?” I wanted to know, trying not to scowl. “We need a name, and we need it before noon tomorrow, when that fucking press conference takes place. There’s nothing more important than that.”
“If that’s all,” Cap said, neatly closing his notebook, “you’re dismissed. Luke, hang back for a moment, please.”
