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“I hate trackers,” Kala said with a sigh. “Talk about rude. And I went for the coffee.”
“Well, if you’d been a little earlier you would have noticed Kenzie slipping out,” Tristan said.
Cooper stopped and leaned against the bar. “Let’s look on the bright side. This could turn out to be a positive if we play it the right way. Lou doesn’t like this guy. Kenz can get close to him and figure out if he’s some generic douchebag or someone we should worry about.”
“Do you think her vagina will tell us?” Kala asked.
Kenzie sighed. “My heart will.”
Kala made a vomiting sound.
Cooper put a hand on his perfectly flat abs. “Normally I would tell Kala to be nicer, but I’m with her on this one. Kenz, you need to tap the brakes and hard.”
“I don’t see why. Tasha’s vagina has already broken this case wide open.” Kenzie turned on her side, propping her head on her hand with a completely unapologetic smile. “Think of what mine can do.”
Zach moved over to Kenzie and stared down at her. “I will pull you and stop this whole fucking op if I think you’re getting emotional about this guy.”
Tash was with him on this one. Her sister was a menace. “I’ll back Zach up, sister or not. It was a complete coincidence that Dare turned out to be the best new target we could find. I didn’t plan this.”
Lou looked up from her screen, the light casting across her face. “She really didn’t. She couldn’t have planned this. Though I’m starting to think the whole ‘oops, the dude who was supposed to meet with Oakley happened to have an accident on his way to the airport’ thing might not have been. A coincidence, that is.”
Oh, she knew when to follow Lou’s instincts.
“What’s got you interested?” Kala was suddenly focused again. She moved to Lou’s side, sliding onto the seat next to hers.
Tasha moved in, too, and Zach went back to the kitchen, pouring himself a mug of coffee. He always had a pot on.
Lou looked up, the lights from the computer shining on her round glasses, giving her a slightly ghostly look. Sometimes Tasha worried Lou would sink into the shadows and lose an essential part of herself, falling into a completely intellectual world. Tasha remembered a time when Lou had been a scared kid with no friends, valued mostly for her genius-level IQ.
“What do our records on Lance Middleton show about his connections to Oakley?” Lou asked.
Tasha had gone over and over the dossier Drake Radcliffe had sent them. “There is no connection except the fact that they travel in the same circles on a basic level. Oakley invests in a lot of the same medical research that the Nash Group does, and Lance is one of Nash’s representatives.”
Had they missed something?
“I was curious,” Lou began.
Zach whistled. “That always leads to something interesting.”
A wistful smile played over Cooper’s face. “Well, at least this time it probably won’t blow up like the time Lou decided to play around with chemicals.”
Lou frowned. “I was trying to show how chemicals react. I had no idea I was making mustard gas. I was fourteen.”
“I still think that’s what went wrong with Travis’s brain,” Kenzie quipped. Of all of them, Kenz was the only one who didn’t seem interested in what Lou had found out. Probably because she was still thinking of Brian and his dreamy eyes.
Sometimes she thought the twins had split down the middle, each of them taking more than their fair share of “parts.” Like Kala got all their rage, and Kenz all the dreamer. If you put them together, they might make one whole person.
“Please continue.” Tasha was rapidly discovering when their parents weren’t around, they all slid back into their kid roles, and that meant she had to keep things moving along.
“I found a bunch of pictures on Oakley’s socials,” Lou explained. “None feature Lance Middleton, but if you look carefully, he’s in the background of a couple of them. According to the intelligence the Agency sent us, they’re not close friends. So why was Middleton walking around in the background of a dinner Oakley threw for his father’s eightieth birthday?”
Tasha looked down and saw the picture Lou had brought up. It was of Oakley and an elderly man smiling for the camera, with family members at their sides. And in the background a man was walking behind the group. He had his head down, as though trying to be inconspicuous, but the picture was taken at an angle that made facial recognition possible. “We’re sure it’s him?”
Tristan moved in behind her. “Did you run it by my dad?”
Tristan’s father was one of the great innovators when it came to facial recognition technology. He and Tris’s other dad, along with several of their friends, had formed a company that found missing persons and aided in finding fugitives. Normally Tris would have immediately taken the new intel and gone to him, but like all the people he loved, Tristan was avoiding his parents, too.
