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He pulled out the chair opposite her and sat down. “How are you?”
“Fine. Alive.”
He stared at her. “Why did you run when I came to the hospital?”
“Seriously? Someone had just tried to kill me and you showed up with a whole team. What was I supposed to do? Sit there and wait to see if it was going to happen again?”
Rutledge reared back and held up his hands. “You’re right. Sorry. I guess I was…a little heavy-handed. But Mac, I thought you trusted me.”
Did she trust him? A bit. “I trusted you to a point, but then Casper was involved with Owens, and I knew you were keeping secrets of your own. It didn’t seem prudent to trust you anymore.”
“What do you want?” Dane demanded.
Rutledge glared at him and then refocused on Mac. “Look, I need to go over stuff with you.”
“Like what?”
“The apartment. I found Owens’s locker contents on your desk. I took a team over to the apartment by Waikiki Beach, but it was empty.”
“Owens is dead. What did you expect to find?”
He shook his head. “No, I mean empty. Like there was nothing in it. Not one scrap of clothing, not one bit of food. Only the furniture was still there, and even then, everything had been vacuumed. There wasn’t one fingerprint anywhere.”
“What?” Mac stared at him. “Are you lying to me?”
“No, I swear it, Mac.”
She looked at Dane. He and Cain exchanged a look and Cain shrugged. “Someone cleaned it up.”
“No shit,” she said. “But who?”
Dane tapped his fingers on the table. “Had to be Owens’s team. It would take more than one person to clean a place that size in a short period of time.”
“Wait. You were in there, too?” Rutledge demanded.
Dane didn’t bother responding to the question. Instead, he asked, “Did you pull the security footage?”
“Yeah. It’s been erased. The whole night was gone.” Rutledge narrowed his eyes at Dane. “I assumed that was you guys.”
Cain shook his head. “We erased some of it but not all. Why would we bother?”
Rutledge counted off his fingers. “Oh, I don’t know, breaking and entering, theft. You didn’t have a warrant or permission to be there.”
“Those things don’t concern us,” Cain said. “At least not at this moment. What did you come here for?”
“I need to know what Mac knows. What you know.”
“And why would we tell you?” Dane asked.
“Because we’re not enemies. Because”—he ran a hand through his thinning hair—“I’m with NCIS.”
“The Naval Criminal Investigative Service? You’re a Navy cop?” asked Mac.What the hell?
He leaned in over the table. “My name is Dalton Sinclair, not Tom Rutledge. I’ve been with NCIS for four years. What I am about to tell you can go no further.” He stared at Dane and Cain. “I’m authorized to tell you because your admiral has sworn to my boss that you can keep your mouths shut.”
Both men nodded.
Mac was still trying to process what the hell was going on. “What the hell, Rut—Sinclair?”
