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“Grab Olivia and Marielle too. We might as well have the whole team on this.”
“You got it. Are we all going to squeeze in here?”
“Yes.”
The door opened and shut—a soft thump through the phone’s speaker—as Trent went to gather the team. Having the conversation in Jake’s soundproofed office was the smart choice. Jake swept his office for listening devices weekly and ran a white noise machine at all times to prevent eavesdropping. Potomac Private Services’ entire facility was supposedly secure—although he had his doubts given the two attacks on his life in the past twenty-four hours. But nowhere on campus was more impenetrable than Jake’s personal office.
“Am I on speaker?” Jake asked.
“You are.”
“Does that mean Leilah Khan is with you?”
“Hi, Jake,” Leilah said.
“You’ve got a lot of people very worried, Leilah.”
“If you hadn’t tried to shut me out, maybe I’d have told you where I was going,” she countered.
“Leilah—”
“It’s done, Jake. Save your lecture.”
“You took a foolish, selfish, and unnecessary risk,” Jake said as if he hadn’t heard her.
Before Leilah could retort, Jake’s door opened and closed, and the rest of the team filed in.
“Ryan and Leilah are on the phone,” Jake told the others without preamble. “Chelsea was right; she took off to find him.”
“Jeez, sis,” Omar groused.
Ryan jumped in to steer the call away from Leilah and toward the files. “I’ve had a look at the files on Ahmadi’s drive. I assume you all have, too.”
“We have.”
“I can’t believe that pig had Leilah followed,” Olivia exclaimed, her anger palpable.
“It’s disgusting,” Ryan agreed, “but it might have saved our lives.”
“There is that,” Trent allowed.
Hearing Trent’s voice reminded Ryan to ask about the black truck. “Hey, Trent, have you gotten any updates about that truck that drove Keisha off the road?”
“Yeah, nothing good. When Jake called the police department this morning, Halloran mentioned they’d found a burned-out vehicle down in the hollow. So we went down there to see for ourselves.”
“Let me guess. It’s the truck that ran Keisha off the road.”
“Bingo. It’s been wiped clean of prints, and the forensics guys say any DNA evidence was probably rendered unusable by the fire—if not flat-out destroyed. A hell of a coincidence, isn’t it?”
“Mmm.” Nobody on the Potomac team believed in coincidences. “Did Halloran buy the story about the explosion being a training exercise?” Ryan asked. That had been worrying him.
“I don’t think so,” Jake said.
“But he pretended to,” Trent added.
“Good enough for me.”
“So what are your thoughts on the files Ahmadi gave you?” Omar asked.
