AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Lucas spun and headed for the stairs.
Remy followed.“What are you thinking?”
“Yeah, clue me in, will ya?”Felina hurried after the two men as they climbed the stairs to her apartment.
Richard was hard at work with a crowbar, pulling the trim away from the doorframe.
Lucas went straight to the bathroom.He remembered grabbing the jeans off the floor when he’d gone through her apartment, gathering a few things she might need until the latent print expert could get there to dust for fingerprints.
He bent low and searched the bathroom floor.
Felina squatted next to him.“What are we looking for?”
“I don’t know.Something small you might not have felt in your pocket.It could’ve fallen out when you took off your jeans.”Lucas lifted a towel off the floor, raised the bathmat and checked behind the toilet and found nothing.
He straightened and looked around the mess in the room.“Why would Gaither slide his hand into your pocket one second and shove you off the landing a moment later?”
“Do you think the headlights flashing scared him, and he shoved Felina in a knee-jerk reaction?”Remy suggested.
“Maybe,” Lucas said as he mentally retraced his steps in relation to the jeans Felina was wearing.“You didn’t take off the jeans in the bedroom and drop them in the bathroom?”
Felina shook her head.“No.They were exactly where I left them when you picked them up and shoved them into the pillowcase with my pillow.”
“The pillowcase,” he murmured and headed for the stairs leading into the shop.At the bottom of the stairs, he looked around.“Where did you put the pillow and blanket?”
“In the bathroom on the supply shelf,” Felina said, descending the stairs behind him.“Along with the other items you stuffed in it.”
He entered the bathroom, took the pillow down and pulled the pillow out of the case.
“Nothing.”
“Last night, I dumped the contents of the pillowcase onto the sleeping bag,” Felina reminded him.
“And shook the bag out this morning before I rolled it up and stashed it in the corner.”Lucas stared at the floor, littered with stems, leaves, bits of ribbon and pieces of Styrofoam bases.
“I guess now is as good a time as any to clean up after my mad dash to get things done this morning,” she said.
Felina pulled the broom and dustpan out of the bathroom and went to work, sweeping everything into a pile in the center of the floor.
While Lucas and Remy sifted through the pile, she bent low and swept beneath the workbenches lining the walls, moving buckets of flowers aside one at a time.
When she moved the bucket full of yellow roses, she found a tiny square piece of plastic.She bent to pick it up.It was smaller than a micro-SD card used in some cameras and reminded her of the SIM cards used in cell phones.“Here’s something that doesn’t belong to me.Is this what I think it is?”She turned toward the two men brushing dust off their hands.
Remy reached for the card.“It’s a nano card.”
“Like the ones used in cell phones?”she asked.
“Yes, among other things,” Lucas leaned over Remy’s hand.“And it’s small enough you might not have felt it in your pocket.”
“Holy hell.”Felina’s face drained of color.“Do you think it contains information people would kill for?”
“I don’t know,” Lucas said.“But we’re sure as hell going to find out.”He crossed to her computer and studied its ports.“We’re going to need a special device to read this card.”
“Let me take it to the boat factory,” Remy said.“Swede and Hank equipped us with just about every electronic device we could possibly use.”
Felina’s brow wrinkled.“At the boat factory?I thought they were making boats there again.”
“We are,” Remy said.“At least on the surface for the casual observer.We’ve created a southern regional headquarters of the Brotherhood Protectors.”
