Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 63763 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 319(@200wpm)___ 255(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 63763 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 319(@200wpm)___ 255(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
“Cipher,” she muttered, irritation flashing beneath her concern. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“Someone searched your files after Nina was rescued.” I opened the secured room door, moved her inside and over to one of the plastic chairs. “You stay here until I clear every route around you.”
Her face lost color, but she lowered herself into the chair without arguing about whether the threat was real. My thumb moved once along the soft skin below her lower lip before I heard Raines enter the room behind me.
The sheriff looked from my hand on his daughter to her pale face, then to mine. Something dark shifted behind his eyes, but he had enough discipline to prioritize the threat. I stood and turned toward him. “I need employee-garage footage starting from Tuesday night, every badge event, and the vehicle-access log.”
Raines’s jaw tightened. “Why Tuesday?”
“That’s when the first search happened and when somebody could’ve known Bex was still here completing statements.” I glanced back at her as she folded both hands in her lap to hide the slight tremor moving through them. “No one enters this room without you or me.”
“Treating me like a prisoner?” Bex’s tone carried more nerves than rebellion.
“No. But you’re the reason somebody’s about to learn that keeping them alive doesn’t mean leaving them whole.” I watched a little spark of heat flare despite the fear in her eyes, which probably said something unhealthy about both of us–-but fuck all if I cared. I couldn’t act on it now though, because her safety would always be my top priority. “Stay put.”
“I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that,” Raines muttered.
I shrugged. “Let’s go.”
Raines led me through an interior corridor to the small security office overlooking the employee garage. I barked at the deputy assigned to the room to pull up Tuesday’s footage. I watched it sped up like a time lapse until I spotted eleven minutes between ten seventeen and ten twenty-eight that showed a vehicle reversing beneath the same flickering light twice. I slowed it down and watched it twice more. The loop was clean enough to fool someone watching in real time, but a shadow crossing the far wall repeated at the exact frame and a moth struck the camera housing in an identical pattern six minutes apart.
“There.” I slowed the sequence and marked the beginning of the loop. “Somebody must have replaced the live feed while she was inside.”
Raines leaned toward the monitor, anger deepening the lines around his mouth. “The garage requires a damn department badge.”
“Or a cloned credential.” I checked the access log and found three entries during the loop, all belonging to deputies whose locations elsewhere in the building were independently confirmed. “None of these people opened that door. Whoever went in used an identifier the system expected and counted on the footage protecting him.”
We entered the garage through the internal stairwell, where Bex’s compact SUV sat beneath fluorescent lights near the far wall. I circled it once before opening the forensic case I’d brought from Black Castle and sweeping the exterior for active radio signals. A magnetic-field scan beneath the rear quarter revealed a hardwired unit tucked above the chassis where an ordinary mechanic might never notice it.
I rolled beneath the vehicle, cut enough tape to expose the casing, and found a commercial tracking module wired directly into the rear-light circuit. It wasn’t a cheap unit. It could wake with the ignition, sleep when the vehicle stopped, and store movement history until it reached a network capable of receiving the upload.
“Son of a bitch,” Raines muttered above me.
I cloned the device memory through an isolated reader, but I left the tracker physically in place until one of my people could come collect the vehicle.
We headed back to Raines’s office and went over the stored history. It began Tuesday night, several hours after Nina’s rescue. It contained Bex’s route from the department to her father’s house, the drive back for Wednesday’s shift, her usual coffee stop, and the return home afterward. Nothing predated the silent call, which confirmed the person behind it hadn’t been watching her at random or harboring some older fixation.
“They started tracking her because she saved Nina.” The sheriff’s voice was quiet enough to sound worse than anger.
“Yeah.” I stared at the route map and imagined someone sitting behind a screen while Bex drove alone, learning when she left her father’s house and where she stopped every morning. “And whoever installed this had physical access to the garage or enough knowledge to copy a badge.”
I called Black Castle’s secure-transport division, and Wrangler answered before the second ring, the low mechanical noise behind him suggesting he was already inside one of his garages. “Need an enclosed transporter at the sheriff’s department, no external markings. Vehicle needs a complete sweep.”
“How soon?”
“Now.”
“I’ll have both moving in five.”