“Not a perfect plan,” he surmised. “But not a bad one. What does it say about the kidnappers?”
She scowled. “They’re smart.”
“My contact at TPD said your car was damaged, but not destroyed. The explosives were placed beneath the engine, but not close to the gas tank.”
“What? Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“Because your car is still toast,” he said. “They haven’t finished their tests yet, but the bomb squad said whatever they used wasn’t high grade. It was more like high-powered fireworks.”
Marisela’s eyes narrowed. “Fireworks? Seems like a cheap option.”
“Or an easy one. Means they might have been in a hurry. Or that they wanted to stop you, but not kill you. Maybe they’re rank amateurs with no access to the real shit.”
She slumped against the wall, gingerly tilting her head back. Instead of retrieving her sister for a triumphant Christmas surprise, she was facing the prospect of telling her that Belinda had been kidnapped out of her care. Her only hope for help was him, and despite the dire circumstances, he couldn’t keep his mind off of how great she filled out her snug turtleneck sweater.
“What if I don’t find her in time?” she asked, her voice quaking with the kind of desperation he’d heard from her only once—a long, long time ago. “What if they hurt her, Frankie? I’ll never forgive myself.”
She turned so that her forehead was flush with the metal elevator doors. He glanced up at the lighted numbers above her, but the car was still motionless. He wiped a bead of sweat off his forehead, then jabbed at the button, as if moving the lift would somehow ease her pain.
Of course, the damned thing didn’t move. He cursed and then spun around, desperate to find the stairwell even though five minutes ago, he’d known its precise location. Frankie had never needed to fix anything for Marisela. It had usually been the other way around. But now she needed him—and he didn’t know what the hell else he could do.
Chapter Ten
Marisela gave herself one full minute to pull her shit together. The elevator would arrive sooner rather than later, judging by the fact that the chick in the short skirt had lost her panties before she got out of the car and the carbón who’d brought her home had had a hard on the size of a salami. Wouldn’t take them long to get their business done and then she and Frankie would plunge into the job of finding her sister and getting her—and her baby—home alive.
Using the app on her phone, she timed her pity party, not risking one extra second. If she went too short, the pent-up frustration smoldering in her bloodstream might consume her. If she went too long, she’d be left with nothing but cinders and ash. She indulged her helplessness until the buzzer sounded and then she slammed the stupid elevator button so hard, she jammed her knuckle.
She cursed, but the machinery cooperated; the gears moaning as the car descended. While she waited, she re-played the message that had come in earlier from her mother, the one she hadn’t had the heart to delete. Aida had gone on and on about how grateful she was for the luxurious hotel stay Marisela had arranged, but she threw in a few jabs about not being home to supervise her cooks at the restaurant on Christmas Eve.
Her heart eased as her mother prattled about how the Morales family had been supplying food for Noche Buena for a generation and how the cooks couldn’t possibly prepare the traditional Cuban Christmas Eve menu without supervision. Marisela knew for a fact that each of them had been soaking black beans and roasting pigs since they were wearing short pants and running around the beaches of Havana, and yet, she listened, drinking in her mother’s every nervous word, filling her chest with the warmth of normalcy even as the heat of the stuffy parking garage caused a sheen of sweat to form at her nape.
This was some Christmas. No cold. No snow. No family. No guarantee that their family would ever be together again, if she let herself think of Belinda as gone forever, which she wouldn’t. For the first time, Belinda’s Asperger’s might work to their advantage. Though the syndrome manifested in different ways for different people, for Belinda, it dulled her emotions—and right now, knowing her sister likely wasn’t as terrified or lost as anyone else might be in the same circumstances gave her comfort.
It wasn’t much, but she’d take what she could get.
“Hey,” Frankie said, sliding his hand across her shoulder as they walked inside the lift. “You okay?”
He laced his fingers into her hair, then tugged her toward him so that she could lay her cheek on his chest. A tightness pulled between her breast bone—a sharp pang she couldn’t allow herself to feel—not until Belinda was back home, where she’d never fit in, but always belonged.
She pulled away. “I’m fine.”
“You were attacked. Your pregnant sister was kidnapped and your best friend nearly blown up. It’s okay to be upset, vidita, even if just for a minute.”
“I don’t get upset.”
“No, you get pissed,” he said, his gaze infuriatingly compassionate. “But you’re not even that.”
She smacked him in the chest, hard, as she pushed away. “You can’t read me all the time, Frankie. I’m so angry, I could explode and take out this entire building. But I can’t let it out. Not until I have those bastards within striking distance.”
He had the good sense to drop the topic. They rode up to his floor—the fifth—in silence, both of them actively ignoring the smell of sex and sweat captured by the stagnant air. Díos mío, Marisela would have loved to lose herself in the mindlessness of a good fuck right now, but she couldn’t, not even if it cleared her head. She couldn’t take a chance that even a short distraction would result in Belinda staying with her kidnappers one more minute.
Once upstairs, Frankie insisted they eat, so they broke into the plastic containers filled with cold chicken and rice he’d swiped from his mother’s house and popped open cans of caffeine-rich sodas while Marisela made calls to various Titan offices on the off-chance someone had not abided by the company order that everyone go home for the holidays.
She got nothing but voicemail.
Frankie booted up his laptop and asked Marisela for the name of Belinda’s company.
“Pro-tech or Protech or Pro Tech, two words,” she answered.
He arched a brow. “You don’t know?”
“As you so sweetly pointed out, we weren’t exactly close.”
They found the right website and with skills that forced Marisela to step back, literally, and re-assess Frankie’s usefulness, he breached the company firewall and entered the employee directory.
“How’d you do that?” she asked.
His grin lifted higher on the right than the left, bringing the dimple on his cheek into sharp relief. “I may not have been a Titan employee for long, vidita, but I paid attention. Especially once I realized I would need skills beyond breaking bones to make it on my own.”
“I’m impressed.”
“Don’t be,” he said. “I used a very basic encryption sequence to break through. They must not care that their employee roster can be accessed.”
“Think that means they’re stupid or that they’re not working on anything top secret?”
He shrugged, but she could tell he was leaning toward the latter. Pro-Tech, two words with a hyphen, was a computer software developer. Even though their main focus seemed to be video gaming technology, their security should have been top-notch. If Frankie had accessed the information so easily, it was because they didn’t care about covering it up.
“Are there pictures?”
He clicked, typed and scrolled. “Yea. By department.”
“Find Belinda.”
She leaned down and watched, fascinating by the speed and accuracy of his fingers on the keyboard. She’d always known Frankie was good with his hands, but his typing and expertise turned her on more than it should. Maybe she was just tired. Maybe she was on emotional overload. Maybe she just wanted this whole mess to be over so she could go back to being Frankie�
�s fuckbuddy rather than dragging her into memories of their brief, but spectacular pairing as partners before he’d left Titan to go out on his own.
“Here she is,” he said as photos of two dozen analysts in four rows appeared on his screen, her sister practically dead center.
She wasn’t smiling. She stared at the camera with her regular, bored expression, as if the activities in her head were infinitely more interesting than anything she might see with her eyes. Marisela supposed her sister’s brain was more exciting than most people’s lives, especially her own—until, of course, she’d gone and snagged herself a lover.
“¿Puedo sentarme?” she asked.
Frankie got up and gestured for her to sit. She leaned in close, examining every male face, scrutinizing every pair of male eyes.
“What are you looking for?”
“Not what. Who.”
“Okay, who are you looking for?”
She threw an incredulous look over her shoulder. “The baby-daddy. Do you have tape?”
“Tape?”
“Scotch-tape. You know, the long strips of plastic that are sticky on one side? I know you’re all master of the computer now, but I prefer to kick it old school. I’m going to eliminate suspects, one by one.”
Frankie padded over to his desk, giving Marisela a chance to scan the room and measure the man against his personal space. The apartment was large, but sparse, which she expected, but the few furnishings he had picked were sleek and modern and stylish. She’d never imagined Frankie with anything other than hand-me-downs and thrift store treasures. That’s how they’d both grown up. Even when she’d bought her parents a brand new house, she’d trolled estate sales and consignment shops to find nice, pre-owned stuff to put inside.
Unlike Marisela, who couldn’t shake the fear that she could fuck up and lose everything at any moment, Frankie embraced his new life. She respected his confidence, but it widened the gulf between them. Day by day, moment by moment, they moved in circles that spun in different worlds and didn’t intersect.
But he was here for her now, just like she would be if one of his siblings had gone missing without a trace.
“Here,” he said, tossed her the tape she’d requested before he dragged a chair beside her. He sipped his cola while she eliminated suspects one by one.
“The other women are out of the question,” she declared, tearing three strips of tape off the roll and pasting them over the female faces.
Frankie winced as she defaced his laptop, but didn’t complain. “Unless this is a love triangle?”
“Oy,” she said, wondering just how much trouble her clueless sister could get herself into. “One scandal at a time, por favor. It’s safe to assume none of these women got my sister pregnant. And we can eliminate this guy, this guy and this guy, too. They’re too old.”
Frankie laughed. “Men don’t need to be young to get a girl knocked up.”
“Ew,” she said, blocking their faces. “That’s disgusting.”
“To you, maybe. But what about Belinda? You don’t know what she’s into.”
“Y yo repito, ew.”
“Have you ever thought about what kind of man your sister might find attractive?”
“I know she never thought you were all that,” Marisela pointed out.
Just as then, he wasn’t offended. “Which proves my point. You’ve always thought I’m all that, so why are you so confident you can pick out the kind of guy she’d be willing to roll around and get sweaty with?”
Somewhere inside all his arrogance, Frankie had a point. And yet, Marisela wasn’t daunted. She may not know her sister’s personal tastes in men, but she was as close to an expert on sex and attraction as any Catholic girl was going to get.
“Belinda’s brain is very precise,” Marisela explained. “She’s all into finding patterns and repetition and shit. When she was little she’d separate her toys by size and color, or by little things no one could see but her, like how many joints the dolls had or the angles of their noses. She’d do it with people, too. She’d comment on the size of someone’s ears and how they didn’t fit their face. She wasn’t being rude—well, not much—she was just saying what she saw. She wouldn’t be attracted to someone whose face wasn’t like, not perfect, but even on both sides.”
She knew there was a word for this, but she couldn’t dig it out of her tired brain and it didn’t matter anyway. She knew what she was looking for.
By the time she’d handed Frankie back the tape, six faces on the screen were still visible. Each guy was approximately Belinda’s age, good looking and… simétrico. Symmetrical. That was the word. If she printed the pictures and folded them down the middle, each side of the face would appear identical, at least to the naked eye. If Belinda was staring at these faces every day, she’d find them attractive.
Hell, even Marisela found one or two of them hot, even if they were on the skinny, geeky side.
She asked Frankie to print out a screenshot, then X’d out the faces she’d covered in tape with a thick black marker he slid to her from across the table. These were her top choices for baby daddy…but were any of them capable of kidnapping? She was going out on a limb, following a line of investigation that could lead her nowhere, but she couldn’t sit by and do nothing.
“How do you know the baby-daddy is someone she worked with?” he asked.
Again, she was operating on a hunch. “Belinda worked twelve hour days. The company assigns someone to watch over the employees who have…challenges…like Belinda does. That’s why my parents agreed to let her work there. All the reports said she rarely socializes at all, but when she does, it’s only with people she sees daily. My sister is a, ¿cómo se dice? Creature of habit. She wouldn’t stray outside of this group. Now we have to figure out how to reach each of them and find out what they may or may not know about my sister.”
Frankie scooted the laptop over and was just starting to search for contact information when Marisela’s phone—the burner she used only for business—dinged. Not a phone call, this time. Text.
She read the words, first to herself, and then aloud.
“Talked to your sister. She says she’s fine. Call ASAP.”
Frankie snatched the phone out of her hand. “Who is this from?”
Marisela scanned the number associated with the message. It wasn’t Lia. For a second, she guessed a hospital line, but the exchange didn’t match.
Then it hit her. She opened the app for recent calls on her personal phone and verified her suspicion.
“Detective Flores. Looks like I’m going to have to talk to her whether I want to or not.”
Chapter Eleven
“Sounds to me like she’s trying to scam you into calling her,” Frankie said.
Marisela shoved her phone into her back pocket. He was probably right, but was she willing to take a chance? “Think your department contact can find out?”
Frankie shifted his weight nervously from one foot to another, his gaze darting at the ceiling. The fact that he had a source of information inside the police department wasn’t so surprising. He’d worked as a snitch for the DEA while in jail, a turn that had resulted in his working for Titan.
But there was something more to this relationship than he was letting on—and Frankie only kept secrets when the truth would piss her off.
“What aren’t you telling me?” she challenged.
“I could fill a book with all the stuff I don’t tell you, vidita,” he said, his grin mischievous. “I’ll call. Just give me a minute.”
She thought about listening at the door, but decided that Frankie had as much of a right to his exclusive connections as she did. If Titan hadn’t been shut down for the holidays, she wouldn’t have needed his help at all, but it was and she did—so she opted not to pry, but instead hope he once again came up with something useful.
She collected the papers they’d put together, topping it all with Belinda’s passport. She thumbed through the pages again, pausing
at the page with the weird Post-it note. The symbol really did look like something she’d see on the sign of an Asian restaurant. The B-shape was elongated at the bottom and the tree, a double horizontal line with a thick base and stylized branches at the top, seemed to stand for something.
But what?
She glanced at the door to Frankie’s bedroom, then at her cell. It suddenly struck her as entirely insane that Belinda would call the TPD and not her. Even the kidnappers wouldn’t have authorized such a bone-headed move. The call from the detective had likely been nothing more than a ruse to get Marisela to call in. Since she didn’t have time for games or distractions, she hit “redial.” Instead of sounding groggy taking a call in the middle of the night, Detective Flores answered with sharp efficiency.
“How do you know it’s my sister who called and said she was safe?” Marisela asked.
The detective wasted no time asking who or where she was. “I spoke with Ms. Santorini and though she was too groggy to give me many details, her mother informed me that your reluctance to speak to me stems from your sister’s disappearance. She’s a grown woman. She can leave with whomever she wishes.”
Marisela snorted, keenly aware that Flores had not answered her question. “So I’m supposed to believe that my sister, who hasn’t lived state-side in fifteen years, decided to run off with a stranger in a SUV and then instead of calling me to tell me she’s a-okay, she called the one cop who’s been trying to track me down for an interview? You don’t know me, detective, but I should probably let you know that I’m not an idiot.”
“You’re also not a criminal, not currently, and yet you’re avoiding a simple interview.”
“Pero, I used to be a criminal, which means I know that nothing about an interview with the police is simple,” Marisela said. “I want to hear the tape.”
“The tape of what?”
Holiday Heat Page 19
