His partner was right on his heels. In fact, he tripped over the first man, stumbling and falling at Romero. At the last second he seemed to realize what was going on, and he attempted to turn his fall into a lunge. It was all in vain. Romero’s fist was waiting for him. One neat upper cut and the man fell backwards. Next Romero smashed his boot into the side of the guy’s head to put him out cold.
CASSIDY WATCHED IN fascinated horror as Romero dispatched the two thugs without expending one iota of real effort. She gazed at him and tried to figure out what it was she felt. Admiration? Disgust? Not for him, but for what he had to do.
He turned and looked at her as though he expected her to say something. She shrugged. “Well that was quick and violent.”
His snort told her plenty. He found her amusing. She knew he did. He also didn’t really know what to make of her, and she was okay with that too. He held out his hand, and she took it.
“I suppose we need to find Mr. John Jacob Mackenzie then, don’t we?” Romero suggested. “You seem to be doing a pretty bang up job leading this expedition. Lead on, sergeant.”
Cassidy’s heart soared. They’d gone from him telling her she wasn’t welcome at all, to him telling her to stay out of his way. And now he was listening to her and recognizing her ability to be not only helpful, but a strong part of this—well, it was sort of a team. Yep. She was so in love.
“He owns an office building not far from here. The top floor is his executive suite.” She started walking, Romero pacing along just in front of her. “What if we waited until tonight? We could go in, look around for information, and hopefully discover a fat file of company names, times, contacts, numbers, money trails, anything that could lead us to Rachel.”
What neither of them said out loud was that they could be searching for an actual buyer by now. Cassidy didn’t want to go there yet. She had to believe that Rachel was still in transit somewhere. They were going to find her and bring her home.
“So maybe we can head for the building now and do some scouting,” Romero suggested thoughtfully. “We’ll see what sort of security he has, how many more of these beefy idiots he has lying around. That sort of thing.”
“Can we get food?” Cassidy wondered out loud. “Because I’m starving. I don’t know what happened last night, but I’m famished, and I feel weirdly rested. I also have zero soreness from all that crawling around with the fire and stuff. I should be dying today, and I’m not.”
“Fentanyl is a painkiller,” Romero explained. “I’m wondering if they didn’t give you some marijuana with a high TCH content. It’s a vasodilator, and it’s been known to make people faint. So they make their targets pass out, then they give them an intramuscular injection of Fentanyl mixed with something like Rohypnol.”
“Wait.” Cassidy was now trying to wrap her mind around something else. “So they gave me the date rape stuff?”
“That would explain the amnesia.” Romero headed toward a little café two blocks down from Cassidy’s apartment.
“Should we be hanging around here?” Cassidy gestured over her shoulder, indicating Heckle and Jekyll. “They could wake up. Or there could be more.”
“Your apartment is toast. We’re not going to be able to go back there anyway. The door is a complete loss. In fact, we need to make an anonymous call about a breakin to prevent your neighbors from deciding to help themselves to your stuff.”
“Ugh!” Cassidy closed her eyes briefly, trying not to give into the urge to shed tears. She’d likely lost her job, and now her apartment, and potentially her stuff. All because Rachel was an idiot!
“Cassidy?” Romero turned, taking her hands and looking deep into her eyes. “It’s going to be okay. I promise.”
“Everything is so messed up,” she whispered. “I just have this feeling that life is never going to be the same again.”
“It might not be the same, but maybe it’ll be better,” he hypothesized. “Don’t give up on me now, all right?”
“I won’t.”
“Let’s get you some food.” He continued toward the café. “I think we’re probably going to be fine around this neighborhood for now. Those men won’t be after us again, and if they go get friends, we’ll be in a public place where it’s a little more difficult to get into a fight without half the world posting a video to YouTube. They’re not going to want that sort of attention.”
“Okay.” She was willing to trust him.
Clutching his arm with her hands, she let him lead the way. The strength of him beside her was comforting in so many ways. She was glad to have his steadiness there with her. She’d have fallen apart without him. There was no doubt in her mind about that.
They entered the café and stood at the counter. Cassidy was trying to decide whether she wanted a scone or a muffin when she noticed a man sitting in the far corner reading the newspaper.
“Romero,” she said urgently. “That’s him.”
“Hmm?” Romero followed her gaze, but didn’t seem to recognize the man.
“That’s John Jacob Mackenzie.” She tried to be discreet, pointing with her gaze instead of her hands. “He’s right there.”
“We’re close enough to his building, right?” Romero mused. “I suppose it’s not unreasonable to think the guy comes here for breakfast before he goes to work.”
“So what do we do?” Cassidy asked, thoughts of food all but forgotten.
“We order breakfast,” Romero prompted. “And then you give me a minute to think.”
Cassidy forced herself to be “normal” as she approached the counter when it was her turn. “I’ll have a Café Americano and a blueberry muffin please?”
“I’ll just have black coffee,” Romero added. He pulled out his wallet and gave the kid behind the counter some cash.
In the middle of all the insanity that was going on, Cassidy had to pause for just a second to be amazed that Romero was buying her breakfast for the first time. Was she lucky or what?
Chapter Nineteen
Romero shouldn’t have been surprised when Cassidy chose a table within spitting distance of John Jacob Mackenzie. She sat down, and it was almost as if he could see her vibrating with excitement there on the little wooden ladder back chair. She peeled the paper off her blueberry muffin, sipped her coffee, and did some not so discreet looking in Mackenzie’s direction.
It was strangely endearing instead of annoying. That was probably Romero’s first clue that he was head over heels for this woman. There was such fire and passion in everything she did. When she saw something, she went after it. There was nothing that could hold her back.
Romero lounged casually in his own chair. He took Mackenzie’s measure from the corner of his eye. The man appeared exactly like one might expect a real estate mogul to look. He was probably five foot ten, paunchy, middle aged, and wearing a suit that had probably cost more than the weekly salaries of every single employee in the café. He was also very interested in Romero and Cassidy at the moment. That could have been because he was aware of the situation going on with the club, but it also could have been because of Cassidy’s obvious rubbernecking.
Romero decided that he might as well play along and see where it got them. They had the man’s attention. They might as well attempt to see what they could do with it. “Cassidy, sweetheart, you need to calm down.”
“Huh?” She glanced back over at him. “What are you talking about?”
“Well”—Romero kept an eye on Mackenzie. The man appeared to be studying the paper, but wasn’t—“we’re not going to get any information about all those missing women in the neighborhood by interrogating everyone who might be connected to the club.”
Oh yes. Cassidy might be looking at him as though he’d lost his mind, but Mackenzie had just set down his paper and was now giving Romero a critical onceover.
“Are you trying to get us killed?” Cassidy whispered, her tone near panic.
“Trust me.”
Now Mackenzie was standing up. He
looked over at their table and neatly folded his paper. Then he walked right over. “Excuse me. Why are you staring at me?”
“Because you’re the guy,” Cassidy said without missing a beat. “The one who owns that club where all the women disappear.”
“Excuse me?” Mackenzie raised an eyebrow. “I own a club. Yes. I own lots of things.”
“Yes. But your other businesses probably don’t have a track record of women going missing from the neighborhood.” Cassidy was staring him square in the eye, not backing down one inch. “Unless you’d like to let me know what you’re doing to find these women? I mean, it’s such a pattern that one might almost think that someone is collecting them for some other purpose.”
“That’s preposterous!” Mackenzie’s voice raised an octave as anger flavored his words. “You can’t go around spreading that sort of rumor! That’s slander.”
“Slander?” Cassidy raised an eyebrow. “I can’t slander a club. I can slander a person. And I haven’t said a word about a person. I simply stated that you own a club. It was the club I was saying negative things about, but I can do that. It’s just an opinion. And I said ‘someone’. I’m sure, as a stand up business owner, that you have no knowledge of any illegal actions going on at your club.”
Romero almost had to laugh at the expression on Mackenzie’s face. Cassidy was dancing verbal circles around the man. In the meantime, Romero had noted that there were two very beefy security types keeping an eye on their conversation. One of them had already yapped about something into an earpiece. They were both obviously waiting for some kind of signal to step into action.
Mackenzie curled his lip at Cassidy. “Women don’t disappear at my club. If they don’t make it home afterwards, it’s probably due to some bad decisions made on their part.”
“Oh, I would heartily agree with that,” Cassidy said with a sage nod. “They make the choice to flirt with one of the bait boys. Then they go up to the VIP lounge because they’re naive enough to believe that it is flattering to be asked. Then they’re dumb enough to go to the third floor, where they pass out and wind up missing.”
Romero nearly choked on his coffee. He hadn’t expected Cassidy to go for the jugular like that. Mackenzie’s glower suggested he knew exactly what she was talking about and was not amused in the least that she had laid out a description of the process right there in a public place.
“What I can’t figure out,” Cassidy continued, “is whether or not the club is really part of the action, or just the stage? So tell me, what do you think?”
When Mackenzie finally spoke, his voice was tight and angry. “I think you’d better keep your mouth shut before people start to believe the nonsense you’re spouting.”
“Oh, it’s definitely not nonsense,” she said airily. “And it’s only a matter of time before the house of cards comes down.”
“Okay,” Romero said gruffly. “I think it’s time to be quiet. You’ve pretty much waved a red flag in front of the proverbial bull.”
“Yes, but now we know that he’s totally aware of what’s going on, right?” She was so eager. He hated to burst her bubble.
“That’s true, but we still don’t know if he’s a player or a pawn.” Romero sat back in his seat, thinking about Mackenzie’s reaction. What did it really mean?
Suddenly one of the beefcakes strode back through the café. He glowered down at Romero and handed him a business card. “The boss would like to meet with you.”
“I bet he would,” Romero murmured. “Thank you. We’ll keep it in mind if we have spare time today.”
Beefcake grunted and left. Romero tossed the card onto the table and raised an eyebrow at Cassidy. “It would appear that our trip to John Jacob’s building might be a little more productive and a lot less clandestine than we had hoped.”
*
Cassidy flung her head back and stared up at the imposing glass and steel office building where John Jacob Mackenzie ran his empire. They were really only a few blocks from every other location in his weird crime drama. The school, her apartment, the club, and now this building were all within a six to ten block radius. Was it possible that Rachel was being held somewhere inside that same radius?
“Are you ready?” Romero was holding out his hand to her.
She looked at him once again, as though she were seeing him for the first time. The dark good looks went well with his cargo pants, combat boots, and the black cotton T-shirt stretched taut over his muscular chest. Surely she was one of the luckiest women on the planet. This man truly cared about her. He had put himself in the line of fire just to keep her safe. Now they were walking right back into the lion’s den. But if she was going to put herself on the line, there was no one else she trusted more to have by her side.
“Okay.” Cassidy put her hand in his. “Let’s see what we can find down this rabbit hole.”
“What’s that, Alice?” Romero said mockingly. “You want to know what happens when you eat the mushrooms?”
Cassidy chuckled. “You faint and wake up in a shipping container bound for some unknown vacation destination.”
They walked into the building’s lobby as though they owned the place. Cassidy wasn’t sure what it was about Romero’s aura, but he could be almost invisible when he wanted to. Other times he took up all the space in a room.
Romero stopped at the security desk. Cassidy could see him casting about, looking at everything. She knew he was taking note of all the cameras, whether or not the security station had access to the feed, how many guards were lingering in the lobby, and where they were standing.
“Do you have an appointment?” The guy at the desk had a snotty attitude that made Cassidy grind her teeth in agitation. What was with people these days?
“We’re here to see John Jacob Mackenzie.” Romero’s tone was all lazy insolence. “Just call up and tell him the couple from the café is here to take him up on his invitation.”
Before the desk jockey could pick up the phone, the beefcake security guy appeared from a door in the far right corner of the lobby. Cassidy wondered if that meant there was a security room over there where the camera feed was actually monitored. It was more likely that the security hub was somewhere else in the building, and that Beefcake had just popped out of a stairwell. Either way, Cassidy made a mental note.
“If the two of you will just follow me,” Beefcake murmured.
Romero barely glanced at him. “Thank you.”
They entered the elevator with Beefcake. He pushed the button for the top floor—in this case it was twenty—and they were off. It was an uncomfortable ride, to say the least. Cassidy felt as if she were drowning in testosterone. Were the guys ramping up their machismo to try to out-swagger each other or something? It was like being in the middle of a silent pissing contest that just gets you pissed on.
They exited the elevator and followed Beefcake down a wide, spacious hallway lined with tasteful art and painted a subtle sand color. The office was beautiful. Cassidy could hear the clack clack of keys on a keyboard coming from behind some of the closed doors. For the most part it was rather silent. There were a few low voices humming in the background, but it didn’t feel like the type of place where a bunch of lucrative real estate deals were being made each day.
John Jacob’s office was at the end of the hallway, of course. Beefcake opened the door and led them into a huge space with an expansive view of the city skyline. It was ostentatious and overdone, exactly what Cassidy might have expected.
“Wow,” she whispered. “This office reeks of effort.”
Romero’s lip twitched, but he didn’t comment. Obviously he had his game face on. Cassidy sighed. She would have to try to do the same.
“So.” Mackenzie was standing at the other end of the room with his back to them, facing the windows. “The two of you have made quite a splash in the last few days.”
“Excuse me?” Cassidy sniffed. “I fail to see how trying to find my friend at the last place she was seen
is making a splash. If someone would just tell me the truth, I would happily stop nosing around.”
Mackenzie turned around and pegged Cassidy with a glare. “How do you know they haven’t been telling you the truth and you’re just too stubborn to accept that your friend ran off with some guy she met at the club and chose not to tell you?”
“Well, I could start with the fact that the guy she was with at the club—the one who took her upstairs—told me himself that he doesn’t know what happened to her after her left her in one of those little cubicles up on the third floor of your club.”
“Perhaps he’s lying.” Mackenzie shrugged dismissively. “That sort of man is hardly a reliable source.”
Romero took a step forward, subtly placing himself between Mackenzie and Cassidy. “Perhaps we should all stop dancing around the truth and just be honest with each other.”
“Excuse me?” Mackenzie didn’t look exactly uncomfortable, but he certainly didn’t look pleased.
The corner of Romero’s mouth twisted into a derisive sneer. “Well, you could just tell us where the containers go once they leave your club. That would immediately get us off your back because it would send us to the next stop in our investigation. See, we will find the women. It’s just a matter of time. Your boys didn’t do their research well enough this time, Mackenzie. They took a woman who happens to be the sister of a SEAL. That was their first mistake.” Romero glared at Mackenzie as though he were nothing but a tiny blip on the radar screen. “Then they attempted to hurt Cassidy. And I have to be honest with you, Mackenzie. That is something I’m not going to let go.”
Chapter Twenty
Oh yes, it was plain to see that Romero had rattled John Jacob Mackenzie’s cage. Of course, that had basically been his intention. The man needed a good cage rattling. Unfortunately, what he did next was reach into his pocket and pull out a little remote. He made a big show of pushing a red button, and then slid the thing back into his pocket.
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