Brother's Keeper V: Wylie (the complete series BOX SET): NEW RELEASE + Series Box SET included!

by Stephanie St. Klaire

  “Are we sure they aren’t already here? Can this have anything to do with Ivy? The timing…” Dace asked.

  “You think she’s mixed up in the cartel?” Luke chuckled. “That girl was all merry sunshine, not the drug lord type.”

  “I don’t know, bro. Look at Dec’s wife, Lydia. She was married to one of the most dangerous cartel leaders in history, and she was just as merry sunshine and oblivious to who her husband really was,” Dace fired back.

  “Whoa. Let’s watch where we step here,” Declan said, defending his wife. “She had no idea who Esteban was when she married him. It’s possible Ivy was drawn in the same way.”

  “I think it’s safe to say the two things happening in close proximity makes it all suspect. We can’t rule out that they’re related any more than we can rule it in – it has to be our working theory for now,” Liam said. His hands danced across his keyboard while his eyes chased the information he was bringing up on several screens. “I’m pulling up CCTV right now from around the alley where Ivy was found, but it only shows a part of the crime scene. I’m tapping into a couple of private cameras in the area to splice the feeds together.”

  All eyes were trained on the wall of screens where several videos played at once. Liam was brilliant, the best at what he did, but it was moments like these when he truly shined and brought things to light.

  “Jesus,” C.T. said. “This is really fucking illegal. You know I can’t use any of this information because of how it was obtained, right?”

  “You were never here,” Liam said, his attention still on his work. “If we find anything worth using, you can subpoena or get a warrant for the shit you don’t have access to and pretend you’re seeing it for the first time…we can call in favors if need be.” Liam sat up straighter and nodded to the wall they all had their attention focused on. “Here we go – it’s uploading. We should see it in about thirty seconds.”

  “I count one, two…and three.” Wylie stood with his arms crossed, calling out the details as he saw them. “Fourth guy at the head of the alley…maybe their watch?”

  “You see that?” Eva added. “Black SUV. Just like the ones we picked up at the coast. There are thousands of those SUVs out there, but given the circumstance, it feels like more than a coincidence.”

  “Jesus. Faces are covered. Of course, they are cowards.” C.T. cringed.

  “Based on stature alone, they’re all men. Three men beating on a woman half their size.”

  Aside from the obvious details, the group took turns mumbling their reactions under their breath as they watched the assault Ivy had endured at the hands of those thugs.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “Bastards are laughing.”

  “She fought back. Good.”

  Dace remained silent as his expression hardened, and his face turned crimson. Rage coursed through his veins as he watched and counted every kick, hit, punch, and cheap shot they delivered. He counted because he was going to find every one of them. And when he found them, he’d deliver the same brutal beating they inflicted on Ivy…and then some.

  Every punch. Every kick. And he’d avenge every deplorable laugh. He’d return tit for tat, exacting retribution one blow at a time. They’d suffer. He’d make sure of that.

  “We’ll find them,” Liam said to Dace. “Somehow…we’ll get them.”

  Dace nodded.

  “Rewind that,” he said. “Did you see that?”

  They watched again as Ivy ran from the men, somehow escaping their grip.

  “She tossed something under the dumpster as she ran past it – a cellphone maybe,” Dace said, looking at C.T. “Did your team recover anything from that spot?”

  “They’re still processing the scene, finishing up actually, but I haven’t heard anything about a cell phone yet,” he said. “I’ll get down there and get on it.”

  Dace nodded. “We’ll send one of our teams with you. Use them at your discretion.”

  “You think I have a loose end on my crew?” C.T. questioned.

  “If it’s the cartel, there’s no telling. Anyone can be bought. Take our team, then let them walk through when yours gives the all clear,” Dace said. “We trust you, Charlie Tango, not the whole force.”

  “Understood,” he replied. “Sadly, I don’t either. I hate this shit.”

  They watched as the men stood still, letting her just out of reach when they fired their shots repeatedly. With each hit, Ivy jerked, swayed, and ultimately fell to the ground as her purse, still across her body, spilled its contents around her.

  “Oh, my God.” Eva spoke, voice shaking. “It’s one thing to hear the report but another to see it.”

  One man crept up behind Ivy, gun hanging at his side, while the other two remained in place barrels fixed on Ivy’s lifeless and now blood-soaked body. When the man reached her, he grabbed her wallet and tucked it into his waistband, then stood over Ivy with his weapon aimed at her head. He nudged her with his foot once, then twice. Satisfied she was dead, he turned and left with the rest of the men in the waiting SUV staged at the end of the alley.

  “No plates,” Liam noted, tapping at his keys. “I don’t have much to go on here.”

  “Look.” Eva pointed at Ivy on the screen. “She’s moving.”

  They watched in silent awe as Ivy dragged herself what must have felt like a greater distance than the handful of inches it truly was. She struggled to reach for a pen that had fallen from her purse and dragged it across her arm: Dace O’Reilly.

  “She was coming here. She needed our help. My help,” Dace said.

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself. It may have been a message for someone else.”

  “Oh, c’mon. Can we just assume she isn’t the enemy for a minute?” Dace hollered.

  “No, brother,” Declan said calmly. “We can’t assume anything, and you know why.”

  Dace shook his head, frustration overcoming him and fury leading the charge. “This is all bullshit, and you know it. She was running from something, someone perhaps. She isn’t a threat.”

  “Dace…” Eva had his attention with her subtle tone. “We all want that to be the case, my friend, and we’ll do all we can to prove it. She’s safe now, and that’s what matters. She’s here, and we’ll protect her either way, but we need to protect you too.”

  He knew what she meant – why he needed to be protected. Dace was vulnerable, and that made him a weak link, which could lead to their collective demise. He’d hardened his heart for so many years, and he’d have to find a way to do so again now, despite having Ivy back. Finally finding her would be his most harrowing case yet.

  He stared at her still body on the screen and said under his breath, “Where’ve you been, Ivy? Who’s after you?”

  Liam broke the placid state. “All I have from either scene – the coast and the alley – is a single ear. One clear picture.”

  “An ear?” Wylie asked.

  “I can run it through recognition. Biometrically, an ear is just as identifiable as say, a fingerprint. No two are alike. I just need to make a few modifications and…” Liam stopped typing when he felt all eyes on him. “You guys don’t care…just get it done. Got it.” He smiled. “This could take time, and it’ll only work if I have an ear in the database to match it to.”

  “And I’m guessing there’s no such thing as an ear database since it sounds ridiculous?” Dace questioned.

  “Bingo. This tech isn’t as well-known or used, so our resources will be more limited than if we had a solid fingerprint or even better DNA. However, a clue is a clue. But I’m already building a…” Pausing to look at the raised eyebrows surrounding him, Liam snickered once more. They’d been through it more times than he could count. Their team was less concerned about the hows and whys surrounding Liam’s expertise and more interested in the outcome, so he’d spare them the tech talk. “I’m on it. It’ll just take time. Anyone already in the database with any kind of record – criminal or professional – will be searched
first. I’ll have to comb through mugshots and compare.”

  “Professional?”

  “Those black SUVs look pretty official to me, so I’m running them through the employee databases across all government mainframes to start. Maybe it’s a sting, and we’ll get a hit off the feds or something?” Liam added.

  Wylie shook his head. “Looking for an ear…”

  “Hey, sometimes, you have evidence and leads, and you just don’t know it. Let’s turn this into something we can work with.” Liam shrugged.

  “Something to think about here…the cartel doesn’t leave loose ends.” Eva spun on her heel and perched her hands on her hips as she faced the group with new concerns framing her expression. “And the only time they leave a body alive is if they’re sending a warning. They don’t just offer up incriminating witnesses – especially a loner in the game. They’d never take a fall like that. If this thing with Ivy and the coast are connected, and we’re dealing with cartel? When they don’t see this in the media or find out she didn’t die…”

  Dace turned to her and finished her thought, the same thought racing through his own mind. “They’ll come looking for her…to clean up the loose end. Unless they want her to talk? Hell, maybe she has a message for us?”

  Eva nodded in agreement, further plotting the series of what-ifs they were brainstorming. “The fact he didn’t leave a final bullet in her head for good measure leaves me skeptical. They tend to send their messages in the form of a dead body. The guys from the alley…too messy. They don’t add up to cartel. If they wanted her to be the message, then why leave her in the alley instead of the doorstep of whoever they’re trying to get the attention of?”

  “But they have the same unmarked SUV as our friends over on the coast – known cartel and whoever they’re meeting with,” Wylie reminded him.

  “So we have three different factions to trace and identify. We don’t have much time to decide if we have more than one case here and whether they overlap, or if this is all purely an odd coincidence,” Dace said, tossing up his hands.

  “And nothing to go on yet but a damn ear.” Wylie snorted. “Shit. We have our work cut out for us.”

  Liam sat back in his chair, arms crossed. “I don’t know if this is something or not, but I can’t pick Ivy up anywhere else. It’s like she just appeared in that alley.”

  “And the SUV?” Dace asked.

  “Still backtracking. It drove all over town and didn’t really stop anywhere. Just…drove around.” Liam shrugged. “The million-dollar question is why? Were they looking for her?”

  “Maybe,” Dace said. “We need to talk to her. This isn’t enough to build a case on. Until she’s out of surgery and awake, I’ll get you a list of names to start digging into from…the old days.”

  “No need,” Liam said, waving off his brother. “Already have them.”

  “Liam, that information is highly classified. The kind of classified we don’t even have access to here at Brother’s Keeper. The kind of classified that only those present at the time have info on. Not something you’ll find stored on a server in a basement somewhere in DC, brother.”

  “When has classified ever stopped me? Missions, manifests, names, dates, casualties… It was there once.” With a quick shrug, Liam addressed the obvious elephant in the room. The one holding all the cards Liam was about to lay out, even if it was incriminating beyond federal law. “What? I always knew where all of you were. I had your back.”

  “Because?”

  Liam grinned. “Ma made me.”

  Dace wasn’t surprised, nor did he doubt his mother was behind Liam tracking his brothers around the world while on active duty. He let out a snort-like laugh. “You do…you, bro. The rest of us should get down to that alley and see what the police didn’t find.”

  “It should be a clean scene, man.” C.T. felt obligated to defend his team.

  “It never hurts to take another look with fresh eyes.” Declan tried to offer support for his friend’s efforts, but he knew as well as the rest of them that local PD was understaffed, overworked, and underpaid, which meant they, like many professions, were easily bought.

  “Hmmpft.” C.T. snorted. “Why does it feel like I’m about to find a hole in my team?”

  “Consider it a favor.” Dace patted his friend’s back. “Better to find out now than not at all. The team we sent over to assist should already be turning every stone.”

  “Let’s go get some answers.”

  4

  Though only minutes away, the quick trip felt like a lifetime of travel. With Ivy still under the knife, time felt as if it stood still. Dace knew there had to be something that would clue them in as to how they needed to successfully tread this case. The initial report from C.T.’s crew was that they turned up nothing. Sure, there was blood, bullet casings, and a random lipstick that may or may not have been a casualty of Ivy’s purse spilling everywhere, but nothing big. Not the break they wanted. The break they needed.

  The group of men was met by their advanced team of Brother’s Keeper agents, who had a good head start. They’d found a few things the PD hadn’t, but it still wasn’t much. A few extra casings, a shoe print in a semi-dried mud puddle, and a sales receipt that was slightly blurred from condensation but a clear barcode they hoped Liam could somehow trace.

  “No cell phone?” Dace asked.

  “Sorry, man,” one of the men said. “We pulled out that dumpster. Nothin’. Searched every inch of this alley, man. Either someone got to it first, or it landed in a nice hiding spot that we just can’t put a finger on.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.” Luke approached the area where the dumpster had been and stared long and hard, eyes roaming relentlessly over the area until the rest of the men joined him.

  “Have I ever told you guys that I’m the real brains of this operation?” Wylie teased.

  “More times than we care to give a shit about,” one of the brothers answered.

  “Prepare to be amazed.” Wylie moved to a long metal rain gutter that had a curved vent at the bottom and kicked it. Hard. It was attached to the brick building the dumpster had been resting against and had a narrowed opening at the ground level.

  “Hear that?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Metal tends to make a loud sound and then echo if you kick it that hard.”

  Wylie shook his head at Luke in disbelief and kicked it again, harder. A satisfied smile graced his face when he moved to the front of the vent. Gripping it with both hands, he continued to kick one side and then the other. After several kicks, he leaned down and pulled at the vent from left to right, loosening it.

  With a solid grunt, he finally pulled the lower portion of the vent from the rest of the assembly and gave it a shake.

  “I’ll be damned,” Dace said, moving closer to the rattling sound. “Tip that son of a bitch over.”

  Wylie obliged and did just that and out slid a muddy white cell phone.

  Dace slid on the black leather gloves he’d previously tucked in the back of his waistband and grabbed the phone, turning it every which way as if there were a clue written all over it.

  “Okay,” C.T. said. “Point taken. My team missed something. In all fairness, though… How the hell did that get in that little opening and lodged that far up?”

  “My guess,” Wylie replied, looking from the dumpster to the vent, “it ricocheted off the wheel of that dumpster or something with just enough force and momentum to get lodged in there. I mean…the screen is shattered, so it hit something with a lot of force.”

  “Almost like shoving a round peg in a square hole.” C.T. joined the circle forming around the device.

  “Yeah. Don’t beat yourself up too bad, buddy. We had a heads-up after watching that footage back,” Wylie said, analyzing the beaten-up device in Dace’s gloved hands. “Your team had nothing but instinct, and instinct doesn’t necessarily trigger dismantling random rain gutters.”

  “Yeah, this thing is caked in sludge, and
the screen is toast. We never would have found it without those cameras on the street.” Dace stared long and hard at the beat-up phone as if it held all the answers. Hoped it held at least a few.

  “Do we arm wrestle now?” C.T. chimed in. “That’s technically my evidence.”

  “But do you have anyone as good and as fast as Liam with this shit?” Dace cocked his head in question. He wasn’t eager to hand over the only piece of Ivy he had, the only clue as to why she showed up after all these years and who hurt her.

  “Do we have forensics? Stupid question,” C.T. teased, knowing full well how this was going to go, despite the advancements his department had made in technology forensics.

  “Look.” Dace began to barter. “We both know Liam can crack this shit faster than any tech geek on the force who will have to fill out a dozen work orders just to spring the damn thing from the evidence locker. Let’s give it to him, and we’ll share the findings.”

  “You know I can’t use anything you find on that thing – not legally.”

  “You can if we put the thing back, and you decide to sweep the alley again, looking for evidence that may have been missed.”

  C.T. nodded. “You know I have to subpoena all the camera footage, right? I can act surprised when my team sees there was a phone tossed, but I can’t stop the inevitable sweep that will follow once they see what we did on those cameras.”

  “Just give us a heads-up, we can be in and out of this alley within minutes from your call,” Wylie confirmed. “We’ll have Liam shut down the cameras real quick and then plant it, just like he is right now. None of us were ever here.”

  “Jesus.” C.T. ran his hands through his disheveled hair and looked at the camera at the head of the alley, pointed right at him. There was something eerie about knowing Liam was watching them at that very moment while erasing the footage taken only seconds before so they were all protected. “Why do I always feel like I’m one crime scene away from losing my job when you guys are involved?”