DISCONNECT (The Bening Files Book 2)

by Rachel Trautmiller

  He hadn’t been this transparent since high school. What was the matter with him? “Did I bust your balls when you showed up married to my best agent?”

  Jordan lifted his chin in an all-knowing nod and then crossed his arms over his chest. “So, it’s like that.”

  Great. Digging the hole deeper. He fiddled with the video and then hit play again. Amanda walked into the café, then out after several minutes. “How’s Ariana?”

  Jordan said nothing for a few beats. “She asked if she could go to the movies on Friday.”

  He looked up, then. “With who?”

  “A few of her friends and somebody named Hunter.”

  “No.” He slashed a hand through the air. “Boys are trouble.”

  “I told her you’d be over today, so she could ask you then.”

  Would he ever be ready for teenage boys? Robinson strode to the fridge, grabbed two beers, and handed one to Jordan before he straddled a stool in front of the island. “I’m ill equipped for this stuff. I can’t help wondering what Lilly would say or do.”

  “Probably something similar to what you’re already doing.” Jordan popped the top before taking a sip. “Amanda handled the situation quite nicely.”

  Robinson followed suit. “Oh?” Did he sound too interested? After all, they were discussing his niece, which entitled him to be as nosy as he pleased.

  “She and Ariana have been working on some art project.”

  Three days outside his care and he didn't even know what projects his niece had due in school. Maybe if he'd been able to stop over more than once so far. Guilt hunched on his shoulders and applied pressure like a mean, older brother.

  “I appreciate you guys helping me out. I planned to stop by daily, but I've been losing track of time more frequently.”

  “We love having her.” Jordan set his beer on the countertop, his fingers still half clasped around the bottle.

  “Well, she's my responsibility.”

  The other man shrugged. “What are friends for?”

  “That why you watch Rupert’s son so much?”

  One blond brow rose on his friend’s forehead. “You really want to play this game, Robinson?”

  He didn’t know they were keeping score on who could call the other one out more. Right now, he might lose. “It’s an honest question. Last time I saw either of you in the same room, didn’t speak of brotherly love.”

  Jordan grimaced. “Last time I saw you and Amanda together, I wasn’t sure if there’d be blows or something else.”

  Ah, yes, something else, in another lifetime. She’d probably slap him silly, if she had any idea. Time to get over it. “Apples and oranges.”

  “Still relevant.” Jordan didn’t budge.

  Robinson shook his head. “You worry too much, Bening. Embrace the fact that you have a half-brother who isn’t as crazy as his sperm donor.” He took another pull from his beer. “Tell me more about Ariana’s project.”

  Jordan ran a hand over his chin. “Ariana begged McKenna to call Amanda to help her. From what McKenna said, it sounds like Amanda was reluctant to agree. Not sure why.”

  Any number of reasons came to mind, the first being the most obvious. She didn't want to expose Jordan and McKenna to the unnamed danger she faced, even though history dictated the pair always ran toward trouble.

  And if he knew Amanda, his niece fell in that same category.

  “Anyway, she caved. Ariana asked about the movies. It was kind of amusing to watch. Amanda asked all the usual questions. What, when, where, who. When Ariana mentioned Hunter, Amanda started in on the third degree about him, but she did it in a way that Ariana didn’t even suspect what was going on. He sounds like a typical twelve-year-old. And she’s a good kid.”

  “Good kids still get into trouble.”

  Jordan nodded. “I feel you. When they told us we were having a girl, my whole life flashed before my eyes. I remember what teenage boys are like. I plan to put bars on all the windows and keep her under lock and key until she turns thirty.”

  “Sounds like a great plan. Heck, any place that’s got the system you’ve installed today would be just as good.”

  “Amanda tell you Renee’s whereabouts for Saturday checked out?”

  Robinson ignored the gnawing in the pit of his stomach that only came from hearing Amanda’s name and knowing she had information, but hadn’t bothered to call him.

  It wasn’t as if he were doing anything different. “That’s great. I seemed to have lost her as a babysitter, anyway.”

  “She quit?”

  “Something like that.” Renee had shown up at his apartment the morning after Jordan and Amanda had questioned her. Dark circles had underlined red-rimmed eyes.

  “She ask you out or what?”

  “Dude, come on.” He rolled his head heavenward for a second. “She’s a kid.”

  “Last time I checked, twenty-one passed for adult.” Jordan lifted the bottled to his lips, a smirk on his face. “Hope you let her down gently.”

  Nothing made a discussion like that easier. He’d known as soon as he opened the door, and received a bone crushing hug, he’d be looking for a new sitter for Ariana. “She’ll find someone her own age.”

  “I hope you didn't say those exact words.”

  “I'm not a complete jerk.” Explaining his lack of romantic feelings, without crushing the girl, had taken the better part of thirty minutes. Lots of fumbling for the right words like a kid. She'd returned his key and left.

  “Any word come back about the maintenance crew?”

  Robinson shook his head. “The office has one set of master keys and they get locked up every night, in a box with a security code.”

  “We’ve got nothing, then.”

  “For now. I’ve got background checks out on all the employees.” He reset the café footage and hit play from the beginning again. Amanda got out and went inside. Several pedestrians walked by, on the sidewalk. Not one of them gave notice to her car or looked remotely out of place.

  “What are you doing?” Jordan asked.

  Robinson took another swig of his beer. “This video bothers me.”

  “Oh?” Jordan came around the island and watched the feed with him.

  “Do you see anything out of place?” Robinson pointed to the screen as Amanda exited the café, unlocked her car and got inside.

  “Besides the fact that she said she never left the restaurant, once she went inside?”

  “You and I might believe it, but we both know that won’t cut it for HQ.” He replayed the video, pausing in several spots, only to come up empty handed. HQ wouldn’t take a gut feeling for evidence, either.

  It was only a matter of time before he’d have to answer to someone only interested in saving face. The public was always more at ease when the law had a tight handle on an incident of this magnitude. The problem was, the responses weren’t always quick enough to suit the masses. Or him.

  “Do you believe it?” Jordan shoved one hand in his front pocket, the other still wrapped around his beer.

  What kind of question was that? And from someone who was supposed to be a friend? Robinson exhaled slowly. A person who could inspect the whole thing from the outside. That's who. “I've got to look at every angle. That's one.”

  “How long you been watching this same loop, Robinson?” Concern laced the words.

  Hours. So long he had every move memorized. Twenty steps to the door. Fifteen steps until a man and woman passed the car with two shopping bags. A kid on a skateboard came next, his hoodie and worn jeans overly baggy. Two seconds after that, the stoplight, barely in view, turned green and a Ford F-150 passed by. He'd run the plates and come up with a Charlotte native, without a record, who'd died in the blast, ten minutes later. “Not long enough to figure out what I don’t like about it.”

  Jordan started packing his equipment away. “I wouldn’t like any video that might incriminate a friend. Right now, that’s what it is. Luckily, it’s only speculation
, because she could have just as easily been doing nothing as setting up a bomb. And here’s a thought. If Amanda really did rig her own car, why would she wait to set it up, in public? Seems kind of dumb.”

  Their guy was anything but.

  “Either way, it’s our job to find the proof. And keep her safe until we do. We've broadened our scope to include males and females.”

  Agreeing with Jordan might have been a little easier if Amanda wasn’t at the center of this guy’s twisted game. How could Jordan remain so calm about all of this? Robinson was hell-bent on burning the candle at both ends.

  Jordan didn’t have all the information Robinson had. Yes, Amanda said she hadn’t left the café after entering, but what else could explain her second appearance on the video? The C4 in her vehicle?

  She'd withheld information once. Would she do it, again?

  ***

  When he should have been rechecking his facts or any number of his daily tasks, Robinson found himself walking into the Two Rivers Care Center, a bouquet of daisies in hand.

  In the beginning, he’d visited Lilly alongside his dad, her husband and Ariana a few times a week. As their family numbers started to dwindle, so did the visits, until he came sporadically for Ariana.

  And once or twice a month to hear himself think. He shook his head. Lilly deserved better from them. From him.

  He stopped at the front reception area. The blonde-haired nurse, behind the desk, looked up and grinned.

  Her hazel eyes sparkled with mischief as they darted to the flowers in his hand. “Baker Jackson, you shouldn’t have.”

  He smiled. Two years ago, he might have found her smile, creamy skin, toned body and bright eyes enticing. Brought her flowers and asked her out. A bland relationship might have formed until one of them got bored. “Sorry, doll. I’d hand them over to you, but Lilly would know in a heartbeat.”

  “I can’t have my favorite patient upset with me.” She placed a clipboard in front of him.

  If only Lilly actually knew the difference. He signed in, the routine familiar.

  “Any chance you’ve got a vase hiding around here?”

  She rolled her chair away from her desk and stood. Smoothed her hands over pink scrubs as if removing wrinkles. “You know we do.”

  “How is she today?”

  “Not much change.” At the sink, a few feet from her desk, she bent and retrieved a vase, giving him a view of her backside.

  Uninterested in her inadvertent show, he looked away. “That’s good on some level, though.”

  She filled the square, glass holder with water and brought it back to her desk. Then she took the daisies from him and arranged them within. “It’s certainly better than a negative change. She hasn’t had another stroke and while her heart’s weak, she’s hanging on. There’s still some response to our daily care.”

  “Anything more than incoherent groans?”

  One sad head shake came, as she handed the flowers back to him. “You better get those in there.”

  He winked. “Thanks, Cindy.” Then he headed down the hall to his sister’s suite.

  Once inside, he placed the flowers on her bedside table, always with the same hope. That she’d wake up, see them and know they’d all been waiting for her return.

  Maybe this time, the things wouldn’t die before she opened her eyes. And, maybe he was asking God for a little too much.

  “Hey, Lilly. He pulled up a chair. Her complexion remained the same pale shade, since the day they’d transferred her here from Mercy hospital. Tubes snaked under the crisp white sheets and connected to monitors. A large tube came from her mouth, something he’d ceased to cringe over long ago. If he concentrated hard enough, he could pretend the ventilator, pumping air into her lungs, didn’t exist and she was only sleeping.

  He adjusted the blankets around her. Ariana always had a hard time coming, torn between wanting to see her mother and being disappointed in the lack of change. The sight broke his heart.

  “I didn’t bring Ari with me today, but I will tomorrow,” he said. As always, he waited for a response that wouldn’t come. At first, talking to her had been difficult, at best. What did you say to someone who couldn’t respond? The whole process had made him feel a little bit crazy. As time wore on, he’d grown accustomed to hearing himself give the details of the life she was missing.

  He’d acclimated to hearing Ariana’s sweet voice do the same. Somewhere in all the visits, the quiet became soothing instead of tense. Sometimes, after a bad day or a long case, he found himself at the care center. Here, he could clear his head.

  Except, his sense of calm was off center, today.

  “There’s been a lot going on at work. Maybe you remember me mentioning Detective Nettles? She’s in trouble. I’m trying to help her without getting in the middle myself. It’s complicated, but when have you ever known me to turn down a challenge?” He toyed with the teddy bear Ariana had brought and placed next to Lilly, after the accident.

  The brown bear had been a present he’d given Ariana as an infant. Up until the day she’d left it for Lilly, the kid had never gone anywhere without it. The material was well-worn and one of the black-eye buttons, missing.

  At eleven, she’d insisted Lilly needed the raggedy, stuffed animal more than her. The kid had held back tears, he’d wanted to erase.

  “I think, when this is over, I might take a month vacation. Jeff said to give you his lov…” He cleared his throat. The lies he told regarding her husband, their father and her deceased child, wouldn’t come today. Loneliness, he usually managed to keep at bay, clawed at his insides.

  He grabbed her hand. Warmth radiated from her fingers, but they lacked human response.

  The events of the last few weeks caught up with him in one, huge rush. They weighed on his shoulders, like an elephant had climbed up there and was holding the entire circus in its trunk.

  The lifeless woman, in the bed in front of him, didn’t resemble the bossy older sister he remembered. The one who teased him as a kid, played with him when she thought no one was looking and organized the family after the death of their mother.

  Without Lilly, the family would have fallen apart. After their mother's unexpected death—a convenience store robbery gone wrong, his mother, an innocent bystander, in the wrong place at the wrong time—his father had taken to shutting himself away, for long periods of time.

  At fifteen, Robinson had been aware of everything, the palpable grief clogging up the silent house. The laughter his mother had brought to life was buried in the ground with her. His father’s guilt over allowing himself to let her leave the house. The old man couldn't see the truth. No matter how much time a person spent protecting the ones they loved, bad things still happened.

  Lilly had been abroad at the time of their mother’s death, studying for a semester in London. She'd flown home for the funeral, found their house in the sorriest state it had ever been. Quiet, unkempt floors, dishes lining the sink, laundry piled up and their father locked in the master suite. Robinson hadn't known she planned to arrive that day, nearly a week after their mother’s death.

  Back then, no one bothered to tell him much. And he was nothing more than a surly teen with an attitude. His mother’s death had given him a new excuse for it all.

  With their normally outgoing and good-natured father down and out, Robinson had dealt with the pain in his own way.

  In a matter of days, he'd skipped school, forged a number of excuse notes, smoked a joint and managed to lose his virginity to a woman twice his age.

  At nineteen, his sister had stepped in and been the pillar of strength his family needed. It had taken time, but she'd coaxed their father from the ledge he teetered.

  Rather than returning to her semester abroad, she took night courses at a community college. Instead of enjoying the freedom an almost twenty-year-old uses with stupidity for years, she fixed dinners. Made sure they went to grief counseling. Hounded Robinson about everything. His grades, his whereab
outs—you name it, Lilly made sure she knew it all.

  Like Robinson's current situation with Ariana, Lilly had stepped up to the plate and become a mom-figure well before she'd needed to. He couldn't do any less, but it wasn't enough. He bowed his head and pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “They say I shouldn’t upset you,” he said in the silence broken only by steady whooshes of air. “That I should tell you only pleasant things. You would have hated that. I would hate that.” He hesitated, his throat as dry as if he’d been walking in the desert for a month.

  “Jeff’s not with us anymore. He couldn’t take the thought of you lying here so still and the fact that you both lost the baby. The bottle was the way he coped. He hit a tree, Lilly. I’m so, so sorry. Dad and I took turns taking care of Ariana, until Dad couldn’t anymore. He passed away three months ago.” He looked around the room. Noted the cards lining the windowsill. A pleasant amount of light filtered in and onto his sister’s face.

  “It’s just Ari and I now and we both know I’m the last person who should have kids. I take too many risks. And she worries, just like you. She’s probably going to need therapy. So, you can understand why it’s more important than ever that you come back to us.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Six days after the incident inside Robinson's apartment—yeah, she had an internal clock keeping track of time between them, like a kid counting down to Santa’s visit—Amanda sat at Trendy Tuesdays, in downtown Charlotte, with Beth and her husband, Guy.

  The same restaurant they'd met at last week, same table with the same pretty blonde hostess leading the way. Their waiter was different. A tall man with round glasses and graying hair, who had a grandfatherly smile. He placed an entree in front of each of her tablemates and then herself as if everything were right in the world.

  How could it be? The families of the Pilots bombing, as the media was now referring to it, thanks to Scott Jonas and his reporting, where not done grieving. They never would be.