Cooper Security 06 - Secret Intentions

by Paula Graves

  “Evie Marsh, I ought to strangle you for scaring your mother and me like this!” He caught her cheeks between his big hands and kissed her forehead. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she assured him.

  He tugged her short red hair. “What the hell did you do to your hair?”

  “Your fault for practically putting my face on a milk carton.”

  Her father’s gaze slanted toward Jesse, and the relief that had lightened his blue eyes faded into anger. “Cooper, what the hell were you thinking, taking her with you?”

  “I made him take me,” Evie said quickly. She could see the news about Rita had put Jesse in no mood to argue with her father. “And it’s a good thing, too. I happen to think I was a big help.”

  “She was,” Jesse agreed.

  “I thought it was clear I didn’t want you to take her off with you. That’s why I did the whole song and dance about her being kidnapped. You should have stopped her from going with you.”

  Jesse exchanged a glance with Evie. “I’ve learned that your daughter prefers to make her own decisions for herself.”

  “Hogwash.” Her father shook his head. “First you break Rita’s heart, now you put Evie in danger—”

  “Bax, stop.” Evie’s mother, Donna, put her hand on her husband’s arm. “Let’s concentrate on finding Rita and worry about everything else later.” She pulled Evie into a tight embrace. “I think your hair looks adorable. But don’t you ever scare us this way again!”

  “Anything new?” Rick Cooper asked his sister Isabel, who had been waiting with the Marshes in the conference room.

  Her husband, Ben Scanlon, stood near one of the windows, gazing out on the rainy night. He turned at Rick’s question and answered for Isabel. “We haven’t heard anything from Rita and Andrew. And Delilah and Terry still haven’t checked in.”

  “What does that mean?” Evie’s father asked.

  “It doesn’t have to be bad news,” Evie answered before any of the others could. “It’s protocol if there’s a suspected threat for our operatives to get the clients to a place of safety. This may include going incommunicado if they believe communications could compromise their safety.”

  “That could very well be what’s happened,” Jesse agreed, quirking his eyebrows at Evie.

  What, she thought, you thought I didn’t listen during the training courses?

  “Why don’t we get caught up to date on what Shannon and Gideon have found?” Jesse watched his youngest sister walk through the door carrying a small box. “Is that the locket?”

  Shannon opened the box and set it on the conference room table. “We think there’s a secret compartment behind the photo, but it seems to have been soldered shut. Gideon says he can open it, but we wanted you to take a look first.”

  Evie darted a quick look at Jesse, her lips curving. His brothers and sisters treated him more like a father than a brother sometimes. Evie supposed that was due to his having to take up so much of the slack in the family after his mother left. His father’s deputy-sheriff position at the time had kept him constantly busy, leaving Jesse to play both mother and father to his younger siblings.

  Jesse lifted the locket from the box and examined it closely. Evie edged closer to get a better look. The chain was nothing out of the ordinary, a series of simple gold links, but the locket itself was large, over two inches long by an inch and a half wide. The front of the locket was inlaid with painted enamel in the form of a peacock in full display.

  “Beautiful,” Evie murmured.

  “Lydia loves it, so I’d rather we not destroy it trying to get to whatever’s hidden inside,” Shannon said.

  “Reminds me of that locket Trey Prichard gave me,” Jesse’s sister Isabel said. “He was my best friend’s brother,” she explained to the Marshes. “After she died, he gave me the locket. Told me she’d wanted me to have it. It took years to figure out that the locket was a clue to who’d killed her.”

  “He’d put a key inside the locket,” Isabel’s husband, Ben, added. “It led to a storage locker where he’d stashed evidence that helped bring down a big meth and pot distribution racket.”

  “When was that?” Gideon asked curiously.

  “Back in April.”

  He smiled slightly. “The general gave Lydia the locket in May. And I know he was very interested in the Swain family drug bust—he sent me all the way to Mobile to pick up every newspaper I could find that mentioned the bust. When I asked him why, he told me I’d understand sooner or later.”

  “The Swains had made connections with the SSU,” Isabel said. “They were negotiating to help the SSU run guns through Bolen Bluff—they’d gotten as far as making contact with a Peruvian gun runner named Carlos Kurasawa.”

  Evie saw her father shift uncomfortably. “Dad, do you know anything about Carlos Kurasawa and the Swains?”

  He looked at her, his lips pressed into a tight line.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jesse said, giving Evie a quick warning look. She tightened her own lips, annoyed that he was taking her father’s side. They needed the information her father was sitting on, and Jesse was enabling him?

  “Let me take a look at the locket,” Evie’s mother said.

  Jesse handed it over.

  Her mother pulled a pair of glasses from her bag and slipped them on, taking a close look at the locket. A smile curved her lips. “It’s not soldered shut. It’s a puzzle.” She pressed the small pewter-colored bead four times and suddenly the gold backing popped open, revealing a small compartment inside.

  “How did you—” Evie began, nearly speechless.

  “When your father and I visited the Rosses on Nightshade Island this past spring, Lydia and Edward took us shopping. Baxter and Lydia went to the bookstore first, but I wanted to do some antiques shopping, and Edward was kind enough to accompany me. We found this very locket in a shop in Terrebonne, and the shop owner showed us how to get to the inner compartment.” She handed the locket to Jesse. “I believe this may be what you’re looking for.

  Evie stepped closer to Jesse to see what lay inside the compartment.

  “It’s a memory card,” Jesse said, carefully removing the small black card from the hidden compartment. As he started toward the laptop computer sitting on the end of the conference table, Shannon stopped him.

  “Let me do it,” she said. “In case there’s some sort of trick to accessing the information on this card.”

  She slipped the card into the slot at the front of the laptop and waited to see if the computer could read whatever data the card held.

  While everyone else gathered around the laptop, Evie noticed that her father had moved away from the crowd, gazing out at the rain-washed night. Torn between her curiosity about the memory card and compassion for her father, she finally dragged herself away from the others and joined her father at the window.

  “I know you’re worried about Rita—”

  “I’m worried about all of you. Your sister, your mother and you.”

  “Is that why you won’t tell us what you know?”

  “What I know may be all that stands between Rita coming back to us alive or coming back to us in a body bag.”

  Evie shuddered. “We don’t even know she’s been taken.”

  He passed his hand over his face. Evie heard the scratch of his beard against his palm and realized he hadn’t shaved that day. It was unlike her spit-and-polish father to let his personal grooming go that way.

  “Is there no way to safely reach your people?” he asked.

  “We’ve put out an alert, but we give them a forty-eight hour window to operate on their own before we send out actual searchers.” Jesse’s voice behind her made Evie jump.

  She turned and found him watching her with curious eyes. “Any luck on the card?” she asked.

  “Shannon says it has an encryption program written in that’s keeping her from being able to open the file. She thinks she can work through the encryption, though it cou
ld take a while.”

  “You wait forty-eight hours before you go looking for your people when they go incommunicado?” Evie’s father asked Jesse, looking appalled.

  “This isn’t the Marines, sir. In many ways, we behave more like covert ops. And in covert ops, you have to trust your people to know what they’re doing. Rushing in and looking for them at this point could put them in greater danger if they’re trying to lie low.”

  “It’s also possible that Rita and her husband are simply not answering their phones for some reason,” Isabel added, wandering up in time to hear her brother’s reply. “Maybe they left the hotel for the day and forgot their phones back in the room.”

  “Or maybe Terry and I spotted a couple of guys on our SSU Most Wanted list and decided it was time to haul these two lovebirds back home.”

  All heads in the conference room swiveled toward the door, where Delilah Hammond leaned against the doorjamb, looking tired but pleased with herself. Behind her, Terry Allen rolled his eyes but grinned.

  And next to them, looking tired but very much alive, were Rita and her husband, Andrew.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The two “lovebirds,” as Delilah had called them, didn’t look as happy. Rita’s hair was a mess, she wasn’t wearing a stitch of makeup, and her clothes looked slept in. Andrew, Evie noticed, was primarily concerned with Rita and her state of mind. So far, he was the kind of attentive, sensitive man her sister seemed to want in a husband. Evie hoped it would always remain so.

  Everyone started talking at once. Evie’s parents rushed forward to greet their other daughter, while Rick started asking a rapid-fire set of questions of the two Cooper Security agents.

  Evie looked at Jesse and found him staring at Rita, relief in his eyes. She looked away, her chest aching.

  As the din in the conference room grew into chaos, he stepped forward and took charge. “Okay, hold up. One at a time.”

  The room quieted down and Jesse turned to Delilah. “What happened?”

  “We were watching the Joya del Mar Hotel early this morning when we spotted a couple of guys on the list of SSU operatives we’ve identified,” Delilah answered in her distinctive Appalachian drawl. She was a tall, curvy woman in her thirties, with dusky shoulder-length hair currently tied up in a messy ponytail and bright, inquisitive eyes the color of dark chocolate. Like several of the current Cooper Security operatives, she had once worked for the government, spending six years in the FBI. If Evie wasn’t mistaken, her time there had overlapped some of Isabel’s and Ben Scanlon’s years at the bureau, although she was pretty sure they’d been in different sections.

  “We held our position until we realized they were staking out the hotel, as well.” Terry Allen continued where Delilah had left off. “And we knew the Kingsleys had plans to visit the beach that morning, so—”

  “How exactly did you know that?” Rita asked, not hiding her annoyance.

  Delilah just smiled. “It’s our job to know.”

  “We’ve been on a plane since ten-thirty Barcelona time,” Andrew said in a calm, even tone of voice. Evie suspected his constant air of reasonability was a big part of his charm for her sister. How she’d ever thought she could live with a complicated man like Jesse Cooper, Evie didn’t know.

  But opposites often attracted, she supposed.

  “Why don’t we find somewhere for you to bunk down?” Jesse suggested. He looked at his sister. “How’s the decrypting coming?”

  “It’s coming,” Shannon answered, sounding distracted.

  “We have a dormitory here at Cooper Security. It’s not quite a hotel, but the beds are comfortable and we can arrange a nice hot meal and a shower for you. Then you can bunk down until we can find you a safe house.”

  “Damn it, Jesse, I don’t want to be stashed away in one of your little vaults like I’m a painting or a piece of jewelry.” Rita’s blue eyes flashed with temper. “Or is that the whole point of sending your goons to stake us out?” She looked at Delilah with suspicion. “I bet you never saw one of those SS whatevers you said you saw—”

  Delilah just shot her a look of irritation.

  “Rita, Delilah and Terry are professionals,” Evie began.

  Rita whirled to look at her. “What the hell did you do to your hair?”

  “Cut it and dyed it so the people who tried to kidnap me twice wouldn’t easily find me again,” she answered flatly, annoyed with her sister’s bad attitude. She tried to tell herself that Rita was exhausted and probably a lot more afraid than she was willing to admit, but there was no excuse for insulting the people who’d put their own lives on the line to keep her safe.

  “Maybe we should just go with Mr. Cooper,” Andrew suggested.

  “Oh, go ahead and call him Jesse,” Rita drawled. “You know everything there is to know about him by now.”

  Evie looked at Jesse for his reaction, but his face was an expressionless mask. She’d seen him shut down that way while dealing with demanding clients, but she’d also seen his expression shuttered when someone mentioned his breakup with Rita, so there was no way to know what he was really thinking. She could only guess, and right now all her guesses made her stomach tie up in knots.

  “I’ll take them to the dorms,” she offered aloud.

  “I’ll come with you,” Jesse said. “I don’t want anyone to go anywhere in this building without backup.”

  “I haven’t agreed to stay here,” Rita snapped.

  “We’re staying here, at least for tonight.” Andrew put his hand on her back. “I know you’re tired. I’m tired, too. But at the very least, the multiple kidnapping attempts on your sister should give us pause. I wasn’t sure we should have gone to Barcelona in the first place, given the situation.”

  “You’re the one who said we should go,” Rita protested.

  “Your father told me I should get you out of the country.”

  “That’s not far enough,” Jesse said quietly.

  Rita’s gaze flew up to his face, but she bit back whatever she had been about to say. She looked away from him quickly.

  “Let’s get you two a place to stay.” Jesse nodded for them to follow him out of the conference room.

  The walk back to the dormitory was awkward, the silence that fell among the four of them thick with tension. When Evie could take no more, she spoke just to end the silence. “How was Barcelona?”

  “Lovely until a couple of relentless people with guns told us to pack our bags and bug out in half an hour,” Rita answered drily.

  “Did you have time to shop for souvenirs?” Evie kept her voice deliberately flippant.

  Rita stopped in the middle of the hallway and turned to look at her, a smile flirting with her lips. “Mercenary brat.”

  Evie grinned. “Because I didn’t get a chance to catch the bouquet at the reception, I figure I should get something out of this whole wedding thing.”

  Rita gave her a swift, fierce hug. “I worried about you the whole time.”

  Evie arched an eyebrow. “The whole time?”

  “Most of the time,” Rita answered with a blush.

  Jesse stopped at a room about halfway down the hall. It took a second for Evie to realize he was putting Rita and Andrew in a room across the corridor from Evie’s temporary abode. Which also put them across from the room where Jesse was staying.

  Stop, Evie. Stop making yourself crazy.

  Andrew dumped their luggage on the bed and sighed with relief. “I could use a shower. Do you want to go first, sweetheart?”

  Rita shook her head. “Go ahead. I’ll talk to Evie and Jesse out here in the hallway so you can have some privacy.”

  “We can go to my room,” Evie suggested as they stepped out into the corridor again.

  Rita ignored the suggestion, turning to Jesse with flashing blue eyes. “Is all this about what happened with us? Is this your way of punishing me for giving up on you ten years ago?”

  For a second, Jesse’s neutral mask slipped, and Evie saw
a flash of indignation in his dark eyes. “Not everything is about you, Rita.”

  “Isn’t it? You practically stalked my wedding. You’ve dragged my sister God knows where and sent your spies to ruin my honeymoon—”

  “Rita, your sister was kidnapped once, almost twice, and witnessed her bodyguard’s murder. In D.C. we were shot at and witnessed the gruesome death of a couple of SSU thugs.”

  “The SSU again.” Rita grimaced.

  Jesse turned away from her, his mouth a thin, tight line. “Go back into your room and get some rest. We don’t know what the next few days are going to bring for us all.” He crossed to his room, unlocked the door and shut it firmly behind him.

  Evie stared at the closed door. He hadn’t even addressed her, hadn’t said good-night or suggested she get into her room and lock the door behind her. She blinked back the tears stinging her eyes and turned to her sister.

  Rita was staring at Jesse’s door as well, her cheeks bright with angry color. “He’s always been such an arrogant control freak.”

  “He’s trying to keep everyone safe,” Evie defended. “That’s a lot of responsibility.”

  Rita looked at Evie, her brow furrowed. “Do you think he still has feelings for me?”

  Evie’s gut tightened. “I don’t think you stop loving someone that easily. You still love him, don’t you?”

  Rita’s eyes softened. “Of course. But not how I love Andrew. Not anymore. You know that.”

  Jesse was right, Evie thought. Just the fact that she was Rita’s sister complicated everything between the two of them, and all the runaway desire they might feel for each other wouldn’t make those complications go away.

  Rita touched Evie’s chopped-off hair. “Now that I’m starting to get used to it, your hair is pretty cute like that. I even like the color. It’s good with your fair skin.” She held out her arms, and Evie stepped into her embrace, holding her sister tight for a moment.

  “I’m glad you’re home safe,” she murmured. “I hope the honeymoon wasn’t a complete bust.”