by Lisa Hughey
“I refuse to be run out of my own office.”
“Well then, you better have your hulk watching carefully.”
“Speculate as to who tried to break in.”
Hamish really didn’t have any idea. No one was supposed to know he was here. But he couldn’t admit that to Jillian.
“I really don’t know.”
Wonderful. Hamish was evading her inquiry. Was he lying? Maybe, maybe not. But he was definitely not sharing everything with her.
She might have questioned whether his apartment had been broken into if it weren’t for the fact that a cop called her. Of course he could’ve paid someone to pretend but she didn’t think so.
“Give me a minute.” Jill rubbed a hand over her forehead, as if trying to ease away a headache. She pressed a button on the office intercom. “Jake. Code yellow while I take this meeting. Be on the lookout for company.”
“Wilco.”
“I have new information about Brianna, er your Beatrice. I went back to the Murphy’s Pub this morning,” Hamish said. “The bartender recognized her.”
Jill sat up in her chair. “Wait, Beatrice was there?”
“Yes. Apparently she went in every day for a week and then abruptly said goodbye with a train ticket in hand and a final bottle of cider.”
“That still doesn’t give us any information on where she is now.”
“North of Philadelphia.”
“That was ten weeks ago. She could be anywhere.”
“I had an idea.” Hamish cocked a brow at her, hesitated.
“Well out with it.”
“Brianna is a creature of habit. She missed home. Which got me to thinking about your partner and how to find him.”
Jill scrunched up her face. Marsh still had not called her back. And she was really beginning to wonder if maybe he had run off with Beatrice. It was time to trust Hamish Ballard. At least a little.
After all, he wasn’t obligated to tell her about Beatrice and the train ticket. It was another data point in the search to find her since she had bailed on their relocation.
“Are you going to share with me?” Hamish asked. “I gave you information about Brianna.”
“What do you want to know?” she asked, feeling defeated.
“Your partner is missing,” he stated.
She shrugged. Not answering.
“Where have you looked for him?”
Where hadn’t she looked? “His usual places.”
“No sightings?”
“No.”
“Credit card usage?”
She just stared at him.
“Quite right,” he said, “You checked.”
Shit. He had heard her tell Kita to break the law.
“No information then?”
Marsh hadn’t used his company cards or his personal credit cards since two weeks after he left. Which meant he must have Black cards. Unless he had taken out cash. According to Kita, he’d gone to the Cape. He’d come back to DC and then been in Philadelphia. Where they had relocated Beatrice Winter.
Maybe she should be worried that he was dead.
“Would he have a burner phone?” Hamish pulled her out of her musings.
“Likely.” Probably more than one.
“We could back-trace from his known contacts and see if an unknown number shows up.”
But he would have called her…or Kita. And he hadn’t reached out to either of them.
However it was a solid idea.
“What about family members?” Hamish prodded. “Siblings?”
“Only child.” Same as her. They’d bonded over that once upon a time.
“Who are his friends?”
“Me. Kita.” Kita was Marsh’s closest friend. They’d known each other since high school. And Kita would tell Jill if she’d heard from Marsh. Oddly her relationship with Kita had grown closer since Marsh had disappeared.
“Who else is he close to?”
“His mother.”
“Has your partner contacted his mother?”
“We checked his cell phone records,” Jill admitted grudgingly. “He hasn’t made any calls in the past ten weeks.”
“Does his mother live nearby?”
“Yes, but I don’t want to worry her.” Except maybe it was time to get worried. Hamish just studied her waiting for her come to the same conclusion as him. He was right. “We need to talk to Marsh’s mother.”
“We can come up with a cover story before we talk to her.”
Jill tapped her fingers on the desk blotter. “What if we just check his mother’s phone records?”
Because he had a point. If Marsh was using a burner, he would still call his mother. Jill slapped her forehead. Why hadn’t she thought of that?
She could ask Kita to check Colleen Adams’s cell and landline records. On the sly. But Kita was in Cape Cod and she was their resident hacker.
“I’ll have Kita check tomorrow when she gets back.”
“Why don’t we check now?”
Jill studied him. “That isn’t my skill set.”
“I am rather handy with a computer.” Hamish grinned charmingly. “If you will give me access to your system.”
The last thing she wanted to do was give him access to the ALIAS system, but if he were right, they might finally have a lead on Marsh which might lead to Beatrice.
“It will take more than handy.”
Hamish sighed. “I work Cyber Crimes, love.”
Well, that explained a lot.
Hamish Ballard had slowly wormed his way into her search for Marsh. But this quest had become about protecting her company, not about protecting her client and her partner. Because if Marsh had betrayed her, the only thing she had left was the company.
She had people depending on her for their livelihood. And even more people depending on her to keep them safe.
“Together.” He eyed her suspiciously. “We do this together or I won’t share.”
She nodded shortly. “Fine.”
She made him sit on the loveseat until she was signed into their sophisticated tracking system. “Okay, now you can look at it.” But she wasn’t going to let him have unfettered access. So once Hamish sat in her chair, Jill leaned over his shoulder and watched every move.
He finessed the keys and for a moment Jill was transported back to last night when he had used those fingers to bring her pleasure. Heat swelled over her in a wave.
She needed to forget about last night. It was an aberration. One she couldn’t afford to repeat.
“Okay. I’m ready. Give me his mother’s phone number.”
Jillian gave him Colleen Adams’s phone number. Within several minutes her phone records came up. It was going to take a while to eliminate valid phone numbers and see if there were any matches. Hamish hit print and several pages of data chugged out.
“This could take a while.” Jillian reached for a pen and scratched out Kita’s phone number and her own phone number quickly. Both she and Kita checked in with Colleen regularly.
Another number they could cross out was Judge Adams’s. He was her ex-husband and monthly booty call—something Jill tried really hard not to think about.
She highlighted several numbers that occurred regularly. Using their private database to identify phone numbers, Jillian was able to rule out a few more numbers as legitimate businesses.
She should have thought about the fact that Colleen had not seemed worried about Marsh. She would bet that he had been calling his mother this whole time. Which meant that he had purposely not been calling her.
That thought triggered a mix of feelings. Hurt. Why hadn’t he called her? Suspicion. Because if he wasn’t calling her, did he think he was doing something wrong? Disappointment. The hope that she had been carrying around slowly diminished.
Their office had been compromised. She couldn’t afford to ignore Hamish’s attempts to work together anymore.
There were only three numbers that they couldn’t identify. “If we ca
n check the records and see where the signal pinged from, we could have a lead.” The pieces of the puzzle were coming together. She just needed to be patient.
“We’re close.” Hamish asked distractedly, “What did the police say when you told them about your break-in?”
Silence.
“You didn’t tell them?”
“That’s not your concern.” Jill used her frosty ice-queen voice.
Hamish didn’t chastise her but she knew he was thinking it. Which made her uncomfortable. She couldn’t read him that quickly, could she?
“Did you get any video of the attempted break-in?”
“Yes.” It would help if they knew who had broken in but neither she nor Jake recognized the perpetrators. “If I show you the video recording, can you see if you recognize them?”
“Aye.”
They shifted positions, and Jill now sat at the computer.
With a few keystrokes, Jill opened up the five-minute recording. The perpetrators wore ball caps on their heads and gloves on their hands and kept their heads down. But maybe if this was related to Hamish’s need to find Beatrice, he would be able to identify the attackers. They were white, fair-skinned. But that was really all that could be seen on the recording.
Jill had already watched with Jake. The sick feeling in the pit of her stomach grew as the rage from the two men became more evident. Toward the end when they couldn’t breach the door, the physicality of the crowbar swings against the door jamb were intense. It was clearly not random. And all Jill could think was thank goodness no one had been around to become the target of all that rage.
Hamish leaned over her shoulder, one hand on the back of the chair. The other palm pressed flat on her mahogany desk.
A shiver skittered down her spine.
Hamish’s heat surrounded her. She should have felt trapped, but instead a feeling of safety enveloped her.
“Wait.” He tapped the keyboard with his fingers stopping the video. “Back that up just a bit.”
Jill hit the rewind button at the slow speed and went back ten seconds.
Then she hit play again.
“Stop right there.”
Both men had kept their heads down, and the ubiquitous DC tourist caps sold by street vendors shaded their face so that it was impossible to identify them. But Hamish had caught a small mistake. For a brief instant, the face of one man was visible. Hamish drew in a sharp breath.
“You know him?”
Hamish straightened suddenly and propped his hands on his hips. “Bollocks.”
Chapter 12
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing good.” Shite. Hamish needed to think. What were Matthew and Malachi Walsh doing in Washington, DC? Hamish shoved away from her and paced around her office, making a circle between the grouping of seating and the desk. “That’s Brianna’s cousin.”
“I thought you said her family was in jail?”
“Her father and two brothers,” Hamish said shortly. “She decimated their business after they kicked her out. The cousins must be looking for her to find out if she hid money or what she did with all their files.”
Because Brianna Walsh hadn’t just testified against her family, she had singlehandedly taken apart their business, destroying computer records and closing bank accounts. Hamish had always thought she’d pocketed the money. Or at the very least skimmed off the top. Although according to the file he’d looked at, she had claimed to be broke.
“How did they escape prosecution?”
“The theory was that they were too small to bother with. They personally didn’t have the relationships with the higher-up criminal elements. So the government chose to concentrate on putting the main Walsh family away.”
“Ugh. I hate expedient choices.” Jillian pressed her palms flat on the desktop. “Did they testify against their family?”
“Not a chance. Part of the reason Brianna needed resettlement was to protect her from a hit.”
“Do you think they are here to kill her?”
“Malachi is known to be brutal with a knife.” The Walsh family was famous for their vicious style of execution, and Brianna’s immediate family had been the core of the criminal enterprise. As far as he was aware, neither Malachi or Matthew had killed anyone. However, perhaps the cousins were dirtier than anyone knew. “So…possibly.”
“Still, why would they follow you?”
That was the question, wasn’t it?
“At the NCA I was vocal in my criticism of Brianna and her need to pay for her crimes.” Hamish mulled over the implication of the Walsh brothers in Washington. “Everyone knew I wanted her brought back in.”
“You think they followed you here to catch you apprehending her?”
The problem with that was no one was supposed to know he was in the US. Of course, Jillian didn’t know that. And he wasn’t about to share. “It is more imperative than ever that we find Brianna and Marsh.” Before the Walsh family found her.
He wanted her rotting in prison. But he had a feeling that the Walsh cousins had a more permanent solution to her betrayal in mind.
She shuddered.
“You do think they are together?” Jill said, clearly trying to hide her glum tone.
He knew immediately she was referencing her partner and Brianna. “Possibly.” Hamish conceded. “I potentially have some other information that might help find her.”
“More?” she ground out.
He knew she’d be pissed but…“I couldn’t trust you until today.” And he still wasn’t completely sure he could trust her.
“Fine. What now?”
It was time for him to share. He had the intelligence, and she had the resources he needed. “Brianna needs special medicine.”
“What kind?”
“She takes a very specific medicine for partial-onset seizures.” That was not common knowledge. “She should be running out soon or have already received the prescription. It’s a Class IV drug so if I’ve understood your prescription drug laws, it should be monitored.”
Jillian tapped her foot in a quick staccato rhythm. Her gray eyes narrowed with pure annoyance.
Hamish continued, “If we can confirm your partner’s cell phone location, then we can search for pharmacies that dispensed that medicine to female patients in her age range, and we might have a line on her location. We might even be able to narrow it down by new prescriptions issued.”
“And you didn’t think to share this information sooner?” If anything, she looked more pissed. “I could have been researching this two days ago.”
“I wanted to make sure we were truly working together before I gave you that intel.”
Hope began to blossom. In any good investigation, there was always a tipping point at which all the pieces started to come together and form a complete picture.
Hamish had backtracked through the calls made by the mobile number that they believed could be Marsh Adams’s but it wouldn’t hurt to confirm the number with the man’s mother.
“Can you call his mother and ask about the phone number we’ve got?”
After an awkward few minutes on the phone, Colleen Adams confirmed that the number she had received calls from every two weeks was in fact her son’s.
Jillian hung up the phone, looking unexpectedly defeated.
“You okay?”
“I will be.” She straightened her shoulders.
Hamish had been so caught up in moving forward in his own quest, that he’d forgotten that Marsh Adams meant something to her.
He wanted to apologize but he wasn’t sorry.
It appeared more and more probable that Marsh Adams was in the middle of something nefarious. Hamish wanted to touch her, to soothe her feelings.
She visibly pulled herself together. “So let’s track that phone’s location.”
“You do know this is illegal.” Shit. Of course she knew. But what a stupid git he was to bring it up.
“I am aware.” She made a rolling
motion with her hand.
So Hamish got down to tracking Marsh Adams’s phone.
“The closest I can get is a tower near Foxhead, Massachusetts, north of Boston.”
“You mean south of Boston, yes?”
“Not according to the map.” He traced his finger over the area and then glanced at her again. “Definitely north.”
“Huh. Marsh has a house on the Cape.” Jillian leaned back in her chair, her head tilted toward the ceiling, and sighed. “So what do you suggest? We just go to Boston and wander around?”
Hamish finessed the computer keys some more. “You’re thinking too linearly, love.”
Her gaze flared at the endearment, then flattened. “You have a better idea?”
“Let’s see if we can find any Irish pubs nearby.” Hamish grinned. “Like a Venn diagram.”
Jillian sat up in the chair. “So if we cross section the third circle which is the drug prescriptions along with the areas of Marsh’s phone call and Irish bars, perhaps we can narrow down our search. Find the intersectionality of those three things.”
Hamish’s heart quickened. Finally, it felt as if they had a solid plan, and were making headway.
“I found several pubs within a five-mile radius of this town.”
“That still doesn’t mean he’s there or she’s there or they are there together,” Jillian commented.
Hamish wanted to rush to Boston. Success was nearly in his grasp and finally he could apprehend Brianna Walsh. But he had to play this next part carefully, because he didn’t have any jurisdiction here. He didn’t have the legal authority to arrest her. And extradition to the UK was notoriously difficult. “It would be even better if we had the evidence that she stole the money.”
“If she did, why didn’t she access it before she disappeared?”
“Too suspicious,” Hamish said. “She needed to wait until she had a new identity before she transferred cash into a bank account. Otherwise the American authorities would have caught on to her plot. We need her to admit she stole the money on recording.”
“We can figure that out later.” Jillian stood and stretched. “Look at how many different cell towers Marsh’s phone has pinged from. According to the data we have, he has been in Portland, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. They could be getting ready to move again.”
