Unleashed (26 page)

She buried her face in his neck and held off a fresh wave of tears. “I don’t really remember,” she lied. She lay there in the dark as her mind touched on the pieces of her dream. That niggling feeling was back, like someone was scratching the back of her brain, trying to get her attention.

D
anny sat back and watched a little regretfully as Caroline pulled away and yanked on one of his T-shirts. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah,” she said, scrubbing at her eyes. “Just a weird dream.”

He threw his legs over the side of the bed and stood up. A blush rose up in Caroline’s cheeks and her gaze slid away from his naked form. She turned her back and pretended to hunt for her clothes.

So that was how she wanted to play it, huh? He’d ripped himself open and let his guts spill out last night, and now she wanted to act like it was no big deal.

Served him right, not that he was going to let her get away with it. It was a big deal. A very big deal. His brain shied away from defining exactly what was going on just yet, but there was no way he could pretend something important hadn’t happened. Danny walked up behind her and turned her gently but firmly to face him.

“We should call Toni as soon as possible, and see if there’s any information—”

Whatever she was going to say was swallowed by his mouth. She was stiff at first, every muscle going rigid and her lips stayed glued shut in a thin, tight line. He wore her down with teasing sucks and licks, and within a few seconds she was sighing into his mouth and curling her fingers into the hair of his nape.

Much better.

“Good morning,” he whispered and gave her a final, soft peck. “I’ll call Toni ASAP to tell her to meet us at the office, okay?” Danny smiled at her dazed nod as he sauntered past her into the bathroom. His morning erection throbbed a protest over Caroline not joining him in the shower, but he figured there would be time enough to fool around after she was completely safe.

When he emerged, showered and dressed, he found Caroline on the couch, her hands curled around a steaming cup of coffee. With her hunched shoulders swallowed up in his giant T-shirt and her hair spilling down her back, she looked like a lost little girl.

He poured coffee into a heavy ceramic mug and joined her on the couch. “It’s going to be okay.”

She shook her head. “So much has happened. I’m just not sure who I can trust anymore.”

He ran a soothing hand down her back. “You can trust me. You can trust Derek, Ethan, and Toni,” he said firmly. “Don’t ever doubt that.”

Her eyes narrowed and she looked like she was going to say something, but stopped herself. Finally, she said, “I guess I don’t have much choice.”

Something about that stuck in his craw, and he shoved the uneasiness aside. “Why don’t you go get cleaned up. I’ll make some phone calls and take you into the office.”

An hour later they met Toni, Ethan and Derek at the office.

“Now what about the flash drive that melted your laptop?” Toni said, holding out her hand.

Danny handed it over, along with the DVD that had been in the safe. “We found this too, but after what happened with the flash drive, I wasn’t about to slip it into my Bose.”

Toni’s eyes rolled behind the lenses of her heavy framed glasses. “Viruses don’t work on stereo equipment, Danny.”

Danny and Caroline followed her back to her office, which was a good five degrees warmer than the rest of the space from the sheer volume of computer equipment. She stuck the flash drive into a Mac laptop and executed a few keystrokes. “I’m running a deep scan antivirus program,” she explained as the computer hummed. “Although since most viruses are written for Windows machines, whatever James loaded his data with is a lot less likely to hurt the Mac.” She patted the computer as though it were a loyal pet.

Caroline took a seat in one of Toni’s guest chairs while Danny resisted the urge to pace.

“Tapping your feet and squirming like a four-year-old who needs the potty isn’t going to make me go any faster,” Toni said without looking up.

Caroline gave a tired little laugh and Danny felt an answering smile tug at his mouth. He willed himself to stay still, even as restless energy sparked through his veins.

For several minutes the only sound was the white noise hum of computers and the clack of Toni’s fingers on the keyboard. Finally she sat back. “Eughh.” She grimaced as though a foul smell were emanating from the computer.

“Eugh? What does eugh mean?” Caroline asked, jumping from her seat and coming around so she could see Toni’s screen.

Toni slouched a little in her seat and she pulled at her lip. “It’s pretty well encrypted.”

Danny’s stomach sank. “You can’t read it?”

Toni sat up straight. “Of course I can read it,” she snapped. “But it might take me awhile.”

Impatience bubbled in his chest and he struggled to keep his tone calm. “How long is awhile?”

Toni’s eyes narrowed and she typed something. She shook her head. “At least a few hours.”

“No problem,” he said, biting back his disappointment. “We know a hell of a lot more than we did a few days ago. We can wait a few hours.” He met Caroline’s eyes and she nodded in agreement. “We’ll leave you to it,” he said to Toni. “I’ll have Derek take a look at the DVD and see if we can get any more info on these bank records.” Toni barely nodded, her focus already on cracking the code of the incomprehensible characters on her screen.

They caught Derek and Ethan in the break room, their dark heads bent as they spoke in low, serious tones. They both looked up when Danny and Caroline walked in. Two pairs of eyes, one striking blue, one dark and fathomless locked on them in speculative stares. They looked back at each other and exchanged a series of nods and facial expressions that had meaning only to them.

Fucking stupid twin shit. “We need to take a look at this,” Danny held up the disc in its clear jewel case. “But we need to be careful in case it’s loaded like the flash drive.”

“Got it,” Derek said and motioned them to follow him to his office. Like Toni, he didn’t load the disk into his regular computer, but pulled out a spare laptop and loaded the CD into the drive.

Caroline and Danny crowded around the back of the desk to see Derek’s screen. Almost immediately the screen went black.

“Oh, no,” Caroline said. “It’s going to be just like the last one. Since when did James know how to booby trap computer files?” Her voice took on a high, frantic tone.

“No, wait,” Danny held up a hand. “It’s just launching a video file.”

A guitar lick with a heavy base line started to play as a series of computer generated credits flashed across the screen. The scene cut to the living room of a house, where a young woman in a tank top and shorts so tight you could see the outline of her sex lounged against the cushions of a couch. A heavily muscled man walked in, his face obscured by the camera angle. A few lines of improbable dialog provided the only setup before the guy was thrusting his tongue in the girl’s mouth and twisting her nipples like he was trying to tune in Tokyo.

Danny felt his face heat as realization dawned.

Caroline got it at about the same time. “Oh my God, is this a porno?”

“Yep,” Derek said all cool and matter of fact as he sat back in his chair. The man on the screen stripped off the girl’s shorts, cursing when he bumped into an off camera microphone. “Nice to see they didn’t spare any expense on production value.”

“Maybe I should watch this by myself,” Danny said.

Caroline gave him an appalled look.

“I don’t mean it like that,” he said. “But if it was in James’s safe, it has to be important. So someone should watch it.”

“Maybe that someone would be me,” Caroline said, “since I’m less likely to be distracted by…ew,” her nose wrinkled and her head recoiled. Then she leaned over Derek’s shoulder and peered closer at the screen. “I know that guy.”

Had he not been resting his hand on the back of Derek’s chair, Danny would have fallen on his ass.

“You know porn stars?” He was glad Derek asked the question because Caroline’s comment had rendered Danny speechless.

“No,” Caroline said. “That’s the guy from that reality show. You know, the fighter one—”

Danny squinted at the screen. “She’s right. It’s Curtis Thomson from
Last Fighter Standing
.” Thomson had been a contestant last season on a trashy reality show focused on the ultimate fighting world.

“He was voted off in round six,” Caroline said.

“You watched that show?” He knew it was stupid, but that small area of compatibility made him smile.

An answering smile teased the corners of her mouth as she shrugged. “A girl’s gotta ogle her man meat.” Then her eyes widened as the light shifted enough to fully reveal the girl’s features. She was beautiful in a faintly exotic way. If her sleepy expression and bored moans were anything to go by, Curtis Thomson wasn’t any better in the sack than he was in the Octagon.

“She was at my house,” Caroline said, an undercurrent of disbelief in her voice. “A month before James was killed.

“I thought they were having an affair,” Caroline said as she accepted a bottle of water and let Danny guide her to one of the leather club chairs on the other side of Derek’s desk. Derek had thankfully stopped the DVD so Caroline wouldn’t have to hear the squirm inducing fake moans and cheesy music.

“Tell us everything you remember about her.”

“I didn’t get her name,” Caroline said.

“According to the credits her name is Lanie Deep,” Derek said, “but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that’s a stage name.”

“I came home early from a weekend with Kate.” She looked at Danny to see if he’d roll his eyes, but his expression remained serious, focused on what she had to say. “I heard James arguing with someone in his office. The door was open and I waited outside to see if I could hear anything. She had a really heavy accent—Eastern European, I’d guess.”

Caroline frowned, trying to remember every detail of the few seconds of conversation she’d heard. Between the hysteria and the thick accent, the woman had been nearly incomprehensible. “James was angry, telling her there was nothing he could do. I must have made some noise because he came out into the hall and found me.” James’s face had drained of color when he’d found her out there. At the time Caroline had been convinced she’d just walked in on her husband and his distraught mistress. “He tried to cover it up and say she was a client having problems. He made her leave. I asked him point blank if he was having an affair. He didn’t try to deny it. Three days later he filed for divorce.”

The woman’s sobs echoed in Caroline’s head as she lowered her face to her hands. At the time, all she’d seen was a beautiful young woman upset with her husband and jumped to the obvious conclusion. She realized the truth could be much, much worse. “Do you think he took her baby? Is that why she tracked him down?” Her stomach twisted and her eyes burned at the thought.

“We won’t know until we talk to her,” Danny said. But she could see the suspicion in his stormy eyes. “Do you know what happened to her?” he asked and handed her a tissue.

Caroline dabbed at her nose and eyes, struggling to regain her composure. There would be plenty of time to lament her stupidity for marrying a man she never really knew. A man who was capable of doing something so horrific. “I have no idea. James wouldn’t give me any information, and I had no idea where to start looking. But if he took her baby for illegal adoption, wouldn’t she go to the police?”

“Not necessarily,” Derek said. “You said she sounded Eastern European?”

Caroline nodded.

“You’d be surprised how many people are trafficked from overseas,” Derek said. “They take these girls, promise them jobs, then sell them into forced labor or prostitution.”

“But she escaped and managed to track down James. She would have to tell somebody—”

“These women are terrified,” Danny said. “When they get here their passports are confiscated and their pimps put a scare into them about going to the police. Most of them are convinced they’ll go to prison and that no one here will help them.”

“Then there’s always the possibility she didn’t just disappear,” Derek said.

A sense of foreboding swept through Caroline at his words. She had a terrible feeling, deep in her gut, that the beautiful girl in the movie, the same distraught woman who had been at her house, had met the same fate as Anne Taggart and Emily Parrish. Whether directly by James’s hand, she wasn’t sure. She still couldn’t see him actually killing anyone with his own hands.

Not because she had any remaining belief in James’s inherent goodness, but because she simply didn’t see him having the balls to do it himself.

“How do we find out for sure?”

Danny leaned his butt on Derek’s desk and rubbed absently at his chin. He was only a foot or so away. Close enough for her to pick up the woodsy scent of his soap and the salty tang of his skin. Close enough to make it hard to resist the urge to throw her arms around his waist and bury her head in his chest so he could whisper that no matter how fucked up all this seemed, everything was going to be all right.

Caroline curled her fingers into the armrests to keep herself anchored.

“Curtis Thomson was from around here, wasn’t he?”

“He’s from Dublin,” Caroline said, smiling in spite of everything as she saw where Danny was going with this.

She could hear Derek typing at his keyboard. “Already have an address,” he said.

Danny offered his hand to Caroline and pulled her up from the chair. “How about it? Want to pay a visit to your favorite Ultimate Fighter?”

Thomson wasn’t at home when they got there but his roommate was happy to direct them to the auto shop where he worked as a mechanic. At six feet, Thomson was tall for a fighter, with all-American blue-eyed, blond hair good looks. The kind of kid you expected to see sitting on a tractor in the middle of a corn field. Not a kid you expected to be beating the crap out of someone in a metal cage.

Or starring in a one step up from homemade porno.

Thomson wiped his hands on a rag before offering one to Danny to shake. Danny suppressed a smile as the kid assessed him and squeezed his hand a little too hard. He faked a wince. Let the kid think he could take him if it made him a little more talkative.

“Thanks so much for talking to us,” Caroline said, all fluttering eyelashes and pouty red lips.