Authors: Julie Leto
As if on cue, Marisela sauntered into the office in step with Ian. Their conversation halted the minute they realized they were not alone.
What the hell?
Ian cleared his throat. “You’re up to speed, then?” he asked Marisela as he approached his chair, giving Frankie’s boots only a cursory glance.
“Completely,” she replied.
Was her voice suddenly softer? Or was Frankie imagining things?
Marisela knocked him in the arm playfully as she took the seat beside him. He felt his expression coil into a scowl. She and Ian looked mighty cozy on their way in. Had they bonded over Cole’s dead body?
Brynn, however, seemed less interested in the camaraderie between her brother and her protégée. “So if we assume Yizenia did the hit, then we can also assume that Evan Cole had something to do with Rebecca Manning’s death!”
“Cole claimed he wasn’t there,” Frankie reminded them.
“He lied,” Marisela said decisively. “And something made him finally want to confess his part. But what?”
“The note with his name on it?” Ian offered.
“Perhaps,” Brynn replied. “He didn’t know about Craig Bennett’s note, did he?”
Marisela shook her head. “Denise Bennett sent him out of the room before she showed it to us. I talked to this caretaker lady at the cemetery. She said Cole visited Rebecca’s grave regularly.”
Brynn’s eyebrows shot up. “Interesting. Unfortunately, we’ve literally a dead end on our hands. Didn’t the police report list an alibi for Evan Cole?”
Frank nodded. “Party on his parents’ yacht. Even Manning believed Cole was in the clear.”
“Maybe Yizenia made a mistake,” Marisela offered. “Maybe she just assumed—”
“Yizenia never assumes,” Brynn assured them, sliding her slim backside onto the corner of Ian’s desk. A split second later, Marisela slapped him on the arm. Must have caught him looking.
Leaning forward, Marisela eyed Brynn with suspicion. Not the accusatory kind, but with enough distrust to get Brynn’s hackles up.
Frankie winced. Not a smart move,
vidita
.
“Just how did you get to know Yizenia so well?” Marisela asked.
Brynn cast a glance at her brother.
“I told her about our mother,” Ian conceded, his eyes darting to his computer monitor, which had just pinged with an incoming message.
Brynn swallowed thickly. Frankie knew the story. Had heard it a long time ago, and frankly, it wasn’t the kind of story a guy forgets. He could imagine that if anyone touched one permanent-curled, dyed hair on his mother’s head, he’d easily and without regret cut the heart out of the person responsible. And he’d do the job himself.
Brynn, on the other hand, seemed to harbor guilt over her relationship with Yizenia Santiago, judging by the shadow darkening her eyes. “I made it a mission of mine to find her once I realized what she’d done for my father, for my family. I didn’t expect to like her, to be intrigued by her, to be fascinated by someone who is almost fanatical about seeking revenge. But once you meet her, you’ll understand.”
“I’ve met her,” Marisela said. “I’m not so impressed.
Pero
, she did you a service. But now she’s the enemy. Am I the only one who remembers that?”
Frankie chuckled. Marisela as the voice of reason? That was a new one.
Brynn gave Marisela a sly grin. “No, you don’t have to remind either of us. I know this woman well enough to realize that Yizenia’s choice to”—she lowered her voice—”
contact
my brother, suggests she has some ulterior motive that could affect us all. We need to find her. We have two ways to go about doing that. One is to search the neighborhood where she’s been spotted. The other is to find out who hired her and track her through that avenue.”
Frankie clucked his tongue. “There’s no guarantee she’ll contact the person who hired her until after the job is done. Cole is dead and Bennett is too well guarded. My bet is she’ll go after the Hightower boys next.”
“She already has,” Ian said. He typed on his keyboard, bringing the large, flat-screen monitor behind his desk to life. A large scan of a newspaper article appeared on the screen.
“Switzerland?” Brynn asked, standing and turning to see the article close up. “What’s this?”
Ian frowned. “Raymond Hightower’s obituary. He died a month ago. Ski accident.”
“They’re sure?” Marisela asked.
Ian’s fingers flew over his keyboard. “Took several days to recover the body. He went over a cliff. An autopsy was performed, but the results are pending.”
“Yizenia strikes again,” Frankie said.
“Actually, that would make him the first of the guys to go,” Marisela assessed.
“He was in Europe,” Brynn said. “Yizenia’s home base is Spain. She could have hit him first because he was closest.”
“Then Bennett, now Cole here in the States. We don’t know where Brad Hightower is. Maybe she doesn’t, either,” Marisela suggested.
“Or else he’s already dead,” Ian said “The team has nothing solid on him yet, though Max discovered that ten years ago, when the parents died in a yachting accident in the Greek islands, he showed up for the funeral and then promptly disappeared. No one seems to have heard from him since.”
“What about the will?” Brynn asked. “To whom did the Hightowers leave all their money?”
Ian arched a brow. “Good question.”
He typed again, more than likely sending a request to his research team. Sounded like a simple question with a complicated answer.
“Always follow the money,” Brynn reminded them. “Unfortunately, Yizenia uses untraceable offshore accounts.”
“So where do we go next?” Frankie asked. The case was confusing and, in his estimation, pointless. They’d been hired to protect Craig Bennett. That was fine, but they couldn’t do it forever. Once he was out of the hospital and on the mend, he’d be a sitting duck.
To find Yizenia fast, they needed to pursue the one solid clue they had—she preferred hanging out in Jamaica Plain, which wasn’t exactly a small area. So far, his money was on Parker Manning as the one who’d hired her. He was the only one with a personal score to settle. But why kill Evan Cole? He’d had an alibi and even Parker Manning claimed to believe the guy had no part in his sister’s murder. Or had that simply been a ruse to throw suspicion off him when Cole turned up dead?
“I think we need to go back to Parker Manning,” Frankie suggested.
Marisela shook her head. “I don’t trust him. And I don’t think Evan Cole was as squeaky clean as he wanted us to believe. A rich guy doesn’t hang out at some chick’s grave just to be nice. He was there that night.”
“He had an alibi,” Ian argued. “The police have witness statements that place Evan Cole on his father’s yacht in Boston Harbor, attending his parents’ anniversary parry, on the night Rebecca went missing.”
“He was on a yacht in the same harbor as the island where Rebecca’s body was found?” Marisela asked, incredulous. “That can’t be a coincidence.”
“She’s got a point,” Frankie agreed. “He might have been on the yacht at some point, but he could have left. A yacht that size would have lifeboats,
verdad
?”
Ian and Brynn nodded. They’d both spent a hell of a lot more time on yachts than either he or Marisela, but on their last mission, they’d been on at least three floating palaces. All of them had had dinghies and tenders and even lifeboat rafts. Hell, Titan’s own yacht had a two-seater helicopter.
Ian nodded as Frankie’s suggested scenario started to make sense. “If Evan was there, what was his part in Rebecca’s death?”
“The only person left who could tell us is Bradley Hightower.
If
he’s still alive,” Brynn said.
“Evan Cole claimed he wasn’t there,” Marisela mused, “but he must have been because someone had proof enough to convince Yizenia of his involvement. What if Evan wasn’t the only one who lied about not being there?” Marisela asked.
“You mean Parker?” Frankie asked.
She shook her head. “No, we know he was away at school. I’m talking about Tracy. She was Bradley’s current girlfriend. Apparently, Bradley dumped Rebecca and took up with Tracy. If you think about it, she had more reason to be on that island that night than her older sister. What if Bradley Hightower brought his new little girlfriend camping with him and her older sister wasn’t happy about it and went to bring her back?”
“But then why would Tracy not tell the police if she saw her sister get murdered?”
Marisela shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t see anything. We don’t know until we ask her. She was only fifteen. Maybe she kept quiet to cover her own ass. Can’t imagine her parents would have allowed her to go out to some island with her boyfriend and his friends. Look, I’m just supposing, but Parker Manning said his sister was really screwed up. Maybe her troubles aren’t so much that her sister died, but that she was murdered and Tracy never said a word.”
“So you think Tracy hired Yizenia?” Ian asked.
Frankie bristled, the intense connection between Marisela and Ian spiking the hairs on the back of his neck. The boss wanted her opinion. All of a sudden, he respected her observations?
“We won’t know if she’s angry enough to hire a killer until we check Tracy out,” Marisela replied. “But we have two people left who were involved that night—Bradley Hightower, who we can’t find, and Tracy Manning.”
“We can’t find her, either,” Brynn pointed out.
Marisela stood, slapped Frankie’s thigh, and jerked her thumb toward the door. “Parker Manning knows where she is.”
Frankie wondered exactly what his ex had in mind. The guy hadn’t been exactly cooperative before. “You want to rough him up?”
“Ew, and touch him? Only if he’s showered. No, I was thinking something a little more…
engañosa
.”
Deceitful? Better than being bored, he supposed.
“Do whatever it takes,” Ian said, his gaze locked with Marisela’s.
Again, Frankie fought off a chill. Those were the kind of words a man could live to regret.
Nine
MARISELA’S BRAIN TINGLED
with ideas on how to smoke out Tracy Manning—some of them legal, some of them not so much. The chance of engaging in a little larcenous activity, for a good cause put an added swing in her step, which Frankie clearly noticed. As soon as they were out of Ian’s office, he slapped her on the ass and whistled like a construction worker. The feel of his hot hand across her backside sparked another list of possibilities to form in her brain—none of which had anything to do with finding missing women or breaking laws. Well, not in most states, anyway.
“You can’t keep your hands off me, can you?” she teased.
Oddly, he didn’t return her smile. “I’m not the only one.”
She stopped, her hands on her hips. “You’ve never been the only one,
cabrόn
.”
She’d meant the jibe to be a joke, but Frankie wasn’t laughing.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” she asked, annoyed. He tried to look casual when he crossed his arms, but she wasn’t buying it.
“What was up with you and Ian back there?” he asked, his jaw a little tighter than necessary for such a casual question.
Damn, he was so transparent.
She played innocent, drawing her hand dramatically to her chest. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. We were just working, same as you and Brynn. I noticed you checking out her
culo
, by the way. It’s nice. A little on the skinny side, but she’s a rich girl, so you’ve gotta cut her some slack.”
She turned and laughed, but once again, Frankie didn’t find her comment amusing. He grabbed her arm. “I’m serious,
vidita
. You can’t let that guy get under your skin. He’s a snake.”
“He’s our boss,” she replied over her shoulder, nonchalantly glancing at his hand. He’d started to squeeze her arm, but she doubted he was aware of it.
“For now,” Frankie snapped back, releasing her.
He quickened his pace down the hall, but she didn’t follow. She knew Frankie chafed under Ian’s rule, even before the Titan chief had used Frankie’s life to manipulate Marisela. But after Frankie recovered, he’d hated Blake no more—and no less than he had before. She always figured Frankie’s
machismo
attitude simply didn’t mix with Ian’s overbearing managerial style. But now she suspected that whatever anger ran between them stemmed from more than just excess testosterone and went back further in time than just three months.
Ian could be a self-absorbed, smug prick half the time, so she usually understood why he pissed Frankie off. But today, Ian hadn’t been so bad. Despite how it made him look like a fool, he’d confessed to his tryst with Yizenia. He’d come clean to his sister and then to Marisela. He’d discussed every aspect of the case with her, and back in his office, he’d listened to both her and Frankie’s suggestions during the debriefing. Hell, he’d not only told her some depressing shit from his childhood, but they’d also nearly gotten run over together in the cemetery. So she wasn’t feeling so annoyed with him at the moment. Didn’t mean Frankie had to go acting all betrayed.
Or worse, jealous.
She caught up to Frankie at the ornate, wrought-iron and marble staircase that angled down to the main floor of the Titan International home office. To anyone casually strolling inside—not that anyone was ever allowed to do that—the building looked like a high-priced law practice or renovated Boston home. Behind the locked doors of the offices, however, hummed the inner workings of a highly technical, covert organization peopled with the best private investigators and security specialists money could buy. Marisela hadn’t had much time to explore the inner workings yet, but she was about to make her first requisition.
“What’s your problem with him, anyway?”
“Look, Marisela. Ian Blake was my way out of the joint. He pulled the strings that got me released.”
“That’s why you went to work for him?”
“Working for him was a condition of my release?”
“For the rest of your life?”
Frankie laughed, but the sound vibrated more with defiance than humor. “What do you think?”
“I think you’re like a caged animal here. I think you’ve stayed because of me. You were going to leave before Blake hired me, weren’t you?”