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Chapter One
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“They found the body.”
Angel DeLuca stared at the text that he’d just gotten from an Unknown Sender. Some might have considered it spam. A sick joke even. But the bad feeling knifing inside him told him this was the real deal.
Sonofabitch.
This was the message he’d been dreading for twenty years.
“A problem?” he heard his boss, Ruby Maverick, ask.
That question did a quick job of yanking Angel’s attention away from the text. He pushed it, and what it meant, aside. He shoved it onto the back burner while he continued the briefing about the assignment that he’d just completed.
“No problem,” he lied.
Yeah, it was a big assed lie. Along with being a big-assed problem.
Still, now wasn’t the time to get into it. He just needed to get through this briefing, and then, well… damn it all to hell, he’d deal with it.
Somehow.
The personal briefings were something Ruby asked of all her team members at Maverick Ops, and Angel figured that the hands on attention was just one of the reasons Maverick Ops was the elite private security company that it was. That elite status had been hard earned by tackling missions that law enforcement didn’t have the resources or the wherewithal to do: Tracking down kidnapped victims, neutralizing stalkers, making dangerous rescues, and solving the coldest of cases.
For this mission, it’d been the first on that list.
A kidnapping, AKA a shitshow, with the thirty-nine-year-old married kidnapper, Kristin Buchanan, abducting her nineteen-year-old-lover, Camden Reeves, when he’d tried to break off their relationship. Kristin had forced Camden at gunpoint into her car and driven off. When Camden’s parents had learned what’d happened, they’d called the cops.
And Ruby.
Ruby had assigned Angel right away to locate Camden and extract him from the dangerous situation.
“About twelve hours after Camden’s abduction, I located both him and his kidnapper at a rental cabin on the Guadalupe River,” Angel explained. “Kristin had paid with cash and registered under an alias for both the cabin and the rental car she was using. She’d ditched her phone and was using a burner.”
Angel had to give it to Kristin. For someone with no police record, she’d taken solid steps to conceal her identity and location.
But then the shitshow part had happened.
When she’d stopped by a convenience store in nowhere Texas to fill up with gas, she had gotten into an argument with the cashier when she’d accused him of giving her the wrong change.
“A cashier at the Hob Nob Texas Quik Stop—and, yeah, that’s the actual name of the place—in Tallulah Point called the locals and reported an irate customer, and when he described her, I thought it could be Kristin. I had my AI app monitoring cop chatter, and I immediately put drone surveillance on her vehicle and drove straight to Tallulah Point.”
That’d been about two hours from San Antonio, where both Camden and Kristin lived. So, another solid move to cover her tracks. Many kidnappers didn’t put that much distance between them and the abduction scene.
“Did the local cops respond, too?” she asked.
“No. The dispatcher who took the clerk’s call hadn’t seen the APB on Kristin, and apparently this clerk has a history of reporting customers for, well, pretty much anything. The dispatcher passed along his complaint to a deputy who opted not to make a trip to the store.”
As a former cop, Angel could understand the logic of dismissing something like this, but what he couldn’t dismiss was that no one in the department had at least glanced at the APB. Then again, manpower in small towns was often stretched mighty thin.
“Did she sexually assault Camden?” Ruby pressed.
Angel shook his head. “Despite their previous sexual relationship, Camden said she didn’t. However, she did give him some bruises when she slapped and punched him.”
Not serious injuries, but Angel knew that often the worst injuries were the ones you couldn’t see. He had firsthand knowledge of that.
“Camden Reeves is back with his family and his kidnapper is in jail. She’ll be arraigned later today,” Angel spelled out, hoping that concluded his briefing.
