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“Your hat was in Kenton’s room,” she said, her voice a raspy whisper. “The one with the Spurs logo that you wore nearly every day.”
She saw the split-second of confusion in his eyes. “My hat went missing, but I didn’t leave it in Kenton’s room.” He paused a heartbeat. “I found your pocket knife in there and took it.”
“You…found it there?” she finally managed to get out. “It was there and you took it?”
He gave a double nod.
Mia had wondered what’d happened to it, and she had no idea how it’d gotten in Kenton’s room. After that sank in, it didn’t take her long to realize what Angel would have thought when he saw the knife and the blood.
That she had been the one to murder Kenton.
She hadn’t, but she couldn’t fault him for coming to that conclusion. Her knife. The blood. No Kenton. She’d considered the same thing about Angel when she’d seen his hat.
“Was there a body when you went in his room?” she asked, and because she was feeling a little awkward about practically being on his lap, she moved back to the passenger’s seat.
He shook his head once again. “What about you?”
“No. Not there. I took your hat, cut it up and went to that storm drain by the park and dropped it in, piece by piece. I’d planned on cleaning up the blood, but I needed to…compose myself first. By the time I got back to the house, someone else had already done the clean-up.”
“Shit,” he spat out. Then, he groaned, and even though he didn’t say a word, he suddenly sounded and looked very much like the cop he’d once been.
Angel glanced back at the camera on the gate. “Put on your seatbelt,” he instructed. Yeah, he still had that cop vibe. “Let’s go for a drive so we can talk. Once we’re done, I’ll bring you back here to get your car.”
“Does Ruby Maverick use lip readers or high-penetration listening devices?” she asked. And it wasn’t a joke. From everything she’d heard, Maverick Ops had a lot of tech bells and whistles, along with experts in nearly every field possible.
“No, but Ruby’s not an idiot so if she sees our expressions, she’ll know something’s wrong,” he spelled out as he drove away. “I’d rather not involve her in this yet. Not until I can figure out what’s going on.”
Mia agreed because there was so much to figure out. Well, one huge thing anyway. Who had murdered Kenton, and who had seemingly tried to set up Angel and her?
Because it was a set-up.
That was flashing like a neon sign in her mind. No way had his hat and her pocketknife gotten into Kenton’s room by accident. There were other flashes, too. Of that night. Of the absolute terror she’d felt when she had seen all that blood and Angel’s hat.
“Danno,” Angel said, yanking her out of those memories. It took her a moment to realize he wasn’t talking to her but to some kind of device in the van. “Search for any info on foster parents, Melanie and RJ Matthews and Kenton Barker. Time perimeter—nineteen years, eight months ago. Run background checks on all parties connected to them and then display on dash as the info comes in.”
“Danno?” she asked, but she waved that off. “Is this the AI app that Ruby’s techs created for all her operatives?”
“It is,” he verified.
There was no need for him to spell out why Angel had given the app that name. Hawaii 5-0 had been one of his favorite shows. Also no need for him to explain what the app could do. The likely answer was pretty much everything that AI could do and then some. She’d heard that Ruby’s techs had managed to link the AI apps with thousands of databases, including traffic and security camera feed.
Despite the troubling subject Angel and she had to discuss, Mia felt a fan girl type of moment over finally being able to see the app in action. It was like having a ticket to a techie Super Bowl.
“Tell me about what happened in those hours before you went into Kenton’s room?” Angel said.
That put a quick end to the fan-girl giddiness, and the images of that night returned with a vengeance. Then again, those images were never far from the forefront of her mind anyway.
She gathered her breath because she was going to need it. “After Kenton tried to assault me…” But that was as far as she got before Angel interrupted.
“He didn’t try. He succeeded. You had bruises on your face and arms,” he spat out. Oh, there was anger in his voice even now. His temper had been much, much worse on the night of the attack.
She nodded, conceding that he had a point, and she gave him the nutshell of events. “Kenton tried to convince me that he was the guy for me by groping me and trying to push me into my bedroom. I’m sure he had all sorts of quick, nasty things planned for me, but Melanie saw what was happening, and she stopped him. She hit him upside the head with a handheld vacuum that she’d just finished using. Kenton cursed us both and ran off.”
Even now, she could recall Melanie taking her into the kitchen afterwards to check her bruises and try to calm her down. Much calming down had been required since Mia had practically been hysterical.
If that attack had happened today, Mia knew how to defend herself. However, back then, she hadn’t had the strength. Kenton wasn’t a big guy and probably only outweighed her by twenty pounds or so, but he’d been damn strong. And she hadn’t been able to get to her pocketknife in time or she would have used it to get him to stop.
“Was Kenton bleeding from where Melanie hit him?” he asked, probably knowing it wouldn’t account for all the blood that had been in Kenton’s room. But Angel likely wanted to know if it’d contributed to it.
