Cheating Justice (The Justice Team) (10 page)

Ethan nodded and tipped his cap a little lower, further shielding his face. “I shouldn’t be here, but Tommy was a crack agent. If there was something I needed, he was there for me. It’s my turn to do something for him.”

Caroline, who’d stayed standing, smiled at Ethan. If anyone was watching, they’d think Ethan had just said something humorous. “Who do you think killed Tommy?”

Ethan shook his head. “I don’t know. None of us do. I’ve been waiting for the ballistics report, the forensics report, anything. Nothing has showed, and there’s no one left at this ATF office who even knows the name of the operation Tommy was involved in. It’s like the whole operation disappeared…or never existed. I mentioned it to my boss and he said to keep my nose out of it, but a little bird in the system told me the case has been sealed.”

Mitch’s skin prickled. “Sealed? Why?”

Ethan shrugged. “You tell me. Everyone is on eggshells. Taskforce members working with Tommy have been fired or sent off to other offices in other states. The bigwigs are tight lipped, and the case is sealed.”

“Shit,” Brice said.

Shit was right. Mitch wondered if they’d come all this way for nothing, but the sealed case file only confirmed what Kemp had told him. There had to be a reason the White House would invoke Executive Privilege. “Tell me what you can about that night. The night Tommy was killed.”

Ethan swallowed hard, fished his cell phone from his pocket. “I was the first one on the scene. I suspected something was going down with him because he called me that day. He sounded off. That night I gave him a call, just to check in. We made plans to meet for a few minutes. He said he had to make a couple of stops and would meet me at a bar on the corner of the street where he was killed. I parked in the bar’s lot and cleared some emails while I waited for him. Then I heard shots and jumped out to see what the hell was happening. I found him on the edge of the lot near the sidewalk with a gun lying on his chest. An AR-15. Right on his chest, like a message from the killer. He was dead, but I tried to resuscitate him. Didn’t work. Some woman tried to help and I told her he was gone already. I called it in, but while I was waiting for backup to arrive, I snapped photos of the scene and the gun.”

He shook his head, his voice trailing off. “It still haunts me. I don’t know what went wrong. Did someone find out Tommy was FBI or did they just get pissed at him for something and shoot him point blank? He never even drew his weapon.”

The former agent in Mitch wanted to see the pictures. The man in him didn’t think he could handle photos of his dead friend. “What do
you
think?”

Ethan shrugged. “With the case sealed and no information coming out about it…” He let the words hang. “When Brice called me, I thought you might want to at least see the photos. I wasn’t on the taskforce so I’m out of the loop on whatever they were doing, but there’s chatter about Balboa, the gun runner we’ve been watching, being involved. He’s got a huge cartel that goes back and forth across the border. Hell, it could have been one of his rivals. When I asked my ASAC about it, he made sure I got the message it wasn’t my concern. Right now, I’m waiting like everyone else. Maybe if you see the photos, you might pick up on something I missed, or be able to rebuild the crime scene.”

Without the reports, they were at a dead end. They needed to know what the ballistics report revealed about the bullets and type of gun used to kill Tommy. With that, they could trace the serial number on the gun, if it still had one, and find out who owned it.

Ethan tapped the touchscreen on his phone, his gaze skating over the people nearby.

Brice, too, was on high alert. He watched the crowd as he spoke to Ethan. “Anyone know you have those pictures besides us?”

“No one,” Ethan said. Seemingly satisfied that no one was watching, he brought up the first photo.

Mitch’s stomach turned to acid. There was the scene: Tommy, a bloody mess. A black assault rifle next to his body.

Ethan pointed at it. “That’s the one he had lying on his chest. I had to move it to perform CPR.”

Pressure filled Mitch’s throat. His voice was trapped in a deep well. The danger came with the job, regardless of the letters that followed your name. ATF, FBI, DEA.

“Mitch?” Caroline had moved close and was leaning over his shoulder to eye the photo. Her voice was soft next to his ear. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” he bit out the word, his voice hollow. He took the phone from Ethan and entered his cell’s number and Caroline’s email address into Ethan’s contacts. “Send us all the pictures, okay?”

Ethan nodded as Mitch handed the phone back. “I hope you can find out what’s going on. Tommy was a damn good agent.”

The pressure was back in Mitch’s throat. Tommy and Kemp were the closest things he’d ever had to brothers. Now, they were both dead.

Good thing he still had Grey. One friend left in the world.
Helluva life.

Mitch shook Ethan’s hand. “Watch your back.”

Ethan stood, gripped his hand hard, and cuffed him on the shoulder. “You, too.”

Caroline rushed through the hotel room door with Mitch and Brice on her heels. The door smacked against the wall and she glanced at it not really caring, but the sound distracted her from her raging thoughts.
Forget the door.
She needed to get her laptop fired up and look at the photos Ethan had emailed.

“Caroline—”

“Shut up, Mitch.”

The crappy faux wood desk was shoved into the corner of the room next to the windows and she hustled to it while fumbling with her briefcase. She hit the button to boot up the laptop and plugged it in while it whirred. No sense in wasting her battery.

Mitch’s big feet landed next to her, his body close—too close—and she caught a whiff of his soap. That clean, salty air smell.

“Caroline, slow down.”

“What’s up?” Brice asked.

Mitch turned back to him. “Give us a sec.”

“No. He’s fine,” she said. Being alone in a hotel room with Mitch would be a mistake. Whatever his problem was with her looking at these photos, he’d turn into the master she knew him to be and talk her into something. How pathetic was she? She knew—
knew
—how persuasive he could be and fell for it every time. And she didn’t even know what it was he was about to talk her into.

Her difficulty with this situation came with standing in front of him, this man who had brought her equal amounts of pleasure and pain, and knowing her intelligence—her common sense specifically—was seeping from her body. No. Not seeping.

Gushing.

“Caroline, I need to
talk
to you.”

She looked up at him, met his gaze, so focused and unyielding, and the gushing continued.

Caroline glanced at Brice. “Go get settled in your room. I’ll call you when I’ve got the pictures.”

Mitch followed Brice to the door and flipped the safety latch.

The laptop dinged and she typed in her password, her fingers flying over the keys. Mitch grabbed her elbow and tugged. “Stop. Please. What do you think you’re going to do with these photos?”

“Well, gee, Mitch. I’m not quite sure.”

“You going to call someone at Quantico and offer to send them over?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No. I’m not. We need a plan for these photos. You’re moving too fast.”

She breathed in, closed her eyes for a second.
He’s right.
Of course he was. This was Mitch, and as crazy as he made her, as risk-oriented as he was, he typically had amazing instincts.

“I think the plan is, we study the photos and see what’s in there. I’d like to get a look at that rifle. We’re assuming it’s the murder weapon, but how do we know? It could have been a plant.”

“We need the ballistics report,” he said.

“Please! First of all, the case is sealed. Second, this happened three weeks ago and it involved a federal agent. Even if they unseal it, which who knows why they would, they’re not going to release reports until they have this thing all nice and tidy. It could take months. Right now, we need to figure out if the gun in this photo was the murder weapon and where it came from.”

Mitch narrowed his eyes. “Serial number. If Ethan got close enough, we can get the serial number.”

Now he was thinking. “We still need the ballistics report. They could be back already, but without me making a few calls, I don’t know how we get that.”

“I can call Grey. He’ll put Teeg on it.”

“You want your friends to hack into the FBI? You said you didn’t want to involve them unless necessary.”

Mitch shrugged.
Shrugged.
God help them. The man acted like infiltrating a government database ranked right up there with deciding whether dinner should be chicken or beef. “I know what I said, but after seeing those pictures…” He shook his head. “Besides, Teeg’s hacked the Bureau database before. Remember a couple years or so ago when the black hats took down the FBI and DOD websites?”

“That was
Teeg
?”

“He was one of them.”

She burst out laughing. “Mitch Monroe, you will be my ultimate downfall. I know it. I stand here looking at you and I immediately turn dense.”

He smiled at her, all Mitch, conqueror of evil, and heat spread low in her belly. Mitch inched closer. She should move back, out of his gravitational pull, but there were a lot of things regarding Mitch Monroe she should do. Instead, she hooked her fingers into the waistband of his jeans and those focused eyes—well, they shot wide. Who was in control now?

She tugged him forward and kissed him. Whammo. He drew her closer, gripping her hips hard and…and—
yes, yes, yes
—this was what she wanted. Lips and tongues and fire that somehow only happened with Mitch.

Every date she’d been on since the-night-that-never-happened had been a sorry letdown. Each time she went into it hopeful that she’d find the one person who could eject Mitch out of her mind and heart and, in a lot of ways, her body, because her body craved him like an addict. But with each date and each man, she quickly gave up trying. Whether the world should be thankful or not, there was only one Mitch Monroe.

The chime of her email sounded and Caroline gripped Mitch’s waistband, bunching the fabric in her grasp, pulling it tight and holding him in place because the damned emails could wait a second. Even if she’d been in a hurry before, her mind had suddenly derailed.

“Ow,” Mitch cracked, but kept kissing her. “Don’t damage me. I may need what’s down there later.”

Oh, and the thought of that. Between the two of them they were about fifteen feet tall, all long legs and lean, athletic bodies that could go all night.

Intelligence gush complete.

“I hate you.”

He backed away, shoved his hands into her hair and hit her with a wicked, vagina melting grin. “My dick doesn’t care. Not sure the rest of me does either.”

The evidence of that was obvious from the bulge against her tummy. Caroline jumped back, her breaths coming fast and hard and—yowzer—it was like being let out of sexual prison. Freed from a lifetime of boring men who couldn’t figure out how to crack the Caroline-needs-an-orgasm code.

“Stop!” she yelled. “It’s too much.” She paddled her hands. “It’s like…like…I don’t know. But it’s too much. You’ve been gone too long and this isn’t what we should be doing now. Right? I mean, we’re professionals. You’re a
fugitive
. You could go to prison and then what? Conjugal visits once a month?”

Mitch’s lips quirked. “Only if you marry me. I don’t put out for free.”

“Marry you? I want to dismember you!”

Dammit. She sounded insane right now, but this is what happened with him. His fault.
He
made her this way. Every time. “Laugh at me, and I will get my gun and shoot you. Then we’ll see who needs conjugal visits.”

Finally, he laughed and yep—
where’s my gun?
—hearing that sound, that deep belly laugh she’d missed so damned much, made her laugh too. Hopeless. That’s what she was. Stupid
and
hopeless.

But maybe, for a little while, stupid and hopeless was tolerable.

Chapter Eight

Detach. Disassociate
.
Disengage
. Mitch hovered over Caroline’s shoulder as she sat at the desk and opened each photo one by one.

You’ve viewed hundreds of crime scenes. This one’s no different.

Except it was.

But he needed to do this for Tommy. For Kemp. For himself. He had to think and act like a Bureau agent again. Cut out the damn emotions and stick to the facts staring him in the face.

Caroline didn’t speak, but occasionally snuck a glance at him as she scrolled through the pictures. The photos devoid of Tommy’s body were easiest to take. Those were area shots. The bystanders, the location, the street sign. Buena Street. No one should die on a street named Buena.

After they’d looked through all the photos, Caroline went back to the one with Tommy and the gun. “Let me enlarge this one.”

She did, blowing up the pixels until they could make out the serial number on the AR-15’s magazine well. At least a partial number. At this magnification, the numbers were fuzzy and the last one was half hidden by one of Tommy’s fingers.