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  “He made those flyers?” Bryce questioned.

  “Actually, before all that, he hacked into insurance company databases to find the names of people who had coin collections they were insuring.”

  The pieces were beginning to fall together and make sense, Bryce thought. “This is turning out to be rather complex, but you still haven’t answered my question,” he told her pointedly.

  He paused to give her the opportunity to volunteer a name. When she didn’t, he asked her again, this time in a more forceful voice.

  “Who is it, Scottie? Who is masterminding these break-ins?”

  She sat there. Her eyes began to fill with tears, something that really annoyed her. She wasn’t the kind of person who used tears to her advantage or to garner sympathy. Clearing her throat, she began to speak slowly, filling Bryce in.

  “I tried reaching him, but I can’t. He’s not answering his phone and he’s not in his apartment. He hasn’t been for several weeks now.”

  Bryce raised his voice. “Who, Scottie? Who’s not answering his phone? Who’s not in his apartment? I need a name, Scottie, and I need it now.”

  She pressed her lips together and then she said, “Ethan. His name is Ethan. Ethan Loomis,” she told her partner, feeling like every syllable was sticking to the roof of her mouth.

  “The guy with the inhaler?” he asked, remembering where he’d heard the name before.

  “Yes.”

  She’d answered so quietly, he’d hardly heard her.

  Well, at least he had a name, Bryce thought. “And where do you know this Ethan Loomis from?”

  This part was even harder for her to say because Scottie felt as if she was betraying her brother somehow. She was supposed to be able to keep him safe because of her job. Instead she was going to wind up being the reason they would be arresting Ethan—if they ever found him.

  Finding him was the important part, she reminded herself.

  Hoarsely she said, “He’s my half brother.”

  Bryce stared at his partner, stunned into silence for a moment. But only a moment. A myriad of emotions ran through him.

  “And just when were you going to tell me this?” he asked, his voice barely controlled.

  A sad smile curved the corners of her mouth. “Ideally, probably in the second or third year of our partnership,” she answered.

  She saw the anger in Bryce’s eyes. Rather than retreat, she found herself desperately wanting to make him understand. “Look, you come from a big family, you must know what it’s like to want to protect one of your own. There’s something wrong here. Ethan’s a good kid, really.”

  “A good thief,” he scoffed, at a loss as to how to react to the information, to her. “Now that’s an original one.”

  “Okay, I grant he did some bad things when he was in his teens, but he got past all that. He paid his debt in juvie and when he got out, he was a totally different person. I got him a job with a gaming company. He’s been working with them for the last five years and he’s stayed clean, Bryce. He hasn’t gotten so much as a parking ticket in all that time.”

  “This is a hell of a lot more than a parking ticket,” Bryce replied, his voice so deadly quiet it almost scared her.

  Scottie tried again. She had to get Bryce to believe her. “I’ve been trying to find him and talk to him. I think—no, I know he’s been doing this against his will. Someone’s forcing him to do this.”

  She was in denial, Bryce thought. But he wanted to be completely fair to her, even if she hadn’t been that way with him, keeping him in the dark this way. “Okay, convince me.”

  Scottie told him everything she knew, everything that she was clinging to in the hope that although her brother was behind the break-ins, he wasn’t doing it for the money. She had a feeling he was doing it to stay alive.

  “I know him, Cavanaugh. I more or less raised him. When I turned eighteen, I petitioned the court to make me his guardian to get him away from our mother who had the nurturing instincts of a shrew.”

  “The court sided with you?” he asked.

  “Completely.”

  “Go on.”

  “Things got a little rocky for a few years, mainly because Ethan was just acting out—like I said, life with our mother wasn’t exactly the kind of thing they based storybooks on. But then, after he did his stint in juvie and came out, he really wanted to turn things around. He turned his back on the people who’d gotten him in trouble. I was able to get a judge to seal his records and he started rebuilding his life. He became the kind of guy you wouldn’t mind your sister dating. Really,” she insisted.

  “Assuming I believe you, what went wrong?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she answered helplessly. “I went by his apartment and, like I said, he wasn’t there, but I questioned his neighbors. I found out that Ethan had been visited by his old girlfriend, or the way his neighbor described her, ‘a girl with multicolored hair.’” She kept forgetting to include things and backtracked. “She was the one who got him into trouble in the first place.”

  “Eva Wilkins,” Bryce recalled. “And he just took up with her again?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Scottie said, distressed. She hated this helpless feeling. “There had to be more to it than that. She had this hulk of a brother, Rubin. Maybe they kidnapped Ethan, threatened him, told him if he didn’t help them pull off these break-ins, they’d kill him. I don’t know, but it had to be something like that. He wouldn’t do this on his own.”

  She shifted in her seat to look at him. The seat belt held her back so she hit the release button.

  “Look, I know I haven’t been the easiest person to work with, but you have to help me find Ethan. If we find him, we can get whoever else is pulling off the break-ins. He’ll tell me,” she said confidently. Pausing, Scottie looked at him, searching his face, for once not in the least distracted by his looks. “You do believe me, don’t you?”

  Bryce regarded her in stony silence, not answering her at first.

  “Don’t you?” she asked again, a little more desperately this time.

  Chapter 15

  “Yes, I believe you,” Bryce finally said. Shifting in his seat, he took out his cell phone.

  Scottie hadn’t thought she’d feel as relieved as she did that he didn’t think she was lying, but she did. Big-time.

  “Who are you calling?” she asked as she watched Bryce tap out a number on the phone’s keypad.

  Instead of answering her he held up his hand, indicating that he needed her to be silent. The next second, she understood why. Whoever he was calling had already picked up.

  “Valri? Hi, it’s your favorite brother. No, your other favorite brother. Very funny,” he said patiently. “Try again. On the third try, not bad. Listen, I need a favor. Yes, I know it’s Sunday, but this is really important. I need you to meet me at the computer lab. We’ve had another break-in and I need you to track down someone doing that magic that you do.”

  He was silent for a moment as he listened to his sister say something, aware that Scottie was listening to every word intently and trying to piece his conversation together.

  “No, I wouldn’t ask if I hadn’t already exhausted every other avenue. Uh-huh. Great. Okay, I’ll see you there,” he told Valri. “I owe you one. All right, I owe you twenty,” he said, terminating the call.

  He tucked his cell back into his pocket, noting that Scottie looked like she was just about ready to burst, waiting for him to say something. “If your brother’s anywhere to be found,” he told her, “my sister Valri’ll find him.”

  But Scottie wasn’t so sure. She’d heard things about Bryce’s youngest sister, and they were all very flattering, but she wasn’t exactly a novice, either, when it came to extricating information from the internet, Scottie thought.

/>   “I’ve already tried,” she told Bryce as he started the car again. “It’s like all trace of Ethan’s vanished. I think he’s erased his digital footprint and everything that could possibly link up to him.”

  She was doing her best not to sound as desperate as she felt, but she had a feeling she was failing at that, as well.

  Bryce didn’t want to start singing his sister’s praises, but he was more than a little confident about her abilities. “Valri likes challenges. That’s why she’s so good at what she does. You mentioned an ex-girlfriend, do you happen to know her name?” he asked. “Her real name,” he stressed.

  “It really is Eva Wilkins.” That had been a very dark period in Ethan’s life as far as she was concerned. She’d spent a lot of time visiting him in juvie and convincing him that it was in his best interests to sever any and all ties with Eva. “If he’s involved with the same people as before, I know every one of their names,” she answered grimly. “They’re all branded on my brain.”

  Sailing through a yellow light, he glanced quickly in her direction before turning back to the road. “Every one?” he questioned. “Who’s ‘every one’?”

  “The so-called ‘tech gang’ Ethan hung out with when he was sixteen. The ones he stopped hanging out with once he was released from juvie.”

  “You’re sure about that?” he asked her. “That he stopped hanging out with them?”

  She could tell he was skeptical and she would have been the first to agree that he had reason to be. People lied all the time. But not Ethan. She would have bet her life on it.

  “Ethan swore to me he was through with them, that he was grateful to get a second chance and that he wasn’t about to do anything to mess that up, or put me through hell again, the way he had the first time,” she told Bryce. “And, yes,” she added, knowing what Bryce was about to ask next, “I believed him.”

  The next light turned red and he was forced to come to a stop. It gave him a moment to regard her.

  “Because you felt he was telling you the truth or because you wanted to believe he was telling you the truth?” he asked, fully aware of the games people could play with themselves when it came to people they cared about.

  Scottie never hesitated. “Because he was telling me the truth,” she said firmly. “We’d grab dinner together at least a couple of times a month. I would’ve known if something was wrong or if he was seeing Eva again. My brother might be brilliant and a computer genius, but he has a tell.”

  “What kind of a tell?” Bryce asked.

  “When he’s not telling the truth, Ethan wrinkles his nose a lot, almost as if he was coming down with a cold.” She’d come close to mentioning it to her brother, then decided not to because his being unaware of the tell was in her favor. “I asked him if he was seeing anyone special the last time we got together and he said no.”

  Bryce nodded, taking in the information and processing it against what they already knew. “Okay, so he didn’t get a chance to lie to you.”

  “He didn’t get a ‘chance’ to lie because there was nothing to lie about,” she insisted adamantly. She sat a little straighter, as if that would help her drive the point she was working on home. “The more I think about it, the surer I am that Ethan’s involved in this against his will—and I’m still not a hundred percent sure he is involved.”

  She couldn’t have it both ways, Bryce thought in exasperation. “You just spent twenty minutes laying out his MO for me, now you’re telling me that you’re not sure that he’s involved?”

  Scottie shifted, turning her eyes upon him just as he pulled into the precinct parking lot. “I’m in hell here, Bryce.”

  He felt sorry for her. But it was his job to stay above all of this, to see the big picture, not the little pieces that littered the terrain. And he wasn’t about to allow her to get bogged down.

  “We’ll find him, Scottie,” he promised, “and we’ll get to the bottom of this. If he is innocent, then—”

  “He is innocent,” Scottie insisted.

  “Then we’ll find a way to prove it. I promise you, nobody’s better at their job than Valri is,” he told Scottie.

  And just like that, she felt her eyes welling up, felt the dampness even though she was trying as hard as she could not to allow it to happen. “Damn it,” she muttered.

  Had she remembered something else? he wondered. “Now what?”

  “I’m crying again,” Scottie complained, annoyed with herself as she used the back of her hand to wipe away the tears. “I always hated women who broke down at the worst moments.”

  Bryce cupped her face in his hands and wiped away the one errant tear she’d missed with his thumb. “I won’t say anything if you don’t,” he told her softly.

  She let out a ragged breath, trying to smile. “You’re being too nice.”

  “Sorry, it’s in my DNA. Nothing I can do about it,” he told her, leaning in closer as he wiped away another tear that insisted on spilling out.

  The moment seemed to freeze then, embossing itself on the folds of time. Very slowly, Bryce lowered his mouth to hers. It was a kiss meant to comfort, a kiss to tell her it was all right to cry. A kiss to let her know that she wasn’t alone in this, that he was there for her and would continue to be there for her.

  It bordered on more.

  She knew she shouldn’t have let it happen or, at the very least, that she should have pulled back when it began. But once his lips touched hers, she realized she was hungrier for comfort than she thought was humanly possible.

  The kiss went on longer than either of them thought it would. And then, as if a bell had gone off somewhere, signaling an end, they pulled away from one another.

  Feeling almost self-conscious—something he was completely unfamiliar with, Bryce cleared his throat, mumbled, “We’d better go in,” and then opened his door and got out of his car.

  Scottie opened the door on her side. She hardly remembered doing so, or getting out. But she did.

  Once out, she took a breath, pulling herself together.

  “Are you sure your sister doesn’t mind coming in on her day off?” Scottie asked, feeling that her best bet was to redirect attention away from her and what had just happened between them. It wasn’t easy, especially since she could have sworn her lips were still pulsing.

  “Valri might complain a little, but she really doesn’t mind. She likes being able to help solve crimes. I’d say she actually thrives on it. Especially since she was the baby in the family, always getting lost in the shuffle, and this is something she shines at. Something the rest of us can’t do. So, no, trust me, she doesn’t mind,” he assured Scottie.

  Entering the building, they took the elevator to the basement where the computer lab and the Crime Scene Investigation’s lab were housed, taking up the entire floor.

  Valri had just gotten in when they walked into the computer lab. The young woman everyone regarded as a computer wizard flashed a smile at Scottie then nodded at Bryce.

  “Okay, what is it that couldn’t wait until tomorrow?” Valri asked as they drew close to her.

  Bryce took out the photograph Scottie had given him and placed it on Valri’s desk. “I need you to track down this guy. His name is Ethan Loomis. He’s one of your people.”

  Valri looked at the photograph and then raised her eyes to her brother’s. “And by that you mean?”

  “He’s a computer wizard.” Glancing at Scottie, he added, “And a hacker. And he’s managed to erase himself. We need you to un-erase him,” he said simply, as if it was an everyday occurrence. Pausing, Bryce held out his hand to Scottie. The latter took her cue and put the list she’d just written into it. “Here’s a list of like-minded people he used to hang out with. Maybe that’ll help you find him.” He thought he’d covered everything, but just in case he hadn’t, he looked at Scottie to
fill in the possible blank. “Anything else?”

  She looked at Valri instead of Bryce as she answered. “He’s my younger brother and I think he’s in trouble. The sooner we can find him, the better chance he has of staying alive.”

  Valri nodded, already calling up databases and putting them up on her screen side by side by side.

  “No pressure here,” she commented. Then, as she began typing and scrolling, she told her brother and his partner, “Give me some time to work on this. I’ll give you a call if I come up with something.”

  And then, as her brother and Scottie were leaving, Valri looked up and said to Scottie what she knew she would have wanted to hear in her place. “Don’t worry. We’ll find him.”

  “Thanks,” Scottie told her just before they left the lab.

  Going down the hall, they took the flyer and the surveillance cameras to the CSI unit for analysis, briefly stating the history associated with each.

  Getting back into the elevator, Bryce pressed the button for the first floor and then looked at the woman beside him. It had been a long day.

  “I don’t know about you, but I could stand to get something to eat. What time is it, anyway?” He felt as if he had spent the entire day working nonstop on the break-ins.

  “Sunday,” Scottie responded wearily. Her nerves felt as if they’d just been peeled down to their very core like the skin of a banana.

  She sounded more exhausted than he did, Bryce thought. Small wonder. “That’s the day, not the time. Never mind, let’s just go get something to eat before we both collapse,” he told her.

  “Is that an order?” she asked him. She wasn’t feeling hungry. If she was feeling anything at all, it was numb. Fear and anticipation of the worst were partially responsible for the way she felt.

  “Pretty much,” he told her. “And since I’m the lead on this case, you have to do what I say.” He was teasing her, but his expression looked serious.

  Bryce led the way out of the building to the rear parking lot. Since it was Sunday and late, the parking lot was close to empty. A skeleton crew was in the station, the rest were patrolling the streets of Aurora.