Searching (PAVAD- FBI Romantic Suspense Book 18) Read online

Kudos.

  The dogs wouldn’t be doing this—not without something being wrong. Not to mention, Nat would have calmed, comforted them—if she was able. Nat was exceptionally attuned to the dogs’ needs.

  Someone, some thing must be stopping her sister from doing just that.

  Jac grabbed her phone and brought up the security app. She’d had cameras installed just two days before Rachel had been killed. It was a system Carrie Lorcan had designed for her own brother-in-law’s company.

  She’d asked Jac and several others in computer forensics if they’d like to test it. Jac had agreed—this system hadn’t even been released to the public. She hadn’t been taking chances with her safety—not with PAVAD being targeted.

  Her sister’s dogs wouldn’t be doing this without a problem.

  PAVAD agents were all at risk right now.

  Including Jac; including Nat.

  The camera for the living room buffered.

  Where Nat stood.

  Nat wasn’t alone.

  There was a man in Jac’s house. In full PAVAD tactical gear.

  With a semiautomatic.

  Aimed right at her sister’s head.

  115

  Her green eyes were red-rimmed. Eugene had stood in the corner of the living room, right there by the back door—he’d slipped inside using the key he’d found earlier, after letting that big brute of a dog out of the fence.

  Eugene could have killed her so easily, just put a bullet in the back of her head and walked away. No one would have ever connected him to her.

  Not now that that son-of-a-bitch Barnes was taken care of.

  Just one shot and it would be done.

  He’d wait until he was in a safe place and go through that asshole’s computer and emails later. See if anyone else out there needed to be taken care of; then he was finished with this shit.

  Mexico was waiting.

  But the girl had been weeping as if her heart had been breaking. The sheer amount of emotion coming from a woman so small had had him pausing. Watching.

  She had been playing a classical piece on the piano that was far too big for the room. It hadn’t seemed as if she was even aware of what she was doing, as if the ranch house was in actuality a grand concert hall.

  How could a woman so young have experienced enough life to play like that, to grieve like that?

  Eugene didn’t know.

  But he had listened. Had watched. Had remembered the emotions he had felt when he had listened to her mother play all those years ago.

  If he had ever had a friend in his life, it had been Felicia Jones.

  Eugene wanted to see Felicia in her daughter’s eyes when she died. Wanted to imagine that was what Felicia had looked like when she’d been murdered.

  He’d needed to see that.

  Had wanted to see if he could find the grief he’d felt for Felicia once more.

  Could understand it.

  Emotions—he’d admit it, he wasn’t one who understood every nuance of emotion like so many of those damned shrinks in the CCU and elsewhere in PAVAD. No. He was the kind of man who did his job—without messy emotions screwing everything up.

  But he had always been fascinated by those who did feel like that.

  Felicia had felt so damned much. Love, for her friends, for her daughters. For Eugene and Ed and everyone else who had been assigned to guard her all those years ago.

  And for that bastard who hadn’t deserved even a moment of her love.

  Now, Felicia’s daughter was hurting. Feeling.

  Eugene only felt emotions of that depth when he watched others die. Then and only then could he get an inkling of what they felt.

  He wasn’t stupid, he knew the technical term for what he was: sociopath.

  Eugene was a confirmed sociopath.

  He was incapable of feeling much at all.

  Oh, he’d wanted to. Wanted to understand what everyone else seemed to take for granted.

  But Eugene just didn’t care about other people.

  Maybe his wife, to some extent. He was supposed to, after all.

  Or he once had.

  Mostly, he’d married her because she was convenient sex and someone to listen to him talk. She’d taken care of his mundane needs like laundry and food while he was busy building his career.

  He’d stuck with her because it was easier than leaving.

  But now…he wanted to try a few other things before he died, first.

  He had to finish with the past first, too.

  With Felicia’s daughter.

  Eugene tightened his grip around her neck. Silky hair fell over his hand. Soft.

  Pretty girl; not beautiful like her older sister, who was the spitting image of her mother, but she’d do.

  Well, she would have.

  If she’d lived.

  He pointed his spare weapon, one taken off a street punk a long, long time ago, right between those unusual green eyes of hers.

  Waiting for the terror.

  It didn’t come.

  That gave him pause. Felicia would have been shaking like a leaf, passing out from the fear. But her daughter just stared at him from eyes shaped like her biological father’s.

  He’d always hated that man’s eyes. They were brown, not the green of this girl’s, and capable of stabbing a man in the gut. But it didn’t matter; he looked at her, and he saw the truth.

  “Don’t move. Or this will be over in a blink.”

  116

  For a moment Jac just stared, unable to process what she was seeing. For just a nanosecond. Then training kicked in. Training that went well back before she’d ever stepped foot in the FBI academy seven years ago.

  Before she could even think about what she was doing she had the door open and was calling out her sister’s name. “Nat! I’m back! I need to change shirts, then we can go to Smokey’s for lunch. You won’t believe what happened.”

  She hoped she was distraction enough for the man holding a gun on her sister.

  Jac had hit speed dial and video on her phone before she’d unlocked the front door. She sat it deliberately on the counter in her kitchen, keeping her back to the living room, as if she hadn’t even realized someone else was there with Nat.

  She pointed the phone right at the center of her living room, hoping it would grab what she needed it to.

  It would be PAVAD.

  Be help.

  There was no way she was losing her little sister.

  “Nat? You almost ready?” Jac was a damned good actress—she’d learned at the colonel’s knee how to portray exactly what he had wanted. Those skills had just grown over the last decade. “Do we need to walk Kudos and Karma first? I saw her in the front yard, and he’s in the back, acting like a total idiot again. I know she’s ready to just take off on an adventure, like always.”

  Karma had never taken off on an adventure in the five years she’d been a certified rescue dog. Jac and Nat were both well aware of that.

  She just had to communicate with her sister—let Nat know that Jac was planning something.

  That Nat wasn’t facing Eugene Lytel alone.

  117

  Eugene Lytel. His entire team. Five men Max had trusted at his back for years. That they were involved in targeting PAVAD pissed him off and made him want to rip them to shreds.

  Jac had depended on them, too. Jac, Miranda, Whit, Alessandra, Carrie, Evan, Jazz, Josh, and J.T.—agents Max had worked with hundreds of times.

  None of them had ever forgotten how dependent they were on the auxiliary PAVAD teams for backup and security. Auxiliary were an integral part of the success of PAVAD.

  Needed and necessary.

  The betrayal cut deep.

  Barnes had outlined everything he knew and everything that had happened in front of him since he had been asked to deliver an envelope containing ten thousand dollars cash from an agent in Dallas. One Barnes had named as the woman who had recruited him to this special, secret task force designed to put PAVAD in
check.

  Sponsored through another organization Barnes hadn’t fully identified. Barnes had given what he could—but he’d been kept in the dark, the email had said. Because he hadn’t earned his place yet.

  Barnes had made certain to say several times he hadn’t known what he was getting in to.

  Ed Dennis had sent Sin Lorcan and Mick Brockman to Texas to grab that team leader as soon as possible.

  Barnes had sworn in his statement that he’d just thought he’d been doing a favor for his team leader: she’d told him she’d purchased a piece of land in south Texas from the man and was paying for it with cash. Barnes had called himself an idiot for believing her.

  Supposedly, Barnes hadn’t known it was Paul Sturvin he had delivered the money to until the night Eugene Lytel had taken him to meet Sturvin and had killed Sturvin right in front of him.

  Barnes had carried Olivia out of a burning building, after Lytel and the others had left.

  He said he’d known that would bring Lytel’s ire his way, but he wasn’t about to leave a child to die like that. That Barnes took his oath to the bureau seriously.

  Barnes hadn’t given a damn about angering Lytel—his email to Miranda had been far more personal, and had showed a side of Barnes that he doubted the other man realized he’d revealed.

  Security cameras had put Lytel in the hotel just minutes before Barnes had been shot. Another had put his bureau-issued vehicle within two blocks.

  Lytel hadn’t been careless—but PAVAD was good. Sin Lorcan and his private team was even better.

  The director had Carrie Lorcan and Shannon Toliver and J.T. Thompkins going over everything Lytel had touched for the last three years. It was going to take a while.

  Max wanted Lytel. Wanted him bad.

  He battled back the rage.

  The man was scheduled to be back at PAVAD first thing in the morning. The easiest way to catch him was to let Lytel come to them.

  It was best not to tip their hand. Yet.

  Every possible agent from the CCU was out there looking for him now.

  They were rounding up Lytel’s team now. They just had to do it without alerting the other agents on Lytel’s team what they were doing.

  The director was on the warpath. Max was right there with him.

  His phone beeped.

  A familiar ringtone.

  Jac.

  She had turned her phone off at the hospital. He hadn’t been able to reach her yet, to update her what had happened to Barnes.

  To tell her about Lytel.

  He paused outside his office and hit accept on his phone.

  A video chat immediately popped up.

  Max almost said her name…until he saw.

  Eugene Lytel was right there in front of him—in Jac’s living room.

  118

  This was not what Eugene had planned. “Well, look who came home early.”

  “Yes, had a problem with some grape juice and a four-year-old,” Jaclyn said, her Glock pointed at him. “Agent Lytel. I’m not going to say hello. I will say that I have questions.”

  He had on his vest—it was a part of his daily uniform now, and it was of the newer Lucas Tech material. Nice and lightweight.

  But Jaclyn Jones had some of the best marksmanship ratings of PAVAD. He’d seen her on the gun range himself and been very, very impressed. She was even better than the men on his own team.

  She wouldn’t need to aim at his chest to kill him. “Put down your gun, Jaclyn. All I have to do is pull the trigger.”

  Hell, no, she shouldn’t put down her weapon. He knew the statistics.

  Her best chance for survival rested in that Glock she held so steady.

  His evaluation of her went up—she had to know just how precarious of a position both she and her younger sister were in now. He certainly was.

  He was going to have to kill them both in order to get out of this now. With her armed, that was going to be harder than he anticipated.

  Unless he killed the sister now.

  But as soon as he pulled the trigger, Jaclyn would do the exact same thing.

  He might not have time to kill them both. And if that behemoth of a dog got through the glass door anytime soon, he could have more of a problem than he wanted.

  Especially with Jaclyn armed.

  He stared at her for a good four full minutes while he contemplated his options.

  She never said a word. She had the training; training Eugene had helped design—in a negotiation scenario, whoever talked most lost.

  Her eyes never wavered.

  “Well, I suppose we should chat, shouldn’t we? Isn’t that how this is done?”

  “Lytel, what’s going on here? Why are you doing this?”

  The younger girl never moved, just stared at her sister.

  Almost…calmly.

  Trustingly.

  Hell, maybe she didn’t feel anything either—but whatever grief had had her weeping her heart out.

  “Jac, I love you.”

  “I know, Nats. I love you, too.”

  “Good. I think we needed to get it out there.”

  They sounded like their mother. Their voices were similar to one another’s, of course, but mostly they sounded like Felicia. It was like stepping back into the past for a moment.

  Did they even realize Eugene was there?

  Jaclyn’s eyes met his. Eugene pulled the sister against his chest. Between her ridiculously small body and the vest he wore, he was about as protected as he was going to get.

  He wished she was six inches taller and fifty pounds heavier.

  His heart was pounding in his ears. From actual excitement. He ran the barrel of the Hi-Point through the silky dark hair the younger sister had left down. She smelled like honey and flowers. His other hand dropped to the front of her narrow chest to pull her closer.

  There wasn’t much there.

  Hell, he was a man. Grabbing a woman there was fun. “Hold still, little Natalie. We don’t want to make big sister nervous.”

  “She’s not nervous, Agent Lytel. Jac is angry. Very, very angry you’re doing this. And you’re going to pay.”

  “No, Colonel Jones is the only one who is going to pay now.”

  119

  Miranda had been ordered by the director to stay behind, after Max had run from the bullpen, yelling for someone to get agents to Jac’s place.

  The director had ordered her to coordinate the teams from the PAVAD tactical op room. Then the director had run, on Max’s heels.

  Max was already on his way to her.

  To get Agent Lytel. But Jac lived fifteen minutes from the building.

  Fifteen minutes was long enough to die. Miranda bit back the panic.

  Now, Jac’s phone was on the big screen in front of them, audio playing around them. Carrie Lorcan had remotely accessed Jac’s bureau-issued phone as if it was right there beneath her fingers. Had done what she could to keep the call open.

  Max had given Miranda his phone. So that PAVAD could see what was happening.

  It was the only connection to what was happening that they now had. All the resources PAVAD had, and Miranda knew they were useless to stop what was happening.

  It was all up to Jac and Nat now.

  Dani was there; Dani and Agent Ward and Carrie Lorcan and Shannon. People who had already been in there when Miranda had run in and demanded someone get Jac’s phone on the big screen.

  Four minutes. It had taken four minutes to make that happen.

  Four minutes, Jac had stood there, staring at Eugene Lytel as he held Nat in front of him.

  Jac’s sister. Her baby sister. If it had been one of Miranda’s sisters, she didn’t know if she could have been as calm as Jac appeared right there on the grainy screen.

  Not her sisters.

  It was Miranda’s job to protect them. Jac felt exactly the same for Nat.

  They were all just waiting. There was nothing else they could do.

  Miranda just stood in th
e center of the room and listened.

  Someone put a hot hand on her shoulder.

  Miranda turned. Knight was standing there next to her. Big and strong and a little frightening, in a perfectly pressed suit.

  He had the glasses off now. Gray eyes the same color as that suit showed his concern.

  He wrapped his other hand around her arm, just above the damned cast. “Jones is on his way to her now. You won’t do any good standing here worrying about her.”

  She knew he was right, but that didn’t help. She was too far away to do anything else. “She lives fifteen minutes away, Knight. He won’t get to her in time.”

  Everyone was watching her. She hadn’t realized that. Miranda turned back to the screen. Just as Nat spoke again.

  120

  “What does the colonel have to do with this?” Nat asked. “He has no bearing on our lives.”

  “Well, he has bearing on mine, sweetheart,” Lytel said. “Constantly doing what he can just to keep me down. Colonel Jones is a real piece of work, you know.”

  “We know,” Nat said.

  Jac kept her weapon steady. Nat was staying calm. She wasn’t stupid.

  This was a scenario their bastard of a father had made them role-play time and time again, when his paranoia that someone was after them in the dozen foreign countries he’d dragged them to would rise up and take over him too.

  Over and over and over, he would put them in similar situations with differing men every time. So they could practice. Prepare.

  Time and time again, he would yell at Jac that it was always her responsibility to protect her little sister. That failure was never an option.

  Jac had learned that lesson long ago.

  “We know he’s a bastard, Eugene. How well do you know him?”

  “Pretty well. Well enough to know he’s not the only bastard in the Jones family. Bet you don’t know that, do you, honey? Your sister isn’t even his. I’ve always wondered if he knew that. We were overseas together, too. I watched that arrogant son-of-a-bitch get four young men killed, with barely a blink. Like he didn’t care. Then he went home to your sister’s birthday here. How old was she? Nine, maybe? Same age as Max’s girl is now.”