Page 15 of Baby Take Me Home

“Keep smiling. Meet his eyes but glance away a lot,” Kessler said. “Then tell him you were nervous to talk to him.”

When Sparks finished speaking, Jensen said, “There’s a signal spike. Armand’s on a network. Kessler, Tam needs to stay in place another minute.”

Kessler fed Sparks lines that the instructor was eating up. The instructor took yet another step closer.

Jensen typed furiously. “Got it!” He said in well under a minute. “Alder, send an alarm to Sparks’s watch and get her out of there.”

Sparks’s watch beeped and she acted startled. “Oh, lunch hour’s over. I have to get back to my boring desk job,” she told the instructor. “But when do you teach next?”

He grinned and crossed his arms, apparently to show off his very large biceps. Jensen sat back in his chair and scowled.

“Friday afternoon at 2,” the instructor said. “And if you call ahead, I can fit you in for a private lesson at 1. On the house.”

“Thanks,” Sparks said. “I’ll do that.”

“Like hell, she will, buddy,” Jensen muttered at the screen, but only I heard him because he’d muted his mic.

“Alder, tell me we know what our reporter is doing,” I said.

“Uploading files to a cloud,” Alder answered. “They’re encrypted, but I’m making copies and starting decryption. This is interesting. Every week at the time of her massage, new files get uploaded or old ones get updated.”

“Can we get the history?” I asked.

“Working backward to copy them,” Alder said. “I’ve got the last six weeks. Just got week seven. Fuck me. That’s it.”

“She went offline,” Jensen confirmed. “Weak signal is moving in the direction of the locker room, probably taking the computer back to the locker where she stores it.”

“Boss, we have Sparks in the car with us,” Penn reported.

“Good job, Sparks,” I said. “Penn, when Ms. Armand leaves, keep a tail on her, track her wherever she goes. Don’t turn this over to the next shift until she’s safe at home. Alder, as you get files decrypted, start printing them and putting them on my desk.”

“Okay, but...” Alder hesitated. “Does the expanded search warrant cover that?”

It was a great question and probably required a legal expert with a high-level security clearance to answer it. We didn’t have time to do the hoop-jumping that would require. Ashlee was playing with the dumpster fire that was the Carbonados and their associates. If they got wind of her real investigation, there was no scenario in which this ended well for her.

“The warrant gives us a lot of latitude, which I’m taking,” I said. “Print the files, Alder. I want to read every word Ms. Armand has written about Luka Kovac.”

“Okay,” Alder said, hesitating again. “But... Fuck me. Jensen, are you seeing this?”

“Fuck me, too,” Jensen answered. He tapped on his keyboard and glanced at me.

I checked my monitor and saw three open files. One was a timeline of the past five years. Another was a deep background check. The third was a FOIA request, dated just fifteen minutes earlier, for a military service record.Mymilitary service record. In fact, all of the files were about me.

“Fuck me,” I whispered, indulging in the use of our unofficial team motto.

“Well, you did tell an investigative journalist to investigate you,” Jensen said.

I shot him a lethal look. “It’s been three days and she’s still digging.”

“She won’t find anything we don’t want her to know,” Jensen assured me.

Under normal circumstances, I would take comfort in that. However, dealing with a trained and experienced investigative journalist did not make for normal circumstances. “Even if that’s the case,” I answered, “just having her digging around endlessly could attract the attention of too many people.”

“Change of plan, Boss?” Penn asked. “Sparks and I could scoop her up and drop her at an FBI safe house.”

I couldn’t stomach the thought of locking her up again, even if it was for her own good. Besides, everything about the situation was complicated on so many levels by the fact that we were dealing with a reporter. “She’s working with someone inside the Sun and might very well have a system for checking in that we won’t uncover in those files. Even with a good cover story, her disappearance might get noticed.”

“What’s our play, then, Boss?” Jensen asked.