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Chapter Twenty-Three

“ W here are we going?”

Jax let go of the steering wheel with one hand, reached over, and held hers. “The FBI office. Everyone else split, but we need to make this official. Cops and FD are going to show up and take care of the house.”

“We need Maizie.” That was the only way they were going to get information off this hard drive in her hands.

So why was she still shaking? They were more than a mile from the wreckage of that house.

The others had all run off, jumped in their cars and split, leaving Jax and Kenna to deal with the fallout.

But they couldn’t exactly do that and continue to be free citizens. They’d broken into the house. They either had to face the truth or figure out how to spin this.

Either way, they’d found themselves caught up in something huge. Maybe even in over their heads.

Maybe that’s why she felt a bit like she was drowning.

“Do you have something to plug that drive into?”

She frowned, holding onto his hand for dear life. “I have my laptop.”

“We need FBI analysts with the tech to read it. The whole thing could be corrupted or password protected, and we have no way of getting into it.”

“Or the scope of what’s on it presents a threat.” Her voice broke on the last word.

“We should use the resources of the FBI.” He squeezed her hand. “This definitely presents a considerable threat. More than what we knew. He kept those guys for years.”

He needed to read the letter, the one that was in the envelope labeled FBI. Then the bureau would finally have an answer on their cold case.

She inhaled a breath that shuddered through her.

When she closed her eyes, all she could see were those two men, one with no mouth and one with no eyes.

Like a macabre representation of the old Japanese saying.

See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

Had there ever been a third man? That saying was supposed to be about mindfulness and avoiding evil by not even participating in it.

As with so many things she’d encountered, it seemed that Doctor Buzard warped the world around him to suit his aim.

“Don’t let him do that to me.” She opened her eyes, her breath coming fast. “Don’t let them take me.”

Jax swerved across a lane of traffic and bumped up into a parking lot, stopping across two spaces. He put the car in Park and turned to her, sliding his hands across her cheeks so that his fingers threaded into her hair. “He’s not gonna touch you.”

She held onto his arms, needing his steadiness to keep her straight. Otherwise, she’d be falling apart. “Say it again.”

“I’m not gonna let him touch you.”

She managed to nod.

Jax pressed his forehead to hers, hanging onto her as much as she was hanging onto him. The doctor had targeted her. He’d touched her. They’d messed with her genetics and altered her physically. And yet, not to the extent that Lorin and Walter had been detained as prisoners for years.

Why did some things happen to others versus what had happened to her? People made choices, took actions, and God was sovereign. She probably wasn’t supposed to understand it, but that didn’t mean her mind wasn’t going to wrestle with the idea.

The road some walked was much harder. She’d had a taste of what chronic illness felt like, but it had been an anomaly for her to feel that way. She couldn’t imagine a lifetime of fighting the kind of daily fatigue she’d had just weeks ago.

Jax’s strong fingers massaged the stress from the back of her neck. “I want to go to the FBI office, but if you want to go home?—”

She shook her head, cutting him off. “Let’s go to your office.”

“I trust my people. We can keep this tight.”

She nodded. “I trust you. The rest of the world, not so much.”

He chuckled. “Not Maizie or Ramon?”

“It’s not the same.” She drew back, and he let go of her. “Not that I think they’re going to betray me.”

“I know what you’re saying. And I trust the FBI, but the faith I have in you?” He stared at her. “The rest of the world, not so much.”

She held on to that idea all the way to his office, through the extensive security procedures— oh, did I leave that knife in my boot? I forgot all about it —and up to the floor where he worked. Jax was still chuckling about all the weapons she’d had on her when they stepped off the elevator.

An agent she’d met before at the police department, Special Agent Herron, glanced over.

She was standing behind a desk in an ocean of pairs of desks that faced each other, spanning a wide room with a wall of windows.

TV screens on the wall displayed most of the major news networks, national and some local.

“This is fancy.”

Jax glanced over, blushing slightly. “It’s too fancy. I’m still reading the manual on how the wall screen works.”

“You’re the boss. You have people for that.”

“Come on.” He lifted his chin to Special Agent Herron and walked Kenna down the hall to another room that was more like a computer lab.

A woman in khakis and an FBI polo shirt hopped off a stool. “You have it?”

Jax glanced at Kenna, then handed over the hard drive.

“You never planned on going anywhere else?” She was about to put her hands on her hips when he drew the letter from his pocket.

“Want to read this with me?”

“You’re trying to distract me. It’s your letter.” She wandered to the technician and sat on her stool. “I want to know what’s on the hard drive.”

The tech, whose name badge above the emblem said, Melissa Glor , looked at Kenna with wide eyes. “It could take some time to?—”

The computer chimed.

“Huh.” She had inserted the hard drive into a port, and the screen now populated with files. “It’s loading everything.” The technician clicked her mouse, moving through the file directory. “No viruses, no encryption. Looks like all the information is right here.”

“Great.” All Kenna needed now was a cup of coffee.

Melissa glanced between them. “I’ll get started logging and indexing everything.”

Jax eyed Kenna, all suspicious. As if she was the one who’d withheld information from him. In fact, the opposite was true. He’d planned all along to come here, no matter what she said. He was determined to care for her. But at the same time, the boss of this office needed his personnel on the job.

She wasn’t going to resent him or begrudge what he felt like he had to do. Why be petty about it? That would only put a wedge between them because she’d be using the weight she had as his wife to make his life more difficult than it needed to be.

“Does your office have a coffeepot?”

Jax cracked a smile, wandered to her, and kissed her right in front of the technician. “I’ll be back in a second. Try not to cause too much trouble.”

She gaped.

He walked away, laughing.

“Okay, so that has never happened before.”

Kenna glanced over at Melissa, who was around five feet tall. Blue eyes and neat brown hair secured at the back of her head. “What’s never happened before?”

Melissa leaned toward Kenna and sniffed slightly. “The boss, laughing. He’s usually a pretty serious guy. Professional and respectful. It’s…nice to see a different side of him.”

“And sniffing me just now?”

“You smell like smoke.”

“The house exploded.”

Melissa let out a tiny noise, high-pitched. “Your house?”

“No.” She probably shouldn’t explain much since knowledge could be construed as Melissa being an accomplice. “The place where we got that drive.”

Kenna dragged her phone out of her pocket and pulled up the app for local emergency service calls. They were going to find those two men, and who knew what else, in the wreckage. Once they put the fire out, the police would begin the lengthy process of investigating.

The whole thing would no doubt drag on for weeks, if not months, before they tied it to Marcus Buzard and whatever he had going on nearby.

Several fire trucks, a chief’s unit, an ambulance, and a police car had been dispatched to the house that exploded. It was being taken care of.

Kenna asked, “Do you have a legal pad?”

“Sure.” Melissa went to a desk and came back with a new one and a pen.

“Thanks.” Kenna wrote down her statement.

Everything she had to say about the house, the two men inside, and who they were.

She kept the others who’d entered out of it.

She also didn’t mention breaking in. The part where she wrote that the men had initiated some kind of self-destruct to blow the house after a short countdown sounded like science fiction.

The investigators would find evidence that corroborated the truth, and then her statement wouldn’t seem so outlandish.

Jax came back with coffee halfway through, and she went to refill it herself after she was finished writing everything down. He walked with her to get more from the break room.

When they were walking back to the technician’s lab, she asked, “Did you read the letter?”

“I had a colleague come in and be a witness. We documented everything with photos, dusted the envelope for prints, and then reviewed the contents of the letter. Given it was addressed to the bureau and not just to me, I figured sticking to procedure was a good idea. Just in case it was contaminated with something.”

“Like Anthrax?”

He shrugged. “It isn’t worth the risk.”

“And the letter?”

“The agent is making you a copy so you can read it for yourself, but essentially, it is Walter’s manifesto. He was investigating the doctor and a group of men who went missing. The men were former military, thought to be abducted by the doctor.”

“The retirement home guys.”

“That tracks.” Jax nodded. “Lorin was also the subject of an investigation, but the two weren’t related.

Walter must’ve gotten too close to Buzard.

He was staking out Lorin in a bar one night, and the doctor captured both of them out back and took the gold.

The letter says Buzard used the gold to fund the building of his ‘silo.’”

“Like the plans on Terri Fleming’s website.”

“Yep.” She went first into the lab. “Melissa, is there anything on the drive about a silo?”

The technician glanced over. “Actually, yes. Why do you ask?”

“Call it a hunch.”

Jax chuckled.

Kenna continued, “Anything on that drive about where it is?”

“Not yet.” Melissa dragged over her stool and sat, opening files from the drive. “Most of these look like schematics. This one is for a water filtration system.” She tapped the mouse. “I don’t see any maps, but there are a lot of invoices.”

“Delivery address?” Kenna went to look over her shoulder.

“This is a storage facility. My dad uses it to keep his boat.” Melissa opened another file. “I’ll keep looking for anything with a location on it.”

“Thanks.” Kenna sipped her coffee, walking around but not quite pacing. She needed to move so she could think. Her phone started to ring in her pocket. She slid her finger across the screen and put it to her ear, knowing exactly who was calling. “Banbury Investigations.”

Jax glanced over, and she mouthed, Ramon .

Her associate on the other end of the phone said, “So you aren’t somewhere you can speak freely.”

Kenna answered, “It’s possible we can do that, but I’ll need more information from you on the incident.”

Ramon said, “On store security footage, we found a van that met the cop car. The two cops handed the kids off to a couple of guys in overalls. We followed the van to a parking garage. They went in and never came out.”

Kenna set her mug down on a metal counter that stretched along one side of the room. “Did you find it?”

The kids had to have been transferred to another vehicle. That, or they were still in the parking garage.

“Another bait and switch. The van is here, but it’s empty. I doubt we’ll find any evidence inside. These people are pros.”

“Got it.”

“You guys are good?”

“Almost got blown up, but we’re all right. Sifting through evidence now.”

“I’ll want the whole story later. Specifically, why Jax let you get into a situation like that in the first place.”

Let her? That was an interesting way to put it. “Maybe it was my idea.”

“I know it was your idea. That’s not the point.”

Kenna rolled her eyes because Ramon wouldn’t be able to see it. “I have work to do.”

“Apparently, so do I.” Ramon hung up.

She lowered the phone and emailed the law office of Hann, Anthony, and Associates. If anyone would know the address of this silo, it was likely the person who had designed it—whose company had probably been involved with building the place.

A screen on the wall flickered to life. Melissa said, “There’s your silo.”

Kenna turned to the technician. “Please tell me that hard drive says where it is.”