Page 7 of Secrets Beneath the Waves (Beach Read Thrillers #2)

CHAPTER

SEVEN

“You can sit wherever you want. Just don’t touch any of my stuff.” Zeyla crossed the room, removing her leather jacket as she went.

Ramon looked around at the small space with one double bed and a worn-looking comforter. The furniture in this motel room had probably been purchased sometime in the nineties and never upgraded. Same with the carpet.

“Unless you don’t want to touch anything at all.” She shot him a look, then drew a laptop from her backpack.

No reason to explain to her the discrepancy between who he had been and who he was now or how he tried to live every day as far from that person as he could.

Even though it seemed like he could never shake the cartel guy he used to be, at least he could afford a quality hotel room that put him in a place where business travelers and families stayed.

Not the kind of seedy spot where people met for underhanded deals and rented rooms by the hour.

He said, “You left your laptop lying around in this room where anyone could find it?”

“So you can’t see the security measures I put in place?” She glanced at him, a curious look on her face.

Ramon looked around. Behind the door, high at the top of the frame, he spotted a small sticky tab with two short wires descending from it about an inch. “Motion sensor?”

“Among other things.” She took the laptop to the short dresser and sat on the chair beside it, typing on the keys before she inserted the flash drive.

Ramon perched on the edge of the bed, feeling a little awkward about making himself comfortable.

Wasn’t like he was tired, even though he hadn’t had much sleep last night.

Generally, he slept about four hours, and it was rare for him to get any more than that.

Kenna always slept a whole day away every time she finished a tough case, but he never slept longer than a few hours without waking himself up in a cold sweat. It was just the way things were.

He said, “You know Maizie can dig into that thing, right? Probably a whole lot faster than you.”

“I call her when I need her. And that isn’t for every single time I need an answer to a question.” She didn’t look at him, and her tone was inscrutable. It wasn’t exactly combative or resentful. But probably not good either.

Ramon pulled out his phone and read his messages, checking in with Bruce—their former CIA friend who had been burned and cut loose years ago.

Kenna’s team had brought him back to the US where he was a whole lot happier than when he had been stuck in the UK.

Currently, Bruce was keeping track of Zeyla’s mom and feeding Kenna intel on what the woman knew about Dominatus .

He replied to a message from Stairns in the thread with Jax.

Mostly, the conversation consisted of current world events they thought were relevant to the fight against Dominatus , but this most recent chat was about how Kenna was doing.

Jax had reported a couple of days ago that her most recent doctor’s appointment had brought the good news that she and the baby she was carrying were both healthy and doing well.

Jax was attributing that to the health food, exercise, and stretching regimen he had her on.

Ramon figured it might be more about the fact that she had spent the first trimester of her pregnancy as the captive of their enemy and a dangerous doctor who had been experimenting on her.

But he wasn’t about to explain that the doctor might’ve helped her to the excited father-to-be.

The whole thing was a waiting game as far as they were all concerned. A normal pregnancy came with enough risks, and no one really wanted to speculate what might happen with this one.

Zeyla grunted. “This thing is password protected.” She looked up at him. “Which, for the record, is the point at which I call Maizie. Because I can do a whole lot by myself. But she is better at hacking than me.”

Ramon lifted both his hands, not wanting to get into an argument with her about asking for help. Or about the value of family.

She grabbed her phone and furiously typed on the screen.

A second later, her phone rang, and she put it on speaker. “Yes, Maizie?”

“I’m glad you’re both somewhere you can talk. Because something happened.”

Ramon figured she must have been keeping tabs on the GPS signal of both of their phones in order to know they were back in the motel room. “What’s going on?”

“I’ll tackle the flash drive in a second, Zeyla,” Maizie said.

“But you guys should know that Pioneer Forensics ID’d the hand that you brought them.

It belongs to a local missing young woman, Amanda Burton.

As soon as they realized it was hers, they called the police and reported it.

That doesn’t mean you guys will get in trouble, right? ”

Ramon said, “It means the police are going to have questions for us.”

“They can ask them, if they can find me.” Zeyla smirked.

Ramon shook his head. He’d rather be out in the open and on the level with law enforcement—until the time came that they needed to keep their activity below the radar. “Who is the missing woman?”

“I’m pulling up all the information now. But let me just log into Zeyla’s computer and get the program started trying to hack that flash drive.”

Zeyla said, “You aren’t going to ask me where I got it?”

“If I needed to know, I figured you would tell me.” Maizie paused.

“Okay, now that that’s running, I’ll grab you…

Amanda Burton. Twenty-three, a student at one of the local community colleges.

Her major is listed as communication. She lived on campus with a very distraught roommate who remembers to perfect her makeup before she goes live on social media to cry about how sad she is that Amanda is missing. ”

Ramon asked, “How did it happen?”

“According to this news article, she was walking home from a fraternity party just after two in the morning. Her roommate had hooked up with someone, but she went home alone. Amanda’s phone was found with her purse, tossed into a bush, and one of her shoes was discarded nearby.

The police believed that someone grabbed her and shoved her in a car.

There were no witnesses or footage. Just a couple of tire burnout marks on the road where someone sped away. ”

Ramon winced. “I hate to ask, but is she the only one, or is this a spree of kidnappings?”

“That’s the problem. The investigating detectives found a boyfriend who also packed up and left on the same night, so they believed she might have left with him and gone out of town to start over. They weren’t even sure that anything nefarious had happened to her.”

Zeyla set her laptop aside and got up to pace the floor. “Given that we found her hand severed from her body, I’m guessing they know now that this has nefarious written all over it.”

“It will give them leads to be working.” Ramon hoped that whatever was under the girl’s fingernails turned out to be helpful. Or something else that Pioneer Forensics managed to discover.

Maizie said, “I’ll check into cases of other missing women that might be connected to this. Give me a second.”

Ramon glanced at Zeyla, trying to get a read on her emotional state.

She had lost someone tonight. Maybe not a friend, but absolutely someone she considered part of her life.

He wasn’t going to go so far as to say definitively that she would break down at some point and be overwhelmed by grief.

Everyone processed emotion in their own individual way, and he didn’t know her well enough to know how she would contend with the loss.

But the fact was she couldn’t ignore it forever, even if she focused on every case so hard she could pretend it never happened.

That was a fast track to bigger problems.

“You good?” He studied her as she turned to face him.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Well, a friend of yours just died. Anyone would be thrown by finding someone they cared about like that.”

“Who says I cared about him?”

Ramon lifted one brow. “He was a human being who didn’t deserve to die like that.”

“And if Maizie can get into the flash drive, then we can make sure it wasn’t worth nothing.” A tiny note of tension rang in her tone.

Was it because Milo Hargrove’s death meant that Zeyla was now also in danger? That the man who had killed her friend might now be coming after her again? But this might not be about the case.

If only Ramon could pack her up and force her into some sort of safe house, but there was no way. She wasn’t the kind of woman who would roll over and allow him to put her under protection without kicking and screaming about it. She never backed down. He’d known that the first time he saw her.

“Okay,” Maizie said. “I have a few missing person reports here that match the profile. Women who were snatched late at night and in a way where no one else saw it happen.”

“Any connection between them?” Ramon asked. “Or any other reason to suspect that they were taken by the same people?”

“Or person .” Zeyla’s brows rose.

He needed to know more about this Count of Shadows and how she had found out about him.

Not to mention why she needed to find him so badly.

If he was the person behind these disappearances, then that was fine.

But Ramon couldn’t help wondering if Zeyla fit some kind of profile that meant she would be next.

Yet, that wouldn’t be the case if Dominatus was behind both the kidnappings and the hit on Zeyla. It wouldn’t make sense. He never would have thought he’d be thankful for a sniper who was also a blast from the past. Except when it meant she wasn’t going to be a target of the kidnappers—just Miguel.

“In the past,” Maizie said, “ Dominatus typically took women who were intelligent and fit a certain athletic profile. We know they used them for their breeding program, creating genetically superior people that were the children of their senior members. That last part is more of a presumption than a fact we can prove. However, these women don’t fit that profile.

Amanda might have been a student, but she was average at best and never did any sports.

Two of them were taken from behind a strip joint where they were employees, and they were also roommates.

The fourth worked at a gas station ever since she graduated high school and had serious credit card debt. ”

“Okay, so they aren’t running the same breeding program here in Spokane,” Ramon said. “What about other similarities between them?”

“Yeah, you’re going to have to see this in order to believe it.” Maizie paused. “Take a look at the screen on Zeyla’s computer.”

Ramon got up and moved to the dresser. Zeyla turned the laptop around, and he started. The four women all had similar coloring and facial structure.

Zeyla said, “He has a type. And thankfully, I don’t look like them.” She shivered, standing beside him.

Ramon was careful not to brush her arm when he shifted, moving away from her a little instead. Just to give her some space. “He goes after women who all look the same?”

“I’ll check missing person databases and open law enforcement cases for any more women who look like this that have gone missing,” Maizie said.

“Look at everything in the last fifty years. We don’t want to miss the first one.” Ramon glanced at Zeyla.

Her dark eyes pinned him with a stare. “Is this guy a serial killer?”