Page 15

15

Tex

I paced back and forth at the far end of the library while listening to Liam on the phone with Blaise Hughes’s computer tech genius, Wilder Jones.

Four days and nothing. We had no fucking lead. I’d not slept, and I’d barely eaten.

Liam had driven down to help me look for her.

Marlana Newbury was expected to arrive in ten minutes. The DEA had called Liam. We hadn’t called them. Marlana knew something about it that she had said would help, but she needed to meet in person. It couldn’t be said over the phone.

“Wait. Let me put you on speaker,” Liam said, looking up at me from where he sat behind his desk.

“Come here,” he told me. Then he laid his phone down in front of him. “Play it again,” he said to Wilder—the man who broke into everything from banking accounts to private security systems to phone lines for the Southern Mafia.

Music played faintly, and I got closer to listen. It sounded like something you’d hear playing at a pub on St. Patrick’s Day.

“Sounds Irish,” I said. “What is it?”

“It is Irish. ‘Raglan Road,’ The Dubliners, 1972,” Wilder said over the line.

“Why are you playing it?” I asked, not needing a fucking lesson on the damn thing.

“It is playing in the background of the security footage when Salem walks behind the storage building. It cuts off moments after she is out of sight,” Liam told me.

My hands fisted. “What do you mean, it is playing in the background?” I asked, trying not to grab the nearest item and hurl it at the wall.

“Someone is playing it outside,” Wilder said. “From what I can tell, it sounds as if it’s coming from a phone. When you rewind the footage, she isn’t going toward the shed. She looks lost in thought. Then she hears the music, and her head snaps up. She starts looking for it. That’s why she walked over to the shed. Someone did it, knowing she’d follow the sound.”

Slamming my hands down on the table, unable to hold in the rage charging through me, I snarled, “Motherfucking Irish.”

Liam nodded in agreement. “But at least we have the answer as to why she went behind the shed and if it was the Landiagos or Brady Murphy.”

I sank both hands into my hair and pulled at it, wanting to rip apart everything in my path. The Irish cartel had taken her and right from under my nose. I shouldn’t have been at the fucking doctor with Nixie.

The lying bitch!

Liam had let her go and sent her away with two months’ pay after the sight of her sent me on a rampage of throwing a chair, lamp, and a stool. I’d had no sleep, and I was at my breaking point.

The door opened behind us, and in strutted Micah, followed my Marlana Newbury.

“DEA is here,” he drawled and went to sink down onto the sofa.

“I’ll have to call you back,” Liam told Wilder. “Thanks for the help.”

“No problem. I’ll keep looking for something more,” he said.

Liam ended the call, then stood up. “Can I get you a drink?” he asked Marlana.

She shook her head. “No thanks. I don’t have time, and I’m meeting with my boss in an hour. He doesn’t much like it when we have liquor on our breath,” she replied. “But I did want to give you this information. Again, it’s confidential. We are keeping it out of the media for now until we have what we need from what was left of the Landiagos’ headquarters.”

“What was left?” I asked, although I already had a feeling I knew.

The Irish bastard had gone after Salem there first. But how had he known she’d be here for sure? Her trackers had been cleared out of here for weeks.

“The plan that Blaise Hughes had his men carry out worked, it would seem. Although the cameras have all been wiped clean and phones destroyed.” She pursed her lips in displeasure. “The son of a bitch even put a bullet in those. Shattered the damn things.

“Anyway, Brady Murphy had to have been who slaughtered the rest of the Landiagos. The only ones who didn’t have a bullet in their head or chest were the wife and two small children of Ezra’s cousin. He must not kill women and children. Lucky for them,” she added sarcastically.

“We traced the purchase of the rubber electrical mat for high-voltage protection. Came from ULINE the day before and was picked up at a local distribution building here in Miami by an Emmett O’Connor. The last name is Irish, and the employee on duty who helped him load it said he had a thick Scottish accent, but we can assume he doesn’t know his accents. His name was Bubba, and his accent sounded like he was from Northwest Florida, so you know…” She shrugged.

“Landiagos are no longer a threat, but”—she winced—“we have no lead as to where Salem was taken. If we did, then we’d have an idea of how to find Brady Murphy. He remains a ghost, and if he’s left American soil, then…we can’t help.”

Left American soil? My stomach turned, and I struggled to pull in a full breath.

“You think he took her to Ireland?” I asked, my voice hoarse from the strain of little oxygen and fucking pain.

Marlana’s eyes told me she did, and for a moment, I didn’t think she’d answer.

“Most likely. He can stay invisible easier there. We don’t even know what he looks like,” she said bitterly. “While Eamon was charming and out in the public—living as a tax-paying, law-abiding citizen, giving us nothing to work with—Brady has never been seen. His parents’ public records don’t even show that they have a second child. How they’ve kept him hidden, I don’t know. But they have, and they’ve done it thoroughly. Even Salem didn’t know she had a brother-in-law. Like I said last time, the only reason we know he exists is because of Eamon’s phone calls that were tapped into. He never called him on the same line. Always a new number, always a burner phone. The conversations were never something we could use against Eamon. They spoke in riddles, and not one of our teams has yet to decipher them. It’s as if they had made up a language in childhood that only the two of them understood.”

“What about the woman or the even the kids of the Landiagos that he didn’t kill?” Liam asked what was on the tip of my tongue.

“They wore black masks. Not one face was seen.”

Fuck!

I rubbed the back of my neck. The caged-in feeling was just getting worse. While the desperate need to find her drove me, I couldn’t find the lead I needed to know where to go. It wasn’t like I could fly to Ireland and start going door-to-door. There had to be something, someone, somewhere that could give me a clue. A town, city, anything to work with. A country was too broad to pinpoint where she was.

“What about air control? If they left on a plane, then someone had to know it,” I said, my voice filled with raw frustration.

How did a man enter and leave the country like a damn ghost?

“We doubt he flew. Probably stowed away on one of the many luxury liners he uses to import drugs. But we did have air traffic control look into it. We have a log of every flight taken in and out of this state, Georgia, and Alabama as well. Looking at private flights. So far, nothing to question,” she said with a sigh.

“Can you check into the yachts and ships that docked at ports in Florida and left around the time they would have?” Liam asked.

She nodded. “We did. All of them. Even the ones carrying goods and cruise ships, although a cruise ship would be awfully hard to board without a passport and paperwork. It was highly unlikely, but we had every one of them searched. They have the best photo I have of Salem. The one I used when setting up her move here for the job.”

“Damn,” Liam muttered.

“Like I said, Brady Murphy is like motherfucking vapor,” she said with disgust. “I gotta go. That’s all we have, and like I said, if they’ve left the country—and we believe they have—then our hands are tied. The moment there is anything, I will let you know,” Marlana told us and nodded, then turned to leave.

“Thank you,” Liam called out when I didn’t.

She hadn’t helped that much. She’d confirmed what we had already been leaning toward. It had to have been the Irish. The song playing to lure her to the woods behind the shed was the clue we’d needed, but that only told us who. Not where he had taken her.

Micah stood up. I’d forgotten he was there. He’d not said anything, which was rare for him. The grim look on his face wasn’t something I saw often.

“I’ll walk her out,” he said, then glanced at me. “We’re gonna find her.” The lack of belief in what he was saying was evident in his tone, but I didn’t mention it.

I just nodded my head. Speaking was too damn hard.

When the door closed behind him, I just stood there, looking at it. My mind ran through every possibility of where he had taken her, how he had gotten her out of the country, undetected, and if she was scared. Fuck, that tormented me the most.

“The positive thing to remember here is that he is her dead husband’s brother. He won’t hurt her. She won’t be raped. The Landiagos would have been a different story,” Liam said.

I didn’t care who he was. When I found him, he was a dead man.