“You let them get away?” Dale yelled, pacing the room his team called the horror room. They got their briefs here for the horrific cases they were to solve.
“I didn’t let them do anything. I didn’t have a choice in the matter.” Damien argued back.
Dale snorted with a sarcastic laugh, “No choice? You could have stopped them if you wanted to, you just didn’t.”
Damien nodded, “Oh yeah. You’re right. I most definitely could have stopped two armed mercenaries with no gun, a five-year-old boy and an unconscious woman as back up. My bad cuz.”
Dale stepped up to him and Damien stood his full height, half an inch taller. There was a lot he was willing to take from his cousin, but he wasn’t going to take crap about putting his family’s safety first.
“You shouldn’t even have gotten as far as the main road. That wasn’t the plan,” he snarled.
He got him there, but Damien wasn’t about to grow a conscience. “She collapsed and the kid was worried. What was I supposed to do? Tell him sorry, your mom is evil and doesn’t deserve medical attention?”
“How the hell do you even know if that’s really her kid? She could have kidnapped him.”
“Yeah, he acted real kidnapped to me.”
Dale growled stepping so close they were nose to nose.
“Look, you keep on coming up with stupid assumptions I’ll give you fitting answers.” Damien took a step back, taking a deep breath to calm himself. “Look, instead of yelling why don’t we find out who took her? They meant business carrying around so much fire power.”
He’d exaggerated a little on the number of weapons they had, but they didn’t look like the type to need much to kill someone. They spelt danger and if he had to say they were carrying a bomb in their trunk to get enough attention to find out who they were and who they were protecting Ellsa from, he was ready to swear to a nuclear bomb. But what use was that when he wouldn’t give them facial descriptions?
He was a conflicted man.
“Ellsa doesn’t have a son, especially one old enough to go to school. Ellie would have known about him.”
Damien shrugged, not bothering to answer because he too found that strange. Didn’t sisters share everything?
Why didn’t Ellsa confide in her sister about their weekend, their son and especially her real line of work? Why didn’t she tell Ellie the fear she had for her life? Didn’t Ellsa care that Vladimir could have gone after her, mistaking her identity like he had?
A lot didn’t add up about Ellsa’s life.
Dale stepped back visibly taking a deep breath. “How, we have no leads.”
I do. Damien knew he should say something about handing DJ his phone but not just yet. He checked his wristwatch. It had been five hours already and DJ hadn’t called yet. He spied Dale’s phone in the middle of the roundtable. Were they flying, was that why? Where were they going? Desperation burned his insides like an ulcer. He couldn’t lose her again, he couldn’t lose his newly discovered son. Maybe he should call. He looked at the phone again. Was it even on? He’d been watching it since Dale put it down. He needed to get to it without rousing attention. But Dale didn’t trust him right now just to hand it over without suspecting he was calling Ellsa. And if he knew Damien didn’t have his phone he might just figure it out and decide to trace it. He should have thought of a better plan at least turned the GPS off, but there wasn’t much time to think of one facing down two guns.
He needed to get out of the federal building, with Dale and his phone.
“Hey man, can we leave now?”
Dale gave him an incredulous look. “What?”
Damien shrugged acting nonchalant even though he felt far from it. “We aren’t going to find them just standing around here. Those guys looked like they mean business. And it’s the middle of the night and you have a family to get to.”
The family part did it. Dale cursed grabbing his phone and stomping out without so much as a goodnight to the rest of the team. Damien waved to them with a short smile as he walked away. “It was nice meeting you all. See you tomorrow.”
They stared at him suspiciously especially the red head—he hadn’t caught all their names yet—and he knew he’d made the right decision-keeping most of the information to himself.