Voss had just gotten off an airplane, and now she was flying again. The small charter plane carried her and Josh southward, with Turcotte and Chang along for the ride. The FBI had plenty of pull, but it had been her Homeland Security contacts who had arranged this ride on such short notice.
Short notice? More like immediately.
If they’d driven, the trip would’ve taken four hours. Too damn long when there was a crime scene waiting. So instead they were flying, and she sat belted into her seat, wishing desperately for a margarita, a beach chair, and a beach to put it on. Ever since this case began, it had been getting uglier and uglier, and now she couldn’t help letting her mind drift back to the days when she and Josh were working ocean interdiction cases for the FBI, headquartered on the island of St. Croix.
Voss nodded. “Sure. Some days, I just miss the Caribbean.”
Josh smiled. “I know what you mean. But let’s not forget how our last case there turned out.”
Voss shivered. “You have to remind me?”
“There are all kinds of monsters, I guess.”
She thought about Gharib al-Din and nodded grimly.
“We’ve got to catch one of these fuckers alive, or we’re never going to solve this thing,” she said. “Al-Din doesn’t do us any good as a corpse.”
“Sure he does,” Josh said, eyes narrowed. “He saves the government the trouble of putting him on trial and the taxpayers the cost of keeping him in prison. Hell, he might have saved me the trouble of shooting him.”
Voss glanced at him. She didn’t think Josh would have killed al-Din, even after the atrocities the man had committed. They both knew where the line lay and, so far, neither of them had stepped over it. Though if there had ever been a case that tempted Voss to mete out some private justice, this was it. But being tempted and committing murder were two different things.
At the front of the small charter, Turcotte and Chang were leaning into the aisle, talking quietly. Voss glanced at Josh, noticing not for the first time the way his gaze strayed toward Chang. A tiny, selfish alarm went off in her chest, but she pushed it away. No matter what she felt for Josh, they were partners first, friends second, and lovers not at all.
“She’s on your mind, huh?” Voss asked instead.
Josh glanced at her, frowning as if he were about to deny it. Then he softened.
“I like her, but it’s not what you’re thinking. It’s thanks to her, I think, that Turcotte’s been playing nice with us.”
“Yeah?” Voss asked, intrigued.
“She doesn’t think he sees how capable she is, but he does. I got the feeling she thought sending her to Bangor—away from the hub of the investigation—was kind of a blow-off.”
“Are you serious? He would never have put her in charge of something like that—a child abduction—if he didn’t have faith in her,” Voss said.
“I agree,” Josh said, with a thin smile. “I guess they just have to learn to trust each other.”
They sat in companionable silence for a few minutes, but she could sense there was something else on his mind … something that troubled him.
“What’s buzzing around your brain? I can see something’s eating at you.”
“It could be nothing,” he said with a small shrug, “but earlier today I got a report about an attempted child abduction just outside Boston. I called the local P.D. The witness descriptions said there were two guys, one white and one black. Non-Arabic.”
Voss felt a strange tugging in her chest. “So you figured it wasn’t related to our case.”
“Right. We’ve been assuming that because these four guys are Arabic, if there are others in their cell, then they must be, too. But we don’t know that.”
“We don’t even know if there’s more to their cell than the four guys we’re already aware of, and two of them are dead,” Voss reminded him.
“I know,” Josh said. “But now we’re headed to Boston. If this DOA is al-Din, then someone killed him in Boston today. And the attempted abduction, not far from Boston, was this morning. At the very least, I think it warrants a closer look.”
“Agreed,” Voss said. “These guys are ghosts. Two of them are dead, but we haven’t been able to come up with shit so far on the other two. Whatever their goals are, we’re too in the dark to make any assumptions about what is and isn’t connected.”
Voss agreed with Josh’s initial instinct, that the cases were unrelated. But if he had started second-guessing his gut, then she would gladly follow along. Instinct had kept them both alive more than once.
“We’ll check it out as soon as we’re done at the airport,” she said. “If it’s that close to Boston, we’ll be over there and back before Turcotte even knows we’re gone.”
Josh frowned, patting his pockets as if just remembering something. “Actually, I think I’ve got the investigating detective’s cell phone number written down.”
“Even better,” Voss said. “We’ll be on the ground shortly. You can give him a call, maybe save us a trip.”