That evening, Ryan surveyed the damage to Sutton’s living room. He’d gotten there after the fire department had finished putting out the flames. His stomach twisted. Had she been in the room when the explosion had happened?
He cleared his throat. “Any casualties?” he asked a fireman near him. Please, no.
“No,” the fireman said, and relief coursed through Ryan like cool water, easing the sharp pang of his fears. The fireman pointed to a spot closer to the door. “But it looked like a bomb of some sort went off.”
And a bomb was what it had sounded like on the phone. He’d almost lost his shit when the connection had died. “I’ll need a copy of your report when you’re done.”
“You got it.”
Ryan went through the rest of the apartment. The acrid scent of burnt plastic fibers and smoke residue made him want to sneeze. Sutton had gotten out. He found the rope ladder hanging out the window.
He frowned. So she’d been prepared for a fast escape. Did that mean she’d known the explosion was coming? Had she blown up the apartment, thinking he was at the door? The charred furniture gave him no answers. He ran a hand over the back of his neck and his gaze caught on the table. It lay on its side near the window.
It faced the explosion. Someone would have had to tip it that way, because an explosion would naturally send the table toppling away with the force. She must have hidden behind it. He surveyed the damage again. If she’d set the explosion as a trap, then she would have left via the ladder before she needed to hide behind the table.
Satisfaction gripped him. Sutton hadn’t set a trap for him. She hadn’t tried to kill him. No one would want to stay in the room with an explosion like that. She must have hid behind the table when someone had thrown something—most likely a grenade—into the room.
He walked through the rest of the apartment. The bathroom hadn’t been damaged and neither had the bedroom. He froze when he saw the giant photograph on her wall. What she looked at every night before sleep.
His beach.
She looked at a picture of his beach every night. Did she regret leaving? Or did she just like the beach?
“Sir?” Mack held up something charred, warped, and the size of a wallet. “I believe it’s the subject’s phone.”
He blinked and left the room, and that picture, and those thoughts behind. “Thanks, Mack.” He looked out the window and down the street. Where would she have gone next?
“Should we canvass the area?” Mack asked.
He shook his head. “Sutton’s too smart to be seen. Have Lexi pull up all security cameras in the area. Maybe we’ll get lucky and one of them will have caught her.”
She pulled out her phone. “What’s next for us, sir?”
“We need to find out who did this. Have EOD check this site. And get Edworthy to find out if someone from his department leaked McRaven’s name. It looks like she might be the next target. Maybe she has the list and someone other than us wants it.”
“Copy that, sir. What about McRaven?”
“We have to start thinking like her and figure out what she’ll do next.”
The woman smiled wryly. “Do you want me to draw up a profile?”
He was about to say no, but he realized he no longer knew the woman he’d once loved with all his heart. “Make the profile.”
Sutton sank onto her heels beside a dumpster in an alley to get out of the wind. In the fall, the nights got colder, but at least it wasn’t raining. She didn’t plan to stay here all night. She just needed to rest without any interference. And an alley seemed as good a place as any. No security cameras and no one walking down it to ask her what she was doing.
She pulled a burner phone from her backpack and called Tony.
“Wallis,” he answered.
“Tony, it’s Sutton.”
There was the sound of a chair screeching against a floor and shuffling. “Jesus, Sutton,” he whispered. “Where the fuck are you?”
“It doesn’t matter. What do you know?”
“Everyone, and I mean everyone, is looking for you. This fancy SEAL commander means business.”
Ryan. She pressed her lips together while Tony continued to talk.
“Why don’t we meet?” he said.
“No. Someone is after me. I don’t want you caught in the crossfire.”
“Sutton, maybe you should just come in?”
Maybe she should. Her own people would protect her...wouldn’t they? Her stomach roiled and her muscles tensed. She should go in, but something was telling her not to. She must have missed some clue. “I’m not coming in.”
“What?”
“Not yet,” she said. “Let me just figure out a few things.”
He sighed. “Then tell me where you are. I can help you.”
“No. I don’t want you involved.”
“I already am. I’m part of the team.”
Fuck. “You can’t play both sides.”
“You’re my friend, Sutton. I know you didn’t do this.”
She heard the truth in his words. “Then tell me what you know. Help me that way.”
She heard him excuse himself to someone else and then the sound from wherever he was got quiet. “Okay, they think I’m talking to my girlfriend.”
“Girlfriend? But...” Anna had been his girlfriend.
He huffed. “No, I don’t have a girlfriend. It’s just what I told them so I could go into the hall to talk to you.”
Shit. “I’m sorry.” She’d said those words so many times. They weighed her down. Sometimes it felt as though she could never be sorry enough for everything in her life.
She took a deep breath. She had no time and no right to a pity party.
“I think we shouldn’t be talking, Tony. If you’re caught...” At best, he would be disciplined and maybe lose his job. At worst, he became a target like her. She couldn’t bear to lose another friend.
“I don’t care.” His voice was hard. “You need help. Tell me where you are. You can stay at my place.”
There was no way she was putting him in that kind of compromising position. “No. Just find out the connection between Mark, Costa, and this list. I’ll call you back when I can.”
“Sut—”
She hung up. Time to think clearly. She needed more information, like what Mark had been working on, and who he’d last spoken to.
There was no laptop found by the police. The killer must have grabbed it. So she was left with nada.
She sank farther down and hugged herself a bit tighter. Panic hovered like a drone ready to release an explosion, but she refused to let it interfere with her thinking. She rubbed the bridge of her nose. Someone wanted her dead and he knew who she was. So she had to stay off-grid to evade him.
But did she want to evade him? She had no leads and maybe being bait would be the best way to draw him out. She almost rolled her eyes at herself. If she let her location be known, then it would be more probable that the authorities would pick her up.
She wasn’t in any position at the moment to turn the hunt around and track the killer, so she had to focus on what Mark had been working on. But she had no idea what that was. The killer had been looking for something in the apartment or he wouldn’t have stayed there so long after killing Mark.
Maybe it was still there.
She bit her lip. It seemed like her only option was to head back to his apartment and search it. Maybe she could find what the killer couldn’t. She just hoped the police had left.
“Crap. Crap. Crap.” Couldn’t she come up with anything better than going back to the scene of the crime? But she had no team to fall back on. She had no hacker, no tracker, no overwatch. This was all on her.
She stood. This was all on her. But she was a CIA agent, and she would persevere. She walked to the end of the alley, ignoring her aches and pains. She had a killer to catch.
Ryan entered his HQ. Lexi sat at her monitor, concentrating on the screen. She didn’t look up. Phil, the DHS agent, was asleep on a cot. Tony was out. Edworthy stalked up to him holding his tablet, his face grim.
Mack came in behind him. She brushed her brown braid off her shoulder. “I should have a preliminary profile worked up in about thirty minutes.” She slid in front of another monitor and started tapping keys.
He looked at Edworthy, not wanting to hear the older man’s news.
“It’s bad,” the man said gruffly. “We have a security camera from the cemetery that shows her and Costa arguing. She draws a gun on him. It’s time stamped right before his death.”
Fuck. She’d been the last one to see Costa alive. “Did she shoot?”
“No. They argue and he walks away, off-camera. And then she follows.” Edworthy heaved a sigh. “There’s more. We’ve gone through her secure files from her CIA laptop. She had top-secret information on there. Information she shouldn’t have had, and some of the same information that had been leaked.” He paused. “I think she was selling secrets.”
No. Something in Ryan reared back and roared. Not Sutton. She wasn’t a traitor.
Edworthy scrubbed his face with one hand. “I should have seen this coming. She’s always been a bit of a loose cannon and ambitious. Maybe too ambitious. It’s been worse since her teammate’s death. She went off the radar for weeks. She could have been doing anything.” He shook his head. “I think she’s gone rogue.”
“We don’t know that,” Ryan said.
Edworthy raised his eyebrows. “Don’t kid yourself.”
“Are you sure those were her files?” He had to ask.
“I’m sorry. This is hard on all of us. It’s never good when one of our own turns.”
Ryan left the older man. He needed a moment to process.
Mack didn’t have anything for him yet, so Ryan used the time to grab some food for his team from the twenty-four-hour cafeteria on the main floor. He needed to get away from them and think, to ponder the woman he’d once thought he’d spend the rest of his life with.
Sutton had been fearless, smart, stubborn, and had a temper. But under the surface, she’d been kind and caring, with a dry wit that could always crack him up. For all of their adventures together, his best memories had been their time off together, lounging in bed, watching movies and eating Thai food. They’d always end up making love, sometimes fast and furious, but sometimes so slow it would drive them both wild. He’d never met anyone like her. She fit him perfectly.
What the hell had happened? Could Sutton really have changed so much?
His heart said no, but his mind...his mind kept going over the facts.
Sutton was tied to not one but two murder scenes.
Evidence of the leaks was on her laptop.
And if she was innocent, then why wasn’t she turning herself in?
Because someone had tried to blow her up.
That didn’t mean she was innocent; that just meant there was more than one player in this game. He couldn’t let his emotions run this op.
He carried the tray of food back to his HQ. Sandwiches, cookies, coffees. He laid them out on a spare desk. He grabbed a sandwich for himself and snagged the latest police reports to scan through. His team scrounged through the food. Mack snagged an extra sandwich and put it in front of Lexi. Those two worked well as a team. They came from different departments at the FBI, and couldn’t be more different from each other personality-wise, but they were thick as thieves.
Mack came over to his makeshift desk. “I’ve got a quick profile.”
“Tell me.”
“I’ll skip her background since you know it already, but it’s an easy profile.”
Ryan braced himself and acknowledged he wasn’t ready to hear about Sutton’s life without him. Had she married? Or worse—had she really turned traitor and sold state secrets?
“In short, she’s an ambitious and dedicated agent, one who has little life outside the agency. No family, except for her sister and a six-year-old niece. No husband or kids.”
He wasn’t sure whether he was happy or not to hear the news that she was alone. Was she content with just her job in her life?
Mack glanced at her tablet. “From what I can tell of her character,” she said, “she is extremely loyal to the point of it being a fault—there are many examples of her throwing herself into danger for one of her teammates.”
“Yes, that’s Sutton.” He shrugged. “That’s a quality of most special operators.”
Mack nodded. “True. On the whole, there’s nothing I can find that would indicate Sutton McRaven is anything but a brave woman dedicated to this country.”
Mack’s declaration reassured him, but he couldn’t afford to let his emotions rule. He remembered what Edworthy had said. “Are there any instances of her being a lone wolf, or any behavior that might have signaled her becoming a traitor?”
“A few. She’s a bit of a maverick, but there’s not been any indication that she would turn traitor and sell secrets. Though, she did go off-grid for the entire last month.” Mack tapped her tablet. “She had a standard psych interview done after her teammate’s death. Just before she went off-grid. It’s...interesting.”
“How so?”
“She says she’s going to chill out at home and just relax.”
“So?”
“She lied.”
Damn. He raised his brows. “How can you be so sure?”
Mack raised her brows back at him. “That’s my job.”
“She’s called the human lie detector at work,” Lexi called out. “People are actually scared of her.”
“They’re not scared of me.”
Lexi spun her chair to face them. “And now who’s lying?”
Ryan needed to break this up. “Tell me what you know, Mack.”
“Unfortunately, without talking to her, I don’t know much more than that. I know she lied about staying at home, but I don’t know what she did instead.”
He turned to Lexi. “Can you track down where she was in the last month?”
“I’m on it.”
He turned back to Mack. “In your opinion, what’s her next move?”
Mack stared at the ceiling for a moment. “She’d known the victim for a number of years. I believe they were friends. If she isn’t the murderer, then she’s trying to solve this crime.”
That sounded like the Sutton he knew. But maybe he hadn’t known her that well. “And if she is the murderer?”
“Then she’d be trying to get out of the country with the list.”
He would have to cover both cases. “Lexi, get into the security cameras for all the airports, train and bus stations. If she tries to flee the city, I want her stopped.”
He turned back to Mack. “I need you to figure out why Su—McRaven went to Rollins’s condo if not to kill him. What kind of communication had the two had in the last few weeks? If she isn’t the killer, then why did she pick that day to go there?”
“There were a number of calls from Rollins’s phone to McRaven’s over the past month, but it looked like none of them had been answered. And then nothing in the last week,” Lexi said. “Unless they were using burner phones for some reason.”
He stood.
“Where are you going?” Mack asked.
“I’m following a hunch.” And he prayed his hunch was right.