Page 15 of K-9 Guardians

“The office is this way.” He moved down the hall on instinct until they found the room they were looking for. The house wasn’t all that big, but there were enough rooms to give the kids their own and provide an office for Adam with a view out the back window.

Hesitation gripped the small muscles in the bottom of King’s feet as he set eyes on the air return vent Jen had mentioned. Three steps. That was all it took to set himself beneath it. The screws popped out easier than he expected, and King jammed his hand into the vent.

Something was stuffed inside the return.

“What is it?” Scarlett held on to each of the dogs’ collars as he brought down a manila file folder.

“Some kind of file. I’ve never seen it before.” King flipped open the cover. And froze at the notepaper clipped inside the front cover.

Scarlett moved in to get a better look, raising her gaze to his. She took the folder from him and scanned through his partner’s handwritten notes. “Looks like Adam was running his own off-the-books investigation into the cartel. With Eva Roday, from what I can see of these notes.”

“Yeah.” A million thoughts were going through his head, but King only had attention for one. He pointed to a section of notes Adam had circled over and over. “And figured out Sangre por Sangre is far more dangerous than we gave them credit for.”

Chapter Six

It was all there.

Scarlett had read the file they’d recovered from Adam’s office so many times the words were starting to blur together. Every detail accounted for. Every move Muñoz had made over the past decade. It all made sense.

Sangre por Sangre hadn’t just started consolidating power by taking out the heads of the other cartels during that DEA operation ten years ago. They’d been absorbing the orphaned soldiers left behind. And accepting funds from an outside source.

Overseas funds.

The kind that never ran out. The kind that came from organizations that had outlived the fall of governments and were impossible to dismantle because of their sheer size. Sangre por Sangre had always been in the drug business, but the partnership that Agents Dunkeld and Roday theorized was slowly taking place revealed something so much worse.

The drugs confiscated at the borders every day were a mere fraction of what actually got through. Cartels were willing to take the risk, knowing the payoff was worth a small sacrifice of product, but with this? Sangre por Sangre would have unfettered access. Humans. Drugs. Weapons. There was no limit if this intel was right.

“Ten years of operations.” King pressed his thumb and index finger into his eyes. He checked his phone again. She’d lost count of how many times, but there was no word about Julien. The tension in his shoulders relayed nothing but concern and impatience. Albuquerque PD had nothing. “Neither of them said a word.”

She and King had been at this for an hour, trying to absorb as much of Adam’s notes as possible. The sun had dipped behind the half-moon ring of mountains to the west. All of this... It was too much for any one person. Or maybe the information was meant to be shared by a team. Designed to ensure one person didn’t have to take it all on themselves.

Scarlett closed the file on her lap. Sweat built along the collar of her shirt as Hans and Gruber kicked in their sleep from the corner of the room.

Turned out the vent in this office wasn’t actually functional for anything other than a poor man’s safe. Adam Dunkeld purposefully put himself in misery every time he sat down at this desk to work the investigation. As though he were punishing himself.

But he had company every single time. Scarlett’s gaze turned to the family photo facing off with her from the corner of the desk. Of smiling faces and happier times. The chair protested as she leaned forward. Her joints screamed for release. “I imagine Eva wanted it that way. In case something happened to her. That way Julien had somewhere to go. Somewhere he’d be safe.”

“Maybe you’re right.” King tossed his section of the file onto the desk and pushed to stand. “Doesn’t make it any easier to swallow, though. Because now my son is right where Eva didn’t want him, and there’s not a damn thing I can do to help him.”

Not until they figured out Muñoz’s involvement in all this. Adam Dunkeld and Eva Roday had stumbled onto something Socorro hadn’t even considered possible for the enemy they’d been fighting, but the intel fit. The increase in soldiers, the upgrade in weapons and armored vehicles. The escalation in violence, abductions and raids. Sangre por Sangre wasn’t the same small-time cartel Socorro had been contracted to dismantle. This was a new threat altogether. One they didn’t know.

“You haven’t heard anything?” Scarlett asked.

“No. No ransom call. No request for money.” King did that thing where he scrubbed a hand down his face before checking his phone. “Which means they’re not interested in negotiating.”

He didn’t need to finish that sentence. It was already burned into the front of her mind. Julien’s abductors weren’t interested in negotiating because they had no intention of letting the ten-year-old come home alive. It’d taken all her persuasive powers to get him to slow down enough to uncover some kind of lead from these files. But was it enough?

Scarlett couldn’t take the thought of watching King lose someone else. This man who’d already sacrificed so much for the innocent lives he protected from the cartel, who’d already lost everything and everyone. She needed to contact Socorro and hand over the intel they’d uncovered. Ivy had to know what they were up against. Every second Sangre por Sangre was connected to whoever was funding them overseas, the less chance she and her team had of winning this war.

But there was something she had to do first. Something only she could fix. “What if we don’t wait for Julien’s kidnappers to contact you? What if we go get Julien ourselves?”

A mirrored ache to dosomethingcarved into King’s expression. “We don’t have proof Lieutenant Muñoz is behind my son’s abduction. If we go in there without a solid lead, we could be putting Julien in more danger.”

“You’re right. But what if we find him?” And Scarlett wanted to find that boy. More than anything. For King. “We might not have hard evidence, but there’s enough in these files to support a real DEA investigation into Muñoz. And it all started with that operation ten years ago. That can’t be a coincidence. What if your suspicion hasn’t been for nothing? What if Muñoz is at the center of all of this? That he had Eva Roday and your partner killed. That he’s the one who sent his crew after Julien.”

King’s left hand fisted and released. “I can’t walk into DEA headquarters with a theory and authorize a raid team, even with Adam’s proof that there’s something more going on inside the cartel. And I know Ivy Bardot well enough to know she’s going to want solid evidence that Sangre por Sangre has my son before she signs off on any operation Socorro will be linked to.” His shoulders hiked on a deep inhale. “So how would we do this?”

Scarlett dragged out a photo from a decade’s worth of surveillance. “We start here. As for backup, you have me and the twins. That’s all you’ll need.”

---