Page 40 of Cyn
Finally, she took a sip of her drink, then sighed. “I fund two schools and three medical clinics in his village, now,” she answered. “The village itself isn’t big enough to support all those, but they serve the region, which includes his village as well as six others. Having the clinics there has helped other businesses, like cafes and necessities shops. And of course, the school includes a lot of trade training so while there still aren’t a lot of jobs in the area, at least the young people can travel and find work and then help their families back home.”
He kept his eyes glued to her as he took his next sip. She was still watching the flames, as if she wasn’t sure of the wisdom of sharing what she’d shared and wasn’t prepared to see his reaction.
A ghost of a smile touched his lips. Yes, Dr. Cyn Steele was amostfascinating package.
Chapter Fourteen
Cyn rolledover in bed and snuggled deep into her down comforter. Joe had left a few hours ago to go to work and she needed to get up and start investigating John Waters, Michael Harrow, and Travis Persons. But she was a sucker for a warm bed on a cold day, especially when she could watch the snow fall through the picture window of her room.
Her attention was loosely focused on the flakes drifting by her window and her mind was blessedly quiet when her phone dinged with a text. Groaning, she withdrew her arm from under the covers and grabbed the device.
“Beni’s looking into it. She should have an update tonight,”Joe texted.
Cyn had every faith that if there was any chatter about something being planned in Boston, Beni would find it.
“It will be a big data dump at Devil’s tonight. At least the food will be good,”she responded, casting her mind back to the last time Devil had actually cooked for them. Supposedly, it had been some sort of noodle dish, but not one of them could actually identify any noodle of any sort.
“You up?”he asked.
“Awake, but not up,”she answered.“I’d like to say I’m finding some Zen while watching the snowfall out my window, and it is lovely, but mostly I’m being lazy and staying warm.”
“The two aren’t mutually exclusive,”he said.“Want me to pick you up at six-forty-five?”
She sent a thumbs-up emoji, which she hated, but couldn’t stop using, then tossed her phone onto the bedside table. Rolling to her back, she stared up at the ceiling. She had three young men to investigate and a potential terrorist attack to stop. The time for lollygagging about was over.
Hours later, Cyn walked into Devil’s house with Joe behind her. She hadn’t left her desk since she’d sat down at it that morning and it was good to get out of the house.
“All right,” Six said, once they were all seated. “Let’s get this party started.” Cyn’s stomach growled when she inhaled the aromas coming from their full plates. At least she thought they were plates. With Devil it was sometimes hard to tell. The outside of her house looked like every other adorable colonial home in Massachusetts, with its wide plank siding, deep porch, and classic shutters. But inside, everything was about as modern minimalist as it could get, from the low-profile furniture to the sleek wood, metal, and glass kitchen. The plates they ate off were little more than flat, rectangular pieces of porcelain. They were beautiful and the colors were striking, from the blue to the red to the orange and everything in between, but it was a little disconcerting to eat off something that felt more like a placemat.
“I’ll start,” Six continued. And so it went for the next two hours with each of them filling the others in on what they’d uncovered. Nora, Six, and Devil had all discovered similar traits among the three potential suspects, which was how Cyn was now thinking of the students. Each had social media accounts, but only on one or two platforms. They mostly reposted right-wing articles and images, and had limited interactions with others. There was nothing illegal or even excessively violent, but there was no mistaking where their sympathies lie. On a personal level, they were all the same age, having been born within six months of each other, and didn’t appear to have known each other prior to meeting at university. They were all members, or former members, of ROTC, which was, presumably, where they’d met McElroy.
As for what she’d found, Cyn had spent hours poking around the university systems. She’d checked their class schedules prior to the December break and then cross referenced those with the ROTC schedules to determine when they were most likely to be on campus and in the library with access to the university computers. Similar to the approach Mac had taken with McElroy, she made the assumption that the men might undertake their planning from a device that was harder—though not impossible—to trace back to them.
After tapping into the CCTV records, she’d confirmed a few dates where one or more of the men had been in the building. Like McElroy, none of them had used their own logins, but watching the CCTV feed had let her identify which computers in the library they’d used, when they’d used them, and for how long. By the end of the day, she had a long list of IP addresses to look into. None of them appeared to be a smoking gun, but she hadn’t had the time to follow up on each.
“I have all the addresses running through a program right now,” she said, leaning back in her chair, well-sated after the excellent meal. “By the time I get home, they’ll be in some order. I’ll still need to go through them, but I’ll at least know which sites were visited most often, by which student, and for how long.”
“Do we need to bring in anyone else?” Nora asked. Everyone looked at her. She was usually the voice of reason among the four of them. Cyn was the reckless one, Six the tempestuous one, Devil the cool (some might say cold) one, and Nora was the baby bear right in the middle of all of those—cool but kind, brave but thoughtful. She could more or less act on anything at the drop of a dime because she’d already given every situation considerable thought and played out every scenario.
“We’re damn good at what we do,” Nora continued. “But we don’t know when this event is supposed to occur, and I don’t want us to miss something.”
“Once we have verified evidence, I can bring in law enforcement. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot I can do until then,” Joe said. Cyn reached over and took his hand in hers, surprising both of them. Well, surprising everyone at the table, really. She wasn’t much one for PDA and couldn’t remember the last time she’d held a man’s hand outside of bed. But fuck it, it felt right.
“You’ve got Beni on the case, and she’s like a dog with a bone. If there’s something there, she’ll find it, and when she does, you two can coordinate the law enforcement response,” Cyn said.
“Let’s give it one more day,” Six chimed in. “If we can’t find anything tomorrow, then we bring in…hell, I don’t know who we’d bring in, but we’re not without resources.”
They weren’t, and Six wasn’t talking about their money. Over the years, they’d each developed a network filled with people in pretty much every walk of life from dyed-in-the-wool criminals to some of the staunchest, most loyal, most honorable people a person could ever encounter.
“I think that’s fair,” Devil said. “We all just got a feel for the playing field today. Let’s see what tomorrow brings, and then we can decide if, or when, we need help.”
With all the information shared and a plan in place, Devil called the official part of the night over and brought out dessert, a decadent tort from the North End, the Italian area of Boston. It wasn’t always easy juggling day jobs and theirtruejobs, but over the years, they’d learned how to help each other balance the stress of their lives with the good things in it—like each other. And dessert.
The evening ended on a much lighter note and got even better once she and Joe returned to her house. Only now, it was past one in the morning, and Cyn was awake and having problems falling back asleep. Shifting in bed, her back bumped against the human furnace that was Joe Harris. She thought about snuggling against him but realized that as antsy as she was feeling, her tossing and turning would wake him.
Finally, after another thirty minutes of staring at the ceiling, she gave up the ghost and slid from beneath the covers. Snagging her robe and her slippers, she donned both, then quietly left Joe to his beauty sleep and headed to her office.
The program that was sorting all the IP addresses had finished its task by the time she and Joe had returned. They’d spent an hour going through the most visited sites, but when they’d found nothing of interest, they’d called it a night.
