Page 35 of Undercover
Something nagged at me, and I went back to the first shot. The group stood in front of a boat, not surprisingly, with the boat itself mostly obscured behind them. And telling different boats apart wasn’t exactly my area of expertise. But I’d studied the Canadian photos closely. And in one of them, the yacht suspected of carrying the contraband was shown from the stern, with whatever the smugglers had used to obscure the yacht’s name slipping to the side a little. Not enough to be helpful in identifying the boat, because it only showed two letters, a lowercasene, in a light-blue script that probably a thousand boats in the area would have—but the name showing from behind the happy drunks ended intune, in the exact same color and script.
Not damning. But definitely suggestive. Whipley had just moved to the top of my list.
I looked at the rest of the photos and poked around the office a little more, but nothing else jumped out at me. I switched off the flashlight and went for the door when I heard the bathroom door open across the hall.
Gabe and I stepped out at the same time. He’d put himself back together, but he still looked flushed and puffy-lipped and disheveled in that indefinable way people always were after they’d had sex.
“Hi,” he said, with a little smile that begged me to make the right move, for once.
So I kissed him. What choice did I have, with him looking so beautiful and freshly fucked and unsure of himself? When I pulled back, I smoothed his hair away from his forehead, earning myself another one of those million-dollar smiles. The strands felt a little damp. He’d splashed water on his face, obviously, although I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him he still looked like he’d sneaked off for some surreptitious fun.
“My turn in the bathroom,” I said softly. “Why don’t you head back down and make an appearance? If we’re both gone for much longer it’ll look really strange.” It’d already look strange, but I needed him out of my way for another ten minutes.
“I’ll meet you by the bar?”
“Yeah. In a little bit.” I kissed him again, because I could. Fuck it. I’d already pole-vaulted over that line and then set it on fire behind me. I seemed to make Gabe happy, and wasn’t that a fucking trip, given my track record with men? I could make him happy without being completely honest. I could make him so damn happy he’d forgive me when he found out the truth. “I’ll catch up with you. Go look like you’re enjoying yourself, and stay out of Whipley’s way. If he touches you, scream.”
Gabe’s eyes danced with amusement. “Stranger danger?”
“That or ‘I have better sex in your office when you’re not there’ maybe?”
He chuckled and stretched up to kiss me. “Absolutely no doubt about that,” he whispered against my lips as he withdrew. “I’ll see you in a few.”
With one last lingering glance that had me wanting to push him up against the wall again, he vanished down the hallway.
I did duck into the bathroom long enough to make sure my tie sat straight and I didn’t have any obvious come stains on my black tux, but then it was off to explore the rest of the executive offices.
I didn’t bother with Mark’s, other than a cursory glance. Middleton Marine was his family’s legacy company, he had plenty of money from his wife’s side of the family as well as his own, and the company’s financials, which we’d already checked out, looked healthy. An old-money man like that wouldn’t dabble in drug smuggling, anyway, in all likelihood. He’d make some other risky investment, something superficially respectable.
Another couple of offices yielded nothing out of the ordinary, and then I found Dave’s. Even though he might have the same attachment to the company his father did, he still seemed likelier. He might have debts and secrets of his own: a mistress, illegitimate children, an addiction to horse racing. Or yacht racing. Who knew. But nothing popped in there except for the yoga mat in the corner of the room.
I grimaced at it. Who did yoga, seriously? Apparently half the population of Burlington. On a whim, I unrolled it and took a look. The logo stamped in the corner matched the brand we were fairly sure the smugglers used to conceal their fentanyl. Suggestive, but absolutely not proof of anything except that Dave had an obnoxious hobby. I pictured him passive-aggressively berating the staff while doing whatever that pose was where you stuck your ass way up in the air. Yeah. I could definitely see that, and I really regretted the mental image.
Ugh. His brother had gotten all the genes for nice asses in the family. Dave was just an ass, plain and simple.
I’d used up my few minutes and then some, so I let myself out of Dave’s office as quietly as possible, headed for the stairs—and nearly ran smack into Dave himself as he turned the corner from the stairwell.
We both stopped dead. “What the hell are you doing up here?” Dave demanded, his voice low and ugly.
“Got turned around looking for a bathroom,” I said, going for breezy. “I don’t think this is the one I was looking for, but I did find one.”
“That’s the bathroom.” Dave pointed at the door right next to me. “Nice try, but you didn’t just step out of it. You were coming from farther down the hallway. Do I need to call the police?”
Shit, wouldn’t that be fucking awkward. Not to mention, it’d make Gabe break my nose and then run screaming, while whoever ran the smuggling operation escaped and covered his tracks. Killing myself before AD Kyle got to me would be my only way out.
“No, of course not. What do you think I was doing? I took a piss, went to look out the window at the view.” Thank Christ there was a window at the end of the hall to give me a plausible excuse. “You have an incredible location here.”
Dave crossed his arms and narrowed his eyes, examining me down his long, thin nose like a particularly cranky bird with its beak out of joint. “A guy like you obviously can’t be honestly interested in my brother, so I’m going to ask you one more time: What are you doing here? If it’s corporate espionage, I’ll bury you. And if you’re some kind of garden-variety gold digger, Gabe doesn’t have anything to do with Middleton Marine, other than sharing a name. You won’t get anything out of us.”
The first few words out of his mouth had my heart jumping and my palms sweating, but then the rest of what he’d said sank in. He hadn’t figured out the truth; of course he hadn’t, or he wouldn’t have been threatening to call the cops. But the rest of it…
“What the hell makes you think I can’t be honestly interested in Gabe?”
I’d kept my body language non-threatening, but Dave tensed up and took a step back anyway.
“Because you’re more or less normal,” he spat. “By his standards, anyway. Are you even gay? What’s your angle?”
I gave him a lingering once-over, head to toe, watching in suppressed, furious amusement as his face went red and he crossed his arms more tightly over his chest. Well, I’d already pissed him off as much as I could, in all likelihood. Trading personal jabs might distract him from the whole corporate espionage train of thought.
