Page 29 of Ranger's Oath
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing.”
“Try again, Cass.”
She exhales. “I hate that you’re in this. I hate that I put you here. If I had… if Aruba had gone differently...”
“If Aruba had gone differently I’d be dead.” I stop walking, force her to face me. “You made a call that saved my life. We can fight about the rest later. Right now I need truth.”
Her hand tightens on my wrist. “Then we’ll find it, with or without them.”
In the kitchen, the house is all hushed appliances and long shadows. Cassidy moves with automatic purpose, pulling mugs,pouring coffee, setting sugar within reach because she knows how I take it.
“They’re keeping things from us,” I say. “I can feel it in the way they talk around sentences.”
“That’s part of their training as Texas Rangers.” She slides a mug toward me. “Compartmentalize, need to know, and protect the women. That last one is part of their DNA.”
“I need to know.”
Cassidy doesn’t argue. She wraps both hands around her mug as if warming her fingers. “Then we stop waiting for permission.”
“Explain.”
“Kari,” she says. “She helped me when the Reaper mess twisted sideways. She studied criminal investigation, but found writing romance novels was more lucrative. She'll know how these guys think. If we build a list of names, shell companies, contracts, she’ll start pulling at the strings until we untie the knots.”
"If she's so good, why isn't she some kind of criminal investigator?"
Cassidy laughs. "She's Gideon's little sister and Dalton's mate."
"Mate? You mean like a girlfriend?"
"It's more than that. It's a biological imperative."
"Then should we be involving her in this?"
“If she knew, she'd already be involved. Besides, she’s not walking into a gunfight, she’s opening her laptop.” Cassidy leans in. “And she already called me. Twice.”
“You told her?”
“I told her I needed a favor. She said she was already looking into the island roster on her own because things felt wrong. That’s Kari.”
A small warmth unfurls in my chest at the idea of help that is ours, not theirs. “Then we start now.”
Cassidy and I move into the great room. The fire has burned down to a bed of glowing coals, casting a dim orange light across the room. I set my laptop on the coffee table and angle the screen away from the hallway. Cassidy pulls a blanket over her legs, scoots close enough that our knees touch. The contact says I’m here in a way words could never do.
She gets Kari on the phone.
“Okay,” I say. “What do we actually know?”
“Aruba’s private island,” Kari answers, instantly in analyst mode as the shared data scrolls down, “is owned by a tangle of offshore holdings.Shell directors overlap with the network the boys..."
"You call them the boys?" I ask.
"Yes. It helps to check their ginormous egos. In any event, the boys have been tracking this group of bad guys for months, illicit shipments, dark money. If island security or the cops were tied in, we can assume the shooter you saw was not a rogue actor.”
I type as Kari talks. “Names.”
She rattles them off, precise and calm. I build a table: entity, owner of record, probable owner, notes. Lines fill the screen. Patterns begin to whisper.
