Page 79 of Unexpectedly Wanted
Kyle shrugged, then said, “If he found a way into… well, it’s what I would have done. Planted this so I could gather as much information as possible. But it would be a slow process.” He went still for a second, then he quickly got to his feet, setting his laptop to the side. “I have an idea. Can I?”
I pushed away from the desk and stood, moving to give him room in a hurry.
If there was a chance he knew how to find Milo, I wasn’t going to stand in his way.
“Take a break,” Cade told me. His arms went to my shoulders and then he was pushing me out of the room. “I know you don’t want to, but you need a moment to breathe. And Reed texted me to make sure you do.”
Reed had been down dealing with the police and Milo’s car. The fire was anything but an accident. They could speculate all day how it had happened, but they wouldn’t know for sure without looking at it. Which wouldn’t happen any time soon because it was still probably too hot to mess with.
That’s what I should have been doing. I should have been trying to find footage of what happened. I knew our building had a ton of cameras, but the scene of the fire was probably too far away for them to have caught anything. We weren’t the only building with security cameras, but it was going to take a lot for me to get that footage. Time that I didn’t really have.
“Drink this,” Cade said, pushing a mug of coffee into my hand once he’d forced me to the break room. “After that, you can get back to it.”
“This is—”
“Necessary,” he said. “I know what it’s like, but if you burn yourself out, you’ll be no good to Milo. Your brain will still work while you take a break. And who knows, maybe you’ll think of something while you’re not trying so hard.”
I smiled despite the panic that had been suffocating me for the last few hours. It wasn’t big, but it was something.
“You know as well as I do, every second counts,” I said. “We need to find footage.”
“I’ll start with ours,” Cade said. “You think he left around six?”
“Yeah, that’s what Austin said.”
“I’ll find you when I have it.” He headed for the door of the break room. “Finish that, then you dive in.”
“Yes, daddy,” I shot at him. He narrowed his eyes, then shook his head as he walked away.
I chugged that cup as soon as he was out of sight. Burned the hell out of my mouth and throat, but I didn’t care. Needed or not, there wasn’t time for this.
I made it to my office with only an eye roll from Cade.
He came walking over the threshold to my space not five minutes later.
“I have him rushing out of the building, headed in the direction of his car,” Cade said, setting the tablet down in front of me with the video ready to play. I watched as Milo walked out, looking normal as he messed with his phone. I bet he was typing that message for me. My heart broke as I watched this, praying that it wouldn’t be the last thing I see from him. “That’s it. He’s looking at his phone as he goes out of frame.”
I mentally picture him walking. I remembered where we found his phone. It couldn’t have been ten feet from where he walked out of sight.
“Something happened right after this. Any other cameras catch anything?”
“No,” he told me with a shake of his head. “Caught a couple different angles of the same thing, but this one follows him the farthest.”
With a heavy sigh, I got back to work. Only to find out two hours later, that the security systems in the surrounding areas that I could get into didn’t show anything either.
I knew there had to be something in this fucking office that would give us a clue.
Time was ticking on, and we were hitting too many dead ends.
But I wasn’t going to give up.
28
Milo
“Why do you do it?” I asked Big Paws. His real name was Desmond. I’d learned that an hour ago when he’d brought me a bagel and a bottle of water— that I hadn’t yet touched— and I’d been brave enough to ask him.
“My grams,” he said.
