Page 50 of Close Encounters of the Sexy Kind
“I must know.” Tiberius turned on his heels, heading toward the casualties, but Ryan stopped him with a hand on his arm.
“It’s a crime scene,” she told him. “You can’t just walk over there.”
“I must know.”
She looked into his eyes and nodded in understanding. “Then come with me.”
“He’s with me,” she told Dominguez as they stepped beyond the yellow, plastic tape. Their feet carried them toward the area where three black bags were laid out on the ground.
“Quintus isnotin one of them,” he said quietly. “Quintuscannotbe in one of them.”
Ryan wondered if there was more to that declaration than the sheer desire for it to be true. She hoped, for his sake, that he was right.
Kneeling, Ryan took a deep breath and opened the first bag. The face that stared up at her wasn’t familiar. She looked to Tiberius, who shook his head.
“He is not one of ours.”
“Are you sure?”
“I know everyone in my employ, and he is not one of them.”
She moved to the second bag.
The face was unrecognizable, a jumbled mass of blackened, charred flesh. However, the ear that remained relatively intact and the tattoos still visible along his neck were enough for Tiberius to identify him.
“That is Enrico. He applied for a security position last week, but he was not hired.”
“Why not?”
“Questionable affiliations.”
Holding his breath, Tiberius reached out and stilled Ryan’s hand before she could check the third bag. He reached out to do it himself. With his thumb and forefinger squeezing the zipper, he closed his eyes.
“Please,” he whispered as he drew his fingers downward, “let this not be my brother.”
Ryan held her breath, too, feeling Tiberius’s anxiety and dread as if it were her own. Then, when his breath released in a whoosh, hers did, too.
The face that stared back at him with vacant eyes was not Quintus’s, but that of an unknown woman.
Ryan looked around, her eye catching on what looked like a partially intact security camera atop one of the giant hooks hanging precariously from the rubble. “What about the security cameras?” she asked. “Do you record footage on site?”
“Yes,” Tiberius said, “but we also have it streamed to an offsite server with all our other data in case this location was compromised.”
“Good. We need to access the videos from the last twenty-four hours.”
“Ryan, you must know that some of the things you might see on the video could put you in a comprising position.”
The fact that he had said “you” and not “me” was not lost on her. Could he really care more about her than his own interests?
“I’m already in a compromising position,” she told him truthfully, “but I’m only interested in anything that will identify who is behind this or what will help us find Quintus.”
Tiberius stared deeply into her eyes then nodded. “As you wish. However, understand that I must answer this grievous attack my way.”
His words reminded her of just who she was dealing with.
Just as Ryan was about to ask him point-blank about that, Haines and Kowalski pulled up to the scene, and with them, the two FBI agents who had been at the docks when they had found Phil.
Making a spur of the moment decision, she grabbed Tiberius’s arm and pulled him away from the scene before the others saw them. She refused to analyze the sudden urge to protect Tiberius, choosing instead to add it to the list of things she would deal with later.
