Page 13 of Liaising Kai

“Let’s go at this in a different direction.”

Kai stopped and rubbed her forehead. He could tell she was tired, and her head was bothering her. Made it hard to think with that double whammy.

“I’m open to suggestions.”

“The only concrete thing we have right now is Mayta’s murder, and we’re sure Lennon was romantically involved with her.” Kai nodded. “So, we run with the murder for now.”

“What about your friend?” Austin asked.

“We find the murderers and we’ll find Carter.”

“It’s clear Carter’s disappearance is related to Mayta’s murder,” Austin said.

“At this point, that’s what we’re going to run with. There’s no direct connection?—”

“There is now,” Justin Mathis, or Math as he was called, their resident nerd said as he came into their area. “Carter Lennon was there in her house. One of the blood samples matches his DNA on the Coast Guard database along with his fingerprints. There were no other prints besides theirs.”

There was a grim silence. “Then where is the body?” Jason asked.

“The sample I tested was too small to be a mortal wound, but that doesn’t mean Lennon is or isn’t dead,” Math replied.

“He could have been injured in a fight,” Austin offered.

“Not at his home. We found no blood there,” Davis said.

“They may have threatened Mayta, and he went willingly?” Jason added.

“That’s possible,” Davis said, nodding.

“There was one other distinctive DNA, but I found no match for that one.”

“One of the kidnappers got injured, maybe?” Jason said.

Math nodded. “It’s probable, but we have something to go on once we track these people down.”

“Anything else?” Kai asked.

“No hits on the bullet that killed our victim, but it came from a suppressed .22.”

“Suppressed?” Austin said.

“Yes, which sounds like a hit to me,” Math said. “And, according to Kelly, she was brutally tortured, which says they wanted something from her in a bad way.”

“And, at this point, we don’t know that she was involved in anything illegal,” Kai said

Just then, Derrick and Amber came into the office. “What did we miss?” Derrick asked. They filled him in.

“What did you find out?” Kai asked.

“Mayta talked to a coworker. She said that Mayta was worried about her dad in Ecuador, and for some reason, Mayta refused to disclose, her boyfriend was looking into it for her. She said he had some kind of lead.”

“Is her work sensitive?” Kai asked.

“No. Her CO said that she was an analyst and that what she was working on wasn’t sensitive. He also said that it would be shocking to find out that someone from China would murder her in that fashion, although now that we know she was killed with a suppressed weapon, it does beg the question, was it some form of torture related to espionage?”

“Since Curran won’t talk to us?—”

“Ah, Kai?” Austin said.

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