Page 74 of Burn

“But you don’t like it.” Lunchbox had set out the platters of burgers. I’d put one together but I wasn’t feeling much like eating. Though I did slide Goblin a burger of his own. Lunchbox nudged my plate toward me. “You need to take something for that leg. So eat.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I waved him off. My phone gave a mild vibration. Maybe one of my searches had turned something up. I’d left the Beast running several programs—including some searches on Grace, her sister, and the people around them. You didn’t just pick a model of Grace’s caliber, or a lawyer like Amorette Black, out of catalog.

Most women sucked into human trafficking vanished into a deep, dark hole and never emerged. The targets were most often going to be women who were not going to be missed. Those with families, social ties, and professional connections generally had folks to make noise.

Grace Black had an international following. No way they could make her disappear without causing a stir. So, who from their lives wasinvolvedin their disappearances? Were they linked? Or was it something from one of their lives bleeding over onto the other’s?

No coincidences was a solid theory. I wanted facts.

The alert on my phone, however, was not from the Beast’s search programs. No, it was a motion detector. Probably elk or moose wandering through. It happened. Occasionally, we got bears.

We left them alone, they left us alone.

Tapping the alert, I blinked as the camera view loaded. It was always a few seconds of delay before it came into focus. The side of the house was visible. Part of the fence line. No animals were around.

Rabbits didn’t usually trigger the motion sensors. It needed to be larger and more solid.

“No,” Bones said with a sigh before he pinched the bridge of his nose. Everything about him radiated dislike and impatience. Whether it was for Grace, the situation, or something else entirely, was to be determined. “I don’t. We cultivated our reputation for a reason. They passed all their background checks, right?”

When he flicked a look to me, I shrugged. “Yes. But I still have one more deep dive to do that I thought we had a couple of months on. I can switch some bots from their current project after we get the first info dump.”

It was hardly an impossible task. I could repurpose some of the searches to work on them then go back to searching for the sister. Without finding answers, we couldn’t give them to Grace.

“How fast do they want us to accelerate the op?” Voodoo moved to the table and started putting two burgers together.

“This weekend,” Bones said.

I wasn’t the only one who snapped a look up at him. “That’s incredibly and suspiciously accelerated, did they give you a reason why?”

“Elections are coming up in the country. They want the factories shut down, completely, anderased, before voting opens.”

The alert vibrated my phone again and I dropped my gaze to the open screen that let me see the side of the house. Maybe the motion sensor was malfuncti?—

“I’m not sure I want to do any job for anyone that changes mid-stream to emergency because they want something gone before an election. It feels…”

“Dirty,” Voodoo supplied the word when Lunchbox drifted off. “I get not everywhere works like here, but when you want to bury something like it never happened—that suggests coverup and conspiracy. Do we want to be in bed with these people?”

“We don’t have to be in bed with them to do the job,” Bones reminded us. “No innocents are involved.”

“Allegedly,” I reminded him. “We don’t have confirmation.”

“They are drug processing,” Bones continued.

“Again, allegedly.”

“We don’t have confirmation,” he said before I could and I met the impatience in his gaze with a shrug. “We need confirmation before we agree to move on anything.”

“Safer that way,” Lunchbox said and there was no mistaking the ease in his tone as he blew out a breath. “Maybe they really need the rush, but we risk too many mistakes if we do. So—we tell them we’ll amend the timetable, but we will decide when, and if that isn’t suitable…” It was his turn to shrug.

“Then fuck them,” Voodoo said. “We have plenty of other jobs. Not to mention, Firecracker is here. We can’t just leave her locked up while we leave the country.”

“I wasn’t planning on leaving her locked up,” Bones said with a sigh. “We will need a backup plan for her though. Especially now that she’s here.”

Here. At our place. Where we never brought anyone.

Lips pursed, I stared at the screen and found the source of the movement pissing off the motion sensor. “Probably a good plan, since she doesn’t seem to have any intentions of staying in her room either.”

“What?” Bones frowned. Voodoo abandoned the food he was building to move over to where I was staring at my phone. I had to zoom in, but there she was, wiggling that tiny body right out of the hopper window.

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