Page 70 of Crossing the Line
She saw a sleek, modern kitchen tucked away in the back and a wall of glassed-in conference rooms. Employees in sharp suits held animated discussions with men and women dressed in anything but office attire. Undercovers, she assumed.
The entire operation reflected efficiency and a single-minded intensity, a devotion to the task at hand. She’d known Invictus was at the top of the private security game, but what Waverly hadn’t realized was just how top.
Xavier pushed open an office door and ushered Waverly and Kate inside. He spoke quietly to the rest of the entourage and closed the door.
“We’re meeting with Hansen and one of the FBI suits in half an hour. Waverly, there’s a bathroom with a shower through there.” He gestured to a door on the far wall. “My admin, Roz, will be in shortly. She’ll get you anything you need.” He stopped, considered Kate’s mess of wet hair. “I’ll see if she can dig up a hairdryer for you so you don’t scare the cops off.”
Kate stuck her tongue out at him, and Xavier gave her a harried half grin. “I’m going to brief the team. Neither one of you is to leave this room until I come back for you, got it?” The finger he pointed landed squarely on Waverly. “I mean it.”
He stared at her for a beat longer and then nudged her under the chin. “Hey. Chin up, Angel. We’ll get this figured out. It’s nothing for you to be worried about.”
She wasn’t sure if the “this” he was referring to was Ganim or what was happening between them.
Xavier left them, closing the door behind him and Kate busied herself setting up her laptop and planners. She pulled out a digital camera from her bag, explaining Waverly’s fans would be clamoring for a proof of life shot sooner or later.
Waverly’s good night’s sleep now forgotten, she felt the exhaustion of despair weigh in on her shoulders. She headed toward the bathroom, hoping a shower and fresh clothes would somehow make it all better.
She returned to the office with clean skin and clothes. She couldn’t stomach the thought of donning the pencil skirt and heels Kate had packed for her and instead went with a comfortable pair of black athletic pants with cargo pockets and a long cashmere cardigan over a white tank. She’d used a light hand with her makeup to chase away the paleness caused by worry over her immediate future.
She didn’t know where she’d be laying her head tonight, but Waverly was sure it wouldn’t be in her own bed. Or Xavier’s.
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The meetings were an eye-opening experience for Waverly. Xavier introduced her to his partner, Micah Ross, in the hallway outside the conference room.
“Ms. Sinner, it’s a pleasure to meet you,” Micah beamed, shaking her hand with the enthusiasm of a sports fan meeting his hero.
“Really?” Waverly asked in surprise.
“Do you by chance have a flagpole at your house?”
“Okay, no more talking,” Xavier said, shoving Micah into the conference room ahead of them. “Remind me not to explain that to you later,” he told Waverly with a grimace.
Detective Hansen and his team had been busy in the last twelve hours. While uniforms and forensics examined every speck of dust on and around the theatre, the detective had techs methodically work their way through surveillance footage in a four-block radius of the blasts. They’d hit pay dirt when they spotted a figure acting inconsistently with the rest of the traffic on the sidewalks on the grainy camera footage of a convenience store.
They’d caught up with him half a block later on an ATM camera and then again after he turned down a side street and got into a ten-year-old sedan matching the one identified by Xavier’s team. With a full plate number and some traffic camera luck, they’d been able to track the suspect to a motel in Hawthorne.
Their luck had run out there. By the time they’d sifted through the footage and tracked the car, Ganim was gone. He’d left the car behind in the motel parking lot and the room had once again been wiped clean. They were back to square one.
The FBI agent, who had been on the case a grand total of six hours, was a grumpy looking man close to Xavier’s age. Agent Malachi Travers was exactly what Waverly pictured for the quintessential FBI agent. He was overworked, underpaid, and had been with the bureau long enough that the idealistic bloom had worn off of him. He was dressed in the on-the-job law enforcement uniform of a wrinkled button down with rolled up sleeves that he’d already spent too many hours in.
Without preamble, he announced that the FBI had unsealed Ganim’s juvie file. It wasn’t good news.
“We’ve got an animal cruelty charge when he was sixteen,” Travers began, tossing out papers to all those assembled around the table except for Waverly. “Ganim killed the family dog of a neighbor girl who’d turned him down—not very gently—when he awkwardly asked her out.”
Waverly saw Xavier’s jaw tighten at the news, and she suppressed a shudder. Violence against animals was a common indicator of a serious mental disturbance. Not that building and using explosives was a ringing endorsement as a human being, but it showed a pattern. Waverly realized they weren’t just investigating, they were building a case—one that they could prosecute whether she was alive or not.
Hansen, shifted his bony frame in the chair across from Waverly. “Ms. Sinner, I assure you, it’s only a matter of time before we find this guy.”
Travers agreed that she could rest easy with the resources of the LAPD and FBI behind her. He’d struck at some of LA’s most elite citizens last night, and the city wouldn’t stand for it. They’d have him in custody in thirty-six hours, Hansen predicted.
As the meeting wrapped up, Xavier and Micah extracted promises from Hansen and Travers to share information as they worked the investigation from both ends.
Yet Waverly felt no safer than she had the night before. Ganim had a plan, of that she was sure. And she felt like every step was bringing him closer and closer to her. There was a possibility that no one could stop him.
The next meeting didn’t make her feel any safer. They exited one conference room of law enforcement and entered another full of executives. And it was there that Waverly experienced one of those moments of knife-edge clarity, an almost out of body experience, as a dozen people who earned huge fees for their particular areas of expertise argued about what was best for her.
Exactly when she had become a commodity, she wasn’t sure. Waverly had a suspicion it had been at conception. Her mother’s pregnancy, she’d learned years later, had served to quiet the infidelity rumors that had begun to surface. But with such undeniable biological proof of her parents’ love, the rumors had withered and died.
