The Mustang’s engine rumbled as we raced down the highway, taking us to her father’s cabin. We had no idea what we’d find there, but whatever it was, I knew I’d at least be fulfilling my bodyguard duties.

But, shit, the more I learned about all this and the more I thought about it, the more I realized this was all way above my pay-grade. I was a security guy, not a detective. And I sure as shit wasn’t the guy you needed for corporate espionage.

But, as we headed up to her father’s mansion in the mountains, I decided something.

Keep it simple, stupid.

My job was to keep Ashley safe. And, clearly, she was going to find a way to get up to that cabin no matter what I did. If I went along, though, I could at least keep her with me and hopefully that meant she was safe.

“Keep it simple, stupid,” I muttered to no one in particular.

Beside me, Ashley didn’t react to my nonsense. She was too lost in her own thoughts about how pear-shaped this whole thing had gone. FUBAR. Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. It was an old military term, and one that fit this situation pretty well.

“But where? That Russian who broke in completely wrecked that place,” Ashley asked after a while, finally opening up from whatever she’d been mulling over for most of our drive. “Do you think the files are what they’re looking for? Do you think he found it already?”

It took me a moment to come back around to her thinking, but I eventually caught up. “Hell, you wanna know the truth?”

She nodded.

“I don’t have a fucking clue. It might not even be that the Russian was the one who broke in. Eagle Eye Security is working for your stepmother and this Barbara woman, not your father. But they could get the alarm codes just as easily, even if they didn’t have a key. And we know those got turned off, don’t we?”

“But the Russian was still watching the house?”

I shrugged. “Well, maybe. All it takes is knowing what a guy smokes and then throwing down some vodka, and we all start chasing our tails looking for the Russkies. Could’ve all been just a ruse to throw us off their scent so they could try and get you pulled in.”

“Why would they want me pulled in?”

“Well, who better to know where Martin Maxwell would hide something like this.”

She frowned and turned away. “Big help I am there. Seems like I barely know the man.”

“Like you said, though, maybe this is all a set-up. We won’t know unless we find those documents.”

“Yeah. I’m still worried, though. I mean, I want to know one way or another…”

“But it’s another part that’s got you worried, ain’t it?”

She nodded, her face lips pressed into a thin line. “It would just make it too real.”

We lapsed into a comfortable silence, our hands still tightly locked together. I wouldn’t have let go for the world, especially knowing what she was going through right now. We took the turnoff for the cabin a few minutes later. I keyed in the code for the gate and we sped off up the drive.

“Do you think anyone will be up here?” she asked anxiously as we took the first turn.

I suddenly got the feeling that the enormity of what we might be stepping into was catching up with her. I could almost smell her fear as it filled the car. I squeezed her hand tight, trying to comfort her. “I don’t know, to be honest. But whoever’s up here, I’ll be right alongside you, okay? Don’t worry about that.”

She nodded and tightened her grip on my hand. “Thanks, Frank.”

We both held our breath as we approached the final bend in the drive. We both released it thankfully as we saw the cabin and its deserted driveway for the first time. “Whew.”

I pulled the Mustang up in front, just like I had the first time the day before, and climbed out of the car. The Audi SUV she’d driven yesterday into the office was still up front, two stray bullets having punched perfect holes in the side. My eyes glanced over it, barely taking anything in with my mind so occupied about the shit show I was stepping into.

Ashley immediately headed for the front door.

“Nope,” I said, my voice curt. “I take the lead. First, though, I gotta call the boss and get an earful.”

“You’re calling him now?” She put her hands on her hip. Damn, she was beautiful in that sassy pose, especially wearing the work clothes she’d borrowed from Jessica. “Why didn’t you do it on the way up?”

“Because I was holding a pretty lady’s hand. Don’t judge.” I pulled my phone from my pocket and called Peter.

He answered on the second ring. “Speak, Frank. What’s the word?”

“Word is, I’m up at the cabin with Ashley.” I briefed Peter on the whole situation as quickly as I could.

He sucked in a sharp breath as I finished. “You a fucking idiot, Frank?”

I winced. He hardly ever swore. “Look, boss, she was going to come up here one way or another. What’d you want me to do? Zip tie her like she was in Al Qaeda or something?”

I could practically hear him shaking his head and slumping his shoulders. “Look, Frank, I’m going to tell you something right now. I know she’s your mate.”

I glanced over at Ashley, at the way she was staring at that cabin like Frodo must’ve stared at Mount Doom. Wait, did that make me Samwise? “Yes, sir,” I said. “She is.”

“Shut up, Frank, and let me finish speaking. I’m just trying to let you know that I understand what she means to you. Do you really think that she can prove her father’s innocence with what might be in there?”

I chewed my lip. “To be honest? I don’t really know. Not till we look at them or have a financial forensics person do it. Besides, reckon I can’t be sure till we find whatever it is.”

He took a deep breath, his nose sounding a little stuffy through the line. “Alright, O’Dwyer. You keep her safe. You find out what you can. The moment you have something, you call. We’re spread thin trying to keep a lookout for all the other players; we even have a line on that Yuri Sokolov character of yours. So keep your head down, keep your nose out of everything, and keep your mate safe. Hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I lost a mate once, Frank.” His voice was dire. “Don’t let it happen to you.”

“Roger. Y’all keep your heads down, too, and I’ll keep you in the loop.”

“He’s okay with it, then?” Ashley asked as I hung up and went over to her.

I nodded and grinned. “Probably figures we might still get paid if we prove your father’s innocence.”

“Really?”

“No. He doesn’t care one way or another. That’s part of the reason why I work for a guy like Peter Frost, and not for the people Simon Falkowski signed on with.”

Together we headed up to the front door, which hung slightly ajar. Yellow police tape crossed the front, and it was clear that they’d had to ram the front door in. Beside me, Ashley made a face.

“Did they really have to make more of a mess?”

“Looks like it,” I said. “Stay out here while I sweep inside. No sense in letting someone get the drop on us.” I pushed the door open and slipped through the yellow tape. Inside, the cabin was quiet as a tomb. Stuffing littered the area, and I had a vivid flashback to the first time I’d set foot inside the building. It was like all our work from yesterday had just been swiped away by four automatic-wielding lunatics.

Sidearm in hand, I swept the downstairs and the upstairs, moving from room to room as quickly as possible. I kept my nose in the air, sniffing at it as I moved. If there was anyone hiding here, they were doing everything they could to cover their tracks. The only thing I smelled was some slightly-off food in one of the upper rooms, a weird kind of curry smell. Satisfied her home was secure, I holstered my weapon and went back out to get Ashley.

“Alright,” I said as we went inside. “Let’s walk this place from top to bottom. There has to be something we missed.”

She stopped in her tracks as she looked around at the inside of the cabin. Her lower lip trembled a little and her eyes brimmed with tears.

It tore me up something fierce to see her like this. I put an arm around her and pulled her into me.

“All that work!” she groaned into my chest as I stroked the back of her head.

“I know, I know. I feel ya, babe. I was right there with you, remember?”

“You don’t understand, Frank,” she said, her tears wetting the front of my flannel shirt, “this was one of the first things I’d done in forever. Do you know how it feels to just have it torn apart?”

“Believe me,” I said grimly. “I know. It’s like building a sandcastle and having the tide come in.”

“Or a bully coming along to stomp on it,” she said, a little sob to her voice.

Nope, she was right. That was a better analogy. I nodded, and grabbed her by the shoulders and slowly pulled her away from me. I locked her red-rimmed eyes with my own. “That’s exactly it. They’re bullies. They’re not the tide. We can handle bullies. I can handle bullies. Okay?”

Nodding, she wiped the tears from her cheeks with the heel of her hand. “We can handle bullies.”

I grinned and nodded. “Exactly. We can. So let’s split up and start our search. Sooner we can find something, sooner we can get all this put to bed.”

“Got it. What are we looking for again?”

“Anything out of the ordinary.”

“Right.” She nodded. “Got it.”

“If you find something that’s even the slightest bit strange, or something you might have forgotten, you holler. I’ll come running and we’ll look at it together.”

We split. With tears still wet on her cheeks, she disappeared upstairs and I started in the garage.

I didn’t want to send her on her way like that, would have preferred infinitely more to hold and comfort her. But, as they say, time was of the essence. I could feel it pressing down on us like a load of bricks.

I stepped out into the garage. Empty. No surprise there, I knew someone with her father’s company had called in to have the cars picked up and winterized. Probably a local concierge shop, one of the ones down in the Rock that doubled as property managers for the people who had vacation homes in the surrounding area.

He’d only left the Audi for personal use up here, and that’s what she’d been driving for the last week.

As I walked through the garage, looking over the lawn equipment that groundskeepers occasionally used and the barely touched small toolbox in the corner, something began to itch at the back of my mind. I hit the garage door opener and, ducking beneath the rising metal doors on the side nearest to the cabin, walked out to the drive. I looked at the Audi and took a long and hard look at it.

That was interesting. There was something I hadn’t ever really noticed before, since I hadn’t been looking for it. I walked back inside and called Ashley over to the balcony.

“Anything?” I asked as she came to the railing.

She shook her head, did that cute little thing where she brushed away a stray blonde hair when she was frustrated or confused. “Nothing.”

“I got a question. You said the Audi outside in front was here when you got here, right?”

She nodded. “Yeah. It was in the garage. Why?”

“Two things. If your father’s people wanted the cars to be winterized, wouldn’t they have sent them all off?”

She shrugged. “Yeah, but I just figured that I’d told Barbara in passing that I was going to be here, so she’d kept one out for me so I had something to drive after the car service dropped me off.”

I scratched my chin. “Why’s it got New York license plates, then? Seems to me since it’s parked here, it would have Colorado plates. Wouldn’t it?”

Her eyes went wide at the revelation. “You mean that car is the one father drove out here?”

“Reckon so.”

“So he was here, then?”

I nodded. “At least for a little while. The question is, where did he get to without it? Maybe an accomplice, someone who’s helping him?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m going to come down, though.”

I nodded. As she came down the stairs and circled back around to the living room, my stomach grumbled like a bear fresh out of hibernation. We’d skipped breakfast, I remembered, and it was already approaching lunchtime.

“Hungry, big guy?” she asked as she approached. She slipped an arm around my waist and pulled herself to me. “Want me to make you something?”

I leaned down and kissed her. “You can cook, too?”

She patted my chest. “Don’t get your hopes too high. Best you’re getting is a sandwich.”

I grinned as she stepped away from me and headed for the kitchen. “Sandwich will work just fine,” I said to her back.

She headed into the kitchen, thinking out loud as she went, her feet kicking aside the occasional bit of glass and shattered plate. “Alright, so we know he did come here when he headed west from New York.”

“So he’s at least been in Colorado for sure.”

“Right. He may have even stayed here for a little while, but was gone by the time I showed up.”

“That’s the assumption.” I joined her in the kitchen, which hadn’t escaped the wrath of the cartel thugs like it had during the first break-in. Dishes scraped the tiled floor as she brushed them away with the toe of her shoe, sounding almost musical as they collided inadvertently with the occasional shard of broken glass. “Does he know anybody who could help him out with this kind of a Houdini?”

She pulled the fridge open and began to go through the drawers, grabbing the ingredients for our sandwiches. “Clearly, but not someone that I know of.”

I scratched my chin as I watched her pull out the fixings.

After a moment of searching, though, she straightened up and turned around, jar of mayonnaise in one hand and a little pot of mustard in the other, a perplexed look on her face as she set everything on the kitchen island between us.

“What’s up?”

“Just thinking, that’s all. I had some curry in here the other night. There’s a chef who comes up and cooks a private meal for you, so I have her up here.” She frowned and stuck out her lip. “And no offense to you or your tastes, but I’d take curry over a burger or a sandwich any day of the week.”

I laughed. “I’m alright with a good curry.”

“Really?” she asked. “You just seemed like a meat and potato kind of guy.”

“Nah, I developed a real taste for the local food while I was stationed in Iraq. Lots of curry over there. Curried meats, curry sauces, kebabs.”

“Well, then, you would love Hannah’s. I had her come up and make me a huge thing of it. Enough to last me a few days the night before the break-in.”

“That good, huh?”

She nodded, eyebrows high. “Oh yeah. My father got me into curry, actually. He would go back and forth between London and New York a lot, and he had a real taste for it.”

I laughed.

“I guess he wasn’t all that bad.” She frowned a little. “Not as bad as I make him out to be.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You must really like that stuff. Eat it all that fast.”

She smirked. “So good, I think I got up in the middle of the night and…” She trailed off, her eyes looking right past me.

“What?” I asked. “Ashley? You okay?”

“That motherfucker…”

“What, babe? What’s wrong?”

“Father ate my curry. He ate my fucking curry.”