Axel glanced back at the row of SUVs as they all pulled up neatly behind his own. Four in total. It looked like overkill, but that was the point. Suspects who were grossly outnumbered tended to give up more easily, and that led to fewer bullets all round.

Fewer bullets meant less chance of injury to both his team and the suspects, and he had a duty of care to both.

You have a duty of care to yourself, too. But he didn’t have time for that kind of thinking, so he brushed it away as he checked that his earpiece was secure.

His team landed heavy, boots on the ground, and for a brief second it was like being back in the Army. It was a sound that always took him back, no matter how long since he’d left that life behind, and he straightened his shoulders.

They’d all been to the briefing. There was no need to repeat himself. Instead he looked Jones in the eye and gestured with two fingers toward the side of the house they’d pulled up next to. Then he directed Dane the other way so the two smaller teams would create a pincer movement around the property.

Satisfied that everything was on track, he jerked his head toward the front door for his own team to follow in his footsteps and he drew his Glock. He moved swiftly, gun up and forward, his hips like a gimbal so that wherever he stepped his aim remained steady as a rock. He rushed up the mobile home’s two front steps and removed one hand from the grip long enough to bang on the door twice.

“FBI,” he yelled. “Open up!”

Yeah, that was usually enough to put the cat right in there with the pigeons. He sighed at the sound of yelling and furniture getting knocked over, most likely in the scuffle to find guns or hide evidence.

Axel held his gun aside so that the agents with him could apply their mobile battering ram to the door, then he and his team swarmed in through the entrance. The plan in these situations was to get everything done fast, to overrun the suspects, because once they were entrenched they’d be far more deadly. They were already on their home turf, though thankfully in this case that home turf was an old mobile home whose walls would probably give way to a light punch.

The door passed straight through to the living area and kitchen, where he counted four suspects just as Dane kicked her way in through the utility room and her team spilled into the limited space. Jones’ squad stopped at the kitchen window, guns aimed at the glass.

“I said,” Axel declared calmly, “FBI. You’re under arrest on suspicion of conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism. You have the right to remain silent, and anything that you do say can be used against you. You have the right to an attorney. If you can’t afford one, then one will be appointed to you by the court. If you are not a United States citizen, you may contact your country’s consulate prior to any questioning. Do you understand each of these rights as I have explained them to you?”

As expected, while two of his suspects nodded in sullen surrender, the other two thought they’d be clever and pretend not to speak English.

“That’s fine.” He shrugged as Dane’s team cuffed the two who had nodded. “I got all day and I speak eight languages. We can do this for hours.” Without pause, he launched into reading their rights in Spanish. And then, while their co-conspirators were led out into the morning sunshine, he went again in Arabic.

Whittled down to two, with four agents apiece aiming guns at them, their resistance broke down, and Axel cuffed them.

* * *

The rest of the team escorted their suspects back to the field office, but Axel remained on site and waited for the forensics crew to arrive. Uniforms could keep civilians out of the property, but Axel liked to have some time just soaking it all up, building a picture in his head of where everything was, both inside and outside the crime scene tape.

He watched forensics do their thing. Despite nobody getting shot, this was still technically a crime scene, and Axel needed all the evidence forensics could crib together before he started trying to question anyone. They’d probably lawyer up, but he had to do his job properly or his entire case would fall apart.

There was an almost meditative mindlessness to watching them work. They were meticulous, moving with clockwork precision as they dusted for prints, checked through cupboards, and bagged up everything from hairbrushes to laptops. Every scrap of evidence was tagged and noted while the crime scene photographer snapped shots of everything and from every angle.

His mind wandered while he had nothing to do, which was a big problem. He hated it wandering, because it usually ended up in the same place. Hell, he worked just about every waking hour to prevent it from wandering, but now here he was.

Wondering where his life was going.

Axel sucked his teeth and stepped away from the corner. “How’s it going, Sofia?”

Sofia Williams put a fist in the small of her back and cracked her spine, then gave him a brief upnod. “All good, Ax. The scene’s yours. You gonna stare at it until midnight again?”

He snorted at her as his hands busied themselves with unfastening the Velcro of his body armor. “You stalking me now?”

She laughed as she pulled her gloves off, rolling one into the other, but her laughter dried up and her brown eyes turned serious. “C’mon, Ax. Your guys won’t say it to your face, so I have to. You’re working too many hours. Go easy on yourself.”

“I’m the SAC around here,” Axel sighed. “I don’t have time to lay around.”

“You don’t want to lay around,” she argued. “When was the last time you even went on a date?”

Axel looked away and let his gaze scan the room once more, as though Sofia’s team might have missed something.

Except it looked pretty obvious that Sofia didn’t miss one little bit.

“Last century, huh?” She reached up to squeeze his shoulder. “Lemme tell you this for free, sugar. Alone’s no way to live. It eats you up, especially a guy like you. All tough on the outside, caring on the inside. You need someone, and working yourself to death ain’t gonna help nobody. Take a night off for once. Go out. Get a date. Good lookin’ guy like you shouldn’t have any trouble. Hell, if I were twenty years younger I’d eat you up.” She gave a little wink, but stepped back from him.

“Yeah,” he said, only half-listening by now. Something was amiss in the house, but he couldn’t put a finger on what was tripping his spidey sense. “They didn’t get to light any fires, right?”

“Right.” Sofia was all business again, and she stuffed her gloves into her case.

“We didn’t hear anything get flushed,” he said as he thought out loud.

She eyed him. “What’s eating you? You got that look.”

Axel held his armored vest over one arm and ran his free hand down the back of his neck to loosen his collar. The armor stuck his shirt to his skin in the Texas heat, even though it was only springtime. There was no air-conditioning in this house, and the humidity was sky high from so many bodies inside it.

Intel suggested the suspects were planning to blow a few things up, but these weren’t ideal conditions to store most explosives. Sofia’s team hadn’t carried away containers of chemicals, either.

He pursed his lips and retreated back to the corner he’d stood in while her team cleaned up and re-scanned the room, hoping it’d jog his thought process.

There.

Like all mobile homes, this one had small grates in the floor for air circulation. He paced toward the closest and reached for his flashlight, then shone it down into the darkness.

Dust, crumbs, and a stink bug.

“What’s under the house?” Axel said.

Sofia frowned at him, then cussed under her breath. “Okay. Maybe your evening off’s gonna have to wait.”

“Maybe I’m gonna have to put this goddamn vest back on,” he agreed.

* * *

Two hours later, Axel watched the last of Sofia’s team as they hoisted plastic containers into the back of the forensics truck to take back to the lab.

“You sure it’s stable for transport?” He called to her.

“You do your job, Mister Muscles, and I’ll do mine.” She grinned to him on her approach, and offered a small plastic bag to him. “You might want to take a look at this.”

He reached for it. Lying in the bag, ratty and dog-eared, was what must once have been a business card. It was smudged with dirt and mold.

“It was stuck to the bottom of one of the containers,” Sofia explained. “We’ve catalogued it, but don’t put your fingers all over it, okay? Send it down to the lab when you’re through.”

“I will. Thanks, Sofia.”

“Any time, sugar.”

He held the card up to the sunlight and squinted at it, then turned away so the sun was at his back. The card was so thin that the light shone through it, and he could just about pick out a few letters here and there as he peered at it from different angles then held his flashlight to it’s back.

“V I… something,” he muttered as he tried to pick out the faded letters on the card. It was like a jigsaw puzzle where half the pieces were missing, but the overall picture was slowly forming in his mind.

Victory Boulevard. It had to be.

Axel pulled his cellphone to check. He’d only been SAC here for a few months, but Victory was the major road between Hidden Creek and I-45. He looked it up just to make sure he hadn’t invented a road name out of nowhere, but Victory Boulevard was right there where he expected it to be.

He smiled slowly and pocketed the evidence alongside his phone. This was everything he needed. All he had to do was run through a list of businesses on Victory to see if the card matched any of them, then he could head on over and start asking questions.

If he was really lucky, the investigation would take hours. All evening, preferably. That way he didn’t have to go hang out alone at a bar looking like a sad sack and pretending like he was at all interested in dating. He could be in the office until late, finally crack this clue, then go home and get straight into bed. No pause, no stopping.

No time to think.

Axel crossed the lawn and ditched his vest onto the passenger seat as he hopped up into his SUV. The rest of his team were already back at the field office. They should have begun interrogations by now, which meant he was home free.

Working all evening was way better than facing his emptiness.