Mastiff Security Offices

Los Angeles, California

 

Wren was shaken.

A serial killer serving time in a minimum security prison not an hour from this very location—though they kept him in shackles most of the time, a curious thing—had told her that he knew who’d killed her mother twenty-eight years ago, but he wouldn’t give her the name. Then he had told her that there was a hitman after one of Mastiff’s operatives, which turned out to be true. And then he suggested that her father had been lying to her about her mother, about his relationship with her mother, and about her death.

What the hell did that mean?

Wren was beginning to wonder whom she could trust. She’d met an FBI agent—Cormac Delaney—who was as curious about her mother’s unsolved case as she was. He thought the serial killer, Devin Wilde, was lying to them. He thought it was just a game Wilde was playing.

Wren wasn’t sure.

She’d gone to her father three times now, trying to bring up the things that man had said, but each time she changed her mind. She thought her father knew something was up, but he was letting her come out to his studio and just hang out, not pushing her to ask the questions she had. Was it because he suspected what she planned to ask?

She was afraid. She didn’t want to know that her father was a liar. She didn’t want to believe that everything her father had ever told her about her mother was a lie.

But how did a man like Devin Wilde know that her mother had originally wanted to call her Wendy? How did he know she liked Peter Pan?

She didn’t have to confirm that little tidbit with her father. He’d read that book to her dozens of times when she was a child for that very reason: because it had been her mother’s favorite.

How did Devin Wilde know that? It wasn’t something that would have been in her case files.

Had he killed her? Was that how he knew? Was Cormac right, that Wilde was just playing games?

Had Devin Wilde killed her mother despite denying it all these years?

Her phone buzzed. Time to focus on business.

“Mr. Spencer White is here to see you.”

Wren took a deep breath and stood, smoothing her hands over the front of her linen slacks as her office door opened. Spencer White was surprisingly short, a squat man with a dad bod and heavy, dark-framed glasses. She knew the name. He was a lawyer who worked for celebrities, negotiating their contracts and keeping them out of the press as often as possible. Should one of his clients get arrested, he was the first call they made. White was notorious for finding a way to negotiate a quiet release before the press showed up. If a celebrity ever saw charges pressed against them, it was because they didn’t have Spencer White as their lawyer.

“This is a pleasure, Mr. White,” she said, moving around her desk to shake his hand. “How can we help you today?”

“You’re Wren Ryland?” He looked her over, naked lust clear in his eyes. “I was expecting an older woman. Someone a bit…uglier.”

She lowered her head slightly. “Well, you’re stuck with me, I’m afraid.” Wren gestured toward a couch situated to the left of her desk. “Would you like something to drink?”

“No. I won’t be here long.”

He took a seat, leaning forward slightly with his hands on his knees. Wren tugged a chair closer to the couch and sat herself, crossing her legs primly as he continued to stare openly at her.

“You’re having an issue that we can help you with?”

“Yes.” He reached up and removed his glasses, twisting them between his hands. “I have reason to believe someone in my firm is leaking private information on my clients. I need someone to figure out who it is and get that person to confess.”

“What exactly do you want us to do?”

He looked up at her, squinting slightly without his glasses. “I need someone who can go undercover in the firm and find whoever it is who has been logging inappropriately into client files. And then I need that person to get close to the suspect.” He lifted his glasses to his lips and breathed on them, wiping them clean with the tail of his suit jacket. “I have to make sure the charges stick. The only way to do that, for certain, is to have some sort of confession on tape.”

Wren nodded. It wasn’t an unusual request from a client.

“But someone discreet. The information this employee of yours will be exposed to in this search is highly confidential. I need to know I can trust this person.”

“Of course. We are very discreet.”

“I’ll need a non-disclosure agreement signed.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem.”

“From everyone involved, including you.”

Wren’s eyebrows rose. Paranoid much? But, she supposed, it was understandable based on the nature of his work. Still…it did seem slightly paranoid.

“We can do that.”

“Great.” He stood up. “I’d like to meet the person you’ll be sending over. And, if you can give me access to a computer, I can print out the NDA forms.”

“Uh…” Wren slowly began to nod as she stood with him, her mind spinning a little. What was the hurry? “You can use my secretary’s computer. And I’ll go find Andres Maldonado, our head of operations, to discuss the operative we’ll be putting on your case.”

“Thank you.”

Wren walked quickly down the hall after leaving Spencer, trying to remember which of her operatives were available for a case right now. She knew Andres had all this under control, but she liked to be kept in the loop. And then she realized that Stevie Wayne had just finished a case. She’d be perfect for this.

“No,” Andres said unequivocally when she suggested it.

“Why not?”

Andres sat back and crossed his arms over his chest. “I know she was recommended by Durango, and you feel this need to make sure she gets good cases. But even you have to admit there are limitations to what she can do.”

Wren frowned, also crossing her arms over her chest. He wasn’t the only one who could look formidable.

“Because she’s deaf.”

“She can’t hear alarms. She can’t hear someone sneaking into a building. And communicating with someone she’s supposed to be getting a confession from is going to be tricky.”

“She reads lips very well. And we’ve modified our systems to give her visual and physical alerts. She’s done well on her last few assignments.”

“She’s good at watching a monitor. And she knows her way around the tech. But actually interacting with people?” Andres shook his head even as his eyes dropped to the top of his desk. “She’s quick to dismiss people. She has little patience with people who don’t have patience with her. And she doesn’t work very well with other operatives.”

“She’s not that bad.”

Andres grunted. “I have half a dozen complaints from other operatives against her. On this case she just finished, she ignored direction when hacking the client’s computer system and accessed information that was not part of the case.”

“But she did what she was supposed to do. She proved someone else had hacked their system.”

“Sure. She did that. But she also notified the SEC that the company was using illegal methods to help their clients.”

Wren lowered her arms, feeling a little less defiant. “We can’t ask our operatives to go against their moral code.”

“But we can ask them not to chase clients off by making more trouble for them beyond what they were looking for us to fix.”

“I’ll talk to her. Remind her what our role here is.”

“You do that. Please. Everything I’ve said to her has fallen on…” He stopped himself, blushing slightly, something Wren had never seen on him. “Look, I have no problem with Stevie. She did me a big favor, staying with Gray and Alyssa during the Klein case. I respect her. But I can’t have her pissing off any more clients.”

Wren nodded slowly. “Here’s the thing: I want Stevie on this case. I think it would be good for her to be trusted with a big case. Everything we’ve given her so far has been under the thumb of someone else. The Klein case, she answered to the other operatives assigned to protecting your family. The Colt Murphy thing, she answered to Jason Stine. This last case, she was answering to Zeke Maxwell. She’s always answering to someone else. I want her to have a case where she has to make her own choices, where she’s answering to no one but the client and us. I want to see how well she does.”

“But Spencer White is the client. Do you really want her test case to be with someone who could have that much influence over our ability to stay in business in this town? You do realize one word from White could make us persona non grata among the Hollywood elite, right?”

“I know that.”

“Yet, you want to put this volatile woman in charge of it?”

“I think she’ll stand up to the challenge.”

“And if she doesn’t?”

Wren pictured the young woman in her mind, remembered the things that had flowed through her mind the day Durango walked her into Wren’s office. She had looked like an adolescent, such a petite woman who chose to dress like she was still in high school. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, her face clean of makeup. She wore jeans and a snug t-shirt, boots that came all the way up her calves. She was beautiful, but so youthful-looking. It took Wren a moment to reconcile her appearance with the knowledge that this tiny thing was the same age as she was.

“Durango believes in her. He told me to treat her like any other operative.” She reached up, brushed a piece of hair out of her face. “This is what I would do with another operative who’d worked for us as long as she has. In fact, I would have done this weeks ago.”

“Another case, maybe.”

“No. This case.”

Andres sighed. “You hired me to make these decisions.”

“I know.”

“I really think Orion or Zeke would be better for this case.”

“I know that, too.”

He was quiet for a long second, his eyes hard on hers. Then he lowered his head.

“You’re the boss.”

“Thank you, Andres.”

“But if it looks like this is going south, I’m taking her off.”

“If it looks like she can’t handle it, I’ll remove her myself and make the call to Durango.”

Andres nodded, his expression telling her that he was getting her message. This wasn’t really either of their call. This was about the man who owned the firm, the man whose reputation was really on the line here. This was about Durango Masters and his decision to thrust a friend on them.

Stevie might be something special to him, but to them, she was just a liability. As much as Wren liked Stevie, she had no expectations as far as her ability to run this case. She was hoping for the best, but reality was a cruel mistress.