“I’m gonna find out where Shooter is,” Cassie said, moving back to the living room.
“Hey,” Offerman hollered after her. “We’re on the same team, remember? This was one I left on the table. I’m back to help.”
Cassie stepped out, and I heard her speaking with Detective Quinones, who had just arrived.
“Ed,” I said, focusing him. “This old case. Is everything in the file? There’s nothing you held back?”
“Just my instinct that it wasn’t over,” he said.
I nodded. “Did you ever find any connection to South Florida?”
He squinted at me, and I expanded the inquiry. “To gun fabrication or militias? Gun sales?”
“No,” he said, his voice a question more than an answer. “Why?”
Detective Quinones entered the room then, his forehead a series of lines as he studied Offerman. “Ed?” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“Warner, hey.” Offerman’s voice was casual, even though he was still cuffed. “I was just canvassing, you know? Going over some leads. Getting back after it.”
A uniformed cop had followed Quinones into the kitchen, and his eyes moved from me to Offerman. Cassie came in, too, and raised her eyebrows at me, motioning at her Apple watch.
“Agent Pardo and I need to get to the airport,” I said. I pulled Offerman to his feet, uncuffing him.
“Shooter’s two minutes away,” Cassie said. Her face had been a shade of red since the “cupcake” comment, and now she turned to Quinones. “You requested federal help, correct, Detective?”
He nodded. “Correct.”
Cassie turned to the uniform.
“Ed Offerman is not with the FBI,” she said. “He’s a civilian. If he does anything to undermine an open case, arrest him. He talks to a witness, arrest him. Shows up at the station—”
“We got it,” Quinones said.
And we walked out. No new suspect. And still no leads pointing us toward a killer.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The seat belt sign dinged as we moved above ten thousand feet, and I looked inside my bag. My cell phone had died an hour earlier, and I could picture my charger plug, still in the other SUV. When we’d split up and I’d gone with Shooter, I’d left it in that vehicle.
“Can I borrow your phone?” I asked, seeing that Cassie had already connected to Wi-Fi.
“Of course.”
I looked up a website and clicked a few pages down.
“Everything okay?”
“Camila’s science fair is tonight,” I said. “I thought I would miss it, but since Poulton sent us home early…” I shrugged. “I think I can catch the last fifteen minutes.”
“The bottles with the rotten meat and the molasses?” Cassie asked, referring to the conversation we’d had at the stakeout.
“It’s a twenty-three-minute ride from the airport to her school,” I said. “Figure seventeen minutes from gate to the street—”
“You want company?”
I was about to say no, but then I remembered how I’d done this in the van outside the bar.
“If you want,” I said.
