“Even more likely,” Jax agreed. “Since he’d need something to sell in the first place.”
Silence fell around the table. Just the sound of ice clinking in glasses and beer bottles being hoisted and set back down.
“Okay,” Mindy said at last. “If we follow that logic, what happens next? The kidnappers still want the flash drive—and I still don’t have it.”
Jax took a drink of his tea, set the glass back down. “We can’t find the drive, but the kidnappers don’t know that. We’ll send Susan a message, tell her we’ve got what she wants.”
Mindy’s eyes widened. “Set a trap?”
“Exactly. If we’re right about all this, we won’t have to go after Susan and whoever she hired to do her dirty work. We’ll get them to come to us.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“THATLITTLETRAMP.”Susan paced back and forth across the living room of Elliot’s sleekly modern, seventeenth-floor apartment overlooking the city. She didn’t come here often. She didn’t want to risk being seen, but today was important.
“And to think I actually liked her.” She turned, paced back the opposite way. “I helped her get the job working for Chase Garrett. I even gave her my cell number.”
“You can’t trust anyone these days,” Elliot said mildly, taking a sip of his Bombay Sapphire martini.
Susan sighed and thought of the text she had received. “She wants to meet me at noon tomorrow at the Vietnam Memorial at Fair Park. She wants twenty-five thousand for her copy of the video.”
“You’re lucky. You thought she’d want a hundred.”
“There’s no way to be sure she hasn’t made a dozen more copies. Twenty-five thousand now, fifty the next time. It’ll never end until we get rid of her.”
She paused in front of the window to look down at the traffic crawling along the street. “And what if she goes to Jonathan? He’d pay a king’s ransom to keep the world from knowing he’s a cuckold. His pride’s too great for that. Jonathan has the best lawyers in the world. I’d get next to nothing.”
“I told you I’ll take care of her,” Elliot said. “You just make sure she comes alone.”
Susan thought of the phone call to Mindy that she had made using one of the disposable phones she kept to communicate with Elliot and anyone else she didn’t want her husband to know about.
“I told her I’d meet her, but only if she came alone. I told her if she brought her SEAL boyfriend, the deal was off.”
“And she agreed?”
“Only if I agreed to the same terms. You were right about the money. She can’t wait to get her hands on it. The only stipulation is that I come by myself.”
Elliot chuckled, sipped from his long-stemmed martini glass. “Only you won’t be alone. I’ll be close by, and my men will be in position to take the girl out.”
“What about the police?”
“As soon as you have the flash drive, you’ll leave. When they find her body, the girl will be in possession of twenty-five thousand dollars. It’ll look like a drug deal gone bad. There’s no way to connect you to any of this. You’ll have the video, and Mindy Stewart will be dead before she gets back to her car.”
MINDYSATONthe brown tweed sofa in Jax’s living room. The evening had settled in. The Chinese takeout they’d had for supper was gone, the dishes cleaned up and put away. After the text she had sent, and the return phone call she’d received from Susan, they knew they were on the right track.
Ryan Shipman had been blackmailing his ex-lover. Now he was dead, and Susan believed Mindy had a copy of the drive, for which she wanted twenty-five thousand dollars.
Since the stakes had just gotten dangerously higher, Jax had insisted they stay at his place where DeMarco and her crew were less likely to find them. Muffin was with them, perfectly at home, curled up in the middle of Jax’s big bed.
Jason had arrived to help Jax flesh out the plan they had come up with earlier and now sat across from them, sprawled in an overstuffed chair.
“You have to bring in the cops,” he argued. “You know it as well as I do. We try to handle this on our own, we’ll end up killing some dickwad and winding up in jail.”
Jax grunted. “At least Mindy would be safe.”
“Stop it, Jax,” Mindy demanded. “You need to listen to Jason.”
It took another few minutes, but since Jax knew his friend was right, he had grudgingly conceded. They needed help. Lieutenant Gunderson was their best option. Jax called and filled him in as much as possible. The detective was on his way over now.
