Trevor chuckled. “Sounds like fun, but Dick asked me to meet him”—he glanced down at his watch—“nearly thirty minutes ago. I guess I should probably get over there before he decides to go ahead and just fire me already.”
Neither of his friends laughed.
“What if he does?” Jake asked. “I mean, I don’t understand why the hell you’re even still working at the DCO. You could walk into the Defense Intel Agency Headquarters at Anacostia-Bolling and walk out with a great job within minutes. Why the hell would you want to hang around this joint and get treated like crap?”
Trevor had asked himself that more than a few times. Pushing back his chair, he stood and picked up his tray.
“It’s complicated,” was all he said.
* * *
The minute Trevor walked into the main DCO administration building and saw the memorial plaque with John’s name, as well as his secretary Olivia’s, on it, he remembered exactly why he stayed and put up with Dick’s and Thorn’s bullshit. Contrary to what he’d told Jake and Jaxson in the cafeteria, it wasn’t complicated at all.
He could have bailed the moment he’d heard John was dead. He’d been up in Maine, dealing with some demented doctors who’d been trying to create hybrids of their own, and it would have been easy to jump the border into Canada and disappear.
Feline shifter Ivy Halliwell and her husband/partner, Landon Donovan, had wanted him to go into hiding with them, and he’d been tempted. He was smart enough to know what life at the DCO would be like without John there. But in the end, he’d wanted to come back and get the son of a bitch who’d killed John. He’d liked and respected John. It was the least he could do for the man.
Admittedly, coming back had been risky. Dick could easily have labeled Trevor one of the conspirators and tossed him in some supermax prison, never to be seen again. Hell, Dick could have had him executed, and no one would ever have known that, either.
Trevor only hoped that Dick wouldn’t realize how closely Trevor was aligned with Ivy and Landon. Outside of one mission in Tajikistan, they’d never officially worked together, so it was possible he might not. Crazy, but possible. Ivy and Landon hadn’t liked the idea of Trevor staying but said they’d help him any way they could.
“If you even think Dick or Thorn are onto you, promise you’ll run, okay?” Ivy had said before she and Landon had gone off the grid.
Since then, all communications had been handled through burner phones, code words on various chat loops, and trusted messengers. It wasn’t the same as being able to talk face-to-face, but it was good enough.
As he strode down the hall, Trevor marveled at how quickly the bombed-out part of the building had been repaired. He couldn’t even smell the smoke residue anymore over the scent of fresh drywall, paint, and carpeting. No one would ever know a bomb had taken out the whole middle section of the first floor and part of the second right above it.
For a man who’d sworn up and down that he wanted to catch John’s killers, Dick had been damn quick when it came to destroying any evidence of the bombing. The new director had had the entire damaged section of the building demolished and removed within days of the murder. Fortunately, Trevor had slipped into the smoking ruins that first night, fresh off the flight from Maine, when the heat had still been so bad it’d melted his boots and burned his hands. But he’d found more than two dozen pieces of the bomb, so it had been worth it.
Unfortunately, he hadn’t known what to do with them right away. Normally, he would have turned them over to the DCO analysts and tech people and let them do their magic. But most of the ones he trusted had left, and the ones who’d stayed freely admitted they had no skill when it came to bomb and explosive forensics.
Because Dick had so many people watching Trevor, it had taken almost a week to get a message to Ivy and Landon, letting them know what he needed. They’d given him the name of Danica’s former FBI partner in Sacramento, Tony Moretti.
Trevor had never met the man, but Danica and the others trusted him, so that meant he would, too. But with people watching him, it had taken another week to get everything packaged up and sent out there. Since then, he’d been waiting to see if the FBI labs could come up with anything. He wasn’t expecting much. It wasn’t like Thorn was an idiot. He wasn’t going to hire a bomb maker who’d be dumb enough to leave any solid clues behind. Moreover, Tony would have to get the bomb remains evaluated without tipping off anyone as to where the bombing had occurred. They simply couldn’t risk word of the investigation getting back to Thorn or Dick.
While he waited, Trevor had been trying to find the bomber another way. DCO training officer Skye Durant and intel analyst Evan Lloyd were helping, but it was slow, excruciating work. He had things he could be out there doing, leads he could be checking out, but he couldn’t, not when he was under constant surveillance. He would have asked Jake and Jaxson for help, but he didn’t want to put any more people in danger than absolutely necessary.
Sighing, Trevor walked into the outer waiting area of the newly renovated director’s office. The monstrously large desk his secretary, Phyllis, was sitting behind probably cost more than John’s entire suite of furniture from the old office. There were paintings on the wall that appeared to be original pieces from the early colonial years, and the coffee machine set up along the side wall looked like something you might need an engineering degree to use.
Phyllis glanced up from her computer. Nearly sixty, she had short, curly gray hair and a thin, almost beaklike nose, on which a pair of half-moon reading glasses were perched.
He grinned at her. “I’m here to see Dick.”
The woman didn’t return his smile. Now that he thought about it, Trevor wasn’t sure the woman knew how to smile. If so, she’d certainly never done it around him. He was pretty sure Dick’s secretary didn’t think much of him, though whether it was because he was a shifter or a smart-ass, he didn’t know. He preferred to think it was his animal nature. He didn’t mind being looked down on because he sometimes had claws and fangs. He’d been born that way and couldn’t do anything about it. But his wit? That had taken him years of hard work to develop. He hated to think the effort had been wasted.
“Director Coleman is expecting you. And has been for nearly thirty minutes,” she said scathingly.
“Great! So I guess that means I can just let myself right in.”
The older woman didn’t seem amused by that. Then again, Phyllis never seemed amused. Or angry. Or alive, for that matter. Maybe she suffered from a perpetual case of resting bitch face.
“You most certainly will not. I’ll announce you,” she said in a tone that suggested she considered him somehow unworthy of that honor.
He smiled even broader. “Well, how about that? I’ve never been announced before. I mean, sure, they announced my number all the time back in prison, but that’s not the same thing, you know?”
He was hoping to at least get a disdainful glower out of her, but not even that comment could crack her bland facade.
Good sarcasm was simply wasted on some people.
