Chapter Seven
The Crimson Club was closed until five, and Elias Costa at Forge Fitness was taking a sick day on Wednesday, which had made Kara's two stops on her way to work completely pointless.
After a morning debrief with the team, she dug into Jonas Cray's life, which was completely unimpressive. A high school dropout, Jonas had joined the Army at eighteen but received a bad conduct discharge before his twenty-second birthday. His employment after leaving the service had been spotty. He'd worked as a bartender, a bouncer, a parking valet, and a handyman. But there was no evidentiary connection between Jonas and Elias Costa or Jonas and Alex or Sergei Novik. No transfers into his bank account, no emails, nothing…
Jonas had been caught on camera entering and exiting the Crimson Club several times a day and also going into Forge Fitness, which certainly made Elias Costa's claim that he'd never seen him before a flat-out lie. But that wasn't proof of anything. They needed more.
Her team, especially Alina and Zane, who had embedded themselves in the dark web over the past year had been haunting online forums for chatter about the bomb or the victims, but so far nothing had come up.
By four o'clock in the afternoon, she was tired and hungry, so she headed into the break room for coffee and a snack. She grabbed a banana first, then moved to the coffeemaker to pour herself a cup.
Alina Volkov came in a moment later, giving her a smile. "I need one of those, too."
She slid the mug across the counter to Alina. "Take this one. I'll get another."
"Thanks." Alina took a sip and let out a sigh. "I needed this."
She smiled and took her mug to the kitchen table. "Me, too. How's it going?"
"Not great. I feel like I need a shower after reading the posts in the last forum of sickos. What about you?"
"Nothing yet. Jonas Cray seems like the perfect guy to hire to do a dirty job, but I can't link him specifically to someone targeting Samantha. By the way, did you get an update on Samantha's condition?"
"Just a few minutes ago," Alina replied. "She's stable but critical. Samantha's sister has been there all day. Dominic Ashford also spent about thirty minutes with her. No sign of trouble at the hospital. Ashford has security outside her room."
"I'm glad Samantha is hanging in there." She peeled her banana and took a bite.
"The hospital released the other two victims today," Alina added. "That there have been no fatalities is very fortunate."
"So far, anyway. Samantha still needs to survive."
Alina sipped her coffee as she nodded in agreement. "Hopefully, she will. So, what's the story with the ex-CIA agent who keeps showing up in this middle of this case." Alina asked curiously. "Tyler doesn't seem to be a fan."
"Apparently, they met overseas when Tyler was in Delta and Max was in the CIA, but no one will talk about that. They're just very distrustful of each other. But Max is helpful to me, because he's tied into Ashford and Samantha Barkley. He has access to their world which we don't have."
"That makes sense. Do you know why he left the CIA?"
"He said he needed a change," she said dryly. "He's not big on answering questions. And, honestly, he could still be CIA; I have no idea."
Alina smiled. "That sounds about right. I've never found anyone in the agency to be helpful."
"Well, he's the least of my concerns." She took a bite of her banana, chased it down with coffee, and then said, "I keep asking myself why anyone would choose to blow up a café just to kill one person? I know murder doesn't always make sense, but my logical brain wants to find an answer."
"We'll find the answer," Alina said confidently. "We won't stop until we do."
"We won't," she agreed. "I don't give up."
"Neither do I. A quality instilled in me when I was a child," Alina added. "You don't quit, and when you lose, you learn."
"That's a good philosophy."
"I'll tell my father you said that. He likes to believe that even though I didn't follow his dream, I got something out of it."
"What was his dream?" she asked curiously.
"My parents brought me here from Russia when I was four and my younger sister was two. They decided we were going to be professional tennis players. They sacrificed a lot to get us into the top camps, and I was pretty good, better than my sister, who didn't like the heat and didn't like to run and just hated to compete. But I loved the fight."
"How long did you compete? Did you play professionally?"
