“Tell us what?” Kole asked.
With a sigh, Kat admitted, “I have a very good memory.”
Good, my ass.
“Ah, come on. You’re being modest.” To the others, Matt said, “Kat, here, can pretty much remember everything about, well everything. Isn’t that right?”
A look of hurt flashed behind her eyes at his mocking tone, but he refused to let it bother him.
“All right, enough.” Gabe spun his gaze to Matt’s, his intelligent eyes narrowing. “What the hell is going on between you two?”
Matt gave the man a simple shrug. “Absolutely nothing.”
“Don’t give us that bullshit,” Kole called him out next. “The tension’s so thick between you guys I can barely see your ass from here.”
Kat’s eyes shot to Matt’s before they skittered over to Kole’s. An instant flush began filling her neck and cheeks, and she looked uncomfortable as hell.
Welcome to my world, Doc.
“Matt and I know each other.” She decided to answer for them both. “Well, we used to. We grew up in the same town.”
“Oh.” Kole thought about that a moment before his eyes widened and his brows shot up. “Oh…” He let the word trail a bit that time. A smug grin began to form on the asshole’s baby face as he looked around Kat and to him. “I bet this is awkward.”
“Not if we focus on why we’re really here,” Jake told them all pointedly. The guy’s rugged face appeared impassive, but the look he was giving Matt said the guy felt anything but.
“Back to the situation at hand.” Jake turned to Kat. “Is what Matt said true? Do you really have an eidetic memory?”
Still appearing embarrassed, she said, “The jury’s still out on the precise term to use, but yes. I can remember everything I see. Have since I was a kid.”
“Do the people you work with know this about you?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think what happened at the lab was an accident,” he announced. “I think whoever sent that text was planning to steal the formula. When you messaged them back, they knew it had been sent to the wrong person. It’s possible they somehow learned of your extraordinary memory, and knew you’d give the information from the text to the authorities if the formula were stolen. I think they decided to silence you, and they used Todd to do it.”
“But that doesn’t make sense.”
“Why not?” Matt had to ask.
Chocolate eyes met his. “For one, Todd died. If he was doing this for money, he wouldn’t kill himself in the process. Two, all of the research data was destroyed. So if someone hired Todd to steal it, why would they then hire him to destroy it? Sure, they might get rid of me, but they also lost their chance to sell the formula. Plus, the explosion happened after I walked out of the lab. If I was the original target, why wait for me to leave before mixing the compound?”
“You said the chemical combination was highly explosive, right?” Gabe clarified.
“Yes, but—”
He cut her off. “You also said your people don’t normally mix those together. So isn’t it possible he either put too much of something in there? He messed up, and the explosion happened sooner than planned?”
Kat opened her mouth to answer but closed it. Matt could tell she didn’t want to believe her colleague had tried to kill her.
Wish the fucker was still alive so I could kill him myself.
Whoa. Where the hell had that come from? Matt didn’t care what happened to her. Not anymore.
“It’s possible, I guess,” she answered hesitantly. “I can’t imagine Todd doing something like that.”
“I’ll need Todd’s last name, as well as Evan’s and Amy’s. Just in case they were involved.” Addressing the team, Jake said, “Since Nate’s gone, I’ll get West on this ASAP. I’ll have him run their financials, check for any large deposits or anything out of the ordinary. We’ll start with Todd’s and go from there.”
Derek West was a former SEAL and member of R.I.S.C.’s Alpha team. Apart from Nate, West was the smartest man Matt knew when it came to computers and all that shit.
