I tore my eyes away and retrieved myself a seltzer. I snapped it open and took a sip of crisp bubbles. “Do you live by yourself?”
He stood up and turned around to face me. His eyes said he knew what I was implying with my question, and sharing might not have been appropriate, but he was going to tell me anyway. “Yes.”
The sense of relief I felt made me bite my lip. I turned back to the fridge to find a snack.
When he finished with the dining room camera, I followed him to the bedroom.
“I see you’ve been studying,” he said, and nodded at the files I’d left spread out over the bed.
“I have, yes. And I have to say, given their backgrounds, the moms, I’m not surprised they know how to run a smuggling ring.”
He dropped the duffel bag beneath the window and squatted to reach into it. “Well, yes. You don’t run an operation like theirs without background experience first. Mistakes are a surefire way to get caught.”
I sat on the foot of the bed and leaned back on my arms, watching him work. “What I can’t figure out is if they are in troublebecauseof the operation, or they started the operation to getoutof trouble.”
“I would guess the former. You saw their files; it’s not like any of them were hard up for money,” he said, and lifted the blinds.
“So then what’s the motivation? Why would a group of moms break bad?”
“Thatis what I’m hoping you can tell me. It’s a piece I’m missing, and I think it will tie things together and hopefullygive us a way in. Can I get a hand?” He was using his elbow to hold the curtains back while he tried to mount the camera in the window, but they kept falling forward.
I climbed off the bed and moved to join him.
“I want this one higher to get a wider angle on the street,” he said as he reached over his head. He’d attached an adhesive strip to the little pedestal foot and pressed it into the belt of wall bordering the window frame.
I stood beside him holding the curtains, a wispy drape of beige linen, off to the side. The angle put me beneath his raised right arm. I felt the heat coming off him and could smell the same minty spice I’d smelled when he first stepped onto my doorstep days before.
“Got it,” he declared with a final press into the wall. He lowered his arm in a way that brought it down as if he were looping me inside. “Sorry,” he said with a shy smile.
My face flushed and I slipped away from him. “What are these connected to?” I pointed at the newly mounted eye in my window.
Bray went back to his duffel bag and pulled out a tablet. “Me. We can keep an eye on anything suspicious.”
“What do you expect to see?”
“More of what’s in the photos. Maybe another person not yet on our radar. Speaking of, what time are we going to see Brittany tomorrow?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Wearen’t going to do anything tomorrow.I’mgoing to see Brittany on my own.”
He looked up from poking his tablet, about to argue, and I silenced him with a stern look.
“You can’t keep popping up everywhere I am, Bray. They’re going to catch on, if they haven’t already. Jana thought you were my husband the other day when I arrived. Clearly, they’re watching. They had flowers delivered before I even got home from coffee today, for God’s sake.”
“Flowers?”
“Yes. At the park, I told them my uncle died, remember?”
“Right. That.” He paused. “Well, that was nice of them.”
“It was,” I agreed, though the swiftness of their intervention still unnerved me. “And in my experience, they are sucking me into their world with record speed, which is all the more reason for you to keep clear. If you want this to work”—I waved my hands around at the apartment, the cameras, the two of us standing in what was essentially a stakeout room—“then I need you to let me handle it.”
To my surprise, he nodded with a purse of his lips. “I understand.”
“Good.”
We stared at each other, and I was acutely aware there was a bed between us.
Bray’s eyes flashed back down to his tablet. “I’ll be ready to hear what you learn from Brittany ASAP though.”
