He crossed the room and stopped in front of Stina. When he held out the tablet, her stomach wobbled.
“I finished cleaning up the image.”
Stina accepted the tablet.
The face on the screen hit her like a punch.
The restaurant came rushing back immediately. The weird voice. The pizza. The shouting. The humiliation of standing there while everyone stared.
Her stomach tightened. Her thumb tightened against the edge of the tablet. “That’s him,” she breathed.
O’s expression hardened.
“Who?” Jolie jumped up to see.
“That’s the man I dumped pizza on.”
No one spoke.
Jolie leaned in closer and studied the image for several seconds before straightening. “It is the man you dumped pizza on. But…”
Stina looked at her. “What is it?”
“I kind of…expected it to be the guy who kidnapped me.” She shook her head, wrapping her arms around her middle. “But it’s not.”
The words seemed to suck all the air from the room. This meeting was supposed to answer a question. Instead, it raised another one.
Stina looked back at the face on the screen.
Slowly, she lowered the tablet and looked between O and Jolie.
“How many guys are there?”
TEN
Rome stared at the screen, jaw tight.
He spent most of the day pushing the image of the suspect from the security camera behind the restaurant through the facial recognition program—again—at Cannon’s request. But on the third pass, he kept hitting the same wall.
Four hours behind the screen had gotten him nowhere.
By now, Stina would be in bed, so there would be no checking on her either.
He shut the last computer tab, closed the laptop and carried it to the war room. The base was quiet as most of Sierra either waited for replies from contacts or hit dead ends.
As he walked, his mind sifted through all the information he’d uncovered, trying to make sense of things that made none. He was a step past Cannon’s office when he heard Stina’s name through the door.
He stopped. Without even pausing to think what he was doing, he turned around and pushed the door open.
Cannon sat behind the desk, elbows planted on the surface. O stood across the desk, arms folded.
At Rome’s unwelcome entrance, they both looked up.
“What happened with Stina.” It wasn’t a question.
Cannon’s expression didn’t shift, but his tone came out with a bite of a reprimand. “You want to knock next time?”
He swung his gaze to O. “What did you find?”
