“No,” Sylvie said. “I usually talk to people and do a lot of research. But you know”—she eyed my all-black attire—“you don’t look dressed for a stakeout.”
I rolled my eyes and laughed. She wasn’t wrong. “What do you know about stakeouts?”
“Everything I’ve seen on TV,” she said. “You should have, like, a bag of chips, and look really bored.”
“We’re just going to check it out. If we decide that it’sworth trying to get in and retrieve some of the evidence, we’ll send back a team specifically for that purpose. You and I are there to take a look at the building, the environment.”
“We’re going to case the joint,” she said.
“You really do watch too much TV,” I said, holding back another laugh.
“Not as much as I used to. But yeah, probably. So, we’re going to check it out. Take notes on security cameras and guards and stuff like that?”
“Stuff like that,” I agreed.
“Does Sinclair Security usually break into police evidence storage?” she asked.
I didn’t grace that with a response.
“And how do you know the evidence from Emily Shaw’s crime scene is at this location?”
Now we were getting into information Sylvie didn’t need. I shook my head.
“Come on, Eli. I signed an NDA.” She reached across the console and poked me in the arm.
“Yeah, which means you can’t talk about the things you know. It doesn’t mean you need to know everything.” I slid her a sideways glance, trying not to enjoy the disgruntled look on her face, her brows drawn together, her teeth sunk into her lower lip.
Sylvie let out a harrumph and crossed her arms over her chest. I was sure it wasn’t supposed to be adorable, but it was. I still wasn’t going to tell her that Maddox and Emmett had done a little hacking and followed the chain of custody on the evidence, especially since Cooper wouldn’t be thrilled to know what they’d done.
The people at Sinclair Security weren’t Boy Scouts, but they were a hell of a lot more by-the-book than we were. In general, that wasn’t a problem. I didn’t mind coloringinside the lines most of the time. Frankly, working on cases that were a little less sketchy was fine with me. I didn’t have a death wish. I liked my work, but when you were willing to push the limits, you attracted clients with more complex problems—things that, when I was a little younger, felt like a fun challenge. And now? Now I wasn’t sure how long I wanted to take unnecessary risks.
In this case, all bets were off. This was about Silas, not a client. And if he needed help, I was willing to take any risk necessary.
I followed the directions on my nav to an area outside the city that looked like a rough mix of commercial and industrial—warehouses, storage units, nondescript concrete block buildings surrounded by chain-link fences. In the middle of the night, everything was dark and quiet.
Exactly how I wanted it.
I dimmed the lights on the SUV and turned off the main road, winding my way through back streets I’d memorized before we left Atlanta, to pull along the back of the one-story rectangular concrete building that served as cold storage for the police department. Cold storage was so named because it held things that were accessed so infrequently that they didn’t need to be easy to get to. I was expecting low security, and so far, that was what we found.
The building was surrounded by a chain-link fence a few feet taller than me, with angled barbed wire at the top. Dim lights glowed at the corners of the building, leaving great pools of shadows everywhere else. I pulled out my phone and took some pictures through the car window.
“I need to get more than this,” I said and opened my door. When Sylvie moved to follow—as I’d known she would—I said, “Pull your hood up all the way to hide your hair and face.”
She did as I said, easing open her door and closing it almost silently. She joined me at the side of the car, watching in silence as I took pictures, staying beside me as I walked to the far corner of the building and took a few more.
I hadn’t spotted a surveillance camera, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one. These days, they were so easy to hide, but the place had a neglected air to it. If you’d told me the chain-link fence and the locks on the doors were the sum of their security, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
I wondered what Sylvie was thinking, but she stayed silent as promised, not getting in my way, not causing any trouble. It was hard to stay irritated at her just for existing. I might not want a partner, especially a civilian whose job it was to make entertainment out of cases like this, but if I had to have somebody stuck at my side, Sylvie was a pretty good option.
“Hey,” she said under her breath, and lifted her chin at the far corner of the building.
I followed her eyes to see a shadow separate itself from the pool of darkness between the two security lights, creeping along the wall of the building, and stopping at a side door. Sylvie drew in a sharp breath but didn’t say anything. Neither did I. We watched in silence as he pulled out what looked like a screwdriver and went to work on the door.
One very long minute later, I heard a grind of metal on metal, and the door swung open. The figure crept inside. I waited, braced for an alarm. There was nothing but silence.
They’d either successfully disarmed the security system, or they didn’t realize there might be a silent alarm.
“What do we do?” Sylvie breathed, her voice so low it was almost inaudible.
