Page 17 of Lock ’N’ Load

“I’ll do that, Matthew. Now scoot.” She made a shooing gesture with her hands. “You’ll be late for the meeting.”

“In a second.” He picked up the phone, then dialed Trista’s extension. His call went directly to voicemail, and he hung up. He’d already left her a message an hour ago about the report. At this point, she’d been in the office nearly six hours. She’d had plenty of time to get the damned report in. But, he suddenly realized, she never intended to file it.

When he’d talked to her about it last night, she’d assured him she would get it done, but her response had been bullshit. He’d seen it in her eyes. She might be a whiz at digging up analytical secrets, but she wasn’t a very good liar.

Not your problem, Connors, so stop thinking about her.

Rubbing his forehead, which had begun to ache from lack of sleep, he headed to the conference room and found everyone else, including Olga, already there, standing.

“Grab a chair, Connors.” Buck gestured to the empty chair at his left. “Everyone, let’s give a big round of applause to our resident white knight.”

Ah, shit. Matt ground his teeth as his colleagues clapped heartily.

“All right, all right.” Buck sat, as did everyone else. “Let’s get down to business.”

Matt handed Buck the crumpled police report. “Here’s the PD report from last night.”

Buck took the report, quickly flipping through it. “And Ms. Gold’s incident report?”

“It’s not here.” Matt met Buck’s questioning look.

“Meaning what?” his boss asked. “That it’s not here? Or that she didn’t write one up?”

“Can’t say.”

A series of oohs and uh-ohs resounded around the table.

Buck sat back in his chair. “Did you call her?”

“Yes.” Matt hesitated to mention that he’d called her twice. She’d nearly been killed last night. Throwing her under the bus for a missing report didn’t sit right with him. There must be a damned good reason she hadn’t filed it.

“How many times?” Buck prodded.

Shit. “Twice. Got voicemail both times.”

The oohs and uh-ohs got louder.

“All right, all right.” Buck held up his hand for silence, then made a note on his pad. “Give us a quick rundown of what happened.”

Matt summarized everything from the moment he’d seen Trista being dragged into the woods to the time he’d dropped her off at her house.

“Wow!” Olga laughed. “First, the kid yesterday at the checkpoint, and now the guy last night. You’ve been doing a lot of tackling lately.”

“Reliving your old college football glory days?” Mark Waters added with a smirk.

With his head pounding full force now, Matt sent them each a silencing glare. A good workout before heading home and sacking out would definitely hit the mark to ease the tension creeping up his neck.

“So, no obvious motive, nothing to show the guy knew Ms. Gold. You really think the attack was random?”

Matt rubbed his jaw. “I don’t know. Could be it really was just a crime of opportunity.”

“But you don’t think so.”

He met his boss’s gaze. Buck not only had thirty years of federal law enforcement under his belt, but he could also read his people and knew what they were thinking.

“I can’t put my finger on it. But the locals have no leads to follow up on.”

“Anything connecting the attack to agency business?” Buck asked.