On Her Master's Secret Service (Masters and Mercenaries #4)(84)

Eve smiled, squeezing her hand. “It’s okay. You did…good.” She gave Kristen’s words back to her. She looked down at the file folders. “And thank you for these. I’m not looking forward to staring at the seventeen bombing victims, but I think it will be helpful.”

Kristen frowned. “What do you mean seventeen? There were only sixteen folders.”

Eve looked down at the folders in front of her, quickly counting them. Kristen was right. Sixteen folders. There were seventeen victims. Why did the FBI only have sixteen folders?

She moved back to the bar. “You didn’t get them all.”

Kristen was mistaken.

The redhead sat up, letting the ice pack down. “I took everything they had. If the FBI had a file, I hacked it.”

“I know this case. There were seventeen dead. If you count my kidnapping, there should actually be twenty, but my folder that includes Leon and Tommy is considered ancillary.”

“You’re in there,” Kristen said. “I just didn’t count you among the dead. According to the FBI, there are sixteen dead from the bombings, two murdered agents and one rape and kidnapping victim. You.”

Adam moved to his computer. “I’m on it.”

She knew this case like the back of her hand. She knew the victims by heart. She played through them in her head. Brewer, Davies, Duncan, Foster, Clemmons, Johnson, Wilcox, Schroeder, Flynn, Betts, Gale, Hardison, Garcia, Kapoor, Ellig, Gilliland, and Foster.

The names were tattooed on her brain. Though she couldn’t remember everything about each victim, she knew their names. Who was missing?

“There were only sixteen files.” Kristen stood behind her, peering over her shoulder. “I pulled everything I could. Did I miss something?”

Garcia. There was no file for Garcia. “Uhm, I think you missed Carmen Garcia’s file. She died in the last bombing. The one in DC.”

It had been the bombing that forced Alex to make that fated move. Evans had bombed a free clinic that offered women healthcare. Four people had died in that bombing including a doctor who worked for nothing to make sure the women in the neighborhood had routine checkups and prenatal care. Dr. Kapoor’s file was here. Where was Carmen Garcia’s?

It was probably just an oversight. Files got lost sometimes. Though not typically in the computer age.

Kristen winced a little as she moved to one of Adam’s three computers. “May I?”

Adam nodded, not looking up from his keyboard. “Sure. I’m going to hack into the fed’s system. It could take me a minute or two. I’m going to route this system through another fifty so they’ll have a hell of a time working the knot out. I don’t want the feds on my doorstep.”

“Don’t you mean you don’t want them on your doorstep again?” Sean asked as he placed a perfectly golden sandwich in front of her.

Damn. She was hungry. Despite the way her every instinct was telling her something was wrong, her stomach rumbled. “I thought Adam didn’t get caught anymore.”

Adam shrugged. “There’s always a way. No matter what a hacker does, if the investigator is tenacious enough, he’ll find you. I just have to make it not worth their while.”

“Shit.” Kristen groaned as she looked down at the computer. “That will teach me to do all my research from government files. I pulled up the press on the last bombing. There she is. Carmen Garcia. Twenty-two years old. Pretty girl. She was a law student at Georgetown.”

“That’s right. I always thought it was odd that she was in that clinic. Her parents had money. She wasn’t a scholarship student. She was from a fairly prominent family in San Antonio,” Eve said. She hadn’t fit the typical profile. Most of the victims were doctors or nurses or indigent women, women who had no other means of health care. “She would have to drive a long way to get to that particular clinic.”

“She had a history of volunteer work,” Kristen mused. “Maybe she was helping out.”

“Her volunteer work all had to do with legal work and politics. The survivors didn’t remember ever seeing her there before, and all the paperwork was lost in the fire. She had to be identified by dental records.”

“I’m in.” Adam got that focused look he had when he was working on a problem. This was Adam’s world. Oh, he could shoot and wield a knife with the rest of them, but when Adam was at a computer, his magnificent brain processing, that was when he was at his deadliest.

Sean put a second plate in front of Adam, proving that most of their animosity was for show. Or that Sean couldn’t resist showing off because that was an amazing grilled cheese. Eve bit into hers and couldn’t help but sigh. The man could cook. “As Kris would say, I didn’t even poison it. Do you want fries with yours? You have a couple of potatoes I could fry up.”

His eyes were hooded, a little wary, as he looked at Kristen, who shook her head slightly. “Nope. Just the sandwich, but brown bag it for me, please. Lugging Jersey Carl’s corpse around made me a little queasy. Maybe after I find a place to dump his body I’ll be ready for a snack. I was thinking of weighing him down a little and dumping him in the ocean. It’s a nice night for it. There should be a current around here, right?”

“I’ll check,” Sean said, obviously resigned to being her accomplice. “Do you have a boat?”