Dream Chaser (Dream Team, #2)(33)

“You didn’t know he was there?” Mueller pressed.

Ryn shook her head. “No.” Again she looked at Boone. “And I now feel like a bitch because she kept texting she was sorry, and I blocked her.”

“The texts,” Mueller mumbled, and the way he said it, it was not for Ryn and Boone, it was aimed at Bogart.

Boone shifted his attention to the cop.

They had Morton’s phone. They saw her chain to Ryn.

Puzzle pieces were slotting together.

“What did Rappaport have to say to you that was worth him making his attorney set you up for this chat?” Bogart asked.

Fuck.

He did not want her to answer that, to these guys, fully.

But he had no way to stop her from doing that.

“He likes my friend,” Ryn stated.

Boone looked back down at her.

“It’s all kinds of weird, but I think he feels bad he kidnapped her, and all of us, and he wanted to see she’s okay and…now here’s the super weird part, get me to tell her he said hey.”

“That’s it?” Bogart asked dubiously.

“No,” Ryn answered.

Fuck.

“He wanted to ask me about Evie’s boyfriend, Mag. If I liked him for her. Honestly, he gave me the impression he wanted to know if he had a shot. He doesn’t and I shared that. And it wasn’t fun sharing it because, you know, he might not have liked my answers, and he’d kidnapped me before, and I was the one in the parking lot when there was gunplay. So I didn’t want to know how he’d react if he didn’t like my answers. But even though he seemed kinda sulky, he also seemed to take the news all right that he wasn’t gonna get in there with Evie.”

“I hope you can understand, considering the kind of man Brett Rappaport is, and the fact he’s wanted for the murder of a police officer, this story is hard to believe,” Mueller noted carefully.

“I can absolutely understand that,” Ryn replied. “Try being the person who was led into a room at gunpoint and then have some dude ask about your girlfriend and having to share he had no shot then being asked to tell her he said hey. Which I didn’t, by the way. Mag would go loco.”

“Did you report this to the police?” Bogart asked.

She shook her head but explained, “Right, see, I told Mag, who I knew would tell Hawk, and Hawk has cop buddies. But honestly, Brett let me go, and I was glad it was just him having the hots for a girlfriend and I made it out alive…again. But bottom line, this guy could get to me. He’d demonstrated that, now twice, so I wasn’t all set to rile him up. The guys knew what happened and that meant I was protected.”

“You told someone called Mag, not your boyfriend, who also works for Delgado,” Bogart noted.

“My boyfriend?” she asked.

“That’d be me,” Boone grunted.

She started and looked up at him.

He smiled down at her.

“Oh,” she whispered.

He smiled down at her more.

She looked to Bogart and continued to demonstrate her apparently keen ability to read people by telling her truths, which were not lies, but they didn’t share the full picture. Though, and this was the genius part, they shared enough of it, with detail, to be believable as the full picture.

“We were in a fight. Boone can be annoying. And bossy. Though I won’t do that again. When Mag called and told him Brett got to me, he lost his mind, at me, primarily because I didn’t call him the minute Cisco let me go to tell him Cisco had me at all.”

Boone burst out laughing.

She was pressing close and grinning up at him when he stopped so he bent and touched his mouth to hers.

“How was Rappaport with Morton?” Mueller asked, breaking into their moment.

Both Boone and Ryn looked to him.

“I never saw them interact,” Ryn answered. “Though, the minute I walked in, she apologized even before I knew there was something to apologize for. She just said he was a client you didn’t say no to. I didn’t know what she was talking about. Until I did.”

“Mr. Morton reported to us that you’re a member of their sex club,” Bogart stated baldly.

Ryn pressed even closer, and in a quiet voice, confirmed, “I am.”

Bogart looked to Boone. “You down with that?”

“And again, you’re asking questions that are not pertinent to your investigation,” Boone said low.

“Your woman involved in kinky sex shit you’re not involved in, and a woman also involved in it gets dead, and all Delgado’s boys are known to have a variety of skills, I’d say that’s pertinent,” Bogart shot back.

Boone’s body grew stiff.

“Boone and I were on the couch all night watching true crime shows on ID,” Ryn snapped, all easy, cooperative, let’s-get-this-done, open sharing gone.

Bogart ignored her and kept his attention on Boone.

“You know, just to say, now that I know who you are, there are a lot of us in the department who aren’t down with Nightingale and his men, Delgado and his boys, Chaos and their thugs, and Sebring and his crew thinkin’ they can do whatever the fuck they want in Denver. A lot of us. No one says dick around Lawson or Lucas, or Eddie and Hank, Malcolm or Tom. But there’s gonna come a time when you fucks are gonna mess up, and there’s gonna be a lotta brothers with badges who are gonna be all over that.”