Road Tripped (Satan's Devils MC Utah #1) - Manda Mellett Page 0,93

seats are filled bar the one next to me and the one used by Honor, Pip tidies his paperwork and puts it aside.

“What are we going to fuckin’ do?” Stormy blazes from the end of the table, impatient to get the meeting started. “It’s one of our own, Prez.”

My eyes widen slightly. Stormy’s an asshole of the highest order, yet he’s the one who’s spoken up first. I hadn’t expected him to be so concerned.

“I’m fuckin’ aware of that!” Pip thunders. “We’re going to get her back. Update.” His eyes go to Snatcher.

“They knew what they were doing. Generator was disabled first, then the power line was cut. None of her electronic warning systems would have worked.” As Snatcher goes on to list what we found when we visited her house, I’m still blaming myself that she was there. “No sign of a struggle in that no furniture was overturned, though there was blood, but not enough to be worried about. My guess is that she was drugged.” Snatcher finishes up.

I concur with that. If Swift had been conscious, she wouldn’t have gone easily. But any blood is worrying.

“It’s been dry lately.” Thor takes over. “There were tyre tracks, but it’s doubtful we’ll get much from them. Footprints, but nothing distinguishable. Multiple people though, two at least, maybe three or four.”

“A big load of nothing,” Stormy comments again, his frustration coming over clearly.

“Until Honor gets back, we won’t know more from her house,” Pip sums up. “Let’s talk about reasons. Duty, have you turned up any motive why she should be taken?”

Duty takes a breath and pulls his tablet toward him. “I’ve been going through everything we know, Prez. I started with recent cases she’s worked on, but they’ve all been in and out, and unlike her kidnappers, we don’t leave footprints.”

“Digital ones? Could she have been traced back to us?”

“Nah. Our systems are watertight, you know that, Prez. We might,” he spares a glance toward Stormy, “be able to get into Fort Knox, but I’d stake my life that no one can break into ours. We’ve got systems constantly tracking external access.”

“And no one knows we exist.” Preacher’s word supports his brother. “If they knew what we do, they could have come after any of us.”

“She may have been targeted because she’s a woman?” Rascal suggests, his brow furrowed. “They could think she’s the weak link?”

“Huh,” Stormy scoffs, rubbing his jaw. “If they do, they’ll soon realise their mistake.”

Pip taps the paperwork. “I can’t see it’s anything to do with any of our assignments. As you say, Duty, we’ve kept our involvement under wraps. Nothing to link what we’ve done back to the Satan’s Devils MC.”

“I’ve started looking into her past,” Duty resumes. “Her service record is clean. Of course it was harder to get into the information about her SAS training, but I managed to break in at last. It seemed quite standard. Worth noting she got top scores on everything.”

She would, that doesn’t surprise me.

“Was she ever used for a kill or something that a person might want retribution for?”

Duty grimaces. “I wish I could say it was as easy as that, but she’s clean as a whistle. She never took up her post in the SAS, so wasn’t involved in any of their activities. Of course,” he glares at Stormy before he can ask more, “I’ll keep digging as something could turn up. If in her service career she pulled the trigger at the wrong time, there could have been a coverup. But there’ll be a trail, somewhere.”

“On the face of it, there’s nothing to suggest why she was taken.” Pip rubs at his clean-shaven chin. “Therefore, nothing to suggest who.”

“Should we contact her parents?” I ask.

“Her parents? Why the fuck worry them?” Stormy rolls his eyes.

“Because,” I turn to him with more than a hint of anger in my voice, “if there’s going to be a ransom demand, it’s likely to go to them.”

“Road’s got a good point,” Pip states firmly. “We need to discuss it. Far as I know, Swift’s on good terms with her parents, had mentioned taking a trip back soon to the UK.”

Duty’s tapping on his tablet calling up some information. “Her dad’s retired with a small private pension, and the mortgage on their house is all but paid up. But it’s not a mansion and they live comfortably, not extravagantly. If someone wanted to shake them down, this is an international operation which has to be expensive. I can’t see