Jeep to Durango, and that’s as far as we tracked her.”
Fitz shook her head. “I suppose if I had a brush with death and two months of not knowing my own name, I’d take my husband’s threats seriously, too.”
“It’s unfortunate. She’s a bright woman, full of life. The second she remembered who she was, everything changed.” Again . . . not a lie.
Brackett pushed out of his chair. “Nothing we’re going to do about it now. Much as I’d love an arrest to attach to two months of my agent being in a safe house, we can’t force people to testify. Not when they’re the victims. Let the local police in Vegas know we’re giving this back to them.”
Leo stopped himself from showing too much excitement. “Will do.”
The story filled all the holes. While slightly fabricated, the bottom-line truth was Olivia had been the one who was shot. The shooter likely was aiming for her in the first place, and she wasn’t going to testify to put that shooter in prison. Until there was evidence to suggest otherwise, that was the story, and Leo was sticking with it.
Not that Leo was sugarcoating reality in his own head. He was crossing a line by not clueing his people in, but how big of a line, he wouldn’t say. Right now, the victim was Olivia. And unless bodies of known assassins that could have been the shooter started piling up . . . Leo shook the thought from his head.
He stood when Brackett got to his feet. “Fitz will catch you up on what you’ve been missing.”
Later that night, when Leo drove to his three-bedroom bungalow home in the hills of Glendale, he pulled into his garage and closed it before he got out of his car.
The second he opened the door into the house, the alarm buzzed. Leo disengaged the security system as he tugged at his tie. He turned on a hall light and moved to the kitchen. He went directly to his refrigerator, opened it, and immediately shut it again. The smell inside was off the charts. His time in Vegas was only supposed to be for the duration of the trial, with weekends at home. Only that wasn’t how it panned out. And all the perishables in the house perished. Instead of a beer, which he knew would be stale, he turned to a bottle of whiskey.
He walked into his dark living room, a big window facing the street outside, and sat in his favorite chair. After toeing his shoes off and unbuttoning the top of his shirt, he sat back and sipped his first drink in over two months.
The fireplace was dark, the room was cold, there wasn’t anything to eat . . . none of that was any different than it had been before Olivia, but all of it screamed at him now.
Where was she?
Was she okay?
Did she know she had ripped a hole in him with her departure?
Leo was a relationship guy.
In all his years . . . from his first high school girlfriend to the two in college and the one beyond . . . he didn’t know how to play.
Then Olivia showed up in his life.
A connection.
He sat up, pulled his jacket off, and removed his phone from it.
He found her picture. She was smiling at him from over her shoulder. Her flirty smile. The one she sent him as she lured him into the snow and attacked him with balls of fluff and ice. He touched the image. He wanted to save her. It’s what he did. All she needed to do was come back and give him a chance.
Leo put the whiskey to his lips, welcomed the burn as it went down.
The image of Olivia disappeared as his phone rang.
He cleared his throat before answering the call on speaker. “Hello, Neil.”
“How are you holding up?”
“Been better.” No reason to say he was fine, everyone in that house knew what Olivia meant to him.
“Yeah.”
“Have you heard—”
“No. She hasn’t contacted us.”
Leo didn’t expect a different answer.
“How did today go?”
“Everything is fine. Back to normal at the office.” He didn’t have to say his boss bought the story, it was implied.
The conversation paused. “I don’t know how to say this without saying it,” Neil started.
It wasn’t like the man to preamble any conversation. “Never stopped you before.”
“True. Your security system sucks.”
Leo looked away from the phone and around the room. “Excuse me.”