in her earwig. "Please for the love of everything holy, tell me you got the man on film."
"Paul Desoto." Rayburn confirmed.
Amber was busy pulling up camera screens. "Did he go into the greenhouse?"
"Yes, he did. Did you get a load of the kiss he put on her?" Watson's voice came through the comms.
"They're more than old business associates."
"Is that what she claimed?" Rayburn asked.
"Yeah." Amber clicked on the cameras angled toward the Edelman's. "Do we have any better angle on the greenhouse?"
"Try the camera on the hangar."
Shit, why hadn't she thought of the higher angle? She selected the camera and directed it toward her neighbor's house. "Not great, but I can see the door."
"Yeah, we got it."
"This is going to the cloud, right?"
Rayburn snorted.
"Not an answer." There was no way she was going to lose this connection because someone didn't double check to make sure the recording was being saved.
"Yeah, it is an answer. It is going to the cloud, and we hit record here in the van as soon as we saw him get out of the car." Rayburn huffed.
"Don't get your panties in a wad, big-boy. I wanted to make sure." Amber chuckled at Watson's outright laugh at her comment.
"My panties are the least of your concern. What is he carrying?"
At Rayburn's questions her eyes popped to the screen. "I think those are the planting pallets Clare uses."
"Why the hell does he need planters?" Watson's question was the one which was on her mind, too.
"Do we have a list of his businesses? Someone please get Terrell on comms." Amber scrolled her mouse to her second screen and hit up the DEA database. She input Paul Desoto's name and brought up his criminal history—three speeding tickets and a misdemeanor possession charge when he was nineteen years old. She dug as deep as she could, but she didn't find anything more. On a whim, she entered Clare Edelman and requested all known aliases. She wasn't prepared for what she saw.
"Oh shit."
"What? What did we miss?" Watson's question was asked about two seconds before Terrell came on the line.
"Captain, Paul Desoto just left the Edelmans’ residence." Rayburn filled him in as Amber kept typing.
"That's the connection."
Amber nodded in agreement and added, "Yes, sir, it is, but the connection runs deeper. Desoto was in foster care the same time Clare was, and guess who lived with Clare for the first two years of her time in the system?"
"Desoto." Terrell made the leap easily.
"Yes sir, and we have another connection. Aarón Rubio was a foster in the same house at the same time."
"Rubio, as in the right hand of Peña?"
She nodded and breathed, "One in the same."
"Are you accessing this information legally?"
"Yes sir. Public documentation obtained through the Freedom of Information Act in a massive foster care fraud filed by the FBI three years ago. It was gathered for that case, and I appreciate the hell out of whoever did the legwork, but it’s all here on the DEA's database." Free and for the taking. Well, free if you were a DEA agent, which she still was, technically.
"Why didn't this information come up on our background searches?" Terrell growled.
"This database isn't connected to the NCIC checks. If you aren't DEA with a reason to search it, there is no way you'd know about it." Hell, she'd only checked it on a hunch.
"So, we have our connection. Great work." Terrell's voice held a hint of relief.
"Our focus needs to shift to the wife, and what's in the greenhouse. We need to find out what Desoto had sandwiched between those crates." Watson put in his two cents.
Terrell agreed. "Unfortunately, we can't stop him from taking the lady's trash out."
"That's the thing though, she didn't want me to throw them away. She said she was going to reuse them, so why did she let Desoto take them?"
"Was there anything unusual about the crates?"
"No. They're those hard, black, rubber containers." Amber wished like hell she'd looked closer.
Rayburn hummed into the mic for a second before he interjected, "Maybe it’s under the soil?"
"It could be, I guess. She was wearing heavy duty rubber gloves today. Not the cloth and leather ones she uses for planting. She said she was cleaning. Come to think of it, I spooked her when I popped in this morning. Maybe she was working with the stuff? But I didn't see a damn thing that resembled drugs."
"You'll need to get a closer look inside the greenhouse."