killed both your father and my grandmother." She paused, her gaze darkening. "He scared me when I was talking to him. He told me if I found out who killed Natasha, he would make them pay. I thought he was talking about the killer, but I think he was talking about making me pay." She took a breath. "What are we going to do, Jax?"
"I need to run this information through my team."
"Can you arrest Constantine?"
"Not yet. We need more evidence."
"You have it right in front of you."
"Everything will have to be verified, and this case has to be worked down to the last detail in a very quiet and thorough way, or Constantine will be in the wind before we know it."
"So, he's just going to keep living his life?"
"I hate it, too, but we'll get him, Maya." He jumped to his feet. "I need to get down to the office. I want to see where Brandon is on the cypher."
She stood up. "I'm coming with you."
He frowned. He didn't want to take her with him, but he also didn't want to leave her alone. "All right. You can come."
"Good. I thought you were going to try to talk me out of it."
He gave her a wry smile. "I didn't feel like wasting my breath."
"You're getting smarter by the minute." She gave him a smile that had been missing most of the day. "I think we're on to something now. Your dad has filled in some big blanks. Hopefully, my grandmother will do the same in her cypher."
Chapter Twenty-Three
"This doesn't look like an FBI building," Maya said, as Jax drove her into the underground garage of a three-story building in Santa Monica.
"I work out of a special task force. It's run by Flynn MacKenzie. We started out together at Quantico. In fact, almost everyone who works here was part of my class. We went our separate ways for the first four years and then once Flynn created his own specialized group of agents, we came back together, one by one. We have an amazing group of people. There's very little ego involved. When something needs to be done, someone steps up to do it."
She was impressed by the passion behind his words. "You really like them, don't you?"
"They're family."
And she understood better now why he needed to feel a part of a family, one that he truly belonged to, not one that had just ended up with him, no matter how good they were to him.
"What does it mean—that you're specialized?" she asked, as he parked the car.
"It mostly means we operate with more latitude than the FBI field office. We can move fast when we need to. We also run a lot of undercover operations, some of which can take weeks or months. We occasionally work in gray areas that might or might not be approved in a more official setting. But our results are very good, and as long as that continues, we can keep doing what we're doing."
"Which you love. I hear it in your voice. I see it on your face. You never spoke about acting or bartending with any real sense of ownership. But this is who you are."
"Yes. Serving drinks felt incredibly tedious to me. I'm actually not a very patient person. I'm better at quick undercover moments than jobs that go on for a long time."
"I can see that about you. And I don't know why I didn't see it before. The way you spoke about my grandmother's murder—your instincts and insights were so good. I should have realized you weren't just a bartender. You were calm in every crisis. Now I feel like a bigger fool."
"Don't. You're not a fool, Maya. You saw what I wanted you to see."
"But that's just it. I need to stop seeing what people want me to see and see what's really there."
"You were starting to see through my cover. You picked up on clues even before you realized what they were."
"I did do that," she said, feeling slightly better with that reminder. "Well, it doesn't matter now anyway. Let's go meet your team."
"The full crew won't be here since it's after six, but Flynn, Caitlyn, and Beck are waiting for us in the conference room. They've been working behind the scenes. Brandon is in the tech center. Hopefully, he'll have something for us soon."
They got out of the car and walked to the elevator. Jax used some type of security scanner to open the doors.