bedroom in skinny jeans and a forest green cable-knit sweater to find him working on his laptop at the dining table.
She looked like crap and she knew it. She was beyond embarrassed about what had happened last night, and yet, as she watched him, a curl of heat tugged low in her belly. It seemed none of the lust she’d felt for him had disappeared.
“Good morning.” Determined to brazen it out, she walked toward him. “What are you working on?”
Bran leaned back in his chair. With the scruff of beard along his jaw and those amazing blue eyes, he looked like every woman’s fantasy, especially hers.
He crossed his arms over his chest. “So I guess we aren’t talking about last night.”
Warm color rose in her cheeks. “No.”
Bran made no comment. She couldn’t tell if he was relieved or disappointed. She wandered over and poured herself a cup of coffee from the pot on the counter and took a sip. “So where are we in the investigation?”
He straightened in his chair. “I’ve been going over some of the things we’ve found so far, and I’ve come up with a theory.”
Picking up his cell, he brought up a photo he had taken of the tat on Digger Graves’s neck and held it out to her. “Shamrock with a 666 inside. You were right about it being a prison tat.”
“Really?” She moved close enough to see. “Have you figured out which gang?”
“Aryan Brotherhood. One thing we know, stealing those weapons took a helluva lot of planning. Everything from computer hacking to murder—if you’re right about your father, and I think there’s a good chance you are.”
She ignored the ache of grief that moved through her.
“Money seems to be the common denominator,” Bran continued. “The one thing necessary to make everything work.”
“I see what you mean. They needed an initial investment of capital in order to get everything done.”
“Exactly. Even if they were expecting a big payoff from the sale of the weapons, somebody put up a lot of cash in advance. The driver of the truck had to be paid. Someone deposited a hundred grand into a phony offshore account in your father’s name. And if my theory’s correct, there were others.”
“Someone in the prison kitchen was paid to put something in my father’s food to make him sick. Someone in the ambulance or at the hospital was paid to administer the lethal drug that caused his heart attack.”
“The question is, how would you find enough people willing to do that kind of dirty work and keep their mouths shut?”
Her mind spun. She thought of the tattoo and the obvious answer hit her. “They all share some kind of bond. In this case they’re all in the same gang.”
He nodded. “That’s right. Maybe not all, but a lot of them. Aryan Brotherhood has members in the army stockade where they were holding your dad, as well as people on the outside. Gang members, former gang members, they all live by the same rules. Number one being, if you talk you wind up dead.”
“You think Aryan Brotherhood gang members pulled off a theft this complicated?”
He snorted a laugh. “Hell, no. I think they’re in it for the money. I think those weapons were sold in advance. I think whoever planned to steal them got at least a partial up-front payment, enough to buy the help they needed to make it happen.”
“What about this guy, Weaver?”
“He’s involved up to his neck, but I don’t think he’s the mastermind. More like he’s at the top of the Aryan food chain. We need to find him, figure out what he knows.”
“How do we do that?”
“We start by calling Tabby.” He picked up his phone and punched a contact number, then put the phone on speaker and set it back down on the table.
“Hey, Bran,” Tabby answered in a buoyant female voice. “I’m glad you called. I’ve got something for you.”
“Tab, I’ve got you on speaker. Jessie Kegan is with me.”
“Nice to finally meet you, Jessie,” Tabby said.
“You, too, Tabby.”
“Listen, Bran, I’ve got some info on that money deposited into Colonel Kegan’s offshore account. I was hoping I could track the money backward, find out where it originated, but it was transferred from another offshore account, one that was highly protected. I wasn’t able to get in so I can’t give you any names.”
“That’s not good news.”
“No, but I was able to track the deposits to an email address. It’s closed down now, but I followed the messages