Showered and dressed in jeans and a clean dark brown Henley, Bran returned to work on his laptop while Jessie sat at the opposite end of the table, typing away. At the moment, finding Weaver was his priority.
Bran searched Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, all the social media websites, trying to find someone named Weaver connected to the Aryan Brotherhood. Coming up with zip.
He looked up at the sound of Jessie’s chair sliding across the vinyl floor. He could smell her soft perfume as she walked up behind him, something slightly sweet but sexy enough to stir his blood. Sweet and sexy, that was Jessie. The last time she’d been this close, she had ended up in his arms half naked. His groin tightened before he could push the lust to the back of his brain where it belonged.
“I assume we’re calling the CID to tell them what Tabby found out,” she said. “We can’t risk letting the buyers use those weapons in a chemical attack.”
“Yeah, well, that sort of poses a problem. Tabby doesn’t exactly go through channels. Technically, there’s no way we could have accessed the info she gave us.”
She cocked a reddish gold eyebrow. “Technically? I’m guessing that means legally.”
“Yeah.”
She sighed. “We need someone on the base we can trust. I think we should take a chance on Agent Tripp. He wanted to go deeper into the offshore account. Maybe he’d be willing to overlook where the information came from in favor of getting important facts.”
“Maybe. Then again, maybe he’d have us all arrested.”
She blew out a breath. “There is that.” Wandering over to the counter, she poured herself another cup of coffee from the fresh pot she had brewed. “You want another cup?”
What he wanted was to take up where they’d left off last night, but that wasn’t going to happen. “I’m good.”
She sipped from her mug. “So where do we go from here?”
Bran reached over and picked up the file he’d been constructing, took out the list of people who had visited the colonel while he was incarcerated.
“I’ve been going back over the visitors list your father’s attorney gave us.”
“Good idea. With so much going on, it’s kind of fallen to the bottom of our priorities. Did you find anything interesting?”
“There isn’t much. Mostly just lawyers and investigators we’ve already talked to, a couple of officers who were the colonel’s friends.”
“I talked to them when I started my investigation. They didn’t know much about the charges. They just came by to support my dad.”
“Unfortunately, the orderlies who brought his meals aren’t listed, neither are the EMTs who took him to the infirmary. But there is one thing we can check out.” He glanced in her direction, tried not to look at the curve of her ass in her skintight jeans.
“Remember the name Mara Ramos? You said your dad had never mentioned her.”
“I’ve never heard of her. I was going to see if I could find out something about her, but then Petrov and Graves were trying to kill us, and I never got around to it.”
He turned the computer so that she could see the screen. “According to Mara’s Facebook profile, she’s forty-five years old, a retired schoolteacher, no husband, no kids, lives right here in Colorado Springs.”
“She’s beautiful.”
Mara’s profile picture highlighted her long, thick black hair, black eyes, nice smile. Jessie was right. Mara was a very pretty woman.
“I’ve got her phone number and street address. We could phone her, but I think we should make a house call.”
“Great, I’ll get my purse.”
It wasn’t far from the hotel to Mara’s unimposing apartment on Sandalwood. Bran parked in front of a sprawling three-story, gray-and-white building complex, and to save time headed for the manager’s office.
A stout gray-haired woman in a flowered dress and house slippers answered the door. “May I help you?”
“We’re looking for apartment 13-C,” Bran said. “The tenant’s name is Mara Ramos.”
The woman looked back over her shoulder. “Cyrus! You got a nice young couple here looking to rent 13-C.”
“I’m comin’! Just need a minute to fetch my readin’ glasses.”
“I’m sorry for the confusion,” Bran said. “We aren’t here to rent the apartment. We’re looking for the tenant, Mara Ramos. Are you saying she doesn’t live here?”
Cyrus walked up to the door, early seventies, snow-white hair and small wire-rimmed glasses.
“This is my husband,” the woman said. “He’s the manager. He can help you better than me.” She waddled a few steps away, but stayed within hearing distance, eavesdropping clearly her primary