Page 28
She checked the time. “I’ve got fifteen minutes before I expect Gates to call back.”
“Then let’s do this,” he said, so she hit play one more time.
~
They went through the footage again, slower this time, concentrating on nuance rather than action. The henchman was still just as fuzzy, more of a background player until he’d offed Benedict. Because the millionaire had been standing closer to the cameras, the equipment had vectored the focus on his face, rather than the background players.
Benny stood by his original assessment. The fuckers had been ballsy as hell.
Benedict must have considered himself completely untouchable to stand in the middle of the street in the wee hours of the morning, knowing there had to be cops everywhere, and basically offer to purchase Beth. He wished that kind of entitlement was the exception rather than the norm for men like Benedict.
When they reached the section where the man who’d never shown himself remained inside the limousine and motioned to his henchmen to do the deed, Benny leaned closer.
There wasn’t much to see. One very expensive Italian shoe. Pleated slacks. Then the brief flash of the man’s arm as he gave his henchmen the go-ahead.
“Can you take that back a few frames?”
Jordan did without asking why.
“Stop.” Benny leaned closer. “Is that a tat?”
Jordan leaned in too, until they were shoulder to shoulder, their faces only inches apart as they studied the screen.
He ignored the sensation that she was exactly where she was supposed to be, right there at his side, and focused on the image.
“It is.” Jordan abruptly sat back.
He immediately missed her warmth. Benny sat back too and studied her expression. “That obviously means something to you.”
“Before I went undercover, I had to do some pretty extensive research on gang tattoos and identifiers. Going into something like that blind will get you dead really fast.” She looked back at the frozen image. “I don’t want to make any wild leaps here, but given the limo, the fact that Benedict was starting to dabble in the drug trade, and the henchmen we all assumed were Russian, I think the man in that car might be La Sombra.”
Benny racked his short-term memory, trying to remember if she’d mentioned the name before and got nothing. “Who is he?”
“He’s the cartel leader I was sent undercover to ferret out. Nobody knows who he is. Nobody in law enforcement has been able to put a name or face to him, we just know that he’s Argentinian, hence the name.” She pointed at the screen. “But right before they pulled me out, I learned he has a very distinctive tattoo on his left forearm.” Her fingertip hovered over the grainy image. “Just like that.”
Before Benny could respond, Jordan’s phone chimed with a message from their group chat.
We may be screwed. Hayes is demanding an autopsy.
It wasn’t even a burner number that showed up on the screen, it was actually Davenport’s name. He’d hacked into their chat stream and added himself to it.
Jordan could practically imagine Dev cursing at the screen. Their secure communications apparently weren’t nearly secure enough to keep Davenport out. It was insult on top of injury.
Dev responded almost immediately. Is there anything we need to do? Also, fuck you for hacking into our system.
Davenport’s reply came seconds later. Don’t make it so easy. And no, I don’t need anything from you. Giving you SA.
Despite everything, Jordan almost smiled. She could appreciate the situational-awareness warning, even if she could have done without the reminder that Davenport apparently wandered in and out of their secure system whenever he damn well pleased. She’d let him and Dev have their little pissing match.
She had a more immediate problem, even if the men’s back-and-forth concerned Benny and everything that’d been done to him.
What the hell was she going to tell IA? Her gaze returned to the frozen image. Did she tell them she thought that Benedict had been murdered on La Sombra’s order?
There wasn’t time to explain everything to Dev and the rest of the crew and ask for their opinions. So she did what she’d done when Benny still remembered their time together. She asked him. “I need your advice.”
Benny turned away from the image on the screen.
“I’ve got something else to tell you,” she said, since he didn’t have the burner in front of him and hadn’t seen Davenport’s message, “but first I need your brain on this matter. Do I tell IA?” she asked. “I’m nowhere near certain this is La Sombra, but what if that information could save the other person who’s still inside?”
