Dane

Dane stormed into the Penthouse, vowing not to yell. But between the stress of the day and his interrupted lust for Lila, it wasn't looking good for Chris.

​​

Chris waited at the dining table, a tablet in front of him. He was on the phone when Dane walked in, but hung up immediately. Dane didn't give him a chance to speak.

"You'll tell me about the Tier One first, but then you're going to tell me how the hell she got out of the building without our team seeing her, and where the car was that she waited twenty minutes for?"

Chris nodded once, and Dane knew he would answer the questions. That was the one thing he could rely on with his brother—when the job got scary, Chris got very calm. It was a good thing it did, Dane had almost erupted out of his own skin when he thought Lila had disappeared.

Dane pulled out the chair across the table from Chris and sat down. "Okay then, go."

Chris turned the iPad around and pushed it towards him. The screen showed a blueprint outline of the house, and to-scale drawings of the property around it. "It's Kelly Sims." The brothers caught eyes and Dane's teeth clenched. Kelly was one of their highest profile clients—she'd always been very happy with their service. "The intrusion was at the west bathroom window. Josh is keeping the scene until Law Enforcement show up. But he thinks—"

"They aren't even there yet?"

Chris frowned. "Of course not, we were already on site. The call happened twenty minutes ago, and there's personal security. It's a level three at best, as far as they're concerned. She'll be lucky if they're there within an hour."

Dane swore and examined the image, scanning for weaknesses in the perimeter as Chris went on. "Josh is insisting it had to be a professional. They have a full team there, twenty-four seven. They all reported in within seconds when the alarm went up, and no one had seen the guy, even though two of them were only twenty or thirty feet away."

"Any chance it wasn't an intrusion at all? Maybe someone opened window from the inside?"

"Nope, the external alarm got tripped—and there's marks on the outside, too. Barring one of our guys doing it himself, then calling in, we definitely had someone on the property. The confusing part is that it had to be someone who knew our processes well enough to stay out of our way—but didn't know them well enough to realize we'd have a full security system on the house?" Chris looked skeptical. Dane nodded.

So they had someone with the skills and knowledge to remain unseen on a guarded property—their teams on Tier One properties did random sweeps and kept perimeter positions. So, whoever it was was either very bold, or very smart.

"How long since the last sweep?" Dane asked.

"Two minutes."

Dane put the tablet down and stared at Chris. "So, he was waiting for the sweep to complete?"

"Looks like it."

"But he popped a window, then ran?"

"We assume so. The team is scouting for movement, but there were four guys and it's a large property. If he was under the trees its unlikely they'd have seen him."

Dane threw several questions at Chris, and he answered them all. He'd done his job, and their systems had worked. Kelly was safe, and the intruder was either gone, or would be found by Police when they eventually arrived. Dane hoped.

"Who's running the team tonight?"

"Josh."

Dane frowned. "Why Josh?" Josh was good at the job, but fairly new. On a Tier One, he should have been back up at best.

"Because this weekend was his first run at Team Leader."

They went back and forth about the team, theories on what might have happened, whether it was a mistake…but in the end, Dane didn't have the answers he needed to make a call. There was an uneasy twist in his gut about the whole situation though, so close to the Becky Hanson situation which he now had no question was a set-up. Was it possible his father was trying to sabotage him from several different angles at once? Dane huffed. Of course it was possible.

Chris had launched into a recap of what they knew about Kelly's property and Dane waved him off. "No, it's fine. You've done everything we needed to do. Increase her team for the next week at no extra charge, and let's wait and see what the cops find."

Chris made a face like he doubted there would be anything new from them, but Dane ignored it. "Now tell me how we missed Delilah today? What good are our systems if we can't keep our own people safe?"

Chris's lips thinned. "So, the car was at the building, but out front. In the loading zone. I asked the drivers and none of them remember her ever being picked up from that point before."

"Why didn't they answer the page?" Dane said through his teeth and raked a hand through his hair as images of Lila, standing in that cold parking lot, alone and unprotected for almost half an hour made him want to sweat.

"Because you called it as a priority. There was only one car assigned to the office because all the others were on jobs or running staff home. That was your car, Dane. When you prioritize it, the system overrides. It won't recall the driver." Chris picked up the tablet and tapped a few times before showing it to Dane again. "You called priority, which kept the car from leaving with anyone but her or you. She paged from reception, then waited in the parking lot here," he tapped the second level plans of the building. "The driver was here." He showed Dane the street front of the building.

"The only walking exits from that level are the front door—which we know she didn't use because the driver was there—and the stairwell that exits on the side here." He pointed to a little alcove, just off the sidewalk from the front of the building. "Assuming she walked down and went out that way, the pillar of the building would have blocked her from the driver's sight—and blocked the driver from her line of sight unless she walked around it. I'm guessing she didn't even turn around, just headed home."

Dane sat, gripping his own thighs as a shudder of fear and rage rippled through him. "You're telling me we've had a blind spot in our own building that we didn't know about for FOUR YEARS?!"

*****

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