Even sitting here waiting for the cuffs to come out, completely useless and defenseless, had tapped out most of his reserves. He couldn’t focus if he didn’t know she was safe.
“Get ahold of Chad or Zach and have one of them meet you at the hospital.” He turned to the officers standing in the room. “Someone will stay with her until her protection arrives.” He said it as a statement not a question, but they confirmed it and he looked back to Sam.
“I need you to do this, Sam. Please.”
She nodded, but he saw she was fighting back tears.
“I’m fine, Sam,” he said despite the fact he was anything but. He was so far from okay, he didn’t think there was any coming back this time. Not now. “I’m fine.”
He said it again as the federal agents now lifted him from where he’d been sitting and began to escort him from the room. Logan knew how this would go. When you’re taken away by these guys, you don’t go down to the local precinct. You’re taken to an “undisclosed location.”
He heard Sam call out one more time to him. “I’ll call Jack and have him get you a lawyer, Logan.”
He nodded even though she couldn’t see him any longer. A lawyer would be good.
Chapter 16
“Oh, shit,” Peter said, looking up from his computer.
Diya had been raging around the house, becoming more and more ticked off. There had been no contact from the men Yoshi had hired to bring Samantha Page to her.
For two days they’d been waiting. They couldn’t risk trying to contact them in case the police had caught them and had the burner phones they’d been using.
So she’d been stewing and waiting for word. She was about ready to send Yoshi to New Haven.
She turned to Peter, raising a brow with a look that should tell him to blurt out whatever it was he’d found, instead of just swearing at her.
“Oh, I uh … sorry. It’s just that I saw a live news feed. Apparently the men you sent were, uh, well it looks like they were taken out by a guy.”
“A guy?” Diya asked, her tone sharpening as Yoshi entered the room, standing beside her.
Peter squirmed in his chair. She valued him for his hacking skills, but his weak temperament grated on her nerves.
“Just say whatever it is, Peter. I don’t need to play guessing games with you.”
He cleared his throat. “It’s uh, the state’s attorney or something. Eric Westbrook, the news says. He’s holding a press conference. He’s calling Logan Stone a vigilante. Said he killed three men instead of calling the police or simply disabling the men. Apparently, the Feds took over the case and they let Stone go once they discovered who the guys were. The Feds said the men presented a clear and present danger to Ms. Page and they saw no grounds to hold Logan. Westbrook is up in arms about states’ rights and the federal government making decisions that should be made on a state level. Um, he says the Feds let that man go up in New Hampshire recently and he—”
He stopped talking when Diya threw her glass across the room.
“Damn it!”
Peter cleared his throat again, but didn’t say anything.
Diya had something to say, though. “She’s probably crawling with body guards now. No way for us to get to her now that those idiots screwed this up.”
Yoshi spoke from beside her. “It’s Stone again. Always—”
“No!” Diya cut him off and then raised a hand to her forehead and pressed shaking fingers against it, taking a deep breath.
Her father had given her so much. He’d done everything to make sure she had a good life. Her mother surrounded her with love her whole life. They’d tried to do the same for her younger brothers, but Logan Stone cut their lives short in a brutally cruel fashion. She couldn’t allow Logan Stone to continue to live his life without a care, while her family would never take a breath again.
“No,” she said more calmly, getting herself under control. “It was those men. They weren’t good enough. That much is obvious if Stone was able to take them down single-handedly. Now they’ve screwed up our shot to get to her. Stone won’t let anyone near her for a long time.”
She sat in the chair at her desk and tapped her nails on the surface. “We need to do better. We need to take care of this ourselves, Yoshi,” she said, turning to her cousin. His dark eyes met hers and he nodded. “We’re going to head to New Haven so we’re ready as soon as they let their guard down.”
“Peter,” she said, turning once again to the man sitting, as always, in front of a laptop. “Tell me what you’ve found on Samantha Page. Is she that hacker you thought she might be?”
“I don’t have any solid proof, but I did manage to connect a few dots. Hackers all leave a certain signature in their style. It’s possible BillieBurke and blu33y3dphr3nd are the same person. Their styles aren’t the same, but it’s possible she was purposely trying to throw people off with the blu33y3dphr3nd identity. If she’s as good as they say she is, she’d be careful to make sure the signatures are distinct.”
Diya nodded and he continued.
“I talked to a friend of mine who’s hacked into some of the files the FBI has on work BillieBurke has done. They don’t name her identity, or even confirm if she’s a man or woman, but I got a list of the jobs she’s done.”
He stopped and glanced up to see if Diya was listening. She made a gesturing motion with her hand to get him to continue. For a smart man, he could be an idiot sometimes.
“Oh, so, anyway,” he said, ducking his head and looking back at the computer screen, “it turns out BillieBurke was involved in bringing down this guy, Lazarus Alonzo. Well, she didn’t actually bring him down. She shut down large portions of his human trafficking ring and helped release a lot of the women. When the FBI couldn’t actually track him down, people say she managed to drain a huge portion of his money from his accounts. Rumor has it she pretty much crippled him and sent him on the run. He’s still out there, but he hasn’t been able to rebuild his empire.”
He stopped talking again and Diya rolled her eyes. “Tell me why I care about any of this.”
“Well, because Samantha Page works for Jack Sutton and Jack Sutton’s wife was one of the women kidnapped by Alonzo’s ring. Can’t be a coincidence, can it?”
He couldn’t have just said this to begin with?
Diya shook her head, slowly. “No, it can’t be, but we need to figure out if that knowledge helps us at all. Yoshi, that name—Alonzo—that’s familiar to me. Why do I know it?”
Yoshi shrugged and shook his head.
“I thought so, too.” Peter smiled smugly and began his incessant tap-tapping on his keyboard, before popping his head up again. “He’s in your dad’s database. Well, your database, but what I mean is, he was in your dad’s journals. He’s got all kinds of info on him. They did business from time to time.”
Diya stared off into the distance. Peter jiggled his foot back and forth, tapping the leg of the table he sat at, over and over. Diya stopped her thinking to glare at him. His leg stilled. She returned to her thoughts. It was moments later that it dawned on her. They could play the Alonzo connection to their advantage.