He frowned at the floor, listening, then slid his attention to Bonnie. Slowly, as though he wasn’t sure of the wisdom in handing the device back to her, he murmured, “Jennette Simpson.”
Her brother’s girlfriend? That was seriously weird. “How’d she get this number?”
Roman twisted for a direct view of his brothers. “A good question.”
“I’m on it.” Leaving Bonnie’s laptop behind, Kir rose and strode from the room.
Evette leaned over and whispered something into Emerson’s ear. He nodded and left the room without a backward glance.
Bonnie stared at the now empty entry for a solid handful of seconds, then lifted the phone to her ear. “Hey, Jennette. What’s up?”
“It’s your brother. We gotta talk.”
Her heart kicked hard enough it hurt and her knees got weak. “Right. Okay. Um...” Roman must’ve figured out she was close to keeling over, because within one strained breath, she found a chair pushed behind her knees and her ass solidly planted in it a second later. She let out a shaky exhale. “What about him?”
“No, not on the phone. Come to the place I work—Froyo Fruitti over on St. Thomas Street.”
“Wait—what? Since when do you work there? I thought you were working at the Sonic in Dad’s neighborhood.”
Jennette paused a beat, then answered, “Oh, no. Got me a new job. Cleaner and easier, that’s for damned sure. Now are you comin’ or not?”
From the stern glare on Roman’s face, she was thinking not. At least not without an army alongside her. “Um, sure. Roman and I can be there in maybe thirty minutes.”
“You mean that big guy that was at your house? Oh, no. I ain’t talkin’ to him. Or anyone else but you. Just you, okay? I’m only callin’ as a friend. I don’t want in the middle of Kevin’s shit any more than I already am.”
Now that was an odd thing to say. How the heck was Jennette in the middle of anything? And an even bigger question—how the hell was she ever gonna talk to Jennette without muscle in tow? “Is this the best number to reach you?”
“It’s the shop number, so yeah. But I’m only here until six.”
“Okay. Let me figure something out, and I’ll head that way.” She ended the call and stared up at Roman. “She says she knows something about Kevin, but she didn’t want to talk about it on the phone...”
“Good,” Roman said with a decisive nod. “We will go to see her.”
“...but she doesn’t want me to bring anyone.”
Roman stared down at her. “No. Unacceptable.”
“But Roman—”
Kir re-entered the room with his own computer in hand. “It’s a forward from her old number.”
“Well, that makes sense, at least,” Evie said, then shifted her focus to Bonnie. “She could have gotten that from anyone you or your brother know right?”
“Probably from the Dusty Dog,” Bonnie added. She looked up at Roman. “Seriously, I don’t see what the harm is. If she knows something about my brother, then I’ve got to talk to her.”
“And risk your safety?”
“Did you see her?” Bonnie fired back. “She weighs barely over a hundred and has zero muscle. I’m pretty sure I could take her if it came to that.”
“And what if it is a trap?” The question came from Sergei, calmly sitting in his chair at the other end of the room with one leg crossed over the other. Unlike the passion she’d put behind her own words, his were deceptively calm. “What if someone put her up to drawing you out?”
“Who?”
His gaze stayed locked on hers, deadly serious. “Whoever has your family.”
A kick to the gut couldn’t have hurt any worse. Couldn’t have sucked the air out of her lungs with any greater efficiency.
Roman crouched in front of her and lowered his voice. “They tried to get you once. You have been under protection ever since. If they want another chance, they know they’ll have to draw you out.”
“But with Jennette? How would they know she and Kevin had a thing?”
“Maybe Kevin gave them her name,” Cassie said.
Not taking his eyes off her, Roman added, “Or they saw her when she came to your father’s house.”
Completely out of nowhere, Kir cut into the conversation. “What day were they taken?”
So caught off guard by the question, it took a whole lot of redirecting mental resources and finger counting before Bonnie wrangled an answer. “Monday. January 20th.”
Kir looked up from the screen. “Do you remember anything happening two days before that?”
“Umm...that’s a Saturday, right? So, I’d have been working at the bar. I didn’t see Kevin that night.”
Motioning to the laptop, Kir said, “That is the day the partition was created and the data added.”
Bonnie frowned. She never used her computer at work. She never had the time and...wait a minute. “I didn’t have my computer that night. I loaned it to Kevin about three days before that. I guess that would have been around the 14th or 15th.”
“He asked for it?” Cassie asked.
“Yeah. He’s always trying to figure out how to make an easy buck, and he wanted to give writing app front ends a go. He said it’s a lot easier when you’ve got a Mac. He gave it back to me the day they disappeared.”
Kir looked to Roman, who slowly straightened to his full height. Then to Sergei.
Sergei nodded. “Figure out what the data is and who it’s tied to. Whoever has her family will be at the other end of the thread.”
“Can we do that?” Bonnie said.
Not taking his eyes off the laptop, Kir typed something and nodded his head.
“How long will it take?”
Sighing, Kir reclined against his seat back and shook his head. “It is hard to say. If these are account numbers as I suspect, we can run traces, but the process can be unpredictable.”
Bonnie stood. “Then we go see Jennette in the meantime.”
“No,” Roman said. “They want you. Or the computer. We will wait and let Kir find the connection.”
“Knox could help us, too,” Evie offered. “Add some firepower to see if we can get there faster.”
“Seriously?” Bonnie let her gaze linger on every person in the room. “You’re telling me any of you would be satisfied with sitting around waiting for some techno geniuses to connect the dots if you could talk to a person who says they have information now? I don’t buy it. Not for a second.” She glared up at Roman. “Least of all you. You’d be gone already, armed to the teeth like Rambo and snarling the whole way there.”