lab verified that the background sounds were consistent with canopy birds in the Amazon. But still no one was able to reach Sam on her cell phone. Daniel offered himself the comforts he usually dispensed to others in situations like this. She was fine. She’d call in shortly. It was just a communications glitch. He didn’t believe himself.
Investigations were the last to report in. “I’m sorry, sir. We have no one who fits the name el Zopilote. There’s nothing in our intelligence files to lead us in any particular direction.”
“Keep looking.” Daniel chewed his bottom lip while suspicions kept nagging at him—that Samantha Henderson had stepped into a school of piranha.
As CEO of Finders, Inc., Daniel was used to sending agents all over the world to track lost or missing items for its clients. Just because he’d ordered Samantha Henderson to Brazil to recover a statue did not mean she wasn’t going to experience problems. In their line of work nothing was ever a sure thing, but that held especially true in Samantha’s cases. Wait a minute—he’d sent her to Brazil, not Peru.
“You remind me of Grant, all hunched over in your chair, glaring at the desk.” Shelby Kincaid-Austen stood in the doorway, watching him.
“Hey, Shel. C’mon in.”
Grant Kincaid had been Daniel’s commanding officer in Special Ops training. The two had become fast friends when both were assigned to covert work in Malaysia. It was Grant who’d appreciated Daniel’s ability at disguise—an ability Daniel had gained from years of practice avoiding news hounds whose stories unfailingly painted Daniel as the heir apparent to McCullough International. Thanks to Grant, Daniel had completed many successful missions pretending to be someone else, someone without a past.
“You’re wishing he was here, aren’t you?” Shelby asked.
He nodded. Special Ops was ugly, a place Grant had grown tired of after he met Shelby. By then Daniel also wanted a more stable lifestyle, so the three had decided to form their own recovery agency. Finders, Inc. was born. That choice had freed Daniel from the expectations his father’s empire had always engendered and allowed him to do his job disguised as anyone he wanted to be.
“Do you wish you could walk away from here, Daniel?” Shelby touched his shoulder. “I’m very grateful you’ve been running the business since Grant’s death, but you don’t have to stay at Finders, Inc. You don’t owe me or the company a thing. You loved fieldwork. Would you prefer to go back to it?”
“Not at the moment. Staying in one place for more than a day has benefits.” He winked. “The vicarious thrills are easier on this old body than firsthand contact. Don’t worry. My life is okay even if it isn’t chock-full of a daughter and a new husband,” he teased.
“Your life could be very full, Daniel.”
She didn’t say it but he knew she saw past his facade. Shelby was probably the only person in the whole building who could have guessed he was worried about Sam.
“I’m fine, Shel.”
“No, you’re not. You coop yourself up in here for eighteen hours a day, worrying about things you can’t change. You need to get out once in a while. With someone.” Her scolding mother-hen glare challenged him to deny it.
“Maybe.” Been there, done that. Didn’t work. He changed topics. “I was thinking about Finders’ rules. We’ve only ever had three. Maybe it’s time we looked at them again.”
“Three are all we need. Complete anonymity for the client. Nothing illegal and every job completed. Why change what works?”
“Maybe they need updating.” Maybe someone should be grading him on his ability to judge character, he felt like saying. “After all, we’re changing. Tim’s on board now. Maybe we need to rethink things.”
Daniel stayed at Finders because Shelby had asked him to. He never wanted her to know that sometimes, when everyone went home to their families, he sat in the dark, waiting for news of another success, feeling trapped by the office and its never-ending demands.
He could never tell her he yearned to don one of his disguises and take off, because he knew the temptation to get back to working in the field hid a deeper longing, one that had a lot to do with a certain frustrating brunette who had cast him as the bad guy in her world.
“Don’t second-guess yourself, Daniel. You sent Sam because she knows what she’s doing.”
“I hope so. We’ve lost communication with her.”
“She’ll call back.” She headed for the door. “It’s just a statue, Daniel.”
“That was supposed to stay in Brazil,” he reminded, but Shelby had already left. Ignoring the sheaves of files loading down his desk, Daniel moved to the glass wall of his office and looked down onto the semicircular floors stacked below, each one housing an integral part of the finely tuned mechanism called Finders, Inc. All this technology and yet…
Sam was fine. Maybe she had needed to go undercover or had a change in plans. Sam knew her job. She was one of the best recovery specialists Finders had ever employed. It was the job she’d applied for that Daniel had been worried about. He’d turned down her request for promotion the same day the Brazil job came up. Samantha’s departure from his office had been abrupt, bitter. Daniel regretted what he’d said, but there was no way now to take it back.
“Can I bother you again?”
Daniel blinked at the blurry figure in the doorway, fumbled for his glasses. Shelby. “You’re still here?” He squinted at his watch. “Shouldn’t you be home with Aimee? Tim checked out a while ago.” He glanced at the security monitor on his desk, registered the notation.
“As soon as he comes back, home is where I’m headed. In the meantime, Aimee sent you a gift. I forgot to give it to you this morning.” Shelby dropped a picture drawn by her young daughter onto the desk. “She said you’d know what it is.”
He moved back to the desk, sat down behind it and picked up the colorful piece of paper. He wanted to groan. Two figures with black capes stood opposite each other holding what Daniel guessed were swords.
“Do you know what it means?”
“Enemies,” he explained sheepishly. “When she stopped by last week, Aimee overheard me arguing with someone. That engendered a long discussion about enemies. I guess she’s reminding me to forgive and forget.”
As if Daniel could ever forget Samantha’s words.
You cheated me, Daniel. I can do that job with my hands tied and you know it. He could still see the hurt at the back of her eyes. Hurting people—you, your father. Is that a McCullough trait?
“Daniel?”
He blinked, saw Shelby’s frown.
“Sorry. Daydreaming.” He hid his embarrassment by grabbing Aimee’s picture and fixing it to his filing cabinet with a magnet.
“Samantha told me you turned down her application to supervise.”
He glanced sideways at her, wondering if he should have run that one past her, but Shelby anticipated his thoughts and shook her head.
“I’m
