Page 34 of Cipher

CIPHER

Leaving Bex at the Rutledge Ranch had been the worst part of my morning. But Jacqueline was with her, Wraith and Smoke held the approaches, and enough cameras covered the property to tell me if a coyote stepped too close to the house. I still had to force my hand away from her waist when she climbed off my bike, though. The kiss she gave me before walking away had seemed like she wanted to make certain concentrating without her would be a miserable fucking experience.

It fucking worked.

I could still taste her when I entered my office inside the clubhouse, secured the door, and settled behind the workstation. Raines had ordered me not to touch Jeff’s second phone until the warrant arrived, and I had given him my word that I wouldn’t. The device remained sealed in county evidence exactly where he left it while I entered the digital ecosystem surrounding the bastard who had used it.

I isolated the search inside a system that couldn’t be traced back to the county, Black Castle, or the club, then started with the number Jeff had used to threaten Nina. It took forty minutes to connect the number to an abandoned recovery account that the idiot connected to his burner, another twenty to find a cloud session that had never been properly terminated, and less than five to get around security built for ordinary criminals rather than a man who had spent twelve years dismantling hostile electronics.

The account opened, returning my attention to my task. It revealed scattered message fragments, cached notifications, and a payment receipt Jeff had apparently believed was too insignificant to erase. The messages were damaged enough that entire exchanges remained missing, but the surviving pieces gave me enough to get started.

One fragment promised a “protected location,” another confirmed that the woman at the address had been “physically verified,” and a third referenced a “short response window after the rollover pulled the east unit.” Nothing identified the person who created the false incident or proved whether the county contact and the contractor access belonged to the same man, but whoever wrote the messages had sold Jeff more than Nina’s address. He had promised time for an abuser to reach her before anyone wearing a badge could interfere.

Luckily, the payment receipt gave me the first useful name. Jeff had transferred forty-nine hundred dollars to DP Field Services three days before Nina called 911. The company existed only as a billing name, but its tax registration led to Darren Pike Investigations, a licensed private-investigation firm operating from a small office near Escondido.

There was a knock on the door before Ghost walked in carrying a rugged tablet from the training range. He placed it in front of me and tapped a dead camera tile with one blunt finger. “East training lane keeps dropping when we detonate.”

“The housing’s rated for blast overpressure.”

“Apparently the housing can’t read.”

I opened the diagnostics and found the problem in a cable connection loosened by repeated shock waves. “You keep putting breaching charges six feet from it.”

“That fucking lane is for breaching charges.”

“The camera doesn’t need to breach the door with you, jackass.”

Ghost leaned one hip against the desk. “So move it.”

“Already sent the work order.”

Ghost nodded before taking the tablet and leaving. The interruption cost less than ten minutes, but my club brothers depended on me to protect the compound.

I returned to Pike and stripped away the polished version of the man he advertised to clients. After digging into his professional life for a couple of hours, it became clear that he knew where the legal boundaries sat and how close he could stand without putting both feet across them, which explained the ordinary story at Nina’s door and the public turnout he’d used to watch the road leading toward my house. He relied on other people feeling foolish for reporting behavior that looked harmless when each piece was viewed alone.

The state registration database listed a dark graphite GMC Yukon in his name. Four characters on the plate matched the combination recovered from Nina’s doorbell footage and my turnout camera.

Darren Pike had just gone from an unidentified figure behind incomplete data to a living man with an office, house, vehicle, habits, and face. That meant he could be followed, pressured, broken, and used to expose the people above him.

The last option was the only reason I didn’t leave the clubhouse immediately to find him and dispose of his body.

I built a working profile from everything available without tipping him off. The most telling find was the cash deposits into a secondary business account had climbed over the past year and a half. The payments were irregular and deliberately kept below thresholds that drew automatic scrutiny, but they were frequent enough to suggest Jeff was not the first man who had purchased a locate Pike couldn’t ethically provide.

His contact history remained incomplete, and no clean record tied him to Eric Stowe, the sheriff’s department, or any county employee. He was the first link we could touch but going after him too soon would warn everyone attached to the other end.

I copied the useful intelligence onto the secure club system, locked the illegal extraction behind a separate partition, and carried the profile down the hall to Stryker’s office. Hawkeye sat at the conference table with Judge while Stryker stood behind his desk speaking quietly to Nomad and Falcon. Ghost had claimed one of the leather chairs near the bar.

Stryker ended his conversation when I entered. “You have him?”

“Darren Pike. Licensed private investigator.” I quickly filled them in on everything I’d learned about him and the conclusions I’d formulated.

When I was done, Stryker studied the image of Pike’s face on the tablet, his eyes revealing nothing while he considered the order in which the man’s life needed to come apart.

Judge rubbed a hand over his chin and muttered, “Raines can’t arrest him because he stood on a sidewalk, took photographs from public property, or claimed he was conducting a locate. The payment and messages might change that once they’re recovered legally, but nothing you pulled can enter the sheriff’s case.”

“I fucking know that.”

Judge glanced at me. “Wasn’t questioning your intelligence. Reminding your temper.”