“I’ll make sure Josie does that.”
The officer nodded. “Well, there’s not much more we can do here. I’ll file my report and get back to you if we find anything out.”
“Josie, are your CDs in their cabinet?”
Daniel looked up from the list he and Josie had been compiling of her missing property.
Claire stood in the doorway, her brows knit in a disturbed frown. No surprise there. According to Josie, her roommate was a long way from having the financial resources to replace her stolen computer equipment. Since her class load was weighted heavily toward computer studies, that was a major problem for her. He figured there had to be a way to help Claire without damaging her pride, but Josie would know best what it was.
They could talk about it later.
“I don’t know,” Josie said in reply to Claire’s question, getting up from her swivel chair.
She crossed to the small corner entertainment unit in the spare bedroom she used as a study. Popping open a door on the lower cabinet, she revealed a large selection of CDs in their jewel cases. She looked up at Claire and asked, “Did you want to borrow one?”
“No, but the DVDs are in the entertainment center, too. And my portable CD player is still in the drawer beside my bed along with my music.”
Josie smiled, her green eyes flickering with warmth. “I’m glad. I hate the fact they took as much as they did.”
“I don’t think you’re getting the point your roommate is trying to make,” Daniel said, not happy to have confirming evidence the break-in hadn’t been a run-of-the-mill burglary.
He felt certain it had been orchestrated by the people responsible for the attempt on Tyler’s life. They had not balked at killing once. He could easily imagine what they would have done if either woman had been home last night. Josie could take care of herself, but even a seasoned soldier was at a disadvantage during a surprise attack, and her security measures were nonexistent.
Thinking about it made him ask, “Why don’t you have a security system?”
“Because this is my house, not my fortress.”
It was that normal life thing again. Her desire to leave her mercenary life behind was really starting to bite him in the ass. “Josette, normal people have security systems.”
“Which are useless if the perpetrator has any kind of specialized knowledge.” She closed the CD cabinet and came back over to her computer desk, where she’d been trying to identify what had been stolen.
“So go with something harder to circumvent.”
“But then I wouldn’t be living like a normal person, would I? I’d still be perpetrating the soldier mentality. Anyway, I don’t see what my lack of a security system has to do with the thieves leaving my CDs behind.”
“Whoever broke in last night is a lot more dangerous than a burglar looking for his next score.”
Claire pushed her black plastic-rimmed glasses up on the bridge of her nose. “I think he’s right, Josette. I read this article online a few months ago about petty theft and the used entertainment industry market. According to what I read, CDs and DVDs are popular items to steal because they’re so easy to get rid of. You don’t have to prove ownership, and a lot of used dealers will give cash on the dollar for them.”
“If the perps who broke into your house were petty thieves, why take the television, which is easier to trace and more conspicuous to carry, but leave behind the CDs and DVDs?”
“Maybe they were in a hurry.”
She wasn’t being a smartass; she was being a good soldier and presenting another alternative, but she knew he was right.
“All of my CD-ROMs are gone,” Claire said.
“Mine, too.” Josie waved her hand toward her desk. “So are my disks, for that matter. They took pretty much everything related to my computer.”
Claire frowned, her intelligent eyes sharp. “Diskettes aren’t worth anything. Even new, they hardly cost anything. The only value they could have to a thief is the data stored on them, and you don’t keep data that could be turned into income.”
“You said you had copies of your dad’s records on your computer,” he reminded Josie.
“Yes.”
“Did anyone else know about the computerization of his files?”
She shrugged, her mouth twisting wryly. “Probably quite a few. He complained about it a lot to the other trainers that worked for him.”
“The school was destroyed along with all its files. Your computerized records were stolen along with anything that might conceivably have copies of them on it.”
“You think someone tried to kill Dad because of what he had in his files?”
“Yes.”
“But I’ve been through them. There’s nothing there that could warrant that kind of reaction. Despite his personal paranoia, he doesn’t keep track of behavior he deems suspicious.”
“Your dad’s records had to have something in them that someone didn’t want him to have.”
Claire sat down with a thump on the armchair in the corner and ran her fingers through her hair, making the wild tangle even messier. “Nitro’s theory is scary, but it’s the only one that makes sense of what has happened.”
Daniel put the list he’d been holding down on the desk and curled his fingers into fists, using techniques he’d taught himself to control his inner rage. The whole situation was really starting to piss him off. First these miscreants blew up his and Tyler’s merc school before Daniel had even had a chance to work out how he was going to turn wannabe mercenaries into soldiers. They tried to kill his business partner, and then they broke into Josie’s home while he was elsewhere.
He didn’t even want to think about the fact the woman whose body gave him so much pleasure would probably be dead if she hadn’t been out taking a midnight stroll in the forest the night of the explosion.
“I have to agree with you two. Whoever broke in here took a lot of stuff to make it look like a regular burglary, but they dismissed too many things a real thief looking for easy cash would not have left behind.” Josie’s worried expression did nothing for Daniel’s temper.
“Which means they aren’t going to fence the stuff.” From the despondent tone of Claire’s voice, Daniel figured she was thinking of her grandmother’s necklace. “They’ll probably just throw it away.”
Josie got up and went across the room to put an arm around Claire’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”
“You lost stuff, too.”
“Not my mementos.”
“At least we weren’t home,” Claire said, her voice stretching for a positive note.
Josie didn’t say what Daniel was sure she was thinking, because he was thinking it, too. If Claire had been home, she wouldn’t have had a chance against the perpetrators.
“I wish I’d been here,” he said.
Claire’s eyes widened, and she shook her head. “I don’t think I could keep living someplace a person had died.”
“I don’t want to kill them,” he said to Claire, wondering what the suddenly impassive expression on Josie’s face meant. “I want to know who they are and why in the hel—blazes they tried to kill my business partner.”
“I have every intention of figuring that out.” Stubborn determination radiated off of Josie like the afterglow of a nuclear explosion.
“We’ve got pretty much nothing to go on.” And he was a mercenary, not a trained detective.
Wolf was the tactician expert, and Hotwire knew more about searching out information than the ground staff for black ops, but Daniel knew best how to fight and win. If he couldn’t identify his enemy, he couldn’t fight.
Josie stood up, her pretty body enticing him, even though he knew making love should be the last thing on his mind right now.
“I wouldn’t say that.”