Hush by Karen Robards Page B

as one of the paramedics produced a penlight, which he no doubt meant to shine in her eyes, Bradley glanced at her. For the briefest of seconds their eyes met.
    Then he looked back at his partner.
    â€œLet’s give them some space,” he said to Bax.
    Riley could do nothing but surrender to the paramedics as the FBI agents left the room.

— CHAPTER —
SEVEN
    â€œT hey let him go.” Bax was bursting with the enormity of it. They’d moved far enough away from the bedroom door that they were in no danger of being overheard, but he kept his voice down anyway. “Diplomatic immunity.”
    It was a surprise that Finn absorbed in frowning silence. After a moment he asked, “What country?”
    â€œUkraine.”
    â€œIf he’s entitled to diplomatic immunity, then George screwed over a government agency or somebody connected with the government there on a pretty high level.” He’d already run the man’s face through his own internal database of bad actors, and drawn a blank. Which meant the guy was either new, or deep cover enough to have not shown up on his radar before now. If the latter was the case, then whoever had sent him was sufficiently concerned about the situation to be deploying the big guns. In other words, some foreign fat cat’s ass was in asling. And that foreign fat cat had enough pull—or knew enough people with enough pull—to get his boy instantly released from police custody.
    â€œGood thing you happened to see a man walk past her window.” Bax thrust his hands into his pants pockets, rattling the change there.
    Happened to see nothing . Finn had been intently watching the aforementioned windows with binoculars from a vantage point on the roof of the building opposite, which was two stories lower than Riley’s apartment. He hadn’t been able to see a great deal, even with the curtains open and the lights on. But he had seen the shadowy figure of a man moving through her living room, and as a result had immediately hot-footed it over to her building and grabbed an elevator, meaning to go low-tech and listen at her door.
    The moment he’d stepped out of the elevator, her scream had brought him running.
    â€œYeah,” Finn replied. “The receiver functional yet?”
    While Finn had been up on the rooftop and then racing through apartment buildings, Bax had been on the phone to tech support trying to verify the status of the receiving unit.
    â€œNothing wrong with it,” Bax said. “Cynthia said it’s working fine.”
    â€œOkay.” Finn wasn’t surprised that Bax knew the tech support person’s first name. Bax had that same geeky cyber-wonk persona that they did, as well as a lot of relationships with a lot of people he’d never actually met. Finn was equally not surprised to discover that there was nothing wrong with the receiver. It had been patently obvious from almost his first conversationalexchange with Riley that she was hiding something. He wasn’t quite sure what it was, but one thing he was now sure of: she’d disabled her own and Jeffy-boy’s cell phones.
    And she wasn’t talking about it.
    â€œSo what we’ve got here is a Ukrainian with diplomatic immunity who was trying to kill Mrs. Cowan.” Bax looked thoughtful while trying his hand at case analysis, which Finn had already discovered wasn’t his strong suit. “The question is, why? You think he was hoping to use her to send another message to George?”
    â€œDon’t know,” Finn replied. He had no real quarrel with Bax, other than the fact that the powers-that-be had set him up to be his minder, but there was no need to go filling his head with too many possibilities. Finn wasn’t sure how much Bax was passing on to his superiors, but he was passing on something, and Finn wanted to remain in a position to control just what that something could be.
    Knowledge is power .