King and Maxwell (Sean King & Michelle Maxwell 6)

“Tyler is vulnerable, Michelle. If they went after us, they’ll go after him in a heartbeat.”

“So we stay away from him?”

“No, I think we need to be his protection detail.”

“We can’t cover him twenty-four seven,” countered Michelle.

“No, but we can do our best.”

“And solving the case?”

“I have an idea,” he said.

“Care to share?”

“If Sam Wingo communicated with his son?”

Michelle caught on instantly. “Then Tyler can communicate with his dad by hitting reply.”

“That’s right. Only we’ll be asking the questions.”

“Sean, what do you think is going on?”

He drew a long breath. “Like Dana told us, I think the Army had some top-secret mission and it all went to hell in a handbasket. And whatever Wingo was brought in to deliver is out there in the wrong hands.”

“But what could it be? A nuke? A biological agent?”

“I don’t know, Michelle. I really don’t know. But if it is a nuke or some turbocharged version of the Black Plague, we might find out about it a lot sooner than we’d like.”

“Why do we humans make things so complicated?”

“Because we’re afraid that keeping things simple makes us unsophisticated. And uninteresting.”

“You could be a philosopher. But how do we engage Tyler without making him a target?”

He said, “There’s no way to do that. So we have to keep him safe at the same time he’s helping us.”

“But he lives with his stepmother.”

“Did I say it was going to be easy?”

Sean gazed gloomily out the window. This was as bad as he had felt since, well, since watching Michelle fighting for her life in a hospital bed. He blamed himself for that one, too. If he had figured things out faster, she never would have been harmed.

“Why don’t you text Tyler and see if he can meet us later? We’ll have to keep it under the radar.”

Michelle keyed in the text and fired it off.

Five minutes passed and then she got a response.

Michelle read it twice to make sure she was actually seeing what she was seeing.

“Sean?”

“Yeah.”

“I think we might have a lot more access to Tyler than we thought.”

“Why?”