some unwritten rule about not throwing confidences back in your men’s faces?”
She purposely let the sincerity show in her expression. “I’m not throwing anything back in your face. I respect what you’ve shared with me. I’m simply giving you time to do what you need to do—for purely selfish reasons, of course. I like my team to be as fit emotionally as they are physically. You put your life on the line every day to protect principals, conduct investigations, and ensure the overall security of our clients. You can’t do that with the perfection I demand if your personal affairs aren’t in order.”
He shooed that off with a wave. “The personal stuff is aces right now, Luce. I work hard, play harder, and rather like putting my life on the line. I’m here for a mate.”
“A friend of yours needs to hire the Bullet Catchers?”
“Sort of. And I’d like to use the time between official assignments to take the job, which might require your resources and…” He paused and pinned her with a steady gaze. “Your support.”
Her curiosity ratcheted up at his tone. He clearly wasn’t expecting to get it easily. “What’s the project?”
“I need to find a woman. I don’t know who she is or where she is. And when I find her, chances are I’m going to get her naked, rock her world, and then make her wish I were dead.”
A smile pulled at Lucy’s mouth. “And how is this different from any other Saturday night for you?”
“Because this sheila might very well hold the key to solving a thirty-year-old murder.”
She propped her elbows on her Victorian writing table, nestled her chin onto her knuckles, and met his level gaze. “Start from the beginning.”
He took a breath, nodding. For a man whose personal hallmark—and occasional downfall—was impetuosity, this deliberation surprised and alerted her.
“My friend is working on a case to reunite a woman with a child she gave up at birth. A while back, he was digging up information for another client who was sold through a South Carolina black-market adoption ring back in the seventies. Evidently, a rural midwife ran a baby-selling operation from a farmhouse on a road known as Sapphire Trail. The whole deal was blown apart in a bust in 1982, and ever since, there’s been an ongoing effort to reunite something like a thousand babies with their birth mothers.”
Lucy nodded. “I’ve had some cases of black-market adoption searches, and I’ve heard about the Sapphire Trail babies. All the birth certs are falsified, and the leads are very, very hard to follow. But it can be done. How much documentation did they discover when they broke the ring?”
“Some.” He stroked the shadow of whiskers that lined his jaw and the bit of golden hair under his lip. “My friend did locate the son of his client, and that case is closed. Now another Sapphire Trail mother has persuaded him to help her find her daughter, too.”
“And you want to help him, and this other mother, find her child?” Why was this something she would object to?
“Yes. But it’s a bit more complicated than that. This birth mother is serving life for murder one, and that sentence is about to end because she’s been diagnosed with leukemia.”
“So she wants to have this reunion with a lost child before she dies?”
“Yes. Especially since a bone-marrow transplant from a living relative might give her a few extra years. Years that might give her the time she needs to prove her innocence.”
Her expression must have been skeptical, because Fletch leaned forward to plead his case. “My friend believes her. He really does. He’s a bonzer investigator and thinks her case was botched from the beginning. So time is of the essence.”
Time was always of the essence to innocent people in jail. Especially when they were dying. “Fletch, if you’d like to conduct a private investigation that could save someone’s life and even lead to the release of someone wrongly accused, surely you know I’d have no problem with that. You are free for a month, until the Keizer diamond drop is scheduled. If you need to tap into our database or work with Sage Valentine’s research and investigation team, by all means, you may. How much information do you have so far?”
He looked a bit relieved, but not completely. Did he really think she’d take a stand against a standard adoption search? Something wasn’t right.
“I have a list of infants that were sold from the Sapphire Trail operation