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them—though I don’t really care one bit if Jones knows I’m on his ass.”
    Sonia didn’t want to walk away, but Hooper’s identitythrew her off her game. She hoped she hadn’t given away her surprise when the Fibbie gave his full name.
Dean Hooper
.
    She had already started down the porch steps when she remembered the reason she was here in the first place. She ran back up the stairs and leaned close to Hooper’s ear. He smelled of expensive cologne and leather. Voice low, she said, “I’m looking for an Hispanic teenager, a thirteen-year-old female. She was kidnapped from Argentina two weeks ago, and I have good reason to believe that Jones knows where she is. If you see or hear anything—”
    Sam said, “Sixty seconds.”
    Sonia caught Dean’s eye. He’d understood. Motioning for Trace to follow, she ran down the stairs and stayed low to the ground, in the shadows, until she was out of sight.
    Dean Hooper
. She hadn’t made the connection when he had first introduced himself as Hooper. Agent? An understatement if she’d ever heard one.
    Everyone in the business for more than a couple years knew Assistant FBI Director Dean Hooper. The FBI’s own Eliot Ness. He’d said her reputation preceded her? She had nothing on Hooper, and under any other circumstances she may have had a fan-girl moment and asked about some of his more interesting cases.
    She didn’t like that a fed with such a high rank was on Jones’s ass, because while she wanted to nail him, she needed more than his tenure in prison. She needed information, and her man inside was still working. If Hooper acted too soon, she’d lose names and files and more people—women and children—would disappear or die. What was he doing in the field, anyway? She assumed heworked out of Washington; if he was in Sacramento or San Francisco, she would have known.
    Sonia didn’t partner well. She thrived in her authority and command of her office, but trusting a partner only resulted in disaster. She called Trace her partner, but she was technically his supervisor, so she didn’t have to worry about him making decisions without consulting her, or going behind her back to plan an operation that could get agents hurt or worse.
    But Dean Hooper had looked her in the eye with a confidence that spoke of unwavering honesty, and she wanted to trust him. She had no choice, really. He’d blindsided her with not only his arrival but his identity. And if Xavier Jones thought that the FBI and ICE had made a major connection in his activities, he’d cut his losses and run.
    She’d give Hooper tonight.
    Sonia heard her team report that Jones’s black Escalade had pulled to a stop in the driveway. She and Trace sprinted to their original position and she grabbed her field binoculars to observe the scene at the house.
    “What’s going on?” Trace asked her.
    “A minute.” She watched Dean Hooper on the porch, standing next to Sam Callahan. Dean was an inch shorter, but with a far greater presence, for lack of a better word. She watched as nothing happened for a full minute. Then the driver got out.
    Sonia’s mouth went dry. The coffee she’d been drinking all night churned painfully in her gut, and she froze, staring. She had to be wrong. It had been years since she’d seen Charlie Cammarata; how could she instantly recognize him?
    As the driver closed his door, she saw part of Charlie’sfamiliar arm-length tattoo. But her mind filled in the rest of the intricate black cross with vivid, blood-red letters dripping down the center:
    La vendetta è mia
.
    Vengeance is mine.
    What was the disgraced, renegade ex-ICE agent doing working for a known criminal?
    What are you up to, Charlie?
    Charlie opened the back door of the Escalade and Xavier Jones, the devil himself, stepped out. Sonia had half a mind to put him in her sights and kill him. That she also wanted to put a bullet in Charlie scared her. She thought she’d gotten over his betrayal. She thought she’d