Stealing Justice (The Justice Team) by Misty Evans, Adrienne Giordano Page B

go back to life as Sydney Banfield, the woman with no family.
    Only now, Syd Banfield would help Fed Boy lock up a predator. A predator just like the one who’d put her mother in this condition.

 
    Chapter Seven
     
    Grey rubbed a thumb on the leather steering wheel of his Challenger, seeing the steel gate and brick façade of Edwin Hospital even though his mind was inside with Sydney. What was she doing here?
    Visiting a patient. That was the only answer. But who? And why?
    Was it one of the women who’d been at Fresh Start? God knew some of those women had mental as well as emotional problems after what they’d been through, but Edwin? This place was for extreme psychotic disorders.
    Something niggled Grey’s brain. An unanswered question. He punched a button on the car’s integrated smartphone, continuing to stare at the gated mental hospital. After a couple of rings, a man answered. “What now?”
    “That background check I had you run. You noted the subject’s mother fell off the grid seven years ago. Did you uncover anything more about what happened to her?”
    “Man, I told you. I gave you every piece of info I found on that chick. There was nothing about her mother after that point. Lady just vanished.”
    “Dig a little deeper. Look at Edwin Hospital. See how many admits they had that year and if any of them match our missing woman.”
    “Shit, Grey. You gonna treat me like your techie bitch forever?”
    “You can be my techie bitch and continue living in your mother’s basement or you can bend over for Luigie DeMarco in federal prison, Teeg. Up to you.”
    There was some unintelligible grumbling. “See what I can do.”
    “Thank you.”
    Renee Banfield. When Grey had read Teeg’s report on Sydney, Renee’s disappearance had left a question mark in his mind. But when he’d purposely mentioned her mother the other day to see if he could get a rise out of her, Sydney had claimed Renee was dead. Grey had chalked up the error to Teeg’s lazy-ass, if usually accurate, methods of running background checks from his computer cave. Not all cities, towns and municipalities were good at keeping online records accurate and updated. Some were backlogged for years. And sometimes you needed a man with his feet on the ground in the outside world—not sitting at a desk lost in Mortal Combat 3—to uncover the truth.
    David Teeg was damn good at ferreting out info, though, as long as he didn’t have to move his ass away from a computer. A good resource for Grey to use in exchange for keeping the computer hacker out of prison.
    Calling up the info on Renee on his tablet computer, Grey scanned the facts again. Ten years ago she went to work as a secretary to a foreign ambassador. By all accounts, she stayed in that job until she fell off the earth seven years ago.
    That was it. Not much to go on. Nothing that suggested she’d headed to Edwin when Sydney was a teenager. At the time of her mother’s vanishing act, Sydney would have been just shy of her eighteenth birthday and old enough to avoid foster care. Which meant, if she wanted to make her mother disappear, or perhaps protect a secret, it would have been easy to do.
    For the next hour, Grey ran possible scenarios as he played with his scope and camera, trying to catch signs of life inside Edwin. Nurses and orderlies came into view here and there, but never anyone who resembled his new partner.
    Sydney was hiding some kind of secret behind those iron bars. A secret that might jeopardize his mission.
    When her car finally came into view, stopping at the security guard’s house for a minute before bouncing out of the gate and onto the street, Grey set his camera on the passenger seat and debated whether or not to confront her. If her mother had experienced a psychotic break and Sydney wanted to claim she was dead, it really wasn’t any of his business.
    But the agent in him had to know.
    Everyone had secrets. But all trained agents knew that secrets could get