Time to learn who has been targeting Rangeman. Many thanks to midnightandahalf for her beta help.

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Chapter 14

"You can use your old cubicle," I tell her as we step out of the elevator on the fifth floor. "Start with Rangeman employees, newest hires first."

"Should I use the background checks that were run when they were hired or start from scratch?" Steph asks as she moves toward her desk.

"Start from scratch. If anything had shown up in the initial search, I wouldn't have hired him." A glance at my black diving watch confirms I have four minutes before my conference call with the Miami leadership team. "We'll meet at 1400 to review what you've found."

"That's only four hours. What if I haven't found anything?" she asks.

"It will be a short meeting. Then you can debrief me." I deadpan, watching the blush creep up her cheeks. I give her a second to think about that before I add, "If it's there, you'll find it, Babe."

I shift my focus from Trenton to Miami as I spend the next two hours dissecting the financial spreadsheets with the management team in Florida. I will make the final decisions, but I value their input. Business is good, but the numbers don't tell the whole story. The Miami office has reached a point where we either need to start adding personnel or turn away clients. Adding employees will be time consuming and labor intensive for the management staff, but telling a prospective account "no" does not lend itself to future business.

With the decision made to start recruiting more staff, we wrap up the call. I spend another hour going through and approving payroll before I register that I've been sitting for too long and need to move. I grab a sandwich from the breakroom and detour by Steph's cube to see if she wants anything.

"I'm good," she says, waving a spinach wrap in my direction. "Les and some of the guys had some soup earlier that smelled really good, but when I went to grab a bowl I saw it had mushrooms in it. I don't get how anyone can eat fungus, yuck."

"Don't knock it 'til you try it, Steph," Les pipes up from a couple cubes away. "Ella's vegetable soup is the best, whatever she puts in it."

"Normally I'd agree, but this time I'll just take your word for it," she calls back. "Anyway, I'm glad you stopped by. There's something about one of your newer hires setting off my spidey sense, but I've hit a brick wall with my research."

"Who is he?" I ask, feeling the tension coiling like a spring through my body.

"She," Steph corrects. "Her name is Carissa Williams. She's a recent hire in accounting."

"An accountant? What was it about her that piqued your interest?"

Steph hesitates, questioning herself now. "It's silly really. Everything about her checks out, but her life has been so tragic. Her mother was killed by a drunk driver when she was seven. She and her brother were in the car when it happened. Her father never remarried so it was just the three of them until her dad dropped dead of a heart attack ten years later. She married young, right after high school. She and her husband Carl ran his family's small service station and garage. He fixed cars and she pumped gas and worked the register. Carl was killed when the lift he was working under failed. He was still alive when she got to him, but died before the car could be lifted off him."

"I looked at her personnel file and she lists 'None' under emergency contacts. This got me thinking about the brother. I did some more digging and I discovered her brother enlisted shortly after their father died. The military connection made me curious, so I ran a check on the brother. There is a whole lot of nothing available on him, until he turns up a victim of suicide."

"The military is trying to help, but soldiers taking their own lives is a sad reality, Babe." Before I can stop them, thoughts of comrades lost crowd my thoughts.

"I know, but only a black hole exists regarding his military career. That makes me wonder if he could have been in some kind of top secret unit. Maybe you crossed paths with him. His name was Carson Lewis."

Darkness flows through my mind at the sound of his name. I remember them all, but this was one of the worst.

"I knew him," I say. "I hadn't heard about his death."

She looks at me expectantly and I fight the urge to shut the conversation down, as I would have in the past. This sharing shit is hard. It's easier to lock it up and not think about it. Deep breath, unclench the jaw. Talk.

"Lieutenant Carson Lewis was the team leader for a recon mission that went FUBAR. The local that was supposed to be assisting the team was a plant. The entire team was captured by the rebel forces they were supposed to be monitoring."

"The powers that be deemed Lewis's team too valuable to abandon, and my team was sent in to rescue them. We found Lewis chained in a cell, the tortured and mutilated bodies of his team on the floor around him. They hadn't laid a hand on him. His torture was to watch and listen as each day they slowly and painfully killed another of the men he was responsible for."

"Oh my God," Steph whispers, horror written across her face. "I can't begin to imagine…"

"How did we not make that connection when she was hired?" I ask, cutting her off. Some of us don't have to imagine.

"She passed all the standard checks and the psych evaluation. There was nothing to flag her for a more intensive screening. I'm just nosy."

I see Vince returning to the cube next to Steph. "Vince, get down to accounting and find Carissa Williams. Escort her to the conference room on the first floor."

"Yes, sir," he replies, reversing direction immediately.

"This doesn't prove anything, Ranger. I could be wrong about her!" Steph says. I hear the self-doubt that a lifetime of criticism has created.

Kissing the top of her head, I tell her the truth. "You have the best instincts of anyone I've ever met. Don't ever doubt yourself."

Her reply was lost behind the retching sound coming from Santos's cube.

"What the fuck, Les!" Manny yells.

He sits directly across the way from Les and is on his feet with a look of disgust on his face.

"Jesus, man, you okay?" he asks.

Even as I watch, the color drains from his face and Manny mumbles something about being sick before grabbing his trash can.

"Steph, get Bobby up here now," I say, moving toward the men.

Both are doubled over holding waste baskets and vomiting like something out of The Exorcist. One or both men have lost control of their bowels. The stench is enough to make me want to gag and I'm not surprised to see a pale and sweating Zero rush toward the restroom.

Inaction frustrates the hell out of me, but there is nothing I can do but watch until Bobby gets here. Glancing back, I see Steph hanging up the phone. Good, help is on the way.

The door to the stairwell opens, but it's Vince, not Bobby. He's shaking and clammy looking. What the hell is going on here?

"She isn't here," he says. "Carissa reported for work like normal this morning but didn't come back from lunch. She didn't say anything about taking the afternoon off to Scott, just disappeared. He tried to call but it went directly to voicemail and she hasn't responded to his text messages."

He's trying to hold himself upright, but as he's speaking Vince is slowly folding inward, clutching at his stomach.

"Where to fuck is Bobby?" I call just as the stairwell door bangs open and Bobby and his medical kit emerge.

"Vomiting, diarrhea," I start before he can ask. "Multiple people are affected."

"Bad stomach cramps, dizziness, chills," Vince adds from where he has sunk to the floor.

"Any more besides these three?" he asks, pulling on latex exam gloves.

"Zero didn't look good but he's in the men's room," Steph says.

"I'll go check on him," I say.

Any action is better than doing nothing. The door is barely open and I have my answer.

"That's four," I tell Bobby.

"First guess is this is some kind of poisoning," Bobby says. "Given the symptoms, I'd say it is something they all ingested. We need to get these four to the hospital for observation, but in the meantime, I want the break room and their apartments locked down. Any place they would have gotten food this morning."

I spy Ella standing outside the break room door. Her face is wet with tears but she looks angry.

"Someone tampered with the soup," she says from across the room. "Who would do such a thing?"

"Explain," I order, then instantly regret my harsh tone. This isn't Ella's fault.

"There are mushrooms in the soup. I didn't use mushrooms in the soup. Hal doesn't care for them," Ella explains.

Hal's face flames as he confirms, "I'm with Steph; I don't do fungus."

"Ella, when did you bring the soup down?" I ask.

"I brought the soup down at 10:30. I always bring lunch down at 10:30 sharp."

"Ramon, bring up the camera feed for the break room starting at 1000 hours. Look for anyone tampering with the food, especially the soup. Bobby, do we need to call the EMT's to transport these guys?"

"No, we'd need multiple ambulances" Bobby replies. "It will be faster if we load them in a couple SUV's."

"Zip, Rodriguez, Barton, and Slick, help get these guys down to the garage. I'll drive one vehicle, Bobby will drive the second."

"Wait," Steph calls, "who else ate the soup? I just googled poisonous mushrooms and it said the most commonly eaten poisonous mushroom is called the 'vomiter' mushroom and causes these kinds of symptoms in 1 to 3 hours. If this is what was added, then even if you aren't sick yet, you will be. The good news is no one has ever died."

Half the guys on the floor have a hand raised. Shit.

"Steph, put out an all call to the teams on patrol. Anyone who ate the soup before heading out needs to get off the road and to the hospital. Call in contract workers to cover shifts. Ella, get a sample of the soup to send to the lab to see if we can determine if those mushrooms are the 'vomiter' mushrooms and not some other kind that does kill people."

"Jesus," Lester groans, head buried in the trash bin, "I feel like I'm dying. Maybe it is the killer kind."

He hugs the stinking trash bin to his chest as I wrap his other arm over my shoulder and heft him to his feet. I'm not sure if I'll be able to get the smell out of the SUV's once we get these guys to the hospital. Might make more sense just to firebomb the vehicles myself.