Her Dark Web Defender

by Dana Nussio

  “Yeah, don’t go so soon,” Tony said.

  Eric pointed with his free hand toward the back of the store, and, with a frown, the suspect scuffed closer to the other two again. At a nod from Tony, the deputy handcuffed the suspect and read him his Miranda warning.

  “You’ve got this all wrong,” he insisted. “There’s been a mistake.”

  Kelly shook her head at the man, who suddenly appeared disheveled and wide-eyed. “I don’t think the chat room transcripts will agree with you, BIG DADDY.”

  She lifted the waistband of her tank top and yanked out the microphone and recording device.

  “You don’t have anything on me.”

  “That will be up to the prosecutor. But you’re going to tell us where to find Harper.”

  “Who the hell is Harper?”

  Kelly swallowed. Of course, the guy would deny it, even if he was involved in the abduction. Still, she hesitated as she turned back to Tony.

  “You okay?” he mouthed.

  His gaze dipped to the drink in her hands, and then he looked up again. Without words, he seemed to understand that it was about more than a flavor choice.

  “I’m good,” she whispered.

  The suspect’s shrill denials and pleas not to tell his wife filled the space as the other task-force officers entered the convenience store and crowded around them. When Tony finally turned away, Kelly sneaked a few deep breaths. Then she closed her lips around the straw and took a long sip of the icy blue liquid.

  It didn’t taste so bad after all.

  * * *

  This was supposed to be perfect. Why wasn’t it perfect? Cory stomped through the overgrown property surrounding the cabin, barely feeling the scratches of the branches and burrs curling out to nab him as he went. He didn’t care if it was misting and so hot that mosquitoes were feasting on his bare arms and legs. He had to get away from that tiny building. From the downstairs room that was becoming smaller with every breath he took.

  From her.

  “Why can’t Harper just settle in at the castle like she was supposed to?” he spat and then shook his head so hard his neck ached.

  Not Harper. Aurora. That was her name now, his favorite among all the princess names since it meant “sunrise.” But she was no ray of sunshine like he’d expected her to be. Nor did she appreciate him treating her like a princess.

  She wasn’t even petite like her screen name, LITTLE BO PEEP, had suggested. She was nearly as tall as he was, and all nails and fists and kicking feet. He couldn’t get anywhere close to her. Yet.

  She never slept, except out of sheer exhaustion. That amazed him about her. She never stopped screaming, either, no matter how hoarse she became and no matter how many times he explained that there was no one around to hear her.

  He hadn’t bothered sharing with her that with his grandfather’s quality soundproofing in the secret cellar, no one could have heard her, even if they were inside the house. That would have made her holler more, and he refused to give her any attention, or any of that wonderful food he’d purchased, until she behaved. She could have water. That was it.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. Maybe he shouldn’t think about the room that muffled sounds, either. No reason to make himself feel claustrophobic, even outside among the trees that stretched sixty feet into the air.

  If only he could go online for a chat. Just for a few minutes. Just to take the edge off. There were downsides to going off-grid. One was leaving his desktop computer behind. That meant no more chat rooms. No more videos, either, at least for a while. He’d brought his tablet, but the solar charger he’d bought with the last rent payment his mother had sent didn’t work well in the rain. Even then, he would need to go into another town to use the free Wi-Fi.

  He’d already found his princess, he reminded himself. He didn’t need to search anymore. And whether she realized it or not yet, she belonged to him. Forever. He had plenty of time for her to come to him and to become his little Aurora.

  If she didn’t, there was enough space in these woods for a cemetery. As unpleasant as it was, he would be forced to do what was necessary, again, and begin a brand-new search.

  Chapter 20

  Tony turned back from bolting the hotel-room door to find Kelly already flopped on the bed near the bathroom. His bed. Even in the roomy sweatshirt and leggings she’d changed into while they processed the suspect at Livingston County Jail, she looked smaller than usual. Fragile.

  His whole body ached with the effort to hold himself in place rather than to rush over and pull her as close as she would let him.

  How did he even have any energy left to do that? He’d thought it was tiring enough tracking suspects, who were as difficult to identify as single stars among all the constellations. That didn’t compare to his exhaustion that night after he’d been forced to stay in the back, helpless, while Kelly had become the bait to catch a suspect.

  “I still can’t believe that after everything, BIG DADDY doesn’t seem to be involved with any of the cases we’ve been investigating,” she said, as she stared up at the popcorn ceiling finish.

  “We ruled out a suspect and took a predator off the street at the same time. That’s what’s important.”

  Why did he bother lying to her? None of that mattered. At least not to him. She was safe. That was the only thing that came into clear focus in his otherwise jumbled brain. It also demonstrated what a mess he was in. How was he supposed to help recover an abducted teen and help capture a murder suspect, let alone figure out who’d sold Kelly and him out, when he could only think about protecting her?

  His stomach clenched just as it had when that other man’s voice had filtered through Kelly’s microphone and tempted him to skip the door and break through the wall to reach her. The suspect hadn’t even touched her, and Tony’s hands had shaken with rage as he’d withdrawn his weapon.

  Kelly rolled over to face him then, catching him still standing next to the door and staring at the hands that had betrayed him. She propped up her head with her hand.

  “I should have known it wouldn’t be him. Why would he still have been pursuing INVISIBLE ME when he already had...”

  Her words trailed away as the truth must have dawned on her. Of course, a crafty suspect could abduct more than one victim. Especially if one of them was already dead.

  “Clive Billingsley’s alibis will probably hold.” He paused long enough to cross to the other bed and sit on its edge. He tried not to remember how she’d slept in his arms there a few nights before. “He seems like any of the dozens of suspects we’ve arrested over the past few years.”

  His gut had also told him that this wasn’t the suspect they’d been tracking. Why hadn’t he told her before the meeting that it wouldn’t help with the current cases?

  “An accountant.” She shook her head. “A clean-cut, successful professional. Married. Father of three. He could pass under the radar.”

  Tony slid out of his shoes. “You mean like Ted Bundy? Appearance. Employment. Those things have nothing to do with it. Predators come from business, politics, clergy from all religions. Even from law enforcement.”

  “I know. That only makes it worse that I didn’t immediately suspect him when I saw him.”

  “That’s just human nature.”

  “Doesn’t make it right.”

  Why was he making excuses for her? Law-enforcement officers listening to their inherent biases instead of basing their investigations on facts alone contributed to delays in apprehending serial predators.

  “No, it doesn’t,” he said finally. “Still, even if Billingsley isn’t connected to our current investigations, he wasn’t some innocent bystander. The things he said on those transcripts should have made your skin crawl. The evidence obtained from his vehicle told us he was ready to carry through on his plans.”

  “You’re
right. You know, all the team members seemed to have our backs tonight. No one acted strangely or made suspicious calls.”

  He slid back on the bed until his head rested against the pile of pillows at the headboard. “You wouldn’t expect them to be amateurs, would you?”

  “I don’t know what I expect. Maybe that the good guys would actually be the good guys.”

  He had to give her that. “But if one of them is involved in whatever it is, he’s probably been at it for a while and has learned how to avoid discovery. This time we must have stepped too close.”

  “Probably.” She flopped on her back again, drawing her knees up so that her bare feet rested flat on the comforter. “It wasn’t him, either, you know.”

  Neither needed to identify which him she spoke of this time. He was the guy who’d stolen much more from her than a child’s belief that the world was a safe place. That man had taken her ability to trust, and Tony wasn’t sure if she would ever recover from that loss.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to be sorry.”

  “I know you wanted a chance to stop him. To make things right. Even if you didn’t owe anyone anything.”

  She kept shaking her head on the pillow, as if that would repel his words.

  “Maybe I can let it go now.”

  He wanted to believe that. He hadn’t missed the color of the drink she’d been holding in the convenience store. Did that blue slush signal a moment of conversion from self-loathing to forgiveness? That his doubts remained only bothered him more.

  “I appreciate your going along with the meeting, even if you knew we were heading in the wrong direction.”

  “I did no such thing.”

  “Liar.”

  Kelly trapped him with her gaze. She had that right, too. He’d been lying to her about lot of things. That he hadn’t believed BIG DADDY was involved in either of the current cases was just a minor one, by comparison.

  “I told myself I was still searching for Harper’s abductor when he invited me into the private chat. I was only being selfish. I had to know for sure that he couldn’t be the suspect who took Emily.”

  “How do you know for sure?”

  “Even in eighteen years, no adult can change his basic face structure or grow five inches taller.”

  “You were young when you saw the suspect. Probably quite a bit shorter, too.”

  He was pressing her, but he had to know that she was certain. As much as he wanted to vanquish her enemies for her, she would have to conquer this dragon all on her own.

  “No memory could be that faulty. It wasn’t him. You were right when you said that it couldn’t be.”

  “Just remember that. I’m right about a lot of things.”

  “And humble.”

  “That, too.”

  She pushed herself up until she was sitting crisscross on the center of the bed. “Seriously, though, Sienna, Madison and Harper deserve better than to have me searching for my own answers instead of theirs.”

  They deserved better than having him wasting time hunting for Emily, too, but that hadn’t stopped him. Not so long ago, he couldn’t wait to close the case and leave the task force, and now he was finding all sorts of reasons to delay it.

  She stretched her arms and blew out an audible breath.

  “If only we had a better idea which direction to look. We can’t just monitor the chat rooms and track down every local guy who tries to solicit.”

  “It’s just one area of our search. Others are monitoring some of the human-trafficking sites on the Dark Web and—”

  “It’s not enough.”

  He didn’t say more because she was right. It wasn’t close to enough.

  “There are so many possible suspects,” she continued. “I CAN HELP. SUPER DUDE. TOO MUCH FUN. UNCLE JOE. Just too many. We’ll never find them all. Even if we did, that doesn’t mean they’re involved in either case. We can’t waste more time that Harper doesn’t have.”

  Tony couldn’t bring himself to remind her that it already might be too late for the girl. He couldn’t bear the thought of losing another one, and Kelly wasn’t ready to hear it.

  “We’ll find her,” he heard himself telling her. Even that was a promise he shouldn’t have made, though he hadn’t specified whether it would be dead or alive. Too much time had already passed. If the case involved human trafficking, she might never be recovered.

  “I know we will. We have to. There’s something we’re overlooking. We have to find it.”

  “It will be clearer tomorrow. We both just need to get some rest. I know I’m tired, and I spent most of my day at a desk, not being forced to dangle myself like a block of raw meat in a lion’s cage. You have to be exhausted.”

  “That was...graphic.”

  He looked up at her again, realizing he’d revealed more than he’d intended. She was grinning this time. A smile that warmed him in places that had no business being warmed, especially after she’d pushed him away.

  “Thanks for not saying that before I had to meet BIG DADDY. I would have been a mess. It was hard enough having to go by my apartment alone to get my other clothes for the meeting.”

  “I didn’t even know you had those clothes.” He blinked to push the memory of her in those shorts from his thoughts, but it would be a long time before he could forget.

  “We all have those things stuffed in the back of our closets.”

  “What for?”

  She frowned again, but her lips finally lifted. “In case we ever have to complete a sting at a convenience store.”

  They each took turns brushing their teeth and getting ready for bed. Tony changed into fleece shorts and a T-shirt since the room’s air-conditioning unit was blowing out heated air. Kelly was still in that sweatshirt and leggings, as if she couldn’t get warm enough, as she climbed under the covers of what had been his bed before.

  “Good night,” she said.

  He flicked through the lighting options on the double lamp between them until the room was dark. But it was too quiet, the damp, heavy air suffocating. The sheet he’d pulled over him stuck to his skin, making it impossible for him to get comfortable. Finally, he had to speak up again.

  “You sure you’re okay?” He hoped she didn’t ask him the same question, since he was anything but.

  “I am,” she said in a sleepy voice. “And Tony?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Thanks. For everything.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Her words judged him and found him lacking. He’d wanted to believe he’d been a part of tonight’s events only for her, but had he secretly hoped that if she reconciled her past, she could build a relationship with him?

  He turned over so that he could stop watching her and wondering if she would sleep when there was no way he would be able to rest. Facing the window didn’t help, the outline of the parking lot lights sneaking past the blackout curtains reminding him that they’d been watched. Followed. Warned.

  Kelly had been in more danger tonight. Though that suspect was behind bars, another threat remained, one he could neither pinpoint nor dispatch. He couldn’t protect her, and it was killing him.

  He trained his ears on the sounds of her breathing, hoping she, at least, would get some sleep. As if there weren’t enough reasons for him to be restless tonight, his newest discovery had guaranteed he wouldn’t be able to close his eyes. He could admit to the darkness what he couldn’t say in daylight. He’d let himself fall in love with Kelly Roberts.

  Chapter 21

  Kelly stood at the side of Tony’s bed, careful not to wake him. He was facing away from her, the curve of his shoulder to his waist and then his hip beneath the sheet outlined in the light seeping past the blinds.

  Though Tony had turned over several times in the past two hours, his breathing had fina
lly settled in sleep. That was more than she’d managed. How could she rest when so many thoughts and feelings were bombarding her, each declaring its supremacy over the others?

  She shivered though perspiration made her clothes cling to her skin. Even dressed, she’d pulled the blankets over her as if they could have shielded her from an attack coming from the inside. So much had changed in the past twelve hours, some things becoming sparklingly clear. How she felt about Tony was one of them.

  That didn’t make it any easier for her to take this step when she was reneging on the deal she’d made with him. Would he even still want her?

  She shook her head, initiating a tremble that continued down her neck, torso and arms. But she’d already proven she was strong that night. Blue-slush strong. Taking this step would serve as more proof.

  She reached for the hem of her sweatshirt, yanked it over her head and tossed it on her own bed in one fluid move. Then she unclasped her bra and lowered it into the pile. She could almost breathe now. Her leggings and panties were easier to remove, though she had to balance herself standing on one leg at a time to shed them.

  Once she stood there in the dark, completely naked, the air drying some of the sweat on her skin, she hesitated. She wanted this, right? No, she needed this. Before she could talk herself out of it, she lifted the sheet and slid in behind him, her arm snaking over his waist.

  He didn’t startle awake as she probably would have had their roles been reversed, but the slight tightening of his muscles told her he was awake.

  “Not okay after all?”

  His voice was rough from sleep, or a shortage of it, but he kept his back to her.

  “No, it’s not that.”

  “Then what is it?”

  As he rolled over to face her in the dark, Kelly’s arm fell away, and his hand brushed bare skin. He did startle then and dropped on his back.

  “What’s going on, Kelly?”

  She chuckled. The sound was strange in her ears. Forced.

  “I thought it was obvious.”