by Dale Mayer
“Why would you think that?” Nico asked curiously. But his tone held no shock, as if he’d already considered it.
Miles turned to study his old friend. “Because of the fact that no evidence has shown up, and we have nothing to go on. It always makes me wonder if somebody isn’t removing evidence or burying it under a huge mass of other stuff.”
“I did think of it,” Nico admitted, “and I ran it through, investigated and interrogated the cops involved in all the cases, but I couldn’t find anything. Absolutely nothing popped.”
“Stranger abductions are the worst,” Miles said.
“Spoken like a perfect detective comic-book hero,” Nico said with a chuckle.
“Well, we need a hell of a lot more than just a handful of theories,” Miles said. “I’m no Sherlock Holmes. We need real evidence to follow. There’s got to be a trail of something.”
“Well, I’m hoping your fresh eyes will handle that. You’re the only one I know of who got through all that mess that we had on that military matter. Was that five years ago now?”
“Yeah,” Miles said. “That wasn’t a good part of my life.”
“It wasn’t a good part of anybody’s life. Finding out one of our own had been killing prisoners of war to make it look like the other team had done it sucked.”
Miles nodded. He tried to block out that case, but it was hard. He had been assigned to a joint mission in Iraq, but instead several prisoners they had found and had brought in were killed. And always made to look like some of the friendly team members of Iraqi soldiers had been the guilty party. Only through Miles’s own efforts did he get to the bottom of it and found out one of their own had been behind it all. And, when the guilty party had been interrogated, he’d shrugged and said, “Well, what the hell? Why do we care? They’re nobody. And we shouldn’t be working with and friendly with these guys anyway. Somebody needed to see that they were dangerous.”
And Miles had replied, “So, because they weren’t dangerous Jihads, as you thought they should be, you made it look like they were killers?”
“Somebody had to. Jesus, Miles, since when are we out here shooting alongside these guys?”
“Every war has two sides,” Miles had said quietly. “These guys were on our side.”
“This time,” his buddy had said. “Just this time. You know in the next kerfuffle, they could be on the opposite side.”
Miles couldn’t say anything about that because his buddy was right. It seemed like the friendly fire switched on a regular basis, and it made things difficult. Hell, it happened all the time with three siblings, where during childhood two would gang up against one for a time, then would regroup so another pair was against the remaining one. He shook his head. But this was worse. Far worse.
And to think something like that was going on here with these seventeen redheads … Well, Miles was pretty sure either somebody was helping this supposed serial kidnapper, or he was just that damn good.
And he also had a system to supply these very specific women. He had a network. But then people had to work for him. He couldn’t have done all this on his own, and so Miles and Nico had to find the weak links in the kidnapper’s system.
Why were these women picked, outside of their natural orangey-red hair and their youth and their looks, which already gave them enough specifics as to what made them a type? What was the kidnapper doing with them, and, if he was selling them, who was ordering these women? And, if he wasn’t selling them, where was he keeping them? “If we could roust out a location where he was keeping these women,” he muttered to himself, “that would help.”
“No, that would blow the case wide open,” Nico said. “Seriously, if we find the women, that’s unbelievable.”
Miles nodded. “I’m going back through the feeds on this latest kidnapping.” And again he came up with the cousin. He brought over the files he had on the guy. “Any idea about what the relationship was like between the cousin and the two sisters?”
“Very friendly apparently,” Nico said. “I interviewed him.”
At that, Miles turned to look at him. “And how was he?”
“Nervous, upset and yet okay.”
“When did you interview him?”
Nico flashed a sideways grin at him. “On the second-to-last case.”
Miles bolted upright. “Seriously, the same guy I tagged on the most recent kidnapping case?”
“Not implicated,” Nico corrected carefully. “Connected to two.”
“But you’re sure, absolutely sure, that he’s not involved?”
“I would swear on my life that he isn’t,” Nico said. “But, like I said before, I’m too close to it, and I need clear eyes. So, you go over it, and you tell me if he’s connected.”
“Because, if he’s connected, but he’s not our guy,” Miles said, “is somebody trying to make it look like he’s our guy?”
Nico sat down heavily and said, “I wouldn’t have thought so last year. Now his cousin has been taken. So now I don’t know.”
“We need to talk to him,” Miles said, standing and packing up his laptop. He looked over at Nico. “Have you got that interview setup?”
“I knew you’d ask,” Nico said. He pulled out his phone and checked his calendar. “We have forty minutes to get there.”
Miles rolled his eyes. “When were you going to tell me about that?”
“I bet myself how long before you would figure that out,” he said, laughing. He walked to the door, and they undid the series of security locks and let themselves out.
As they headed down the small back alleyway, Miles looked at him and said, “And what if I hadn’t said anything about it?”
“I would owe me twenty bucks,” he said on a laugh. “I would have then told you that we had him already lined up to talk to.”
“Good,” Miles said as they got into the car. “Has Vanessa’s sister been taken into protective custody?”
Nico took a deep breath. “She refused to. Said that, even based on everything we knew so far, she was safe until next year.”
Miles gave a half snort. “That’s a lousy reason for not going into protective custody.”
“Well, we tried to tell her that.”
“But obviously you think she is in danger?”
“Yes, I think she is,” Nico said. “I’m just not sure if it’s for the same reason.” And, on that cryptic note, he started the sports car and headed onto the main street.
“Meaning?” Miles asked after a while.
“She’s within the right age range, but she’s different enough that she wouldn’t be the first choice of this kidnapper. She’s more of a reddish-blond than a bright orangey redhead.”
“Meaning, she doesn’t fit the usual profile?”
“Yes, but, because the news has now picked it up, we’ll get a lot of copycats. And what I don’t want to see is her taken by somebody else who thinks, ‘Hey, that’s a great idea. Let’s go kidnap a beautiful redhead woman and keep her chained up in my basement, and I can do whatever the hell I want with her thereafter,’” he said in a caustic voice.
“Did you explain that to her?”
“No. We’re meeting her right after her cousin.”
“And where are we interviewing them?”
He looked over at Nico, who smiled and said, “We have a room at the police station.”
“Wow. And why the hell do I want to be there?”
“You’re a special investigator. That’s all you need to know.”
“Shit,” Miles said as he looked out the passenger side window. “I haven’t had much to do with any of this. You do know that?”
“Not for the last five years but then beforehand you were bucking up against the military police pretty steadily.”
“That’s because I knew,” he emphasized that last word, “somebody in our ranks was responsible. And I couldn’t get anybody to listen to me.”
“Because it was treasonous on your part to even mention it,” Nico
said quietly. “And nobody wanted to contemplate that possibility.”
“I know,” Miles said. “Believe me. It made my last few years that much more difficult.”
Nico nodded. “It’s also when I left. Remember?”
“And why specifically did you leave?”
“Because of somebody within our ranks,” Nico said quietly. “Who the hell wants to work with guys turning around and pinning murders on somebody else? But it could just as easily have been the ‘friendly’ guys doing it to our team. And I decided I didn’t want to live with that kind of betrayal anymore.”
“Understood,” Miles said. “And, for me, I had been dealing with so many young guys who, you just knew, when they started, were calling you grandpa and mocking you behind your back. And you gotta think, just maybe they don’t trust you anymore.”
“The young punks don’t trust anybody coming in,” Nico said. “They’re full of piss and vinegar, thinking they own the world. They respect some elders to a certain extent—giving them their rightful kudos for having lived this long through all the shit—but, at some point in time, that respect wanes, even if you haven’t done anything to get knocked down from that pedestal. The youths see themselves as the next wave of big cheese.”
“Maybe they’re right,” Miles said. “We know that most SEALs don’t last that long. The stress of the ops and the evil involved and the high levels they are expected to continually operate at is all incredible.”
“You’re one of the longest active SEALs,” Nico said with a nod.
“Was,” Miles said with a smile. “No longer active.”
“Oh, you’re active,” Nico said. “You just don’t realize how covert and specialized this Mavericks unit is.”
“That’s because we haven’t been told jack shit about it,” Miles said.
“And I doubt we will be,” Nico said, “not fully, but I’m in because we have the scope to do so much more.”
“Like finding a serial kidnapper on the streets of London?”
“I hope so. Regardless, we’ll focus on Vanessa’s case, on her kidnapping, on getting her back,” Nico said. “Nothing else matters.”
Miles thought about it and then nodded. “I’ve taken care of plenty of kidnap victims the world over. You’re right. Our priority is not to get the kidnapper, but I’m all for that too. Yet our priority remains to get Vanessa back.” As he sat here, he pondered about it and then nodded. “We haven’t done enough research on this angle. Why her?”
“And you’re thinking beyond the profile?”
“Have to,” Miles said. “The thing is, she’s also available. Too available. Just hit any of the social media sites and find where she was last spotted. Or check out her own website for an itinerary of her upcoming trips. People put too many of those personal details online for the whole wide world to see. She’s a well-known face too. So either somebody was thinking that he wanted to add her to his collection or he thought that maybe it would be more of a challenge to take this one off the streets. Maybe he’s bored in life and looking for more prominent people, for more risk, for more stakes?”
“Which makes the prime minister’s family that much more of an issue.”
“Sure,” Miles said. “But we don’t have a year’s leeway to solve this. We’ve got to get Vanessa back in a few days.”
“Faster, I hope,” Nico said.
“I know. Otherwise she’ll disappear into some underground system and possibly already has. And it’ll be almost impossible to track her down. And we can’t get hung up on the red hair because it could have been dyed while she’s a prisoner. We’ll never recognize her. … Except for that slightly larger freckle just below the corner of her right eye.”
Nico cleared his throat. “You got a thing for our victim already?”
Miles glared at Nico’s usage of the word victim when it came to Vanessa. “You wanted fresh eyes? Well, you got them.”
“It’s okay, buddy,” Nico said, then laughed. “The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”
Miles shook his head, ignoring his partner. “We need facial recognition on the get-go.”
“We’ve been running that software since we realized that she’d been taken,” Nico said.
“And what about the sister and the cousin?”
“Do you want them followed?”
“I want to know every move either of them took since Vanessa disappeared,” Miles said, as he stared out into the buildings that traveled past him at lightning speed. “It’s way too easy to think that this guy’s a pro. Maybe he is a pro. Maybe it’s by experience. Maybe it’s by training. But the fact of the matter is, so far, he hasn’t been picked up. So we have to think out of the box.”
“You were always good at that,” Nico said. “Tell us what we need to do.”
Miles thought about it for a long moment before speaking. “We need more information. Much more. I want every step of those two people’s movements—the sister and the cousin.” He pulled out his laptop, turned it on. “I want an around-the-clock watch on Vanessa’s apartment, but I also want camera feeds from several weeks earlier, before the street construction, and I want to know the names of everybody in Vanessa’s apartment building, plus a face for each of them.” As he spoke, he typed into his chat window, asking for this information, and then he realized he had no internet. Thinking fast, he pulled the sunglasses from his pocket and put them on. It connected him to his operative.
“Ryker,” Miles said, “I need information, and I need a lot of it.” And he fired off his demands.
Nico laughed. “Now that’s more like it,” he said. “Let’s hope we can narrow this window down to the last twenty-four hours.”
“I hope Vanessa can stand up and fight for herself,” Miles said. “The trouble is, she’s likely drugged, locked up and completely incapable of doing anything.”
“Most likely, yes, but that doesn’t mean that she isn’t doing what she can.”
“Right.” Miles closed his eyes and sent out a whisper into the ethers.
Vanessa, if you can hear me, hold on, sweetie. We’re coming. Come hell or high water, I promise I’ll find you.
Chapter 3
Vanessa couldn’t help but wonder if anybody was looking for her. She was supposed to have meetings and the photo shoot, then return home to her sister. Her sister would have at least raised the alarm. If nothing else, her sister was a worrywart to begin with. She often warned Vanessa, like about a couple boyfriends she’d had in the past, telling her how they were nasty pieces of work who she should get away from. She almost always took her sister’s advice too.
Was that what this was about? A disgruntled boyfriend? Could you get rid of somebody you didn’t like by contacting someone online to do it? If somebody had done you wrong, could you turn around and have them taken care of? Even not so much a murder-for-hire but just pick them up and put them someplace where they’d have to suffer? She hated to think so, but, with everything she had heard that was going on in the Dark Web—a place that she didn’t understand except that it was for hackers and the worst of the worst—she realized that, if people could dream up any atrocity, it could happen in reality, ready and available for the right amount of money.
She couldn’t help but wonder if that’s what this was. And this went past her realm of even contemplating such a thing.
Her blindfold remained up on her forehead so she could see. She had even picked up her catheter bag and hopped around the bedroom. She’d made it to the window and looked out, but, of course, it was dark outside still. Yet maybe dawn approached? She glanced around, in a hurry to see if she recognized a landmark. Yet she had more pressing matters to confirm, all before that man returned.
She determined that she was on the third floor with a concrete sidewalk down below. And now she had to wonder if she could even get out of here. She’d have to shatter the glass—or hope beyond hope that the windows would open—and she had a bedsheet, but it wouldn’t take her very far down. So her
best bet was to attack her kidnapper. But he would be expecting that. If he’d had other prisoners here, they surely had tried something. The longer she was here, the bolder she would have to get.
The catheter, however, was still a nasty-ass problem. She stared at it and winced. She’d had surgery before and remembered having a catheter then and how the nurse had removed it later. That’s what Vanessa had to do now: remove it. But, if she did, she had no bathroom otherwise, and that was a concern too. Not a nice one but something that she had to consider. She still had the water on the night table, and the more she drank, the more that damn catheter bag filled up too. She’d remove it at the last moment, before she made her escape.
She had no weapons, but she had a night table. A chair. There was a plastic straw too, and, as she thought about it, she wondered if she could use it to poke his eye. She hated the bloodthirstiness of these thoughts, but, at this point in time, she was not changing her viewpoint. She would entertain bloodthirsty thoughts if they got her out of here. She hadn’t been able to untie her wrists or her ankles though. The knots were so very damn efficient and tight that she wondered what the hell they were called.
Just then the door opened, and she looked up to see her captor.
He laughed. “Feeling a little more comfortable, are you?”
“Not much,” she said quietly. She studied him, but, with his black hat over his head and dark sunglasses, she didn’t see a whole lot. He had a beard as well, but she knew that that could be shaved off or glued on as needed. And he wore a T-shirt, showing a ton of muscles underneath, so he’s fit and a gym buff or somebody who worked out consistently. But something was regal about his bearing. Almost a military precision. “Do I get more food?”
He nodded. “You will but not just yet. I came in to make sure you’re okay before our visitor arrives.”
She winced and murmured, “That can’t be good.”
He laughed again. “Maybe not but, for you, it’ll mean a change at the very least. Don’t you want to see who cares?”
“Depends on why I’ve been brought here,” she said. She kept trying to maintain her cool, but she wanted to lunge at him and claw his face apart. And, with her building rage, she might pull that off, but he looked like the kind who could bend her into a pretzel shape and snap her backbone without even breathing hard. She was five foot ten and 125 pounds. She was a lean model, and she didn’t have a ton of muscle, and whatever strength she had would be crushed as easily as peanuts in a shell for this guy.