Had mulled that over. “Okay, maybe…”
“What was the text?”
“Said something happened at work that was interesting and that I should call her.”
Lobo smacked her hand against her forehead. “Seriously? Guys are morons. She wants you to call her.”
Feeling a smile creep onto his face despite his best efforts, Had nodded. “Yeah, okay. I guess so.”
“I know so.”
He sat there for a moment, looking at this agent in front of him. She was young, young enough that Had, who had always thought of himself as being a lot greener than everyone else around him, felt like an old veteran.
She wore a ton of makeup. It was strange to him. Lobo was attractive, with dark brown eyes that were almost too dark, like two pools of melted chocolate and a pleasing shape to her face. Why did she go to such lengths to cover herself up?
Her hair was a little stiff and appeared more processed than what Had liked, but the overall effect was one of a slightly ghetto but pretty girl. Pretty, and more intelligent than she let on.
Realizing something, Had leaned in. “Hey, I don’t know your first name.”
Lobo blushed and ducked her head. “Um… it’s Dolores.”
She pronounced it with a Spanish accent. Doh-LOH-days. And while Had might agree with her on the typical American pronunciation of the name, he found he liked her version.
“I dunno. I kinda like it.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “It means ‘sorrows.’ That’s why I hate it so much. I feel like my name is a walking warning against PMS or something.”
Had chuckled, but then thought about the name. Dolores meant sorrows and Lobo meant wolf, or at least Had thought so, based off his high-school Spanish. Sorrows of the wolf. Had wished his name were half so cool.
“I’m not a huge fan of mine, either,” Had confessed.
“What’s yours?”
“Kyle. Had comes from my last name, Hadderly.”
She squinted at him. “Had suits you more. But I like Kyle.”
“Meh. It’s boring.”
“Better boring than a reference to the sorrows of the Mother of God.”
She might have a point there. Had pushed his plate back, feeling stuffed. He probably shouldn’t have finished off Lobo’s sandwich. His own had been large enough that it’d barely fit on the plate.
“You done?” Lobo asked.
“Yeah.” An idea struck him. “Hey, we probably won’t be starting on the mail fraud case until tomorrow. Want to go to the brewery?”
“Sure, why not? Let’s go back to the hotel for me to grab a couple of things.”
Had tried not to be too excited. It seemed that he had found someone who was willing to go with him on his travel adventures. The rest of the team tolerated his desires to see the strange and unusual, but they didn’t do much to accommodate them, nor did they spend any time at all joining him.
Maybe he had just found a travel buddy.
* * *
Sariah exited her room, her heart pounding. After having fallen asleep for a brief nap, she had awoken to a vague sense of panic. Maybe some dream she had been in the middle of, perhaps some vestige of fear from the gas station, but she wanted to gather the team together. Now.
As she moved down the hallway to get Joshua, who had checked in with her after arriving with Salazar and Reggie, Sariah ran into Had, who appeared to be on his way to Agent Lobo’s room. He grinned at her.
“Hey, Coop, want to come with Agent Lobo and me? We’re going to the brewery.”
“No, Had,” she answered, and watched as his face deflated. At some point she would have to start going with the officer on his outings, but today was not going to be that day. “In fact, I was wanting to get the team together to have a chat about what we’re doing next.”
“Oh,” he replied, deflating even further. “I’ll go get Lobo.”
Sariah nodded. “Meet back in my room in three?”
“Sure.” Had moved off toward Lobo’s room, his natural optimism already resurfacing after his momentary disappointment. That was one nice thing about Had. If you didn’t like his attitude, all you had to do was wait a bit and it would come back around. She wondered how he managed it.
She knocked on Joshua’s door, calling in to let him know about the meeting. He grumbled back a reply that sounded less than enthusiastic, but at least positive, so she moved on to Reggie’s. Her answer was clearer and much less pissy. She was another source of positivity on the team, even if there were times Sariah could do without her constantly distracting beauty. Who could hope to live up to that standard?
Shaking her head, she braced herself before she knocked on Salazar’s door. For a split second, she considered not including him in the meeting, but that would end up making a bad situation worse. He needed to be included in the group, for better or worse.
As she rapped, Sariah noticed that the door was held ajar by the metal safety lock that had been pulled toward the doorjamb. “Salazar?” she called out, as she pushed the door aside and stepped in.
There was no answer. The room appeared to be vacant. Salazar hadn’t yet pulled down the blankets or sheets on his bed, nor did she see any signs of unpacking. No signs of his luggage, as a matter of fact. He must’ve put his things away in the closet and was waiting to take care of settling in later in the day.
She moved back out into the hallway, finding a sour-faced Joshua waiting for her. He pointed to Salazar’s door.
“Pretty boy not joining us?”
“He’s not there,” she answered.
“Huh,” came the puzzled response. “He couldn’t still be out running, could he? That was like an hour and a half ago. I’ll go down and check with the front desk. See if they’ve seen him come back.”
Sariah nodded, then noticed something missing. Or someone, rather.
“Where’s Bella?”
Joshua turned back. “Oh, Agent Lobo stopped by to say she was going out with Had to some brewery tour or something. Asked if Bella wanted to join them.”
Sariah nodded as Had jogged up the hallway toward them, coming from Lobo’s room. He called out to them.
“Hey, I knocked, but Lobo didn’t answer. She said she was going to wait for me down in the lobby, so…”
Joshua began moving toward the elevators. “I’ll head down with you. Kill two birds or whatever.”
Sariah did a quick calculation and realized that by the time everyone regrouped it would be a half an hour from now at the earliest. Her sense of urgency, spurred on by that nagging feeling of destruction hanging over her, spiked.
“I’ll grab Reggie and join you down there. Might as well meet in the lobby, since it looks like most of us will be down there at this point.”
The men nodded and moved off, their steps in synch. Sariah mused at the change in that relationship. When they’d first started working together, it had gotten so bad that Joshua’d taken a swing at the younger cop. Sariah had half expected that she’d end up filing charges against the former agent on Had’s behalf.
Now the two men acted almost like family. Joshua was the crusty older brother with more experience, while Had was the wide-eyed kid that idolized his sibling to the point of worship.
Turning back to retrieve Reggie, Sariah was struck with a new wave of panic. The fear swooped in, creating knots in her stomach. The sensation was so strong, so overwhelming, that for a moment, she wondered if she was going to be ill.
Something was off, and her need to bring the team all together changed from a way to assuage her vague worry to a necessity in the blink of an eye. There was something they were all missing. She didn’t have any way of articulating how she knew it, but that didn’t make her certainty any less.
Now all she had to do was figure out what the hell it was.
* * *
Rushing down the hall, Reggie kept glancing over at Coop. The strong-featured BAU agent had her intense face on, which Reggie had always found both intimidatin
g, and strangely sexy all at once.
Reggie had no idea what was going on, but it was clear that Coop was upset. So far, all she’d said was that she wanted the team to meet down in the lobby to talk, but the energy that was radiating off of the agent was both palpable and negative, belying the innocuousness of the request.
When they got to the lobby, Had and Joshua were there. They both had worried expressions on their faces. Nothing as serious as Coop’s, but if these two were showing concern, there was something significant going down.
“What’s happening?” Coop asked before Reggie was able to do so herself. “Where’re Salazar and Lobo?”
“We couldn’t find either one of them. No one at the desk has seen them.” Joshua said, rubbing at his stubble.
“Where’s Bella?” Reggie asked, noticing the absence of the gorgeous dog. Joshua pretty much never went anywhere without her.
“With Lobo,” he said, his tone curt. He glanced at her and softened. “Sorry. I’m just a little… They should be down here, and we don’t know why they aren’t.”
“Agent Lobo said she was going to meet me in the lobby,” Had chimed in. “And she didn’t answer when I knocked at her door earlier.”
“The front desk said that Salazar had come back like a half hour ago,” Joshua added, his brow furrowing deeper by the second. “So he should have been in his room.”
Coop stepped in at that point, speaking to Had. Her voice was knotted up with the tension of whatever it was that was going on inside her.
“Had, go to the front desk and tell them we need a key to Lobo’s room. Salazar’s room’s still open, so we can look through it.”
Joshua held out a hand. “If we’re just being paranoid…”
Coop flashed him a look. “We’re not.”
Nodding curtly, Joshua fell into stride behind her as they made their way back to the elevators. Reggie had a hard time keeping up. When these two got an idea in their heads they turned into juggernauts.
By the time they arrived back at Salazar’s room, the tension felt like it had reached some kind of critical mass. The energized focus Reggie had felt from Coop was now twisted up into roiling bands of bleeding fear that radiated from the whole group.
It didn’t feel like it was possible for it to ratchet up any further.
Coop flung open the door, not even bothering to announce herself this time. If this turned out to be a mistake, they were all going to have some serious explaining to do to the hotheaded agent. Reggie didn’t see Salazar as being the forgiving type.
It took seconds for them to search the room. There was nothing there. No luggage, no clothes, no depression in the bed made by a man taking a momentary seat.
By the time they were back out in the hall, Had was running toward them from the elevator, a key card in his hand. Without speaking, they rushed toward Lobo’s door. Had’s hand shook a bit as he inserted the key card in the lock. It flashed red. He swiped it again. Red.
Coop yanked the card out of his hand, swiping downward. Green.
She stepped into the room, the rest of them following. Then she stopped, and Reggie almost stepped on the agent’s heel. Moving to the side to make room for the others, Reggie found her own feet wouldn’t go any further. They were stopped by the same sight that had immobilized Coop.
There, in Agent Lobo’s hotel room, was a scene straight out of a disaster movie.
Clothes had been strewn everywhere. There was a suitcase on the bed that was lying open and upside down, items pooled up around the mouth where they’d been emptied in a hurry. Her crime scene kit had been torn apart, fingerprinting dust coating the surface of the bed opposite them. Luminal looked like it had been splashed on the bed as well, illuminating a spatter pattern that covered the bedspread. Either someone had gotten extremely lucky on that bed before they’d arrived, or Agent Lobo was hurt.
“There’s not too much blood here. Looks like the spray pattern might be from a bad cut,” Coop said, tracking Reggie’s gaze to the blood droplets. “It’s not too much worse than that, at least for the moment.”
Reggie was shocked at how calm Coop appeared. Now that it was clear that something terrible was going on, it was like all that fear and tension had vanished, leaving only focus.
“What happened here?” Reggie asked, her stomach up in her throat.
“It looks like Salazar attacked her and ripped apart the room,” Joshua stated, his tone flat and deadly. Reggie looked up at the former agent, whose face appeared to be carved from flint, its every line hard and sharp, its color gray and smoky.
Reggie made the intuitive leap and realized that if Salazar had taken Lobo, that he’d probably taken Bella as well. And that was best-case scenario.
The desire to go to Joshua, to comfort him in his moment of distress, overwhelmed her with its intensity. But just as it was clear that he was hurting, it was also evident that he would allow no one to comfort him. His walls were up high, and there was no breeching them. At least not right now.
“Hey,” came Had’s voice from the other side of the room, near the table and chair that were ubiquitous in hotel rooms across the US. “You better take a look at this.”
There, propped up on the table, was a card.
The name carved into the front in hard block letters was JOSHUA.
CHAPTER 13
Joshua stood immobilized. The name… his name… seared into the back of his mind, etching a pattern there that would not, could not ever be erased.
Humpty was coming for him.
He shook himself, moving toward the card. Coop held up a hand.
“Don’t touch it, we need to dust for prints.”
Joshua brushed her concerns aside, reaching for the missive. “He’s been too careful up to this point. You really think he’s going to leave something behind now? Besides, we don’t have Lobo.”
Agent Cooper didn’t answer, but she did place herself in front of Joshua, keeping him from the envelope that was propped up against the lamp on the desk. His name beckoned to him, just out of reach. He could see it, but he’d have to do physical violence to Coop to push her aside.
He contemplated it, just for a moment. Would it be that bad of a thing? She was keeping him from finding out what had happened to his dog and a fellow agent.
She must have seen the determination in his gaze, as she held up a finger, asking for a momentary truce. Stepping aside, she scooped up something from off the bed.
“Here,” she said, holding out two latex gloves. “At least put these on.”
That was a concession he would make. He didn’t think they would find any prints or trace evidence on the envelope, but it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. It was the wasted time that he was the most concerned about. Every minute they delayed was more distance between them and Humpty. Or at least Humpty’s helper.
Shoving his hands into the gloves, Joshua picked up the card. It may have been his imagination, but it seemed like he could feel the emanations coming from the note. The animosity, the rage, the violence, radiating up from the surface of the envelope, where his name screamed at him, the depth of the pen strokes an indicator of the force used in their creation.
Pulling out the plain white card that was wedged into the envelope, Joshua found that he could not focus on its content for a moment. He took a deep breath, trying to still nerves that were all firing at once. There was a pulsing sensation behind his left eye.
Joshua,
It was time, don’t you think? You’ve flirted with sobriety for long enough. Used the dog as your crutch to keep you out of the clutches of your addiction. So I took her.
Surprise.
Too bad about the extra agent that came along with the package, though, wasn’t it? Total accident. See, I have a soft spot for dogs. You come out to meet me, your pooch stays intact. Not so much with the human.
Pity about Lobo though. With that name, I might almost want to spare her, but you know how I feel about the FBI.
As for
you, stay thirsty, my friend. I count on you being good and drunk the next time we cross paths.
Your friend, Roman and fellow countryman,
HD
PS You might want to look inside the minibar. And I’m not just referring to the alcohol.
It was Humpty. His language, his snide turn of phrase, his demonic planning. But at the same time it was not. There was something about all of this that was clearly not his doing.
He’d had help, of course. That seemed to be another part of the pattern, didn’t it? Attacks on Joshua, attacks on his team, now an attack on his dog.
His vision narrowed, turning red for a moment. Bella. The bastard had Bella. Lobo was bad enough; the resemblance she had to his daughter made this moment feel like history was repeating itself. But to go after his dog? His sober companion, the one who had helped him leave the bottle behind?
His eyes went back to the postscript. The minibar. There was something waiting for them in the minibar.
Coop, who had been reading over his shoulder, saw his move and made to preempt it. “There could be a bomb waiting for us in there.”
Joshua spoke, surprised that his voice was still operating. His tone sounded flat and dead, even to his own ears.
“He doesn’t want us dead. Not yet, anyway.”
“Joshua…” she began, then stopped at the look he leveled at her. She nodded and stepped aside.
The fridge called out to him, its exterior innocent, simple. He’d seen it a hundred times before. Knew its contents better than he knew his own face in the mirror.
As the crackle of the seal breaking sounded in his ears, Joshua steeled himself for what he would find inside. But when the door opened, all he saw was bottle after bottle, row after row of Johnnie Walker Red Label.
Every single other item that should have been inside the bar had been removed. All that remained was a repeating image of Joshua’s favorite drink. His hands began to shake and his vision blurred.
With a jagged swipe of an arm that almost didn’t want to respond to his commands, Joshua swept out all the bottles he could in one motion. The bottles clanked against each other on the floor, a couple of them breaking as they smashed against one another. The smell of the whiskey crept up from the ground, enveloping Joshua in a cloud of aching desire.
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