Smirking, he slid his hand along her cheek and down the side of her neck.
It was obvious that the guard didn’t intend on stopping there.
“I’ll thank you to take your hands off her,” Tate warned darkly as the man’s hand just grazed the swell of her breasts.
Anger flashed in the other man’s eyes, but just as quickly, it subsided. The main reason he’d been told to bring this client here was to get Conrad to make his final decision so that the deal could proceed.
Apparently, it looked as if the deal was about to be sealed. The bottom line was, and had always been, money. So, much as he would have personally rather shot out this client’s kneecaps, the guard raised his hands in the air in mock surrender.
“They’re off,” he declared dramatically, wiggling his fingers in the air to underscore his point. The smirk on his face deepened as he looked at Hannah knowingly. “So, this is the one you want, eh?”
“She’s the one,” Tate replied, his tone scrubbed free of any emotion.
The other man nodded his approval. “Gotta say, you’ve got good taste. She’s a beauty.” With hooded eyes, he looked her over again. It was obvious that he was putting himself in the client’s place. “She also looks like she might last you awhile.”
Hannah drew in a breath. They’d given them all some sort of pills, but she had managed to fool her captors into thinking she’d swallowed hers when she hadn’t. Each word from the guard felt like a dagger, stabbing into her heart.
Her eyes swept over both men. “Please don’t do this,” Hannah pleaded.
It was impossible to know which of them she addressed her plea to.
For his part, though he took care not to show it, Tate felt terrible. He could certainly imagine what was going through Hannah’s mind. What Caleb’s sister was anticipating. He would have given anything to comfort her, but that wasn’t what was going to save her.
In order to accomplish that, he had to be convincing in his role. Which meant that he needed to go on with this charade, continue to maintain this facade so that he could, ultimately, get her and her friends away from these men.
If he went about it the traditional way, pulling out a service weapon and threatening to shoot the other man if he got in his way, Tate knew that he might—or might not—be able to get out of the hotel with Hannah. Most likely, they’d be stopped before they ever made it to the street level.
No, this way was more effective. It just required a great deal of focus and an iron will—and the ability to block out that look in her eyes to keep it from getting to him.
“What did I tell you about opening your mouth?” the guard was demanding angrily. He pulled back his hand, ready to bring it down on her face.
Hannah’s alarmed cry tore at his heart.
“If she has one mark on her, the deal’s off,” Tate warned him in a voice that was deadly calm, belying the turmoil that lay just beneath.
The guard stopped in midswing. The expression on his face told Tate that the guard was getting fed up with what he undoubtedly considered a high-and-mighty client. The man let his guard down for a second, the sneer on his face telling Tate that he thought he knew his type. Not just knew it, but hated it because he felt inferior to the supposedly rich client.
“You don’t buy her, someone else will,” the guard jeered contemptuously. But he dropped his hand to his side nonetheless. “Sit!” he ordered Hannah with less compassion than he would have directed to a pet dog. Only when she complied did the guard finally look his way. “So, I take it we’ve got a deal. You’re interested in acquiring this tasty morsel?”
Tate’s expression gave nothing away, including the fact that he could easily vivisect him without so much as a thought. “I might be,” he replied after a beat had gone by.
“Might be,” the man echoed with contempt. He was at the end of his patience. “Look, the man I represent doesn’t like having his time wasted. We’re alike that way because neither do I.”
Tate slowly walked around the young woman, deliberately pausing and taking a lock of her hair between his fingers. He made a show of sniffing it. “That goes both ways.”
Suspicion immediately entered the guard’s eyes. “So what do you have in mind?”
There was no hesitation on Tate’s part. “A man doesn’t buy an expensive car without taking it on a test run, seeing how it handles,” he pointed out, his voice continuing to be flat.
It killed him to see that Hannah had winced again in response to his words, and he saw real fear in her eyes as she watched him.
How did he get it across to her that he was one of the good guys without blowing his cover?
“Go on, I’m listening,” the other man said.
“I’d like a private session with her, to see how we ‘get along,’” Tate proposed.
“The boss doesn’t deal in damaged goods,” the other man snapped.
“I have no intentions of ‘damaging’ her. Just ‘sampling’ her,” Tate informed him. “There are a lot of ways a man can see if he likes the goods he’s getting.”
He was standing in front of Hannah now, looking into her eyes, wishing there was some way to set her mind at ease. His back was to the other man and he smiled at Hannah. The smile was kind, devoid of the lust that had supposedly brought him here. Lowering his head so that his lips were right next to the young woman’s ear, he whispered, “Caleb sent me,” before straightening and backing off.
Her eyes widened, but she held her tongue.
Tate said a quick, silent prayer of thanksgiving to whoever it was that watched over law enforcement officers.
“What did you say to her?” the guard demanded. There was no arguing with his tone.
Tate turned to look at him, emulating the latter’s previous smug look. “I told her that paradise was at hand.”
As he said that, Tate slanted a look toward Hannah, hoping she would put two and two together and take some comfort in the covert message. He couldn’t tell by her expression if she’d believed him—or even understood what he was trying to tell her. He wasn’t even sure if she’d heard him say that Caleb had sent him.
Terror, he knew, had a way of blocking out everything else.
The man relaxed a little, then laughed. “Good one,” he pronounced. “That’s where she and some of those other girls come from, some backward hole-in-the-wall called Paradise Ridge.”
Tate tried to sound casually uninterested. A man making small talk, involved in a meaningless conversation that would be forgotten before he walked out the door. “Is that where all the girls are from? This Paradise Ridge place you just mentioned?”
His question was met with a nod. “This batch is. They picked up others from—” He abruptly stopped his narrative. His eyebrows narrowed over small, deep-set eyes. “What’s with all the questions?”
Tate shrugged. “Just trying to find out how big a selection you’ve got—in case things don’t work out with this one,” he explained.
“Oh, it’ll work out,” the man promised. There was no room for argument. He looked at Hannah pointedly. “She knows what’ll happen to her if it doesn’t. Don’t you, honey?” The smile on his lips was cold enough to freeze a bucket of water in the middle of May.
This time, instead of fear rising in Hannah’s eyes, Tate thought he saw anger. Anger and frustration because, he guessed, there was nothing she could do right now about the anger she was feeling.
The other man was apparently oblivious to her reaction. It was clear that fear was all he looked for, all he valued.
“Don’t want to wind up like your girlfriends now, do you?” he taunted her.
Things suddenly fell into place. The annoying little troll was referring to the two dead girls Emma and Hannah’s brother had initially discovered. Solomon Miller, a so-called “repentant” Amish outcast had brought them straight to the bodies, hoping to use the fact that he was informing on his “boss” as a bargaining chip.
Initially part of the group of men involve
d in the sex trafficking ring, Miller had become the task force’s inside man, trading information for the promise of immunity once all the pieces of this case came together and they got enough on the men running this thing to take them to court—and put them away for the next century or so.
If they didn’t wait until they discovered exactly who was behind all this and bring him—or her—in, if they just grabbed up the two-bit players they were dealing with in this little drama, the operation would just fold up and relocate someplace else.
And Amish girls would continue disappearing as long as there were sick men to make their abductions a profitable business.
No, they had to catch the mastermind in order for this operation to be deemed a success.
“Don’t threaten her,” Tate warned. When the guard shot him a malevolent look, he told him, “I want her to be willing to be with me, not because she was threatened with harm if she wasn’t.”
The guard looked at him as if he wasn’t dealing with a full deck. “Hey, man, don’t you know? It’s better when they fight you.”
The world would be a much better place if he could just squash this cockroach, Tate thought, struggling to hang on to his temper. With no qualms whatsoever, Tate would have been more than willing to put everyone out of their collective misery—himself included.
But instead, he was forced to tamp down his temper and nonchalantly tell him that “We each have our preferences.”
“Yeah, well, you’re the man with the bankroll,” the guard grumbled resentfully.
“Yes, I am.”
Tate was grateful for the elaborate lengths the department had gone to in order to give him a plausible backstory. His brother, Gunnar, had funded his huge bank account.
Whoever was running this sex trafficking operation wasn’t a fool, Tate concluded. He was very, very careful to get everything right. That included vetting his clients rather than just accepting them at face value, or going with hearsay.
Nothing was simple anymore, Tate thought. Not even the peddling of flesh.
“So it’s settled?” Tate asked the man. The blank look he received in return forced him to elaborate. “I can have a private session with her?”
“Soon as I run it by the boss” came the reply.
“And how long is that going to take?”
He knew things had to progress at their own pace, but he hated the idea of leaving the girl alone with this thug for another moment, much less for another day or two. There was no telling what could happen in that amount of time, and he didn’t want to take any more chances than he had to.
“Anxious?” the other man jeered, enjoying himself. He liked having the upper hand and, in this case, he clearly got to call the shots. “Tomorrow. Come back tomorrow. She’ll be ready for you then.”
Just what did that scum mean by “ready”?
A premonition had a shiver zipping down Tate’s back, but there was absolutely nothing he could do about the circumstances. Tate was well aware that if he pressed, if he remotely said that she looked ready now or tried in any way to hurry this along, the whole thing could just fall apart on him. There were steps to take and he knew it.
That didn’t make taking them any easier.
If this was rushed, the people they were after would smell a setup and not just back off but vanish into thin air, taking the young women with them. He’d seen it before.
Hell, he’d been part of it before—having an operation unravel on him that allowed a killer to be set free. The man was ultimately taken down and brought to justice, but not before he’d killed several more young women. Young women who wouldn’t have died if he had done his job right in the first place, Tate thought ruefully.
That wasn’t going to happen again, he vowed. This time, he was going to do things by the book. Even if that meant he had to find a way to physically restrain himself.
“What time tomorrow?” he asked the guard.
“We’ll get back to you about that,” the man told him, affecting a superior attitude.
Tate narrowed his eyes, looking as cold as the man he was dealing with. Colder. “I don’t like being jerked around,” he said in a voice that contained an unspoken warning.
“Nobody’s jerking you around,” the other man promised, sounding more than a little nervous that this encounter could turn physical. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said again, this time far more amiably.
“I’ll look forward to it,” Tate said, not bothering to tone down the note of sarcasm in his voice. He looked from Hannah to the man, wondering if she even realized how breathtakingly beautiful she was. She reminded him of a rose newly in bloom. “In the meantime, I don’t want anyone touching her.”
The other man began to smirk again. “She really got to you, eh?”
Tate was aware that men like the one he was dealing with directly understood only one thing: money. It was the only language they spoke. However, he hadn’t been given the suitcase that was to be filled with the cash he was to trade for Hannah. That came tomorrow.
Whatever cash he had on him at the moment was his own, but it was only paper as far as Tate was concerned. Paper that was capable of buying both him and Hannah a little peace of mind.
Taking out his wallet, Tate removed a hundred-dollar bill. As the other man eagerly put his hand out, Tate tore the bill in half and handed one piece to him.
“What the hell is this?” the man demanded. “Some kind of stupid game?”
“No game,” Tate assured him. “You get the other half of the hundred when I come back tomorrow and see for myself that she’s all right.” His eyes bored into the other man’s dark ones. “We have a deal?”
The other man cursed roundly, then shoved his half of the bill into his pocket. “We have a deal,” he retorted grudgingly.
“Good.” Tate turned on his heel and crossed to the door.
Tate could almost feel Hannah’s eyes watching him as he walked out of the suite.
Tomorrow seemed like an eternity away.
Chapter 2
“Did you see her? Was she there?”
Caleb Troyer fired the anxious questions at him the moment the thirty-one-year-old cabinetmaker walked into the makeshift, satellite FBI office.
Rather than the customary laid-back attitude normally associated with people who came from the Amish community, Caleb reminded him of a rocket that was ready to go off at the slightest provocation.
He couldn’t say that he blamed the man, either.
“Yes, I saw her,” Tate answered.
He glanced toward his sister, who’d come in with Caleb. He sincerely wished that Emma had followed protocol and persuaded Caleb to stay away and let the task force do its work.
Granted, the distraught man was Hannah’s brother as well as Emma’s fiancé. However, Caleb was also a civilian and, in his experience, overzealous, emotionally involved civilians had a way of causing a mission to fall apart.
They couldn’t afford to have that happen. Too many young, innocent lives were at stake. And Tate had absolutely no intention of watching another mission self-destruct on him.
“How did she look?” Caleb pressed. “Have they...” At a loss, Caleb searched for a word that didn’t drag a cat-o’-nine-tails across his soul, making it bleed when he considered the implication. “Have they hurt her in any way?” he finally asked nervously.
Beneath the cabinetmaker’s apparent restlessness was anger. Tate could see it in the other man’s gray eyes. Tall and muscular, Caleb Troyer, once unleashed, would be a force to be reckoned with. Not that he could honestly blame Caleb for what he was feeling. If all went well, maybe Caleb would get his chance at some payback when the operation was over.
But until then, the man had to be restrained.
“She looks tired and frightened,” Tate told Hannah’s brother.
His response was true—as far it went. What Tate didn’t add was that when he’d initially seen Hannah in the motel room with the other two girls—before he’d been give
n the DVD to watch, she’d appeared to be drugged, as were the other girls. It was the easiest way to control the “inventory” and keep them from escaping.
Caleb definitely didn’t need to know that. If he did, that might provide the missing ingredient that would set Hannah’s brother off and God knew that Tate had more than enough to deal with without having to worry about the father of three suddenly going ballistic on him.
He could just picture Caleb storming into the motel room, breaking down the door and subsequently getting shot for his efforts. If that happened, he’d have another body on his hands—as well as his conscience—and his sister to deal with.
Omitting certain details was the far safer way to go in this case.
“If you know where she is, then what are we waiting for?” Caleb demanded impatiently. He looked from Emma to Tate, searching for a glimmer of support. Why were they hanging back? “Let’s go get Hannah and the other girls,” he urged.
Turning on his heel, he was almost at the office door when Tate moved in front of him, blocking his way.
Tate completely sympathized with what the other man had to be going through, but what Caleb was proposing almost guaranteed a bloodbath.
“We can’t just burst in there,” he told Caleb as calmly as possible.
“Why not? Why can’t we just walk into the place?” Caleb wanted to know. He didn’t understand why this detective who’d promised to bring his sister and the other girls back was acting so reticent. Was he going back on his word? “You said there were just two godless thugs guarding the girls. There are three of us here—and you can get more,” he pointed out.
Caleb was obviously focused only on rescuing Hannah at all costs. He didn’t blame the man. But Tate was able to take several different points of view regarding the op besides the way Caleb did.
Tate did his best to make the other man understand. “Yes, I can get more manpower and maybe we could rescue Hannah and the other two without incident,” he allowed, deliberately not going into how dangerous that sort of overt action could be. “But we also want to be able to rescue whatever other girls the ring has hidden away—the girls who were kidnapped for the same reason that your sister was taken. And we won’t be able to do that if the guy who’s the brains behind all this gets wind of what happened.
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