“Mackenzie,” I replied. “Mackenzie Hart.”
“No, you’re not.”
3
Wolfwater
To my credit, I didn’t flinch or react in any other obvious manner to the accusation, but my arms did begin to pucker with goose bumps. I hid them beneath the bar as the woman, Taylor, examined me from head to toe. She had a sharp, calculating eye and a smirk that boasted information not privy to anyone else. When I first walked into the bar, I assumed that she was local. The boots, the shirt, the slump over the countertop all matched the native color, but her shrewd attentiveness was from out of town. Wolfwater was slow, dull, and a little dense, and this woman was nothing like that.
“Sorry?” I said, hoping she wouldn’t notice the way the pitch of my voice had suddenly gone up a few octaves.
“You’re not her.” She plucked the sleeve of my uniform. “First of all, this uniform is not fitted to you at all, and I have a hard time believing that it’s just because you forgot to get it tailored. Look how long those pant legs are.” She kicked my boots, where the cuffs that I’d folded into Mac’s uniform pants had come undone and trailed themselves through the mud outside. “Second, you don’t hold yourself like a cop. Close, but not quite. Cops are all about their belts. It’s the only place they got to rest their hands. You look like you’ve never worn a utility belt in your life, and every time you accidentally brush against the Glock, you jerk away as if you’ve been burned.”
To prove her wrong, I rested my hand on the grip of the gun. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m sorry if you’re confused.”
“I’m definitely not confused,” she said. “You’re not a cop.”
She didn’t bother to keep the statement quiet. A few heads perked up from around the shabby bar, too interested in my presence for my tastes.
“See, if you were a cop, you wouldn’t have looked around like that to check who was listening in on our conversation,” Taylor said smugly.
I squared off my shoulders, faced the bar, and calmly took a sip of my water. “I don’t have to prove anything to you.”
“Yeah, actually, you kind of do.”
A badge flashed under the counter, out of sight of the other patrons but in complete view for me. The gold glinted beneath the dim lights, reflecting into my eyes, as I squinted at her credentials. CIA Special Agent. Oh, shit.
“You don’t look like a CIA agent,” I said in an undertone, nodding at her dirty boots and sweat-stained T-shirt. “Where’d you buy the badge? Ebay or Etsy?”
She tucked the badge into the pocket of her jeans. “You want to play games, huh? Fine. You’re a cop. Let’s see a photo I.D. then.”
I hesitated for a moment too long. I didn’t have Mac’s driver’s license on me, and even if I did, there was no way I could pass myself off as her. For one, her bright red hair would be a dead giveaway, and other than a similar body type, we didn’t share any definitive features.
Taylor finished off her drink with a refreshed sigh. “Ahh. That’s what I thought. Why, may I ask, are you pretending to be an officer from Belle Dame? I have a few guesses, but I’d like to know if I’m right or not. I’m also hoping that you didn’t kill the real Mackenzie Hart in order to steal her uniform.”
“No, of course not! She’s my friend.”
A second after the sentence left my mouth, I realized my mistake. Taylor’s guess had been pure speculation up until this point, but I had verbally confirmed that I wasn’t the real Mackenzie Hart.
“And does she know that you’ve made off with her uniform and cruiser?” Taylor asked. “I saw it parked at the sheriff’s department next door. Do you know what the consequences are for impersonating a police officer?”
“Look, you don’t understand—”
“Why don’t you fill me in then?”
Greg emerged from the kitchen again and slid a platter of fries between us. “Hot plate, coming through.”
Taylor slumped in the stool again, back to her local Wolfwater persona. “Did you hear that?” she asked me in a thick drawl that didn’t belong to her. “He called me hot plates.”
Greg rolled his eyes and snapped the bar towel across the counter near Taylor’s fingers. “Just eat your damn food.”
He walked away and busied himself by organizing the booze bottles on the shelves behind him in alphabetical order, despite the type of liquor inside them. I strongly suspected that Taylor had vexed him more than once or twice if he was that desperate to avoid our exchange.
I leaned toward Taylor. “How am I supposed to know that you’re a real CIA agent?”
“Because my I.D. matches my face.”
“Yeah, but the cowboy boots don’t match the job.”
“I’m undercover.”
“Bullshit.”
The plate of fries sat untouched between us, little ramekins of malt vinegar and ketchup quivering amongst the steaming spuds.
“All right, Detective,” Taylor said. “Let’s hear it. I spotted you as a fake from a mile away, so why don’t you fill me in on my mistakes?”
But as I’d noticed before, Taylor wasn’t the same breed of small towner as the rest of the population of Wolfwater. Sure, she wore the clothes and the boots, but the accent and the posture slipped often, revealing a crisp, honed professionality beneath her facade.
“Isn’t the first rule of working undercover that you don’t talk about working undercover?” I asked. My stomach rumbled. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten a real meal. The hospital breakfast from that morning had hardly been edible. I nabbed a few fries from Taylor’s plate, dipped them in ketchup and vinegar, and stuffed them in my mouth while I waited on Taylor’s answer.
“Normally, yes,” she said. “But in a situation like this, I think the risk of revealing myself might be worth the payoff.”
My mouth was full of fries. “Why’s that? You think turning me in is going to help your case? I assume you are working on a specific case, right? Isn’t that why agents go undercover in the first place?”
“Right, you are. Here’s the thing. The case I’m working on? It’s the same one you’re working on. Or pretending to work on.”
That caught my attention. I swallowed my mouthful of fries but didn’t reach for more. “The CIA is working the Holly Dubois case?”
“Not quite. Dubois is a small part of what we think is a larger operation, but this isn’t the kind of thing that we can talk about in public.” She pushed the plate closer to me. “Finish the fries. You clearly need them. Then we’ll go to my place to chat. Maybe you can tell me how you got that giant lump on your head. I’m sure it’s an engaging tale.”
I had no reason to trust Taylor, but the fries tasted great and I was desperate to get out of the dismal bar. Not to mention, Taylor didn’t seem all that concerned with the fact that I was impersonating a police officer. Either that, or she was waiting for the best moment to arrest me. No matter what, she alluded that she might have information about Holly, and I wasn’t about to pass up that chance out of fear of retribution. I polished off the rest of the plate, dusted my hands, and gestured for Taylor to lead the way out.
“Hey!” Greg said. “You gotta pay for those!”
“Put it on my tab,” Taylor called over her shoulder.
It was pouring outside, and the thunder and lightning were getting worse. The area hadn’t seen a storm like this in a long time. Trees buckled under the wind. Loose branches tumbled down the street, while miniature tornadoes sucked up leaves and dirt and cycloned them around the town. The sidewalks and gutters had flooded, and I was glad that Mac’s thick work boots were waterproof. Taylor’s place wasn’t far. We sprinted two blocks down from the bar before ducking into a narrow alleyway with a dumpster full of wet, reeking trash. Taylor shoved a key into the lock of a small, weathered door, threw it open, and ushered me inside.
It wasn’t much of a home. The walls were made of the same red brick as the outside of the building, and you could
hear the wind howl through the thin window panes. A bucket caught leaking rainwater from the roof in the kitchen, which was less of a kitchen and more of a corner of the one-room flat for Taylor to put a hot plate and a mini fridge. A portable cot served as the bed. The lumpy mattress promised back aches for days to come. There were no personal items anywhere. No pictures or journals. No instruments or sports gear or anything else that might indicate that Taylor actually had a hobby. The apartment was bare and boring until I caught sight of the hidden equipment beneath the cot.
“What’s all that?” I asked, pointing.
Taylor adjusted the blanket on the cot so that it draped over the edge and obscured the hardware beneath. “Nothing. Stuff for my job.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Cameras, computers, listening devices, et cetera,” she replied with a nonchalant wave of her hand. “I’m the only one assigned to Wolfwater, and I’ve only been here for a few months. It takes a lot longer to get the locals to trust you, so sometimes you have to make concessions.”
“You’re spying on people here?”
“Don’t sound so scandalized,” she said. “I do what I have to do for my job.”
I stepped farther into the room, running my fingers over a threadbare couch. “Your job. Right. You mentioned a larger operation that included the Dubois case. Want to fill me in?”
Taylor threw me a towel and draped another across her own shoulders. “That’s not how this is going to work,” she said. “I have information that you want, right? Well, I think you have information for me too. I say we make a trade. A fact for a fact.”
“How do I know it’s worth it?” I asked her, blotting the front of Mac’s uniform with the towel before squeezing the excess moisture from my hair.
“Because I know who you really are.”
I froze mid drying process. Taylor took a kettle from a cabinet in the kitchen, filled it with water, and turned on the hot plate. She took in my shocked expression.
“Oh, come on,” she said. “Like it wasn’t obvious. I recognized you as soon as you walked into that bar. It’s Bridget, right? You look exactly like your little sister. Great genetics, by the way.”
“Is that why you haven’t arrested me yet?” I asked. “Because you feel bad for me?”
“That’s part of it,” she admitted as the kettle gurgled on the hot plate. “I have an idea of what it’s like to lose a sister. Not quite like you do. It was a different scenario, more our own fault than anyone else’s.”
“And the other part?”
“I told you,” Taylor said. “I think you might have information that I want.”
The kettle whistled, a line of steam escaping from its spout. Taylor pulled it off the hot plate, poured two cups of hot water, and dunked a green tea bag into each. She handed one off to me, and I nodded my thanks, warming my pruny fingers against the toasty ceramic.
Taylor leaned against the back of her couch, blowing cool air across the surface of her tea. “Here’s how we do this, okay? First of all, we have to trust each other. I know we’ve only known each other for about ten minutes, but this sort of thing doesn’t work without mutual trust. It’s a leap of faith. Do you think you can do that?”
“It sort of depends on where all of this is going,” I told her. “I’ve got a timeline to keep to.”
“You can tell me all about your timeline in a minute,” she replied. “I just need to know that if I help you out, I can rely on you to help me too.”
I took an experimental sip from my mug, burned my lip, and drew away. “Fine. Mutual trust. Got it. What’s next?”
“Why are you in Wolfwater?” Taylor asked. “Why come here at all? I imagine the same information is available in your hometown.”
“Not exactly.” I draped the towel over the couch as a barrier between my drenched pants and the questionable fabric below and sat down. It felt good to lift the weight of the utility belt from my waist. “I don’t know how much you know about me, but I was never the goody two shoes that Holly is.”
Taylor tapped the name tag pinned to the front of my shirt. “Really? I never would’ve guessed.”
I swatted her away. The tea jostled in my grip, sloshing over the lip of the mug and coasting down my hand. “It’s like you said before. You do what you have to do for your job. I’m doing what I have to do to find my sister. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to compromise my own integrity to keep someone else safe.”
“I’ve read your file.”
“The CIA has a file on me?”
“You’ve crossed our radar,” Taylor said. “Specifically my radar. That bigger operation I was talking about it? It appears that you used to be a part of it.”
For the second time since I’d met Taylor, my skin crawled with anxiety. I had a feeling that I knew exactly what operation Taylor was talking about. It was the human trafficking ring that Fox had run out of Paris. Technically, I had been promoted from victim to employee against my will. It was safer to work with Fox rather than for him, despite drowning in guilt over the consequences of my actions. I’d left that part of my life in France three years ago, but as of late, my past chipped away at a slate that I thought I’d wiped clean.
“What do you know about that operation?” I asked Taylor.
“Not much,” she admitted. “We only picked up on it after the girls in and around this area started to go missing. Holly Dubois and Melody Harver weren’t the only ones. For months, blonde athletes between the ages of fifteen and eighteen have been disappearing one at a time. We totaled eleven missing girls in the last year. Obviously, something was going on.” She paused to drink her tea and join me on the couch. “After examining the evidence, we were able to link the disappearances here with similar occurrences overseas. There were a surprising amount of threads to follow, but once we tracked them to Paris, we lost the trail. It’s as if whoever is spearheading this campaign stopped bothering to cover his tracks, or at least he’s not being as careful as he used to. Any ideas about that?”
A hard lump rose in my throat. I swallowed it down. My mug lay forgotten in my lap. “Do you know him?”
“We know of him,” Taylor said. “Got a couple pictures from the airport security cameras when he arrived in the States. The better question is how do you know him?”
A rush of suppressed memories flooded through me, but I quickly flushed them out again. “The man you’re looking for used to run a trafficking ring out of an abandoned hotel in Paris. I never knew his real name. He called himself Fox.”
Taylor set aside her mug, took a notebook from the kitchen counter, and began scribbling hastily in it. “And what was your affiliation with this Fox character?”
“He abducted me,” I said bluntly. “During a party in an off-limits sector of the Paris Catacombs.”
Taylor didn’t flinch like others might have. From the way her pen flew across the page of her notepad, I knew that this wasn’t information the CIA was aware of yet. The words that came out of my mouth were currency, and I had to figure out a way to use it to my advantage.
“We didn’t find any leads in Paris,” Taylor said, chewing on the end of her pen. “What happened there? Why did Fox decide to move his business to the United States? Specifically this area? It’s not like North Carolina is a hotbed for this kind of activity.”
“Because of me, I imagine.”
“You?”
“Fox and I shared a special relationship,” I said, spitting out the word special to imply that there was nothing good about our relationship at all. “But if you want to know anything else about me and that asshole, you have to help me first. You’re the one who said this was a two-way street.”
“This information is vital—”
“I know it is,” I said. “Which is exactly why I’m not going to blurt it all out to you in some crap shack in the middle of nowhere. My sister is in trouble, my foster parents are worried sick about her, my best friend hates me, and the real Mackenzie Hart is lying in
a hospital bed with a bullet wound in her thigh because of me, so if you want information on Fox, I’ll give it all to you after you help me find my sister.”
The pen tumbled out of Taylor’s grasp and clattered to the floor. “Wait, the real Mackenzie was shot? Is she okay?”
“She’ll pull through,” I said. “She’s a badass. My sister, on the other hand, doesn’t have as good of a chance. I didn’t come to Wolfwater for fries and a pint. One of the locals spotted Holly and the idiot who took her at some abandoned train station on the outskirts of town. I want to go out there and check it out.”
“I heard about that,” Taylor said. “Wolfwater’s deputies have already combed the area though.”
“Wanda—Officer Martin—said she used to play out by the train station when she was a kid,” I told her. “Apparently, there are a lot of places to hide out there. Emmett could have easily found one and holed up with my little sister.”
The thought sent a shiver down my spine. I shuddered as Taylor tossed aside her notebook.
“So if we go out to this train station together and find your sister, you’ll fill me in on everything you know about Fox?” she asked. “I mean everything. From the moment you met him to the last time you saw him and all of your communication in between.”
“If we find my sister alive, I’ll tell you whatever you want,” I said. “All that matters to me is that Holly gets home safely.”
Taylor stood up and took two heavy-duty rain jackets from a nearby coat hook, one black and one dark green. She handed the black one to me. “All right then. Let’s head out. You’re driving though. We might as well put that stolen cruiser to good use.”
The borrowed jacket protected me from most of the wind and the rain, but when we piled into the cruiser and started driving to the edge of Wolfwater, it was slow going. The windshield wipers didn’t make a dent in the sheets of water that showered down from the dark clouds above, and the world was one gray portrait of madness. The headlights punctuated a fraction of the road in front of us, so I eased along at a glacial pace, wishing that the damn weather would just clear up so that I could speed after Holly without running into a telephone pole. How long had it been since Christian’s bullet had grazed her side? I hadn’t heard her voice in my head since that morning, but I held out hope that she was still alive. As connected as we were, I knew that somehow, if she died, I would feel it.
Little Girl Lost: A Riveting Kidnapping Mystery- Book 2 Page 4