by Dale Mayer
And, for the first time, she started to believe it. “I’d do a lot to avoid being recaptured again,” she whispered.
He ever-so-gently stroked her cheek and whispered back, “I have no intention of losing you again.”
She closed her eyes and huddled under the blanket, her body slowly calming down. She didn’t even want to dwell on the crime-scene cleanup, but it was hard not to when she saw just how efficient and smooth the other people’s actions had been. She couldn’t imagine what all these guys were trying to do and how much effort they had gone through to do it.
A whole team had come in and swept out the place, then cleaned it up and swiped it of fingerprints and that body. … Sure, a service elevator was here, and it wasn’t even that far away, but somebody had shut down the cameras to let them all escape detection. The same thing had been done to the cameras that had enabled her kidnappers to get her out of the original hotel room and to move her out too. “Who was that who took off with the prisoner?”
“A government agency rep.”
“Do you think our prisoner was connected with some government plot?” she asked, bewildered.
“Not necessarily,” Nico said. “We have to consider all avenues.”
“Like what?”
“Like your family,” Keane said suddenly.
She looked at him in surprise, but Nico’s phone buzzed, gathering her attention now.
He looked up to read the text and walked to the front door. “Coffee’s here.” He opened the door and pulled in a cart.
And she realized that the text had told him that it was outside the door. She shook her head. “So now they won’t knock?”
He grinned at her. “Here,” he said and pushed the trolley between the two beds.
She looked to see a beautiful latte with a pattern on the top. She smiled. “So, even in times of stress like this, I get something pretty.”
“Is there a reason not to enjoy every moment?”
“I think I have even more reason to enjoy every moment,” she said.
“Especially now.”
She sat up, lifted the cup, and took a sip. Then she put it on the night table and hitched her butt backward, so she could lean against the headboard with the blanket up around her chest and then hugged her coffee again.
He returned to the silver coffee carafe. He poured two cups, for him and Keane.
“How did you guys know I like lattes?”
“We know everything,” Keane said in a dry tone.
She winced at that. “Well, I hope not,” she said.
“And why is that?” Nico asked.
“Nobody wants their entire life completely opened for viewing.”
“Very few people ever get to see the details,” Nico said. He again turned toward the trolley and lifted the lid off the dome in the center.
She’d seen it there but hadn’t even registered it—or what was under it. A big plate of cookies and muffins. She cried out in delight and immediately snatched a muffin.
He stared at her. “Are you still hungry?”
“Well, I ate the apple to give my jaw something to work on,” she said by way of explanation. “But this looked so good. And I guess maybe I am a little hungry.”
Nico offered Keane something off the plate, and, when the plate was returned to the trolley, she still saw several cookies and another muffin. She had no intention of being ladylike and not indulging. She was still hungry and still afraid that whatever was coming would be a little harder than anything she’d seen yet. “Are you going to tell me any details about how we’re leaving?”
“No,” Nico said, “not yet.”
“Right,” she said. “I’ll just sit here and eat then.”
“You do that,” he said.
And she did, but, after the coffee and the food, she felt sleepy again. “You guys won’t leave me alone, right?”
Nico looked over with a smile and said, “Go to sleep. I’ll wake you when we’re ready to leave.”
She stared at him in surprise. “Are we leaving tonight? Well, I guess it’s technically morning.”
“In a few hours,” he said. “Go ahead and sleep. It’s the best answer yet.”
Not being able to get any more information out of him, she curled up and laid her head on the pillow, then pulled the blanket back up to her chin and fell asleep.
“You’re getting too attached,” Keane growled.
“I don’t think so,” Nico said. “I’m just a little friendlier than you are.”
“It seems to me that you’re getting too attached.”
Nico ignored Keane. Nico’s partner was big and gruff, but he had the heart of a teddy bear. They were just trying to make this as easy on Charlotte as possible. Nico got up and moved the trolley out of the way, so, if she had to get up in the night when she was still groggy, she wouldn’t trip over it. She’d left them two cookies, one each. He handed one to Keane and then took the last one, collecting all the dishes as he put the trolley back outside the door. “Do we have an update on the timeline?”
“Helicopter’s arriving on the roof in one hour and forty.”
“It’s not quite enough sleep for her, but anything she gets is good.”
“It’ll be all she gets for a little while,” Keane noted.
Nico nodded. “It should be an interesting trip.”
“Well, it’s the way this has panned out,” Keane said. “We have a long way to go to get back. The flight’s the most direct, but, short of a private jet on a private airstrip, it won’t be the easiest way to go.”
“That’s all right,” Nico said. “I’m okay to go back on a cruiser or a submarine or whatever.”
“It’ll be a combination,” he said with a smile.
“Right.” Nico sat down and worked on his research. “I’d like answers from that damn idiot though.”
“Not to mention the shooter.”
“All that the Mavericks team says on the shooter is how he was carrying a wad of cash, and they suspect he was paid for the job.”
“Which we already figured out,” Keane said in a dry tone. “So that’s really not helpful.”
“I know,” he said. “So we focus on the last two men of the kidnapping team. The one we caught and the one we haven’t seen yet.”
“And whether the shooter was the mastermind or if he’s just another minion.”
“I’d say minion.”
“She didn’t recognize him though.”
Nico nodded. “Still, you’d think getting more men involved would make it even messier. Or they suspected that, if the shooter failed, we’d have killed him anyway.”
Just then the chat window opened up, and a picture of a fourth male came up. A search of the local reports by Australian authorities regarding gunshot wounds tracked the gun used to kill the first two DBs.
“Good. Now if only we can find the fourth man,” Nico said, sharing this newest intel with Keane. “Still our bloody prisoner should be damn glad he’s alive.”
“Interesting,” Keane said. “So they’re cleaning up and getting rid of everybody.”
“Which means they’re changing the operation or moving it.”
“I’d say more like shutting it down,” Keane said quietly. “We’ve got her, and it’s obvious we won’t give her up.”
“Or they’ll lie low and grab her later.”
“We’re thinking it’s about the brother?”
Yes,” Nico said. “At the mention of her family earlier, she looked more puzzled than anything.”
A soft voice spoke from the bed. “That’s because I don’t have any family,” she said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Your records surely would show that I was in foster care.”
“You had a brother,” Keane said. “What happened to him?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “We were separated when I was in fourth grade, and he was in second. I never saw him again. I’ve tried contacting the adoption agencies and foster care, but nobody will give me any information
.”
“And yet they didn’t tell you that he had passed on or anything else?”
She shook her head. “No, nobody will tell me anything.”
The two men exchanged hard glances.
She sat up slowly. “What do you know that I don’t know?”
Nico drummed his fingers on the table, waiting to see what Keane would say.
Keane looked at Nico and said, “It might have something to do with him.”
“What might?” she asked.
“This kidnapping,” Nico said.
“Only if he’s alive and if he’s some prominent businessman that I don’t know about,” she said. “Otherwise who’d care?”
“Nobody said anything to you at all, huh?” Keane asked.
“I told you,” she said, as she stifled a yawn. “Nobody told me anything.”
Keane asked, “And you just automatically put down your kidnapping to your activism?”
She shrugged. “It makes sense. I pissed off a lot of people. But all this killing? … None of that makes any sense.”
That part bothered Nico too. “Did anyone attack any of the rallies you’ve attended, bring weapons of any kind? Bombs? Something more organized?”
She stared at him in surprise. “No. Nothing.”
“Any of the organizers being blackmailed? Threatened in any way?”
“Not that I know of.” She shook her head. “Maybe you guys should be the ones to answer that question.”
“We’re looking into it, but a lot of people were here for this Australian rally.”
“Check the organizers because, like I said, they didn’t have any reason for me to come over here. But I ended up giving in anyway.”
“Was that you giving in or your assistant forcing you to give in?”
“Well, Maggie’s very good at coercion,” she admitted with a wince. “She doesn’t travel with me, but she was adamant that I came.”
“What’s her name?” Nico asked, hearing Charlotte’s response and typing in the name of her assistant. “Maybe this has something to do with her.”
“I doubt it. She’s like sixty-five years old and has nothing to do with anything. She’s only worked for me for six months, but she’s a godsend.”
At that, the two men exchanged glances and bent down to their laptops.
Her soft voice drifted toward Nico. “You can dig as much as you want,” she said, “but I’m telling you that you won’t find anything.”
“Why is that?”
“Because she’s the sweetest, nicest person I’ve ever met,” she said. “She’s the mother I never had.”
“What happened to your parents?”
“They died in a car accident.”
“And your brother?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “When you’re in foster care, you’re surviving day to day. I was traumatized when they split me and my brother up, and it’s always been in the back of my mind that he’s out there somewhere. But I didn’t know for sure that he is. It’s a sucky system where they don’t let you find your other family members.”
“I thought they did?”
“Then other people know what buttons to push that I don’t,” she snapped. “I couldn’t get any information out of anybody.”
“We might be able to take a look,” Keane said.
At that, Nico raised an eyebrow. It wasn’t for them to say anything without getting some actual word, but he could understand her wanting to know something about her family.
“Well, if you have any more pull than I do,” she said in surprise, “I’d really appreciate it.”
Nico kept his thoughts to himself, but just because Maggie was a nice old lady didn’t make a damn bit of difference in his world. He would like to see Charlotte reconnect with her brother, particularly if there wasn’t any reason not to. He quickly sent a message to his team. Find the brother. I think it’s time Charlotte got reacquainted.
The message came back with a question mark, meaning, they didn’t know but they’d make inquiries. Is it related?
No clue yet. Check on her assistant right now.
Name?
He typed it in and said, She hasn’t worked there very long.
Nico then glanced at Charlotte. “How long have you known Maggie?”
Chapter 5
Charlotte shrugged. “She was always there in the periphery of my world for the last couple years. I used to see her often, sit down, and have a cup of tea with her. Only when I needed an assistant, after my other assistant left, then I considered hiring Maggie. She was in a tough spot, down on her luck, and just needed to have something, even part-time.”
“What happened to your previous assistant?” Keane asked.
“From one day to the next, she disappeared,” Charlotte said in a harsh tone. “I contacted the police when she didn’t show up and filed a missing person’s report, but I never heard anything more.”
Nico sat back at that news. “That’s another major issue to have come up in your life in the last year then, isn’t that?”
“Well, sure,” she said, “but it’s not my issue. It’s not my world. I mean, obviously it was tough losing her. But I mean—” Then she stopped, her voice faltering. “Let me put it this way. I wasn’t terribly friendly with her. She was doing a job for me, but she wasn’t doing it the best that she could. I wasn’t sure how to fire her because I had nobody to replace her. She was barely doing what I needed done, so I was almost ambivalent.
“As it was, she didn’t show up for work one day, and I assumed she’d gotten another job. I had her new phone number, but she never answered. I did drive by her place and knocked on her door, and no one was there. Honestly, I figured she just had had enough of me and buggered off. She was always talking about going back East anyway.”
“Is that the working mentality of the youth these days?” Keane asked, his lips quirking.
“I don’t know what it is,” she said. “It was frustrating at the time mostly because, if she had just told me, it would have been fine. But to not show up from one day to the next, what was I supposed to think?”
“Did she have a boyfriend?”
“Yes, and, when I knocked on her neighbor’s apartment, they basically shrugged and said that they hadn’t seen her in weeks anyway.”
“Meaning that she was staying all the time with her boyfriend?”
“I think so, yes. I haven’t seen her since. I don’t know if she sees me and avoids me or if it’s just the fact that our paths don’t cross, and that’s the way she likes it.”
“Interesting. Did you pay her fully?”
“I paid her up to the last day as per our agreement,” she said with a nod. “But I deposited the money into her account.”
“Do you have her account info?”
She looked at him in surprise and then sat up slowly and said, “Well, I’m sure I can find it. But I don’t have my phone.”
“And there was no laptop in your room, was there?”
She shrugged. “No, I forgot it at home. I could use one of your laptops to log on to my account though.”
“We found no purse either. Do the kidnappers have it?”
Charlotte shook her head. “No. I don’t carry a purse usually. Not at home and not when traveling for sure.”
“So, did you always transfer funds for your previous assistant’s wages?”
“Sometimes I transferred, and sometimes I walked over and deposited a check.”
Keane stepped aside and said, “Here. You can use my laptop if you like.”
She walked over and sat down, then brought up a new page, logged into her bank account, and searched back by date. “Here it is,” she said. “I always put it in my notes when I do a transfer like this.”
He quickly read off the account number to Nico.
And, with that, she logged off and stepped away from the laptop. She walked to the window and stared out into the odd light outside. “It feels so surreal,” she murmured.
&nbs
p; “Yeah, when you get into a scenario like this, it certainly leads you away from the mom-and-pop type of living that you were doing.”
“And I already lived a little bit on the left-wing,” she murmured. “I was trying to get out of all this. But …”
“When was the last time you attended a rally like that?”
“Two years ago in England,” she said. “That was just a little too violent for me too.”
“Did something happen there?” Nico asked, his voice sharp.
She turned to look at him and gave him a soft smile, then shook her head. “No, I was just thinking that all the rallies did were incite the people to get hotter about the issues. Change wasn’t really happening, and, if my job was to get the word out, then I had a better chance of doing that through my books.”
“Maybe,” he said in a noncommittal tone. “It does make you a little less visible on a personal level than speaking at rallies.”
“That was another consideration,” she said. She leaned against the window ledge and just looked at the city lights twinkling all around them. It was gorgeous, but, at the same time, she now knew that an underbelly of evil and nastiness she couldn’t even begin to contemplate was out there too. “Do you think the prisoner will be okay?”
“Not likely,” Keane said, not holding any punches. “If he’s visible and available, the mastermind behind this kidnapping will probably take him out. Otherwise he’ll be locked up for his crimes.”
“And the kidnapping? That’s only if I press charges, isn’t it?”
“And are you telling me that you wouldn’t?” Nico stared at her in astonishment.
She frowned at him. “I don’t really want to be part of a trial on another spectacle like that.”
“Another spectacle?”
“You know what I mean,” she said irritably. “They’d make a case like mine blow up, and it would be a zoo. Honestly, I’m pretty well done with being a physical public figure.”
Just then another buzz went off. She glanced at them. “You guys make more noise …”
“No,” he said, “not anymore.”
She watched as they quickly packed up. And then she realized they were leaving. “Now?”
He nodded. “Now.”