by Неизвестный
“I just need to talk to Becky Anderson. It’s important.”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”
Dillon caught Becky’s eye and motioned her to come over. She started down the aisle, her face revealing that she knew exactly why Dillon was asking to speak with her.
“Sir—” the teacher began.
“This is about a missing girl. I have to speak with Becky.”
Without giving the teacher another word, Dillon took Becky by the arm and led her away from the crowd.
The petite eighteen-year-old had guilt written all over her face.
“Do you know why I want to talk to you?” Dillon asked, trying to maintain calm while his concern over Lucy continued to grow.
“I—” Becky bit her lip. “I don’t know why Lucy’s late.”
“An hour late?” Dillon asked.
“Well, I…she’ll be here,” Becky said lamely.
“What happened after Lucy arrived at your house this morning?”
“Um, she didn’t.”
“What?” Dillon exclaimed. “Where was she going?”
“Please, you don’t understand.”
“I need the truth, Becky. Now.”
“She went to meet someone.”
“Who?”
“A friend.”
“Name?”
“Trevor Conrad.”
Dillon frowned. “That doesn’t sound like one of her boyfriends.” But he admitted to himself that he’d been too busy lately to keep up with Lucy’s love life.
“He’s in college.”
Dillon tensed. He didn’t like where this conversation was going. “Where did she meet him?”
“Starbucks. The one right around the corner,” she added as if that made it safe. “We always go there.”
“And you lied for her?”
“I didn’t really lie,” Becky said.
Dillon raised an eyebrow, but didn’t have to say anything. “Lucy knew everyone would throw a fit if they found out she met someone on—” Becky shut her mouth.
“Online?” Dillon prodded.
Becky nodded.
Dillon pulled out his cell phone and dialed Lucy’s number.
“Hola! It’s Luce. I’m either talking or sleeping! Leave a message. Adios.”
“Lucy, it’s Dillon. Call me as soon as you get this message. It’s important.”
He hung up.
“What do you know about Trevor Conrad?” Dillon asked Becky.
“He goes to Georgetown. He’s a freshman and from Los Angeles. Lucy met him through an online group at Georgetown. It’s all legitimate. You have to be a student to join. She’s not stupid.”
She doesn’t have to be stupid to be in danger.
Dillon was now as concerned as Carina had been earlier. Trevor Conrad may be a student at Georgetown and still a threat. Or he could be impersonating a student. Dillon needed to get to Starbucks as soon as possible and talk to the staff.
“When was Lucy supposed to meet this Trevor?”
“Nine,” she said.
“Is there anything else you’re not telling me, Becky?”
She bit her lip, tears rolling over her lashes. “She promised to meet me here fifteen minutes before graduation started. I don’t know what happened. Lucy should be here by now. I’m so sorry.”
Lucy regained consciousness when a reverberating motor changed pitch.
Her eyelids wouldn’t open, her limbs were numb, and she was bone cold. She shifted and discovered she’d been tied to a metal pipe.
She was sitting in a low puddle of ocean water, its distinctive salty aroma permeating her senses, waking her fully. The low rumble of a motor and the rise and fall of the floor told her she was on a boat. It wasn’t a big boat, she could tell, but it was big enough to have a couple of rooms beneath the deck.
Her new suede jacket—the one Carina had given her for high school graduation—was torn. Lucy felt a flap of material hanging from her elbow. That angered her for a split second, before she realized that something else was very, very wrong.
Someone was in the hold with her.
“So you’re finally awake.”
She jumped at the unfamiliar male voice.
“Who are you?” Lucy tried but failed to keep the panic out of her voice.
No answer. Though it hurt her head, she forced her eyelids open. Faint, orange emergency lights glowed dimly. It was indeed the hold of a boat, a small room with pipes and storage bins. The engine was behind her, its sound vibrating off the metal walls, making it seem like it was coming from everywhere. She swallowed thickly, coughed.
A big man with blond hair sat on a chair by the door, staring at her with dark eyes. In his right hand was a gun.
She swallowed again, feeling nauseous. “Who are you?” she repeated, fear bubbling in her gut. How did she get here? What had happened? Everything seemed fuzzy, her head felt thick. Had someone hit her over the head? She couldn’t remember. No, her head didn’t hurt like that. Just tired.
Had she been drugged?
The stranger stood, then knocked on the room’s closed metal door. A moment later, it opened. “She’s awake,” he said to someone Lucy couldn’t see.
“I’ll get him,” another voice replied, and Lucy heard someone walking up metal stairs.
“What’s going on?” Lucy tried to sound brave, but she was terrified.
The last thing she remembered was leaving the house to meet Trevor. They’d spent the past year talking online and more recently on the phone.
She’d never even made it into Starbucks. What had happened? She honestly couldn’t remember.
Think, Lucy!
It had been crowded, nine o’clock on a Thursday morning. She’d had two hours to get to the school, more than enough time. Parking at the far end of the lot, Lucy had been nervous. What if Trevor didn’t like her? What if he thought she was too young or immature?
She had opened her car door—
Then nothing. Lucy couldn’t remember anything after that.
The metal door of the hold reopened and another man walked in. He dismissed the hulking figure with the gun as he said, “Circle the island until all is clear, then let me know before you dock.”
Island? Lucy shivered. This man wasn’t as old as the big lug with the gun, but Lucy wasn’t sure exactly how old. Maybe thirty-five, maybe forty. He was also blond, but with windswept hair. Handsome, too, until Lucy looked in his eyes.
Cold, hard, blue. Even in the dim light, she saw how icy pale they were.
“Hello, Lucy.”
“Who are you? Why am I tied up?”
He put on an expression of mock surprise. “I’m shocked you don’t know who I am.”
She shook her head. “I’ve never met you.”
He smiled, but it didn’t make her feel any safer. “I recall you told me once, ‘We’re soul mates. I can feel it. I’d know you anywhere.’”
Lucy dry heaved, her words coming back to her. The words she’d typed to Trevor Conrad. Her online boyfriend. But Trevor was a freshman at Georgetown, where she would be starting college in the fall. They’d met in a Georgetown student chat room. He was nineteen. He wasn’t this man who was older than her brothers.
“You’re not—”
He laughed and touched her face. Lucy recoiled as if burned and he scowled, bringing his hardened face an inch from hers. Fear Lucy had never known before gripped her and she began shaking uncontrollably. “You should have listened to your family and not met with someone you didn’t know.”
“Why?” Her voice came out a squeak. She hated being afraid. “Why are you doing this?”
“You’re going to be a star, Lucy.”
“I want to go home. My family has some money. Call them. They’ll come.”
He laughed, stood, and walked back to the hatch door. “Lucy, do you think everything is about money? You don’t understand now, but you will. Very, very soon. Your family might try to find you, but you’ll never see t
hem again.”
He opened the door.
“What are you going to do?”
Trevor looked over his shoulder. “Trust me, sweetheart, you don’t want to know.”
She was perfect.
Trevor Conrad wasn’t his name, but he’d once known—and killed—a man named Trevor Conrad. In fact, were Trevor still alive he would have fallen head over heels for the dark-haired beauty. But Trevor was, deservedly, in his grave. As far as Lucy was concerned, he was Trevor Conrad, a freshman at Georgetown. Trask was fine with that identity for the time being. After Lucy was dead, he would step into another dead man’s shoes. He had plenty to choose from.
Trask wasn’t his name, either, but he’d grown used to it. He liked it. The name commanded respect. Trask. Strong, forceful, in charge. He’d particularly enjoyed the way Special Agent Kate Donovan spat it from her mouth, with such venom, right before he disappeared from the warehouse with her partner. He loved women who fought back. They were the most fun to kill.
Unfortunately, he hadn’t been able to get to Kate in the warehouse, a minor failure. Ever since she and her partner had started investigating Trask Enterprises, they’d been a problem. On the surface his corporation had been legitimate, but they had dug too deep. They’d never be able to prove he killed April Klinger. First, his face had never been shown on screen. Second, there was no body. The acid would have eaten away every identifiable piece of April even if they were able to find where he’d buried her.
But his other operations were at risk. While Trask Enterprises was legitimate and aboveboard, his more entertaining sideline was not.
The bigger failure of that night was Kate Donovan killing two of his men. He couldn’t forgive her for that. Good men who took orders were hard to find. And because she’d seen him, he’d had to disappear, putting his legitimate business in the hands of pathetic investors who were now raking in the dough from Trask’s own cyber masterpiece: sexual fantasy role-playing. And Roger had had to go underground because he was wanted for murder.
Just thinking of all he’d lost, the money he’d been forced to spend to stay in hiding these past five years, enraged him. He’d taken care of Paige Henshaw, but Kate had slipped away. The bitch. He couldn’t wait to someday get his hands around her little neck.
But for now, he’d let pretty little Lucy think whatever she wanted. And she thought he was Trevor Conrad. Although it really didn’t matter if she knew his real name; she’d be dead in two days.
“All clear?” he asked Ollie as he went on deck.
The sun had set, and its dim light was fading fast. The evening breeze this far north was cold, but he didn’t put on a jacket. He enjoyed the sensation, the freshest air in the world empowering him. He’d always felt at home here.
“Yes, sir,” Ollie said.
“Dock next time you come around. Is the house ready?”
“Yes. Denise did a terrific job.”
“I knew she would.”
He had planned on killing Denise years ago, but she was so perfectly submissive she had ended up becoming a necessary partner. Special Agent Paige Henshaw had died in her place. It was better that way. Denise would do anything Trask asked, though it wasn’t as much fun pretending to rape a woman as it was to take a woman who didn’t want him.
Paige. She’d been satisfying, though because of her arrogant partner tracking her to the cabin, he’d had to rush her kill, resulting in a loss of more than a million dollars.
He’d lied to Lucy Kincaid: it was always about the money. The rest, well, that was just plain fun.
This island had become his sanctuary five years ago when he’d had to go underground. His network had temporarily fallen apart and he had tried, unsuccessfully, to find that bitch who’d fucked him. But Special Agent Kate Donovan had her own problems and she’d disappeared herself.
How does it feel to be on the run, Kate? Someday I’ll come for you. You can’t hide from me forever.
Killing Lucy Kincaid would be fun.
Killing Kate Donovan would be ecstasy.
* * *
TWO
JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT the alarm sounded.
Kate leaped from the cot, sliding her feet into boots before they touched the frigid cement floor. She strode to the computer bank that filled an entire wall of her barren room. She didn’t need additional lighting. The computer screens provided enough illumination for her to use the keyboard.
Typing in her personal codes, she watched the computer security program she’d enhanced identify the latest webcam that had gone live.
She didn’t get her hopes up that it would be Trask. For the past five years she’d been running and watching, always on the lookout for him. She was keeping strong, staying smart. After Paige, he’d killed two others, and they, too, weighed on her conscience. If only she’d taken him down when she’d had the chance.
But now she had better technology, more equipment, and time. After finding this hiding place two years ago, she was no longer running. That gave Kate an edge. She didn’t have to watch her back as vigorously.
Her alarm went off at least twice a day, sometimes more. She ran through the protocols she’d set up to triangulate the signal, not missing a step. The methodical process kept her heart rate steady, her mind engaged.
She knew that if she could find the signal quickly, it wouldn’t be Trask. He was too good.
Feed not found.
She sat up straighter, flipped on the coffeepot to reheat what was left from earlier in the day. Her resources were at a premium, drinking stale coffee part of the routine. Her blond hair and blue eyes stuck out in Mexico, so she didn’t make the daylong trip to Monterrey often. She didn’t want to have to disappear again. Besides, between government factions both good and bad, and the bands of criminals and drug smugglers, the whole area was dangerous—except here. This mountaintop observatory was an ideal place to monitor Trask’s movement. High enough to get rid of chatter, to tap into national security networks, to monitor every live webcam she found the feed for. Remote enough that she and ancient Professor Fox didn’t get visitors or tourists.
She usually bribed one of the local kids to bring her supplies. Sometimes they left with her money, but sometimes they came back for an opportunity to look at the stars.
Sometimes she looked at the stars as well, on nights when she didn’t feel that everything she did was hopeless. That Trask was going to kill again, another woman was going to suffer a violent, miserable death so Trask could rake in millions of dollars from the perverts who jerked off to the rape and torture and slaughter of women.
Kate wanted to kill him with her bare hands, wanted to make Trask suffer like he had made, by her count, nine women suffer. She would use a knife or a gun or any other weapon at her disposal. He needed to be dead.
She pushed her emotions to the back of her mind and tried her second protocol.
Feed not found.
She poured lukewarm coffee into her mug, dumped in a spoonful of sugar, and stirred, watching the strings of numbers, each representing a satellite frequency and corresponding land-based server. Legitimate webcams would route the information to the satellite and then to specific servers around the globe. They used the same system, so they were easy to identify.
Trask, like most cyber criminals, piggybacked on legitimate transmissions and repeatedly bounced the data he sent from server to satellite to server so that it was virtually impossible to track where the feed originated. By the time law enforcement tracked it—which could take days, if they found the physical location at all—the suspect could disappear. Or, like Trask, they might use a randomly generated protocol that made it impossible to track, unless federal law enforcement had a warrant. And even a warrant didn’t always help. Criminals often set up a false signature behind the feed so that it looked like it was coming from somewhere else.
Kate was no longer concerned with things like warrants. What she was doing was highly illegal. And her goal was not putting Trask in prison.<
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Feed not found.
She hesitated a moment, then logged on to the dummy account she’d created five years ago to monitor Trask. If someone at the Bureau was watching in real time, they might be able to track her. So it was imperative that Kate get in and out fast.
Her dummy account profile was that of a wealthy Texas businessman. She had a credit card with no limit, though the cost of watching a woman die was twenty-five thousand dollars. She’d used it once before, but she’d been too late.
Five years ago, Kate and Paige had been assigned to April Klinger’s disappearance. She had run away when she was seventeen. A private investigator her grandmother hired had discovered that April was an online porn actress. He had found one filmed segment that disturbed him, and he had brought it to the FBI’s attention.
It looked like April had been murdered, and the rape-fantasy scenario and her death had been posted online. Downloads of the segment numbered in the hundreds of thousands.
Problem was, they had no body—dead or alive. The FBI investigation led to Trask Enterprises, run by the slimy Roger Morton. He denied that “Trask” the person even existed.
Trask Enterprises had its tentacles in many so-called legitimate Internet pornography sites. The corporation was set up to rake in the money with willing participants and hundreds of thousands of regular-paying customers. At anywhere from $9.95 to $29.99 a month, sexual deviants could watch live sex, fantasy role-playing including rape, men and women stripping, and more. No longer was pornography a male-only spectator sport. During Kate’s tenure on the sex crimes task force of the Violent Crimes/Major Offenders unit—VCMO—she had investigated numerous claims, most of which ended up being consensual sex, advertised for the world to see.
But this case sent Kate’s instincts into orbit, and when witness after witness turned up dead or missing, she knew she was on to something. Or someone.
Trask.
She and Paige had managed to get to one person inside Trask Enterprises, a terrified woman named Denise Arno. They had promised her immunity, anything and everything, to set Trask up.