“So what now?” he asked. “Are you taking me to Canada?”
Even as he said it, he realized that couldn’t be the case. Jesenia wouldn’t have told him there was a cabin in Canada if she’d really been planning to take him there after she abducted him. Besides, it would be too difficult for her to get him across the border.
“There’s nothing in Canada,” Jesenia said, validating his thought process. “I have a nice private place set aside for us in Wyoming. You’ll be safe there, and once you understand that this is for your own good, you’ll be happy there too.”
Ángel swallowed the bile that crept up the back of his throat. He kept his voice steady as he said, “You know that I—that I can’t return your feelings, right? You’re a woman, I can’t . . .”
He trailed off then—because while he’d never contemplated the possibility of being raped by a woman, it occurred to him now that it was possible, and his brain was providing him with several creative scenarios.
“Sex doesn’t define a loving relationship,” Jesenia said, in a light scolding tone that was beyond bizarre, given the circumstances. “I just want to protect you, make sure you’re taken care of. There’s no other way for me to keep you safe, Ángel. You’re too self-destructive.”
Ángel watched the passing scenery, seeking any indication of how far they’d come or which route they were taking. There were no signs, though, no mile markers—they were on a two-lane road winding through a rural area, not a major highway. Jesenia would want to avoid law enforcement, cameras, and tolls as much as possible.
While the disadvantages to Ángel were obvious, there was also an upside—the more circuitous their route, the slower their progress, giving more time for the others in San Diego to figure out what had happened and track them down. Ángel had to believe that Charles wouldn’t be content to let him just disappear without a word this time.
Jesenia drove exactly the speed limit, taking them deeper into the California hinterlands, the police scanner crackling softly in the background. Ángel kept himself turned toward the window, refusing to interact, but eventually, a need arose that he could no longer deny.
“Jesenia,” he said reluctantly, “I have to go to the bathroom.”
Without taking her eyes off the road, Jesenia reached into a bag in the backseat, withdrew an empty water bottle, and dropped it into Ángel’s lap.
Ángel stared at the bottle in horror. “You’re not serious,” he said after a moment.
“I can pull over to the side of the road to help you, but I’m not stopping anywhere,” said Jesenia.
After everything that had happened—everything Jesenia had done to him, every dark secret she’d revealed—it was this humiliation that came closest to breaking him. “Please,” he said, tears stinging his eyes. “Please don’t do this to me.”
Her resolve clearly wavered, and it struck Ángel that she liked him needy, enjoyed him pathetic and helpless. It fed into her self-image as his caretaker.
He had no qualms about taking advantage of that. “I’ll be good,” he said. He curled himself into a smaller ball in his seat. “I promise. Please.”
Jesenia sighed and then nodded. “All right. I guess it wouldn’t hurt to top off the gas tank, anyway.”
A few miles down the road, she pulled into a small gas station with only four pumps out front. She parked by the building, unbuckled her seat belt, and turned to face him.
“I want to make some things very clear,” she said. From her other pocket, the one not storing the syringe, she pulled a stun gun. Ángel recoiled instinctively, but she made no further threatening movements. “First, I won’t hesitate to use this on you if it looks like you’re about to do something stupid.”
“I won’t,” he said. He’d only get one real chance to escape; if he failed, she would either kill him or become so restrictive that he’d never have another opportunity. He wouldn’t waste an escape attempt while he was still lethargic and fuzzy-headed from the drugs.
Jesenia tucked the stun gun away and lifted one side of her jacket, showing him the pistol in her shoulder holster. “If you try to communicate with anyone, or signal for help, I’ll only hurt you a little—but I’ll kill whoever you came in contact with. ¿Me explico?”
“Claro.” He had not an ounce of doubt that she was serious. She knew him well; he’d never endanger innocent civilians to try to save himself.
She withdrew a pocketknife from her jeans, bringing her personal weapon count up to four. After cutting him free from his zip ties, she instructed him to stay still while she came around to the passenger-side door. He assumed it was another way for her to assert control—until he tried to stand up, and his knees gave right out from under him. She caught him around the waist and helped him away from the car before slamming the door shut.
As much as he hated to touch her, Ángel had no choice but to sling an arm around her shoulders and lean on her for support. Jesenia pulled up the hood of her jacket and then kept her free hand in the pocket with the stun gun as they shuffled along toward the restroom.
A man emerging from the shop crossed their path and stopped, looking Ángel over with concern. “Hey, man, you okay?”
“He had a little too much to drink,” Jesenia said.
If Ángel had truly intended to reassure the man, he would have met his eyes, smiled, offered a friendly and self-deprecating comment. Instead, Ángel ducked his head and deliberately avoided eye contact—obeying Jesenia’s order to not communicate while ensuring that the man would leave their encounter feeling uneasy. That internal sense of not right would stick with him, nagging at him; he would remember this, even if he didn’t do anything about it.
The man continued on his way, and so did they. Jesenia propped Ángel up against the wall of the building while she quickly checked inside the single restroom.
“Don’t lock the door,” she said, gesturing for him to proceed. “You have three minutes, and then I’m coming in after you.”
He staggered into the bathroom, gripping the walls and then the sink to balance himself on his shaky legs. Behind him, Jesenia rattled the doorknob to be sure he hadn’t locked it, but she didn’t open the door.
After Ángel relieved himself, he stood at the sink to wash his hands, studying his reflection in the mirror. No wonder the man had asked after him—he looked like hell, his eyes sunken and hollowed out, his skin drawn tight over his face, his dry lips visibly cracked. In case the man did mention what he’d seen to someone, Ángel had to leave some kind of sign behind. But what?
His eyes caught and lingered on the cracked, jagged edge of the mirror. Impulsively taking a page from Jesenia’s playbook, he slashed his fingertip against the glass, then squeezed until several drops of bright red blood welled to the surface.
Jesenia wasn’t the only person who could paint with blood.
Though he couldn’t discount the possibility that she’d check the restroom for messages, people tended to have one significant blind spot while searching their environment—they rarely looked up. He was taller than Jesenia, and if he stretched his arm to its limit, he’d be able to reach the very top corner of the mirror.
He did exactly that, smearing his blood on the glass to form a discreet WY. Then he washed his hands again, scrubbing the cut with soap and putting pressure on it to stop the bleeding.
Jesenia opened the door just as Ángel grasped the doorknob. “Sorry,” he said, leaning against the threshold and breathing heavily. “I feel a little dizzy . . .”
He stumbled and pitched forward, obliging her to grab for him. As he’d hoped, his distress proved an excellent diversion.
“Ay, pobrecito,” Jesenia said, smoothing his hair. “Come on, let’s get you back in the car.”
They walked away, leaving Ángel’s message undisturbed. It was the smallest of breadcrumbs, barely worth pinning his hopes on, but it was better than nothing.
He had to believe that someone was searching for him, or he might as well give up now.
/>
“I’ve got all of Jesenia’s financials,” said Jade. Her long brown hair was pulled up in a messy bun, and she still wore the sweatpants and tank top she’d been in when she rushed back to the office. “I’ll put out an APB on her rental car—”
“She wouldn’t have taken that car.” Charles paced the length of the conference room as he spoke. At Eva’s emergency summons, the entire team as well as Ed had returned to work, but he couldn’t relax enough to join them at the table. “Jesenia’s too smart. She would have had an alternate vehicle ready, and she would have dumped her legitimate car somewhere to distract us, the same way she did with Agent Warner’s car at the El Paso airport.”
“If Jesenia’s so smart, why didn’t she dump Ángel’s bike far from her motel too?” Shane asked.
“She probably couldn’t drive it,” Sakura said. “You can’t just hop on a motorcycle and take off if you’ve never driven one before. It takes time to learn how to balance and steer them.”
“Charles,” Eva said, watching him from her seat at the head of the table. Unlike Jade, Sakura, and Shane, who were all casually dressed and looked a little rough around the edges after a long day, she was still as crisp and fresh as she’d been that morning. “We’ve got Jesenia’s and Ángel’s faces splashed across every news outlet statewide, and Ed is on the phone right now liaising with the FBI to take this national. We’ll find them.”
Charles opened his mouth to respond, but was distracted by a soft chime from his computer. He practically leaped across the room and clicked on the new email in his inbox.
“Ben from the Super 8 sent me their parking lot security footage from the past couple of days,” Charles said as he started downloading the compressed files. “At some point, Jesenia brought another car to that motel, and we need to find it. We have to review the—”
He stumbled to a halt, abruptly aware that Eva was regarding him with one arched eyebrow.
“Sorry,” Charles said, rolling his tense shoulders. “Fuck, sorry, I just . . .”
“What were you planning?” Eva asked.
“We need to review the security footage going backward from the time when the cameras went out today. And we also have to break down every alias Jesenia Santos has ever used and find something to help us figure out where she would take Ángel—safe houses, contacts, financial assets, anything.”
“Agreed,” said Eva. “It’s probably best if Jade and I take the research angle. You three split up the video files and see if you come up with anything.”
With a grateful nod, Charles sank into his seat.
Sakura knocked back the rest of her energy drink and crumpled the empty can. “All right, let’s do this.”
The Super 8 cameras had cut to static less than thirty minutes after Ángel arrived. Charles watched from his bird’s-eye view as Ángel hopped off his motorcycle and approached Jesenia’s door, completely unaware that the friend he trusted had been the one tormenting him. This grainy image could be the last anyone ever saw Ángel—
Charles exhaled one hard breath and shook out his hands. Ángel didn’t need Charles to wallow around in fear and regret right now; he needed Charles to fucking focus.
He, Shane, and Sakura chose different time stamps in the footage and worked their way backward, keeping an eye on Jesenia’s corner room. It was tedious work, but it required close concentration, which helped keep Charles’s panic at bay. He had little mental energy to spare for obsessing over what Jesenia might be doing to Ángel at this very moment.
“This is weird,” Shane said after about half an hour of tense silence.
“What?” Charles jumped up and circled the table to lean over Shane’s shoulder.
“Jesenia’s entering her motel room here . . .” Shane tapped the figure on the screen, then pointed to the lot. “But her rental car is all the way over here. I went back and found the point where she left the room, a couple hours earlier, and she never gets into or out of that car—but she never gets in or out of any other car either.”
Charles narrowed his eyes, watching Jesenia saunter out of her motel room on Monday morning. The angles of the security cameras were terrible, especially since Jesenia had that far-corner room, but he could see enough to figure out she was heading for the main road. “Okay, looks like she’s planning to take a cab, maybe catch a bus. Show me when she comes back again?”
Shane clicked forward to the appropriate time stamp. Again, the poor sight lines of the cameras made it difficult to tell why Jesenia would approach her room from this direction—at least, for someone who’d never been to that motel before.
“She’s coming from behind the building,” Charles said, cursing his own idiocy. “There’s more parking out there, but no cameras. She went out and got herself a new car somehow and then parked it in the back lot.”
“Craigslist,” said Sakura.
“What?”
Sakura spread her hands wide. “If I needed a vehicle to use in an abduction, that’s how I’d do it. I’d pay cash for a used car off Craigslist, not change the registration, and slap on some plates from another car I knew wouldn’t be used for a while.”
That was exactly what Charles would do too. “Fuck,” he said with feeling, and then turned back to Shane’s computer. “We may not have cameras from behind the motel, but we do have a camera at the entrance. Let’s see if we get lucky.”
They did. In the five minutes preceding Jesenia’s return to the motel, only one car had entered the lot, a silver Toyota Prius. Unfortunately, their luck ran out when it came to the license plate—the first three characters were all that were visible, the rest indecipherable thanks to a combination of low-quality equipment and bad angles.
Jade’s quick search revealed that no silver Priuses registered in California had license plates beginning with 5GE. Sakura was right; Jesenia had swapped the plates with some unknown car, making it impossible for them to fill in the blanks.
“And there’s nothing you can do to enhance the image?” Charles asked Jade.
“I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “These are cheap motel parking lot cameras. I’m good, but I’m not a magician.”
“A make and model with a partial plate is still good progress, man,” Shane said. “We’ll add it to the APB—”
The panic Charles had been ruthlessly tamping down welled up with a vengeance, threatening to burst free. He spun on his heel and strode out of the room, ignoring Eva calling his name.
Charles hurried down the hallway and into the empty break room. Swinging the door halfway shut behind himself, he collapsed into a hard plastic chair and gripped the edge of the table with shaking hands, closing his eyes. He didn’t bother opening them when someone else entered the room; he knew it was Eva from the clicking of her high heels.
“Charles,” she said, her voice soft. Another chair creaked as she joined him at the table. “We’re gonna find him.”
Opening his eyes, Charles said, “What if Jesenia kills him?”
“She won’t do that. Look at everything she’s done—she’s obsessed with Ángel. She must love him in some warped way. Ángel will know how to handle her.”
Eva always spoke with utter self-assurance, as if she knew that everything she said was the absolute truth. Her cool, unflappable confidence was what had drawn Charles to her the moment they’d met, and after a few short months, she’d earned his trust enough for him to confide things in her that he’d never told anyone else. But there were things he’d never shared even with Eva.
“We fought,” Charles said. “The last time we saw each other, we fought. And now he’s alone and afraid and maybe hurting, and he’s going through all that . . .” Charles swallowed harshly. “He’s going through that thinking I don’t love him.”
“Oh, Charles,” said Eva. She covered his hand with her own.
Charles had never said that aloud before, not ever, not even to himself, but Eva didn’t seem fazed in the least. “You’re not surprised,” he said.
&nb
sp; “When you first came to San Diego, you’d been gutshot,” Eva said. “You were bleeding out all over the place and insisting it was just a flesh wound. I’ve never seen a human being more determined to deny they’d just had their heart broken. So, no, I’m not surprised you love Ángel. If anything, I’m surprised you’re willing to admit it.”
“I didn’t want to love him.” Charles turned his hand palm-up beneath Eva’s. “Love by itself isn’t enough to sustain a relationship over the long term. You have to share goals, values, and I knew— I thought that the things Ángel and I wanted out of life were too different. I knew it couldn’t last; I knew he’d get bored of me sooner or later. I didn’t want to get too invested in him, build my life around him, and then have it all fall apart because we were walking down two different roads.”
Eva tilted her head. “I’d be more inclined to approve of that decision if I weren’t sure you made it unilaterally, without ever actually talking to Ángel about any of this.”
Charles groaned and slumped back in his chair. Eva squeezed his hand, then released him.
“I promised him that if he stayed here, I wouldn’t let anything happen to him,” Charles said quietly.
Before Eva could respond, her cell phone chirped with an incoming text message. She fished it out of her jacket pocket and raised her eyebrows. “Jade says we’ve got a break.”
They returned to the conference room, where it was all Charles could do not to grab Jade and shake the news right out of her. “What happened?” he asked.
“We just got a call from the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department,” Jade said, pretty much vibrating in her seat. “Some guy out in the desert around Palm Springs saw Jesenia’s and Ángel’s pictures on the news and reported that he saw them at a gas station near I-10 around eight thirty. He actually stopped to talk to them because Ángel looked sick, but Ángel wouldn’t even look at him.”
Charles’s stomach leaped and did several nauseating somersaults; he breathed deeply and rolled his shoulders to release their sudden tension. “Did he see where they went?”
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