by Julie Miller
She opened her locker door and pulled out her lipstick, using the excuse of freshening her makeup to hide behind as she pulled out her phone to finish her text to Josiah.
But the door swung open behind her and she got the sinking feeling her phone wasn’t going to do her any good. So she put on a show for the company who’d joined her, bending close to the mirror on her locker door to fluff her hair and touch up her lips.
“What are you up to, sugar?”
“Hey, a little privacy here?” She quickly closed her locker door and turned to face the club manager. “What if I was coming in to use the bathroom?”
Rocky propped his hands at his hips and leveled his dark gaze at her. “Were you?”
“I know, I know. You caught me trying to make time with Danny.” She put up her hands as if surrendering to the glare of parental-like disappointment in his eyes. “I suppose you’ve got a rule about no fraternizing among the staff. Break time’s over. I’m going already.”
Rocky nodded. But not to her.
Too late, Riley realized Rocky hadn’t come in here alone.
She felt the prick of a needle at the side of her neck. Within seconds, the room swirled out of focus. Her head and limbs grew heavy, and she was out cold before she hit the floor.
* * *
“Damn it, A.J., she’s gone.” Josiah should have seen Riley back behind the bar by ten-after nine. He’d come looking for her at 9:15. He’d cleared the club by ten o’clock and turned on all the lights to look again. But all he’d found were empty rooms, from Rocky’s office up to Slade Russell’s penthouse. There were no security guards on the premises at all now, no accountant, no manager. There wasn’t even a bum outside to say he’d seen a gorgeous redhead running down the alley, or being taken by force, away from the club. “I should have been the one taking those chances.”
“We’ll find her.” The black-haired officer who trained and managed undercover ops like this nightmare exited Opal’s office behind Josiah. “And the others.”
Josiah punched open the dressing room door with his fist. This was his third search tonight, now as an official cop, with his gun and badge strapped to his belt and his superior officer looking at the scene with fresh, objective eyes. “Somebody caught her snooping. She could talk her way into this mess, but she couldn’t talk her way out of it. I promised her I’d keep her safe and I dropped the ball. She just wanted to find her sister.”
A.J. Rodriguez’s calm voice of reason didn’t help the knot of fear and anger twisting in Josiah’s gut one bit. “I normally don’t support the idea of a civilian getting involved in our work. But our investigation into Russell had stalled out. You couldn’t do more without blowing your cover. You assured me she understood the risks. She was helping us make headway again.”
Maybe he was the one who hadn’t fully understood the risk of letting Riley become a part of his investigation, a part of his life. “I could have knocked down the damn door. We knew the club was just a front for the illegal crap going on in there.”
A.J. opened lockers and peeked beneath chairs and makeup tables. “And exposed our investigation and gotten yourself killed in the process? We’ll find her.”
Even the veteran cop couldn’t find any signs of a struggle, anything that looked out of place. Riley was gone. Vanished. Just like her sister. His heart had gone missing right along with her.
Josiah opened Riley’s locker, staring at the same purse, jacket and tube of lipstick he’d seen twice before. Riley’s cell phone was gone, but if she had it with her and was able to use it, she would have called him for help or dialed 9-1-1.
She hadn’t called.
He pulled his own cell from his pocket and looked at the screen. The incomplete text she’d sent did him no good whatsoever. There were enough abandoned office buildings in the Kansas City area to keep the department busy for months, searching for the missing women. He had less than two hours to find her. What if he was already too late?
A young crime-scene investigator wearing a navy-blue jacket knocked on the door to report to A.J. “The computers are all password locked. We won’t get anything that way until the techs have a chance to decrypt the system and pull the hard drives. I left the rest of my team up there to go through the room inch by inch, pulling prints and trace. We should be able to identify who the users were.”
Good news for the case. Didn’t do him a damn bit of good locating Riley.
“Josiah. Look.” A.J. had spotted something in Riley’s locker. “Is that her handwriting?”
He leaned in to read the message scrawled in lipstick on the locker mirror. He didn’t know about the handwriting, but the red color was hers.
It wasn’t much of a clue, just the word Bartle written inside a box.
Bartle Hall? What did a convention center have to do with some illegal sex auction? Clearly Slade Russell and his crew couldn’t be holding the girls he was selling in such a public venue. Located near the Missouri River, the massive downtown convention center with cables, flags and conical points on the roof resembled a suspension bridge to some, a row of circus tents or unfurled sails to others.
“Wait a minute.” Josiah held his phone up beside the red box and read Riley’s incomplete message again. “Auction tonight. Abandoned Office Building. Can see…” He looked at the mirror. “Bartle.”
Doreen Riley, the toughest survivor he’d ever met refused to give up without a fight. Pride, hope, and something to fight for himself, gave Detective Josiah Kemp a renewed purpose.
“Sir.” He pointed the rectangle out to A.J. “It’s a window. She can see Bartle Hall through the building’s windows.”
The older detective clapped Josiah on the shoulder and nodded. “That narrows down our search grid considerably. With all the renovations going on downtown, there aren’t that many old unused buildings left. We’ve still got an hour or so to find them. Let’s go.”
Chapter Eleven
Riley stirred in bed, blinking her eyes open to the dim light shining through the window and the worst hangover of her life.
Closing her eyes, she rolled over and poked around the bedside table, checking her alarm clock to find out what time it was. Only, there was no clock. There was no bedside table.
Think, Riley.
She wasn’t at her apartment. Okay.
Josiah.
Smiling despite the ball bearings circling around inside her skull, she reached behind her to see if the bed was still warm. Or better yet, occupied.
“Ow.” Her knuckles scraped against concrete.
There was no man. There was no warmth. She was alone.
Oh, no. She looked up at the moonlight filtering through the dirty window. No, no.
Riley was awake now. Horribly awake.
She swung her feet off the side of the bed, clutching her churning stomach as the room swirled around her. When the dizziness passed, she looked down at the white material in her fist. A nightgown. Crudely made from a crisp cotton, like a bed sheet.
She still wore her own bra and panties underneath, but otherwise she’d been stripped down and bathed before being tied into the generic cover. A glance around the room revealed a pitcher of water, a glass and a bucket. Her clothes had been taken from her, along with her phone and any other means of communicating with the outside world. She pushed to her feet and lurched to the door of the tiny converted office. No key pad or secret code in sight. Just good old-fashioned solid wood that was impossible to break through on her own.
They had her. Slade and Rocky and Opal—they had her.
Riley circled around the room. Whatever drug they’d given her made her woozy and unsteady on her feet. But the more she moved, the more it worked through her system and the more she could think. If she’d been kidnapped and put on display like the other women on Slade Russell’s website, then that meant she was close to Megan. She had to be here.
She ended up at the window again. Riley rubbed a spot clean on the glass and looked out. There. Rising a
bove the roofs of the old downtown district, she saw the flags and towers of the Bartle Convention Center lit up in the night sky.
She was right. She’d figured out where Megan and the other women were being held. Now she just prayed she’d done enough to communicate that information to the police.
“Find me, Josiah,” she breathed against the glass. “You promised you’d have my back.”
And she’d promised to have Megan’s.
The rusty window sill had some give beneath her hands. She’d been locked inside a bedroom before, waiting for the threat outside to come find her. She’d armed herself with a lamp that night. She’d have to be more creative here.
With a little bit of muscle and one broken fingernail, she pried the loose strip of metal off the window. Worried by how late it was, by how long she’d been here, she went straight to the door and slipped the metal between the lock and the jamb. This was a skill she’d learned on the streets, too. She wasn’t as quick as she’d once been. But the simple lock attached to the knob eventually gave way and she jimmied the door open.
Dropping the metal strip in favor of the heavier bucket, Riley slipped outside into the empty hallway. The chipped marble floor was cold under her bare feet. The cracked walls and ribbons of plaster hanging from the ceiling created grotesque faces and gnarled fingers that reached down from above. What had once been a grand masterpiece of early 1900s architecture was now more like a high-rise house of horrors.
The interior halls were darker than her room had been, and she had to feel her way along until she neared the boarded up elevator where one overhead light cast a meager glow through its dusty shade. She couldn’t tell if there were any security cameras, but there was definitely a guard patrolling the premises, judging by the rhythmic jingling of keys and single beam of a flashlight bouncing across the floor. Riley pressed her back against the wall and held her breath as the light came closer. When she saw the hand holding the flashlight poke around the corner, she swung the bucket straight at the man’s head. Stunned by the attack, the flashlight clattered to the floor. She walloped him a second time and he went down.
Upgrading again, Riley exchanged the dented bucket for the flashlight. She didn’t recognize the portly man as anyone from After Dark, but the Russell Security uniform warned her she’d be foolish to trust him. He was too heavy for her to drag all the way back to her room to hide, so she plunked the bucket over his head, and borrowed his ring of keys. She unhooked the gun and radio from his belt and dropped them behind the crisscrossed boards in front of the elevator. Without an easy way to carry the weapon and no training on how to fire it, she figured she didn’t need it. But at least this way, no one could use it against her, either.
Without a radio, the guard wouldn’t have an easy way to call for backup. She took the guard’s cell phone to call Josiah, but quickly realized she didn’t know his number since he’d programmed it into her phone. Would a call to 9-1-1 help? Or would the police simply consider it a crank call if she couldn’t give them an address to where she was being held?
But the phone did have a clock on it that sent a clear message. 11:40. She had twenty minutes to search through the building and find Megan before the auction began.
Looking for more tiny office spaces like the one she’d escaped, Riley turned on the flashlight and raced from room to room. She quickly learned that if the door opened, the room was unoccupied.
Her heart skipped a beat when she discovered the fifth door refused to open. She jiggled the knob and heard a moaning sound in response. She knocked softly. “Hello?”
She was sorting through the keys she’d stolen, inserting anything that looked remotely like it might fit into the lock. She heard a soft, “Help me,” and felt the knob turning in her hand.
“Megan?” As soon as the lock clicked, she pushed the door open, nearly knocking over the blank-eyed brunette there.
Riley’s disappointment rushed out in a breathy sigh. And then she went right back to work. “Do you know Megan Riley? Have you seen her? She’s only eighteen. Strawberry-blonde hair?”
The woman shook her head, either not knowing the answers or not understanding the questions. With that unseen deadline ticking mercilessly in her head, Riley squeezed the woman’s hand and hurried down to the next door. Inside, she recognized the dark-haired woman inside from Slade Russell’s website.
The woman thanked her but shook her head when asked about Megan. “I sometimes hear someone crying in the room below me, but I’ve never see anyone else except the guard who brings my food and water.”
“How long have you been here?”
“A week? Two weeks? I don’t know. I went to a job interview on the fifteenth and—”
Nodding her own thanks, Riley left to open two more doors. But no Megan. Time to go down to the next floor. As soon as she pushed open the stairwell door, the strains of party music filtered up from somewhere in the building below her. It was probably all part of the show, maybe even a guise to get the guests a little drunk so they’d bid more money. This sex-slave auction was simply a bigger, richer, illegal version of what went on at After Dark. Riley seethed at the knowledge that people were celebrating the destruction of several innocent lives.
She charged down the stairs to the next floor, wondering if there was a guard on each level, or if the man she’d conked over the head had been making rounds through the building. Surely it was only a matter of time before her escape was revealed. Maybe the partygoers downstairs were too busy preparing for the midnight event to be worried about a guard who was late reporting in. But if he came to upstairs…
She checked the time. 11:50.
Riley shoved open the door and continued her search.
“Megan?” She unlocked the first door and nearly burst into tears.
“Doreen?”
The younger, sweeter version of the girl Riley had once hoped to be pushed unsteadily to her feet. But Riley was already across the room, wrapping her baby sister up in a tight hug before the teenager could even get her arms around her.
“Are you hurt, sweetie?” Riley asked, stroking the soft red-gold of her sister’s hair. “Did anyone hurt you?”
“I’m okay,” Megan assured her, her thin frame shaking with not-so-silent tears. But there were no marks on her, no obvious signs of mistreatment. “I screwed up big-time, Doreen. Nate was high when I went to his apartment that night I called you, so I didn’t stay.”
“You didn’t go back to Sal and Mom, did you?” Megan shook her head, pulling away. “You should have come to me. I’ve been worried sick. The police are looking for you. I…I found you on a website.”
“I know. I was so stupid.”
“Those people took advantage of you.”
“I stayed the night with one of my friends from school. And the next day…” Riley brushed aside the long red-gold hair clinging to her sister’s face. “I’d answered an online ad about doing some modeling. Sent them my picture, and the woman on the phone invited me to come take some more shots for a portfolio. I thought if I got a better job, I could be on my own. Like you.”
Riley was not who her sister should aspire to be. But that conversation, and any others, needed to wait for another time. She slid the ring of keys over her wrist, tucked the flashlight under her arm and switched the phone to the same hand so she could grab Megan’s. “We have to go. We have to get out of here.”
“Did you call the police already?” Megan’s gaze dropped to the phone Riley had taken. “Are they on their way to help us?”
“No, I don’t know where…” Riley groaned. “Idiot!” She didn’t have to know Josiah’s number. She didn’t have to know the building’s exact address. She handed off the ring of keys to Megan. “Here. See if you can find anyone else and let them out. But be quick. There’s only a little—”
“What’s that?” Megan asked, as the floor vibrated beneath their feet.
The music was getting loud enough to hear through the floors now. No, that was a
different, clashing, sound that shook the floor for a few seconds and stopped. Three times at even intervals. Chimes.
“That’s somebody’s idea of a bad joke.” Riley swore and punched in 9-1-1. “It’s midnight. Check the doors on this side and then we’re out of here. Go!”
When the dispatch officer picked up the call, Riley didn’t wait for her to finish her spiel. “This is an emergency. My name is Doreen Riley. I’m working an undercover case with Detective Josiah Kemp. Can you connect me to him? Please.”
“I’ll need a badge number for verification to connect your call.”
Riley swore with impatience. “I’m not a cop. But he’ll take my call. Please. He needs to know my location ASAP or stat or whatever you say.”
“If you require assistance, I can dispatch a police officer to your location.”
Riley bit down on the urge to yell. “I don’t know my location. Just connect me to Josiah. He’ll know what to do.”
“Please stay on the line while I contact Detective Kemp. If he can confirm—”
“Stay on the line?” Riley swore. “Lady, do not put me on hold. Something really bad is going to happen here in just a few seconds.”
The floor vibrated again.
“Doreen?”
She turned at the soft, hoarse voice. “Mary Sue?”
The brunette burst into tears and fell into Riley’s arms. “I was so scared. Do not trust Oscar or Rocky or—”
“I know, sweetie. I know.”
Megan ran up behind the petite brunette. “That’s it. These last two were the only ones I could find.”
A blonde woman joined the group gathering around Riley. Another woman whispered a warning from the stairwell door. “I can hear someone coming up the stairs. What should we do?”
These women were looking to Riley for help. They expected her to help them all survive this horrid nightmare.