Hashtag Rogue

by Chautona Havig

  This time, he paid close attention to every item of food, article of clothing, toiletry, and even her books. The Bible lay on her pillow—proof Erika hadn’t packed for herself. It also explained why her makeup bag was gone. Erika would never bother to pack it. She knew the protection drill—no time for that nonsense.

  His phone buzzed the moment he opened the fridge. Mark. “Hey, I’m checking out Erika’s—”

  “Need you on the Langat case—now. The idiot thought he could notify his security detail of his location. They’re ready to move, but if you sweep in and take him, we can round up the detail and then send Sol and Raina in to relieve you again. No one else is close enough.”

  “Where are they?”

  “I’ll send coordinates with... ” Mark hesitated. “Let’s go with Biblical protocol.”

  You’re worried… about what? Keith didn’t even need to ask. The answer—obvious. “Tyler?”

  “Probably clean, but we can’t risk it. Um, and there’s even more bad news about the Cayman account.”

  “Yeah?” Mark should be impressed that his voice sounded as calm as it did.

  “Tyler also found copies of tax returns….”

  All self-assurances that Flynne would make rational decisions fluttered to the floor of his gut. “She reported the interest income?”

  “Yeah.”

  So much for my theory on it being a setup. It took a few huffs—he sounded like a bull snorting in the ring—before Keith managed to stamp down enough fear and anger to say, “Mark. Do me a favor.”

  Mark agreed.

  “After I disconnect, swear for me.”

  Nestled among tall trees and a few random rhododendrons, the cabin emerged as if grown there rather than built. Keith crawled past slowly enough that Sol and Raina couldn’t miss him. No cars on the highway when he turned off, and still no sign of them now, meant he’d beaten the security detail. With the way he’d thumbed his nose at every speed limit sign, it’s a wonder he hadn’t racked up a dozen tickets and been an hour behind instead.

  Keith parked just past a tree break a few hundred yards from the edge of the property and worked his way back through to the back door. Raina met him there. “You got here fast.”

  “Yes.” They didn’t have time for chit-chat. He passed the keys to his plum Civic and held out his other hand for keys to the commercial minivan.

  “A Honda?”

  “2000—plum. Bashed back quarter panel.”

  She sniffed and made the exchange as she stepped aside. “You travel in style…”

  “Yeah, because every girl’s dream car is that thing over there.”

  That brought a smile. “You don’t love the lack of side windows and Piper’s Plumbing & Septic painted on all sides?”

  “I wouldn’t… except it at least has the name written in reverse on the front, too. That’s class, baby.”

  Sol appeared—six and a half feet tall, broad enough shoulders to do serious damage to narrow doorways, deep honey-brown skin, and bleach-blond hair. The enigma of him rivaled only Mark when he’d been “Cho” and looked like he had been ripped from a Norwegian clothing catalog. “Langat is ready. You?”

  He nodded. “Let’s go.”

  Obama Langat was an imposing man for someone just under five and a half feet. Scrawny, with thick glasses, his piercing gaze swept over Keith, and he nodded. “I will go.”

  Like you have a choice. You signed, buddy.

  A blip from the other room sent Sol dashing away. “Incoming!”

  Trying to induce Langat to run—impossible. After the third, “C’mon!” Keith hoisted the man over one shoulder and did his best to run to the tree line. “Better… be… glad… you’re… light.”

  “Put me down!”

  Keith did not. Instead, he broke into the trees, dashed left, and promptly tripped over a log he’d forgotten about already. Almost too late, he clamped his hand over Langat’s mouth to stifle a roar of protest. “Shut. Up. We’re paid to keep you alive, and we can’t do that if you keep dragging us down and announcing our presence. So, shut up, and run.”

  This time, Langat ran.

  That slight concession to cooperation ended the moment Keith pulled out zip ties and a large bandana. “What is this? Are you the one—?”

  Keith whipped the bandana into a strip of fabric and gagged the man before he could spew the rest of his indignation. Zip ties took a bit more effort, as Langat fought to free himself, but a trip, a knee to the back, and a face full of dirt was all it took to have the man ready to stuff into the van.

  A long, agonizing wait followed. “I wonder if your security team is better than Sol and Raina thought. It’s taking longer—”

  A shot rang out.

  “Nope. There it is. We go.”

  He helped Langat—shoved, more than anything—into the van, tied the man’s wrists to a loop by a low seat, and slammed the door shut. Taking the direct route to the highway would shave half an hour off their trip back to HearthLand, but that would beg for a tail. Not something he could afford.

  His thumbs hovered over his phone. Is HearthLand the best choice? Well, not exactly HearthLand, but the fields to the north… there’s a perfect landing spot over there hidden by the trees…

  Keith went for it. He typed in the last four digits of the longitude. Count to twenty. A single period. Twenty seconds. Then the first two. To Tyler’s phone, he sent the last four digits of the latitude. A single period. And then the first two—all separated by twenty seconds.

  The helo would be waiting by the time Keith and Langat arrived. They’d go off to Oregon, and he’d go back to the treeler—just in case Flynne really did think she was saving Erika from something.

  Just in case God gave him some direction on where to start looking.

  Just in case…

  The texts came in one after the other. Tyler burst into the room with the first, and seconds after he’d left, he raced back. “Do you have the rest?”

  Mark just reached for Tyler’s phone and added the numbers to the coordinate list—Dolman Highway—probably close to HearthLand, if he recalled the numbers correctly. “Get the helo to…” A few clicks and a dozen taps later, and he found it— “Yes. Mile marker forty-two, north of Hearthfield Way. Now.”

  Only the soft snick of the door as it closed hinted that Tyler had listened. Mark opened the office messenger program and tapped out another request. Get that real-time satellite thing for me. The link. Guilt prompted him to add. Please.

  The link came through half a minute later, along with a message. Remember. Unless something changed in the past year, it still has a three-minute delay.

  Movies acted like anyone could watch anything as it played out, but that wasn’t true. Still, Mark had never told the team that the so-called three-minute delay was actually ninety-seconds. Not perfect, but better than waiting for updates sometimes.

  A moment later, Tyler reentered with only half a knock’s warning. “Okay. Helo sent. They’ll be waiting.” He set the office iPad on the desk and stood back. “Have a minute to go over my plan for finding Flynne?”

  “Pop it up on the screen,” Mark said.

  A list of places appeared a few seconds later. “I’ve ranked these by probability,” Tyler explained. “First, she has an uncle with a lakehouse in Grand Haven. I don’t think she knows I know that, so that’s my first guess.”

  “What makes you think she doesn’t know?”

  Tyler went on a long explanation that would have confused Rube Goldberg, but Mark finally got the gist. A photo on Flynne’s fridge, a mention of summers at the lake house, and a little digging had turned up property records. “I thought it was her dad’s, but no… not that place.”

  Mark scribbled down a note to start there. “Next?”

  “Okay, so she and her friends have these big gaming parties. They take their stuff and rent an Air BnB. They’ve gone to the same place the last few times, and I’m pretty sure I found the right one.”

 
; “Those things have to use a credit card. Flynne wouldn’t.”

  “I disagree.” Tyler tossed an apologetic look but didn’t back down. “I think when Flynne has been a good customer for several times, if she showed up and said she was having trouble with her card or something, I bet because of a customer relationship, she could get them to rent with cash. They have experience with her, you know?”

  “Maybe… but can you find it?”

  He swiped the screen and several houses with small guest bungalows or pool houses appeared. “It’s probably one of these places because she’s talked about how they get to swim in the pool and can see big house parties sometimes. According to Flynne, the owners of the big house leave the rental stuff to a friend of the family. The friend gets to keep half the income for her trouble, so she is on it.” Tyler hesitated before adding, “I checked and almost all of them are empty for the next three weeks—totally the slow season in the St. Louis area for Air BnBs, so another reason the manager girl might do it.”

  “Or because with cash, she doesn’t have to split with the owners. The owners wouldn’t know.”

  After staring first at the screen, over at Mark, and back at the screen again, Tyler frowned and pushed the Air BnB option to the top. “Flynne would like helping someone. If she thought of that, she’d do it.”

  She’d think. I’m sure of that.

  “Third option might be out there, but Flynne hates camping. I mean seriously hates camping. She tries to hide it, because her whole family is really into this camping thing—even their family reunions are huge camping events. So, I wondered if she might not go buy all the stuff and get someone to drop them off at a campground.”

  “Drop them off? Why?”

  “Because she wouldn’t stay long if she had a way out. So… enforced… something?”

  Three options—equally plausible, in Mark’s opinion, but Tyler knew Flynne best. Then again, it makes him too close, potentially. Then what?

  The screen changed. Surveillance cameras appeared. Seven of them. Tyler tapped each as he spoke. “Okay, so this was the morning she took Erika. This is the last traffic cam I could hack before her neighborhood.” A new image formed. “I think that’s her twenty-five minutes later. That’s a few streets over. Then, I found this one…” Flynne—obviously Flynne riding a bicycle with a trailer appeared. “And again…” the picture clicked. “If you look at the tires…”

  “Something’s in the trailer.” He leaned closer to be sure. “Right. Okay. So, where does that trailer go?”

  Tyler shrugged. “No idea. I drove around that area last night and found three companies advertised with stickers and such—security companies. Three photos cascaded onto the screen. “But that’s as far as I’ve gotten. HomeSure has the easiest site to hack into, so I’m working with everything I can find there. The problem is…” He zoomed in on one of the company logos. “SmartServe sends all video footage alerts to the owner. The owner has to pass it to the company. So, I’d have to find each owner, find their phone service, then hack all of it.”

  “What you’re saying is finding any footage of Erika and Flynne is almost impossible.”

  The screen went blank as Tyler moved toward the door. “No… not if any of the other houses have anything facing toward the street. But if they’re still in that neighborhood, the only way we’d see what house it is, is if they or the neighbors across the street don’t have SmartServe.”

  “What’s your plan?”

  Tyler turned off the screens and moved to the door. “I’m starting with campgrounds and Air BnB. The only way to do the lake house thing is to send someone up there. We can’t afford the manpower right now.”

  “Which…” Mark refrained from throwing his pen across the room—barely. “Flynne would know. Send Claire to Grand Haven. We need to know.”

  If the look on Tyler’s face meant anything, the kid had been about to protest, but that shifted. “Got it. Helo should arrive in about twenty minutes. I’ll go make those calls.”

  Left alone, Mark stared again at the now empty screen. “You’re doing better than I expected, Miss Dortmann… now make a mistake, will you? Don’t have time for this stuff.”

  Nine

  Langat groused all the way from Fairbury to the Dolman Highway. Muffled words Keith couldn’t understand filled the back of the van, but he ignored them. Concentration was everything. Twice, he’d seen vehicles that unsettled him, but both times, they’d turned onto other roads without doing anything odd at all.

  However, when a third one appeared ahead of him, Keith let the vehicle go over a small hill without him and pulled over. He jumped into the back of the van and jerked the gag down over the man’s jaw. “Where’s the tracker?”

  “I do not know—”

  Keith’s hand shot out and gripped the man’s throat. “Don’t lie to me. You’ve got two choices before you right now. You either tell me where your tracker is, or I leave you on the side of the road and our contract is canceled. You do not get a refund. I’ll give you five seconds to decide.”

  “That’s preposterous!”

  “Four.”

  “I don’t have to—”

  “Three.” Langat swallowed hard as Keith followed that with, “Two.”

  “I—”

  “One.” Keith ripped open the van door and pulled out his knife. He went to slice the rope free, but Langat shrank back, kicking at him.

  “No, no.” The man pointed to a gold tooth in the back of his mouth. “There. That is it. It removes for charging.”

  Keith pulled the thing from the man’s mouth and grabbed a Ziplock bag from a bin. He hopped out, tucked it all under a rock, snapped a picture of the rock and of a nearby mile marker, and climbed in. “Just in case,” he assured Langat as he climbed back in. “It’s just in case.” He started to put the van in gear, but the sight of Langat without his gag made him double back.

  The man begged. “I won’t complain anymore.”

  “It helps muffle things if there’s an accident. It’s natural to scream. We do it with cooperatives, too. I’ll get you out of this—safe. Just give me a bit of time.”

  With that, he shot as fast as he could to the same hill the other vehicle had disappeared behind and slowed on his descent. The vehicle had vanished down the road—only a dot. “Looks like I was overly cautious. Sorry. Shouldn’t have taken the time—”

  A black SUV shot over the hill behind Keith. His mouth went dry. “Um, brace yourself. I think we have to race this one.”

  Scenarios whizzed through his mind, each pausing long enough to be rejected. The SUV gained on him. If Langat could get buckled somehow, slamming on the brakes might be the best choice, but the man would be flung about like a rag doll right now. No, he’d have to outrace them… somehow.

  Only a quarter mile back. Bile inched its way up Keith’s throat. He clenched his teeth and punched it. The van whined, wheezed, and strained forward. The SUV grew even closer. A turn signal came on.

  Keith lifted his foot off the gas pedal and watched as the SUV shot around him. He braked enough not to lay down rubber and slowed. The SUV didn’t. It zoomed ahead as if on a mission.

  I could turn around now… probably out race them back to the Fairbury highway. Or…

  He pushed the van back to sixty and kept going. Another two miles passed before he saw the helo with its spinning blades in the field—right where he’d sent it. Another mile passed before he thought he saw something off with it.

  At a quarter mile, he couldn’t see anything being in a small valley, but as he came back out, there they were. Helo. SUV. Men with AR-15s trained on the helo.

  Lord, help us all.

  A bang and the faint sound of oof! preceded Tyler’s entrance into Mark’s office. Red-faced and stammering, the kid rushed to him, thrusting a phone out as if it explained everything. “I was trying to hack into the Air BnB website—that thing is ridiculously secure, by the way—when this came in.”

  “#hashtagrogue. No
t unexpected.” On the other hand, the second hashtag changed everything. Again. “Does that really say #-does-he-still-come-for-coffee?”

  “Yep. Got goosebumps when I saw it.

  Mark looked closer. Erikaff2 “Erika’s account still, right?”

  “Yep.”

  Before passing back the phone, he gave it one last glance. “Did you pull up Java the Hut’s surveillance and see?”

  “Not yet—brought it to you first.”

  “Excellent.” Mark typed in the URL to Erika’s account before nodding at the door. “Now, go check that out.”

  A ping told him the helo was landing. Mark moved that satellite monitor to the foreground and, a minute later, watched as the helo touched down. It sat there… all alone in the field, its blades creating waves in the new spring grasses. A black speck formed at the left corner of the screen. It grew until it became obvious that it was a dark-colored SUV—probably black.

  Mark reached for his phone, but it rang as his fingers wrapped around the handset. “This better be Keith.”

  “I’m assuming breach—not sure if the breach was me making a stupid mistake somewhere or if it was back at the cabin, but I just drove past the rendezvous spot to see guns on the helo pilot.”

  “Client safe?”

  “Yes—confused, but safe.” He growled something Mark couldn’t hear, but the next words came through—each one louder than the last. “Maybe next time he’ll listen when we tell him something.”

  Another growl hit. “Aaaargh. All the curse words I can’t say or think! They’re chasing. Scarecrow protocol. Thursdays.”

  The line went dead.

  In three seconds, he’d disconnected and punched a speed dial for the Rockland Gazette. The automatic system kicked in immediately, but Mark just punched in 4229 for the extension he wanted. “Doe here. Need a classified in the personals put in tonight.”