Stolen Identity

by Lisa Harris

  She stopped at an intersection cordoned off for the festival and scanned the crowd streaming through narrow rows of vendors. Last year, she’d brought Lauryn and her mother. They’d feasted on shrimp, oysters, crabs and steamed clams while listening to live music well past dark despite the dipping temperatures. Today, the smell of butter, garlic and fresh seafood filling the air turned her stomach. And instead of watching local chefs show off their culinary skills to groups of admirers, she followed Jason to the prescribed meeting place and searched the crowd for the hacker.

  Philip had managed to dig up a ten-year-old high school yearbook photo on Facebook, verifying that the man who’d taken Lauryn and her mother was Ian Gallaway. She’d memorized his updated features from the surveillance footage. Late twenties, short dark blond hair, medium height, thick ring on his right hand….

  Danielle glanced at her watch. At the edges of the festival where they stood, the crowds had thinned slightly. If he was here, they should be able to see him. “He’s late.”

  Jason took her hand. “He’ll show up. He wants this exchange as much as we do. Just keep walking.”

  A man stood beside a booth that was selling tuna barbecue. He looked at her, holding her gaze for several long seconds before dropping his cigarette onto the sidewalk and stamping it out.

  She’d seen him before.

  “Jason… The guy just ahead in the faded leather jacket and jeans… He was at the post office.”

  “It’s not Ian.”

  The description didn’t fit. He was older, balding, with a distinctive tattoo on the side of his neck. She looked back to where he’d been standing. He’d vanished into the crowd. She started walking again. She had to be imagining things.

  A woman bumped into her, knocking Danielle’s bag off her shoulder. She stepped aside to let her pass. The other woman didn’t even seem to notice.

  Danielle struggled to focus. Details of the plan played over and over in her mind. While she’d insisted on making the exchange according to Ian’s demands, Detective Rodriguez had assured her that undercover officers would be present at the festival watching their every move. She and Jason had already picked up Garrett’s package at the post office. Officers were poised to step in as soon as the exchange was made.

  If everything went according to plan.

  She pressed her lips together. The plan had to work, because Ian was the only person who knew where Lauryn was.

  Someone else jostled against her. Danielle started to move aside, then froze. Something jabbed hard into her back.

  She could smell the beer on his breath as he whispered into her ear then noted the faded, black leather jacket he wore. “Don’t look back. Tell your friend to keep walking beside you.”

  “Jason? He wants you to keep walking beside us.” She looked to Jason then back down at the man’s arm that was wrapped around her waist. “Who are you?”

  “A friend of Ian’s. There’s been a slight change of plans. We’re going to the pier, away from the crowded festival. You’re going to give me the password, then all of this will be over.”

  “Where’s Ian?”

  “Let’s just say Ian couldn’t make it.”

  “And my daughter. Where is she? We had a deal. The information for my family.”

  “Like I told you, there’s been a slight change of plans. Now move.”

  They walked toward the pier. Away from the festival, the crowds had all but vanished.

  Danielle tried to take in the details around her. Two old men fished for crabs at the end of the pier. Seagulls cried overhead. A boat bobbed in the water beside the massive pillars of the pier.

  He was planning to make his getaway.

  The man stopped halfway down the pier. “Give me the bag.”

  Danielle glanced again at the boat. “Where’s my daughter?”

  A woman yelled behind her. “Slow down!”

  Danielle turned around as a thirty-something woman stepped onto the pier with a half dozen boys ready to fish for crabs.

  The kids ran toward them, carrying rope, crab pots and traps down the narrow walkway, forcing them to step back. The man lowered the gun in the commotion. Jason slammed against him with his shoulder, pinning the man’s arm against the side of the pier. The gun fell to the ground. Danielle kicked the weapon away as police officers swarmed in around them shouting orders.

  “Police! Put your hands above your head.”

  Danielle stood in the middle of the pier, feeling so numb she couldn’t even cry. It was worse than the lingering feeling of the weapon pressed against her back, or the terror of wondering if she was about to be shot.

  She watched as one of the officers placed handcuffs on their attacker then led him toward the squad car parked on the shore. “I don’t understand. Where’s Ian?”

  Detective Rodriguez tugged on his gun belt. “We don’t know yet. The man we just arrested will be taken into custody for questioning, and hopefully we’ll know something soon.”

  “But what about Lauryn…and my mother?” The panic was back. “Without Ian we’ll never find them.”

  *

  Jason tried to get Danielle to eat some of the leftover fruit salad from breakfast, but after several bites she shoved the bowl across the dining room table. Looking up at him, she saw the same worry and fatigue she felt reflected in his eyes. The past few days had worn them out both physically and emotionally. And just when she thought it was all going to be over, the nightmare had taken an ugly twist. All she had now was a list of unanswered questions—and no idea where Lauryn and her mother were.

  She picked up Lauryn’s stuffed Eeyore off the chair beside her, numb from the waiting. She’d asked to come here, because she couldn’t face being in her empty house without Lauryn, but there were signs of her daughter all over Jason’s father’s home. Her crayons and favorite fairy coloring book. A pink hair band. The polka-dotted backpack she’d bought her for her birthday.

  Signs of her mother’s maternal, homey presence was just as obvious. She’d spent the morning cleaning the dining and living rooms, apparently convincing Eddie to start going through some of the piles of magazines and newspapers. Something told Danielle that Eddie Ryan’s life was about to change forever. As soon as they found them.

  God, I need to find my baby…and my mother. Please bring them back to me….

  Danielle pushed back her plate at the knock on the front door. A moment later, Eddie let in Detective Rodriquez. Her heart pounded in her throat. The last time a police officer had knocked on her door, he’d come to tell her that Quinton was dead. If he’d come to deliver bad news…

  She started across the room toward the detective. “Please tell me you found them, and that they’re okay?”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Corbett, but there is still no news on your mother and daughter.”

  Danielle felt Jason wrap a protective arm around her shoulders. She leaned into his embrace and closed her eyes for a moment. “If you haven’t found them, then why are you here?”

  “I have some news I thought I needed to tell you in person.” The detective clasped his hands behind him. “The reason Ian never responded is because he was found murdered.”

  Jason’s grip tightened around Danielle as she felt her world collapse. If Ian was dead, how were they going to find her family?

  “What happened to him?” Jason asked.

  “They traced Ian to a hotel near the coast where one of the guests heard gunshots and called 911. He was found shot twice in the head in his room.”

  “And Lauryn and my mother…?”

  “They weren’t there, Mrs. Corbett.”

  “What if whoever killed Ian took them?” Guilt laced Eddie’s question as he scrubbed a hand over his face.

  “That is a possibility, but from what I’ve been told, there aren’t any signs that they’d ever been there.”

  “Then where are they?” Wriggling free from Jason’s embrace, Danielle collapsed down on the couch and ran her fingers through her hair.
She didn’t want to picture the scene. Another murder. She needed Ian alive. She needed to know where Lauryn was. “Who met us at the festival?”

  “He’s just been ID’d as Donavan McNeill.”

  “Who is he?” Jason asked.

  “We don’t have a lot on him so far, but he appears to be an Eastern European businessman with connections in just about every kind of illegal trafficking you can imagine, including selling intellectual property on the black market.”

  “So he was after Garrett’s passwords.” Danielle tried to process the news. Ian’s death shoved them another step further away from finding Lauryn and her mom. “Donavan…is he the one who killed Ian?”

  “I can’t confirm that either way at this point, but I can tell you that he did have Ian’s cell phone on him.”

  “It makes sense.” Jason sat down on the couch beside her and took her hand. “He goes to confront Ian over the promised password and finds out we have it. If our message came through while Donavan was there, he might have realized he didn’t need Ian anymore.”

  “We also found photos of you and your daughter hanging on a board in the hotel room where Ian was found.”

  “The photos he sent me as proof that he’d been watching us.” Danielle fingered her phone in her pocket. Four days ago, she was worried about what to fix for dinner and the high price of gas. How had things come to this? “What about Kate? She has to know something.”

  “The latest update from the hospital is that there were some complications during the surgery in removing the bullet. The doctors aren’t sure if she’s going to make it.”

  Danielle pressed her hand against her forehead, wishing the pain medicine she’d taken thirty minutes ago would start working. “So you’re telling me that my baby and my mother are out there somewhere, but we still have no idea where?”

  “We are doing everything we can to find them, ma’am, but it might take some take time.”

  “What if they don’t have time?” Danielle tried to hold back the tears, but she’d had enough of waiting and being patient. “We don’t know where they are. We don’t know if they have food and water…”

  “Wait a minute.” Eddie looked up from the dining room table where he’d been sitting. “I might know something they do have.”

  “What do you mean, Dad?”

  “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before.” Eddie started rummaging through the stuff on top of the hutch. “I was sitting here with Maggie this morning talking about my job like I told you before. She was asking questions about my gadgets, and I was trying to impress her with a few tall tales of life as a P.I.”

  “Get to the point, Dad….”

  “Sorry.” Eddie stopped and turned around. “It’s not here. One of the small portable tracking devices I showed her is gone. It’s no bigger than a thumb drive, but she was sitting right there when Ian busted through the front door. If she managed to slip it into her pocket…”

  Danielle finished his sentence. “It’s small enough that Ian might not have even noticed what she’d done, and we could track them.”

  Jason didn’t look convinced. “Dad, with all the stuff you have lying in this room, you’re expecting me to believe that you can tell something is missing?”

  “Yes. It was sitting right here at the table. If she was quick, Ian wouldn’t have even noticed.”

  “So we need to see if we can track the signal.” Danielle started praying they weren’t simply chasing another false hope. “How does it work?”

  “As long as it is on, we can track it in real time. I just need my phone….”

  Eddie crossed the room to his recliner and dug through the pile of remotes until he found it. “This tracker works person-to-person, which simply put means it doesn’t require my using some operation center to tell me where its location is.”

  “Then how do you find it?”

  “The system links to a Google map allowing me to track the location of the device.” A moment later he nodded. “It’s turned on, and I’ve got the signal.”

  Danielle’s breath caught. “Where are they?”

  “Give me a minute…” Eddie smiled for the first time in a while. “It looks like they’re a few miles north of Pacific Cove. There are a few old cabins in the area. The perfect place to keep someone out of sight.”

  *

  Sitting beside Jason, Danielle’s heart pounded as he sped down the winding coastal road flanked by thick foliage and stately evergreens. The men they were dealing with had proven to be ruthless. Which meant while Eddie might have found the location on the GPS, there were still no guarantees that her mother and Lauryn were still there. Or that they were okay.

  The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want…

  Danielle pushed aside the negative thoughts and tried to cling to the verse she’d learned as a small child.

  Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

  Sometimes not fearing was just so hard to do.

  Jason reached across the console and laced their fingers together. “We’re going to find them, Danielle.”

  She squeezed his hand and nodded, choosing to hold on to the hope they’d been offered in the form of one of Eddie’s electronic gadgets. Jason was right. Lauryn and her mother had to be there.

  Please Lord, let them be okay. I need them to be okay.

  “We’re almost there.” Eddie spoke up from the backseat. “Another…hundred yards and we should see the house.”

  The run-down cabin sat a mile inland from the coast, with paint chipped off the outside walls, and a front porch that needed replacing. As soon as Jason stopped the car, Danielle jumped out of the passenger seat, ignoring the police officer’s words of caution from behind her.

  A minute later, one of the officers had broken down the door that had been padlocked from the outside. Danielle stepped into the dusty room, pausing only to allow her eyes a moment to adjust to the darkened room.

  “Mama?”

  Danielle heard her daughter’s voice from the other side of the room. “Lauryn!”

  She sat huddled with her grandmother in the corner of the unfurnished room, their hands and feet secured with duct tape. Danielle ran toward her daughter, then pulled her into her arms. Jason and the officer helped undo the tape while Danielle breathed in the lingering smell of cigarette smoke mixed with her daughter’s strawberry-scented shampoo.

  Her mother stood up slowly, stretching out her cramped muscles. Her clothing was wrinkled, but beyond that, she didn’t seem to be hurt.

  “Mom.” Danielle didn’t try to fight the tears. “Are you okay?”

  “Besides the fact that we were locked in a house for the past few hours thanks to that no-good man, yes, we’re okay.”

  Her mom pulled the tiny GPS from her pocket and handed it to Eddie with a glimmer of relief in her eyes. “I guess one of your trinkets came in handy, after all.”

  Eddie wrapped a protective arm around her mother’s waist, pulled her toward him then kissed her square on the lips.

  Her mother was smiling once he finally let her go. “Why, Eddie Ryan, you certainly know how to make a woman swoon.”

  Danielle chuckled at the scene, but the reality of what had just taken place—and of what could have happened—wasn’t going to be easy to forget. “I’m so sorry you had to go through this. Both of you.”

  “I’m the one that is sorry.” Eddie had yet to move away from her mother. “I was supposed to protect both of you.”

  Jason shook his head. “There was nothing you could have done to prevent any of this from happening, Dad.”

  Danielle’s mom took Eddie’s hand, the relief clear on both of their faces. “It’s over. That’s all that counts.”

  “You were smart, grabbing that tracker.”

  “There wasn’t time to think about it, to be honest. What I don’t understand is how that man managed to get past the dogs and…”

  Danielle smiled up at Jason. Her daughter’s ch
in was nuzzled into her shoulder, and all she could feel was overwhelming relief. “I know there are still lots of unanswered questions, Mom…but for now, let’s go home.”

  NINETEEN

  Danielle stopped outside Kate’s hospital room and paused before going in. She’d been betrayed by someone she’d always considered to be a friend. Over the past forty-eight hours, details behind Kate’s involvement in the case had emerged. In return for a lesser sentence, she’d given the police a full confession, helping to implicate Donavan McNeill. But Danielle still needed answers, and not just from a police report or the ten o’clock news. She needed to hear the truth from Kate.

  Jason’s hand pressed gently against the small of Danielle’s back. “Are you sure you’re ready to do this?”

  Danielle glanced back at Lauryn, who sat between her mom and Eddie in the hallway, and she couldn’t help but smile at the sound of her daughter’s laughter. Her family was safe, but there was still one more thing she needed for closure.

  “No, but I need to do this.”

  Danielle sent up a prayer for strength, then entered the room. Kate’s hair had been pulled back from her face exposing a long purple bruise across her cheekbone from where she’d fallen. According to the doctors, she’d been lucky. The bullet had hit her shoulder during the drive-by. Farther to the right, the bullet could have struck her heart, and Kate would be dead.

  Danielle moved toward the side of the bed, wondering where to start.

  Kate’s gaze shifted away from Danielle to the blank wall at the far end of the bed. “I didn’t think you’d come.”

  “I needed to see you for myself. To try and to understand what happened. I…I thought we were friends.”

  “We were.” Kate looked at Danielle and caught her gaze. “There were some things about my life that were real.”

  “Like how you loved Garrett? Or how you put my daughter’s life in danger?” Danielle sat down on the edge of the plastic chair beside the bed. “Friends aren’t supposed to betray each other.”