The Innocent: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel

by Stevens, Taylor

  Behind her the blankets rustled, followed by the quiet of Bradford’s settling. He switched off the bedside lamp, and the room was bathed in the computer screen’s ambient glow.

  The window of time was narrow, and in these hours of darkness Munroe would—had to—find what she needed. It was either that, or the kneecaps. She placed the headset over her ears, and in a purity of concentration that only focusing on an assignment could bring, allowed the rest of the world to fade away.

  Collectively, pooled over the past two days were twenty-eight hours of voice, split unevenly among the three Havens, a lot to cull through, but not nearly as much as it would have been had Bradford not already clipped out the extended silences and unintelligible chatter.

  The bulk of the recordings came from the Ranch, which was good in that it increased the odds of finding what she wanted, but daunting for the amount of time it would take to locate it.

  She started with the two hours from Haven Three, the smallest and nearest, with only one channel open for audio. She expected to find little there, and wanting to eliminate this chunk before moving on to the rest, Munroe set the software to allow for listening at a distorted high-speed, closed her eyes, and ran it.

  The recordings were an aural version of voyeurism, peeping into the lives of those exposed, and the momentary snapshots, as they filled the hour, confirmed what she’d supposed. There was nothing of value.

  Of the remaining twenty-six hours, eight were from Haven One, and like those she’d just scanned, she expected nothing and set them aside.

  Munroe paused before the machine and took the headset off, feeling comfort in the darkness of the room and in the rhythm of Bradford’s sleep. She waited, listening, falling into the cocoon of silence, willing her mind to emptiness, and then turned again to the headset and the voices.

  The hours from the Ranch were divided among six channels, one for each of the listening devices placed by either herself or Bradford. She started with what would have seemed the most obvious, the device on the stairwell, listening to gibberish and group talk, picking out snippets in Spanish and English and the occasional stray conversation in Finnish or German. Time passed.

  She moved to the girls’ room, to the living room, and finally on an urge to clear the smallest channel, found the first clue. In a fitting form of irony, it came from the bug Bradford had planted in the electric socket of the boys’ bathroom.

  The voices of the visitors filled the headset—their words, more than tone or accent, had given notice to the change in speakers, and the difference was enough for Munroe to recognize what she had. She reset the software, slowing to normal speed.

  The conversation from the hallway, picked up but not perfectly clear, was a discussion of Hannah, what appeared to be a restated agreement to take the girl and a guardian away for an indefinite period, but there was no indication as to where, and nothing more was said about it.

  The only other piece to go on, a hint of what would come next, happened in the moments when Munroe had left the kitchen. The talk between Morningstar and Hannah was of packing, of a stay, and no answer to Hannah’s question of how long. They hadn’t discussed the why, but then, for Hannah, that was probably never much of a question.

  Munroe set the headset on the desk and for the first time noticed the change of light in the room. Small rays creeping past the curtains announced that day had come. She turned. Bradford lay on the bed, arms behind his head, watching her.

  “How long have you been awake?” she said.

  “Half an hour.”

  “Hungry?”

  “Starved.”

  They took breakfast at a café down the street, coffee and croissants with the sun coming in off the window, and the warmth comfortable and drowsy.

  “How good is your guy?” Munroe said.

  “Guys,” Bradford said. “Plural. It’s been a long time since we’ve worked together on anything big, but if the past is any indication, they’re solid.”

  “Connected?”

  “I expect so.”

  “I’ve got a lead on Hannah,” she said. “Not much, but something. If it was me, I could work with it, but I don’t have the time to entrench and do it myself. If your guys are worth anything, it’ll be faster to go through them.”

  “What did you find?”

  “Hotels.”

  “Hotels?” he said.

  She nodded. “Hotels. Bed-and-breakfasts. Inns. Youth hostels. Anything of that nature within the boundaries of the city.”

  “It’s a wide net.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. They might own one, they might own three dozen. It’s still a smaller net than the entire city. I’d like to put out a line, see if we can draw a bead on anything in particular.”

  “There shouldn’t be a problem to throwing it out there.”

  “How fast till we get something back?”

  “That I don’t know,” he said. “But I can push. What about you, are you going back to the Ranch?”

  “I need to sleep,” she said. “I can feel myself slipping, losing my edge. If what we’re going up against is even half as bad as you say it is, I need to be at full capacity. I can dose enough to take myself out for eight hours—and it’ll free you to work without worrying about me.”

  He cringed.

  “I haven’t medicated for over a week, Miles, one day isn’t going to make me an addict. It’s either that or you lose a day of work and take the risk of me trying to kill you again.”

  “The risk I can handle.”

  “Go work,” she said. “I’ll sleep.”

  He didn’t say anything, and so she stood. They returned to the hotel in silence, and once in the room, she moved to the bag that lay slumped against the foot of her bed. As much as Bradford would have wanted to dump the bottles in her absence, he wouldn’t have. She unzipped it and rummaged through the contents, knowing they’d still be there.

  She grabbed a bottle and broke the seal. Tipped the liquid into her mouth and then, matching his stare and with a hint of defiance, wiped the trace of syrup off the corner of her lip. “One day,” she said.

  The potion was a sweet seduction as it trickled down her throat. Not nearly as strong or as addictive as hydrocodone or morphine, the codeine still did the trick. The warmth of the opiate was a heady relief from pressure and pain and responsibility, a relief from feeling anything at all, a rush, not unlike adrenaline, coursing in the opposite direction toward repose. Had Bradford any idea how strongly Munroe fought the desire to live in a perpetual state of this bliss, he would have tried to fight her, perhaps even attempt to remove the bottles by force. And that would have been a mistake.

  But he hadn’t. And she’d drunk. And now on the bed with a smile on her face, she closed her eyes and descended into the ecstasy of oblivion.

  When she woke, it was to Bradford’s touch on her shoulder. Perhaps more than a touch. Maybe he’d been shaking her for a while. Awareness came slowly through a haze, and even if she’d wanted to react, her only response was to smile a drunken smile. She rolled on her back, still smiling, still stupid.

  She laughed at the look of concern on his face, ran her finger along his cheek, and said, “How’s it going?”

  “I think I might have what you’re looking for,” he said.

  She nodded, pressed her lips together to suppress the internal laughter.

  “Maybe I should get you some coffee,” he said, “and a heavy meal.”

  “I’ll be fine, just needs to wear off. How long has it been?”

  “Five hours.”

  “It’s a big dose I took,” she said. She closed her eyes and resisted the urge to drift back into the web of darkness. “Give me what you’ve got. I’m not functioning at a hundred percent, but the brain is still working, even if my lack of sense of humor is impaired.” In the wake of his silence, she soughed at her joke, and then she laughed.

  Bradford sighed. “Okay,” he said. “The Cárcan family does have an interest in a numb
er of hotels around the city, most of them are midsize, one step up from the Budget Inn–type places. But those are all owned by companies and partnerships, nothing privately held, everything out in the open and legal. Except for three smaller places that belong to one of the sons—a little side project of his, you could say.”

  Munroe scratched the back of her neck, her eyes still closed. “Sounds like a good starting place,” she said. “We’ll need to get some form of surveillance set up on each—some way to find out if that’s the right direction—if she’s there in one of those.”

  “Go back to sleep,” he said. “I’ve got some ideas. I’ll let you know what we’ve got to work with.”

  It was dark when Munroe pulled out of the haze. She’d been asleep and was then awake. Just like that. Light off, light on. Bradford was still gone and his phone was missing. She assumed it was with him. She reached for her watch. Seven o’clock. Doing the math, she figured it had been around three when he’d woken her. He’d been gone four hours. A little long for a drive-by.

  She stepped from the bed to the shower, turned the water fully cold, and the shock against her skin was an unpleasant return to the land of the living that took away with it the final effects of the bottle.

  There was still no sign of Bradford when she came back to the room.

  She dressed for recon, pulling on pieces that belonged to the night and the dark alleys. They felt good, like a second skin, the stuff you wore when scaling walls, walking ledges, and sliding into tight spaces, nothing like the upscale feminine clothes of the last few days.

  And still no sign of Bradford.

  She didn’t need him in order to make the next move. The information he’d gleaned during her hours asleep had been left on the desk, his notes clearly legible and obviously intended for her benefit as much as for his. She could set out to gather her own intel and at worst double on Bradford’s effort, but it was uncomfortable not knowing where he was or what he’d been doing since he’d left.

  Munroe stood in front of the mirror, face-to-face, eye-to-eye with herself, as she plotted through the events to come. One way or another, Hannah was hers. Recon or no, Bradford or not, alone or together, she was going after the girl, and if she returned to the Ranch, she wouldn’t be going as a guest.

  From a pocket in her overnight bag Munroe pulled out one of the several purchases from her shopping spree. She unwound the cord. Snapped the plastic guard into place and switched on the buzzer. Head over the sink, she sheared off the last remnants of femininity, and years of practice left a young man with a military buzz cut looking back at her. He wore an evil smile.

  She cleaned the mess and packed away the machine, and still no Bradford.

  Munroe trusted his judgment, his survival instinct, assumed that when he said the Cárcan family was not to be trifled with that the warning applied to himself as much as it did to her. He would be careful. She checked her watch. It was late by what he’d told her, still early by the city’s standards.

  Munroe sighed and returned to the desk. As odd as it was to allow another her role, she would let Bradford work. If he wasn’t back by early morning, she’d try to raise him on the phone, and if she couldn’t contact him then, she would go alone. In the meantime, there were the last of the audio tracks.

  Chapter 31

  The clock had passed midnight and the voices with their worthless conversations were coming to an end when Bradford finally walked through the door.

  Munroe turned to face him, an accusation almost to her lips until she saw him. She stopped and forced back a laugh.

  “Where the hell have you been?” she said, but this time she was smiling.

  Bradford was dressed in old clothes, ratty and tattered, the kind of getup you’d see on a kid who’d spent the last four months hitchhiking the continent. The boots on his feet were beat up and worn through, and over his shoulder he carried a small backpack. This wasn’t the Bradford who’d headed out at midafternoon.

  “I’ve been hobnobbing with the base and seedy,” he said. He shrugged off the backpack. Held it out, as if the grime were contagious, and dumped it on the floor. “There wasn’t really any way to call. I’m glad you waited for me—hope I didn’t worry you.”

  Munroe nodded at his outfit. “Talk to me,” she said.

  “We’re in,” he said.

  “You found her?”

  Bradford shrugged and smiled a bragging smile, an actor’s grin. Munroe let him have the moment. She moved from the chair to the edge of the bed, audience to the stage, and motioned for him to continue.

  “Out of the three hotel-slash-hostels on our radar, two are normal run-of-the-mill-type places,” he said. “Not a whole lot happening. Quiet. Empty. Clean. And from what I saw, there didn’t appear to be any Cárcan henchmen around. Now, if I were a Cárcan big shot, and I were going to stash a kid like Hannah as a favor, I’d wonder what exactly my friends were up to, and I’d put her where I could keep an eye on her. Which brings me to the third location.

  “This one is different. It has three stories and borders one of the rougher neighborhoods, and rumor has it that a lot of the guests are not as transient as you’d expect—that the Cárcans use it to house short-term employees. You know, the kind who are in town for a special job before moving on? Definitely more up our alley and closer to what I expect we’re looking for.

  “Whatever else the place may be, it’s also open for regular business, and it seemed the easiest way inside was through the front door, although not the way I was dressed. I found a kid a few blocks away who liked my offer of clothing and shoe exchange. I had to pay extra for the luggage.” He shook his head theatrically and rubbed his finger along the shirt’s frayed collar. “I checked into the Cárcan family suites. The place is a dump, but the rooms are clean and the doors lock. There’s a small cantina downstairs. Metal tables, folding chairs, tepid coffee, local TV. I’m sure you know the drill. Hung out there for a while, and eventually me and my trusty guidebook made some new friends.”

  Munroe raised an eyebrow, as if to say And?

  “Hannah’s a real cute little lady,” he said. “Looks just like a miniature Logan. That woman who’s with her, though—” Bradford grimaced and shook his head.

  Munroe’s face remained deadpan, and her voice monotone. “You have target location?”

  “No need to thank me,” he said. “But yes, we have confirmation.” He paused. “And I love what you’ve done with your hair.”

  Munroe grinned and, without breaking eye contact, stood. She moved toward Bradford, slow and languid. He remained motionless, eyes tracking her as she drew near, head turning slightly to follow her approach until she was close against him, mouth to his ear, her lips close enough to graze his skin.

  “Not bad for a night’s work,” she whispered.

  The hair raised along Bradford’s neck. Munroe continued on past, and he, with a deer-in-the-headlight glaze, turned to follow her.

  Leaning against the wall, she said, “Considering the type of neighborhood, I’m surprised two women would be socializing late at night with a strange man.”

  “They had reason to feel safe.”

  “I assume it wasn’t because you’re such a great guy.”

  Bradford shook his head.

  “Lay it out for me,” she said.

  Bradford’s time in the hotel had allowed him to plot the floor plan; his time at the table discussing first the country and then religion had gotten him Hannah’s room number.

  On a piece of paper, Bradford diagrammed the access points, the blind spots, and the sticky issues. Hannah was on the third floor, and the only way to her was through the front door, past the front desk, and up the stairwell that wound from the rear of the tiny lobby through the center of the building. There were no elevators or fire escapes or emergency exits. Not in this part of town, or this building.

  The hotel’s desk clerks were gatekeepers rather than humble staff. Shift change showed each man as beefy as the other, with
weapons behind the counter and no subtlety in the handoff. There were no security cameras, but two of the Cárcans’ foot soldiers traded off in a leisurely form of round-the-clock, patrol-the-hallways, keep-an-eye-on-things security. From the condition of the hotel and the sidewalk out front, the measures did well at keeping the local riffraff from messing with the place. Whatever street crime occurred in the area wasn’t happening there.

  Up the stairs, branching right and left off the stairwell, were two floors of short hallways, four doors to a side, sixteen rooms to a floor, and Hannah’s was at the far end of the hall. The entire third floor, Hannah’s floor, housed only the Cárcan’s people, although, as far as Bradford could tell, Hannah was only being hidden, not specifically guarded.

  Getting past the desk going in was a nonissue. Coming back out with a drugged teenager who also happened to be the personal guest of the hotel owner and the Cárcan family was another story altogether. As far as extractions went, it wasn’t as simple as it would have been had they pulled Hannah out of the sleeping Ranch, but it was far easier than a hostage rescue.

  Pinpointing the new location as quickly as they had was a lucky break, and Munroe wanted nothing more of waiting. That said, her world was one of information and intelligence, stealth and smarts over guns and door kicking, and by that token, it might have been the wiser choice to acquire more knowledge, to get a personal feel for what she was going into, because Bradford’s point of view, no matter how accurate, could never substitute for her own.

  But at this stage, she no longer cared.

  It was impossible to guess how long Hannah would remain holed up in the hotel, and the Cárcan family inevitably had plenty more places to stash their charge if The Chosen got jumpy. More still, Munroe was wary of what men like those she’d met in the hallway would do if they got their hands on a young girl like Hannah, and Hannah was now surrounded by an entire hotel floor of them.