The sound of a zipper came from across the hall, followed by a muffled groan.
“This isn’t what you usually bring me,” the unknown voice said. “This one’s old.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Mihail answered in his thick Eastern European accent. “The boss wants her eliminated.”
The unknown voice chuckled. “He didn’t want to try to sell this one online?”
“No one would buy this one,” the third voice said. “She’s damaged goods.”
Harper’s breath caught. She recognized the third voice. Recognized it well. As soon as she’d heard it on the dock, she’d suspected it was him, but now she knew for sure. Knew because she’d worked alongside that voice for almost a year. Had stupidly trusted that voice. And had spent the last damn year plotting all the ways she was going to make the man behind that voice pay for pushing her off the force.
“All the ones you bring me are damaged goods,” the unknown voice said. “What did she do to the boss man?”
“She couldn’t keep her mouth shut,” Noah Pierce answered, just as smug and vile as he’d always been.
“Stupid woman,” the unknown voice muttered. “Then again, most of them aren’t very smart. Good for only one thing.”
The soft chuckling that met Harper’s ears only made her vision blur red even more.
“How much did you give her?” the unknown man asked.
“Twice what we normally do,” Mihail answered.
“Shit.”
“We had to hit her twice,” Pierce muttered. “She’s used to the easy stuff.”
“Hmm. We’ll have to give the drugs time to get out of her system.” Another groan echoed from the open doorway. “Put another strip of tape over her mouth, zip up the bag, and strap her to the table. We’ll check on her in a bit to see how she’s doing.”
Footsteps sounded in the room. Harper turned back to Rusty and motioned toward the open doorway where he’d snagged those instruments. He nodded and moved silently in that direction. Following him, she ducked into the dark room and moved behind an instrument cart where she went still and waited.
A lifetime seemed to tick by in the silence. Her heart raced as she waited for them to finish whatever they were doing and leave. Metal scraped metal. Footsteps sounded. Then she heard a click, like a door shutting, and she sucked in a breath, relieved they were finally going.
Voices echoed in the hallway, then footsteps. She held her breath as they passed. But the unknown voice called, “Wait. Did one of you go in here?”
Footsteps drew closer, and a click sounded, followed by light flooding the room where she and Rusty were hiding.
She went still as stone, afraid to move, afraid to breathe. The gun grew heavy in her hand at her side. The man with the unknown voice stepped farther into the room and glanced around. From where she was hiding behind the instrument tray, Harper could just barely see his feet—encased in black dress shoes—his slacks, and the bottom of what looked like a white doctor’s coat.
Moving her head very slowly, Harper glanced to her right where she knew Rusty was hiding behind a refrigeration unit. She couldn’t see him. She hoped to God this man couldn’t see him either. She had no doubt Pierce was armed. He was always armed. Mihail she wasn’t sure about, but considering he’d pulled a gun on Rusty in that tunnel, odds were good he was armed too. This man in the doctor’s coat was a wild card.
“Jesus,” Pierce called. “You left that door open earlier. Come on, Johnson, I’m starving. If you want my help with that harvest tonight, I need food.”
“Fine, whatever,” Johnson muttered. “There’s sushi in the staff room.”
“I fucking hate sushi,” Pierce muttered.
Johnson flipped the light off and closed the door. A click sounded, then his muffled voice chuckled. “That’s because you have no class, Pierce.”
Their footsteps faded down the hall along with their voices, but Harper didn’t move for several minutes, just in case.
Rusty was the first to make a sound. He stepped out from behind the refrigerator and was at her side in seconds. “Motherfucker,” he whispered. “They’re harvesting organs from the girls they can’t sell.”
Yeah, she’d already figured that out. “We have bigger problems at the moment. I think they locked us in here.”
He moved toward the door, closed his hand around the knob, and muttered, “Fuck.”
“Can you pick it?”
He knelt and studied the lock. “I don’t know. I don’t have my pick kit with me.”
“There has to be something in here you can use.”
He glanced behind him at the drawers in the cabinets along the wall. “Look for any small instruments with a long, pointed end.”
They both went to work, pulling drawers open as quietly as they could. When she found what he’d described, she drew it out and said, “Got it.” She met him at the door and handed it to him. “Will this work?”
“We’ll find out.”
He dropped to his knees and inserted the instrument into the lock hole, moving it back and forth and up and down. Her pulse picked up. She glanced through the window in the door, out into the hall, hoping and praying Pierce and his friends weren’t on their way back.
“Relax,” Rusty muttered. “I got this.”
“We need to get that girl out of here before they come back.”
“If they drugged her, it’s going to take several hours for the drugs to wear off.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about.”
“No?”
“If she starts making noise, like I suspect she’s about to do, I don’t put it past them to find a way to shut her up without drugs. They only need her alive enough to take her organs.”
Rusty’s hands stilled against the lock. “Shit.”
Yeah. Big-time shit.
He worked faster. And when the lock clicked several minutes later, Harper silently rejoiced.
“Good job.” As she pulled the door open, a groan sounded from across the hall. “She’s waking up.”
Harper checked the corridor. Finding it clear, they made their way across the industrial tile floor, where she breathed a sigh of relief that Pierce and the others hadn’t locked this door.
The room was dark when they stepped inside. Only a single light was on over a sink on the far wall. Rusty moved quickly for the body bag strapped to the gurney in the middle of the room and pointed toward the door. “Lock that, just in case.”
Harper holstered her gun at her lower back and flipped the lock. When she turned back, Rusty was already unzipping the bag. The girl inside groaned again, this time louder.
“Oh shit,” Rusty muttered.
“What?” Harper moved to his side, and her eyes grew wide when she looked down. “Oh my God, it’s Destiny.”
The stripper who’d helped them both moaned beneath the tape covering her mouth, her eyes tightly shut, and tried to move. But with the bag strapped to the gurney, all she did was shake the table.
Harper’s gaze shot to Rusty. “They know she helped us.”
“That’d be my guess.” Rusty went to work on the closest strap. “Get that one. We have to get her out of here.”
Harper fumbled with the buckle on the second strap and silently hoped they could do that without causing any commotion. Their lives hinged on Destiny staying quiet and cooperating.
Considering she was drugged and that whoever had grabbed her wanted her dead, there was no guarantee one way or the other.
Rusty’s pulse was a roar in his ears as he followed Harper back down the dimly lit hallway with a limp stripper dressed in nothing but a ripped and flimsy T-shirt dress over his shoulder.
Gun drawn in front of her, Harper paused twice and held up her hand, telling him to stop, making his heart beat even faster because he was sure they were about to be overrun by the three goons from before. Each time though, Harper lowered her hand, then nodded for him to follow her closely as they headed back toward the loading dock.
Thankfully, Destiny stayed quiet until they reached their destination. When he tried to climb down with her slung over his shoulder, she let out a loud groan. Sure she was about to set off some silent alarm, he went still as stone. But when nothing happened, he told himself to stop being so jumpy and hustled to catch up with Harper.
They managed to get Destiny loaded into the back seat of his truck. Pulling a blanket out from under the seat, he handed it to Harper, who climbed in the back with her, then he jumped in the driver’s seat and pulled away from the facility as slowly and quietly as he could.
Harper didn’t talk as he drove, but he checked his rearview mirror to make sure both women were okay. Destiny lapsed in and out of consciousness as she lay sprawled across Harper’s lap, wrapped in the blanket. Harper was still on high alert, checking car lights behind and in front of them, just to make sure they weren’t being followed.
Now that they were out of immediate danger, he couldn’t help but think about what he’d seen back there. Harper had been right. They were using the facility to get rid of evidence. This went way beyond human trafficking. It dipped into black market organ trade and he didn’t know what else.
Twenty minutes later, he pulled to a stop in front of St. Vincent’s ER. After flagging down assistance, he helped two orderlies haul Destiny out of his truck and into a wheelchair. He didn’t want to have to file a report, so he gave them the bare basics, told them they didn’t know what kind of drugs she’d taken, then split as soon as they turned to wheel Destiny inside the hospital.
Harper was sitting in the passenger seat of his cab when he came back out, the phone pressed to her ear. As he put the truck in “Drive,” he whispered, “Who are you talking to?”
“Callahan,” she mouthed. “Yeah,” she said into the phone, “I’m here.”
Their conversation was brief. She gave him an abbreviated summary of what they’d found at the body broker, then asked him to send someone to watch over Destiny in the ER. Rusty was just coming out of the tunnel on Highway 26, heading toward downtown, when she hung up and said, “I need to make a stop before we head back to O’Donnell’s.”
“What kind of stop?”
“A police kind of stop.” When he eyed her skeptically, she added, “Don’t worry. I won’t be long. But I recognized more than just Mihail at that facility.”
“You did? Who?”
“The second guy. The one who met Mihail on the loading dock. It was my ex-partner, Noah Pierce. The same detective who questioned you after Melony Strauss went missing.”
“Shit. That’s why his voice seemed so familiar.”
“I need to let my former captain know. That’s not something I can sit on.”
He understood that.
He parked across the street from the department on Second Street. Lights shone down over the smattering of cars on the road at this hour and the trees trying to leaf out in late March.
Harper popped her door as soon as he pulled to a stop and jumped out. “I won’t be long.”
“I’ll g—”
He didn’t get the words out before she slammed the door and rushed across the street.
He climbed out, hit the lock button on his fob, and hustled after her. Catching up with her just as she yanked the front door open, he grabbed it above her head and held it for her. She looked up in surprise and said, “I thought you were going to wait in the truck?”
“And miss all the fun? No way.”
She frowned but didn’t seem too bothered. “This won’t take long, I promise.”
He waited behind her while she crossed to the reception counter and checked in with the officer on duty. Short minutes later, she handed him a visitor badge, then turned toward the elevators with her own badge. “This way.”
Three officers were waiting for the elevator when they reached it. They nodded at Harper as if they knew her, and she did the same in response, but there was no spark of friendship. He couldn’t help but wonder if she’d been close to anyone in the department besides Pierce—the man he wished he’d been able to take one good swing at with a crowbar, like the weapon back at the facility.
They rode the elevator up in silence. When the doors opened with a ping, he followed her off the car and into a large room filled with cubicles and officers and a flurry of activity, even at the late hour.
She pointed toward a trio of plastic chairs along the wall. “Have a seat; I’ll be right back.”
He wasn’t thrilled with being relegated to the waiting area, but he could tell she was slightly stressed, so he did as she said with a nod. She wove around desks and cubicles, heading for a door on the far side of the room. As she passed, a few officers took notice of her, but no one called out her name or muttered hellos, and Harper didn’t acknowledge them either.
She stopped near an office on the far side with a wall of glass windows blocked by drawn shutters. The sign over the door said CAPTAIN; she didn’t bother to knock. Just twisted the knob and walked straight in as if she owned the place.
The door slapped shut. Rusty eyed its dark wood, knowing he should stay put as Harper had told him but curious about what kind of reception Harper would get from this captain. She’d told him the department was a good ol’ boys’ club. He knew her captain hadn’t believed her before and that he’d forced her out of the department. What if he didn’t believe her now? What if he took Pierce’s side over hers?
Instinct pushed him to his feet. He skirted the edge of the room, around the outside of the cubicles, following the path she’d taken. A couple of officers eyed him speculatively, but after glancing at his visitor badge they went back to their work. He slowed his steps as he approached the door he’d seen Harper march through. Voices echoed from inside, sending his pulse up. Forceful voices. Hers and a man’s.
“You’re absolutely sure of this,” the man said.
“Without a doubt. I saw him. What the hell is going on, Daryl? He wasn’t working undercover, was he? Do you even have control over what’s happening in your division?”
“Watch it, Blake.”
“Why? People are dying out there. They’re killing those girls and selling off their body parts as if they’re nothing but livestock. You’ve got a mole here in the department, and I just told you who it is, and you don’t seem to even care.”
“I care, goddammit. It’s just not that easy.”
“‘Not that easy’?” Her voice lifted an octave. “He lied to the review committee about me. I knew it, he knew it, and you even knew. I got fired, and here he is a year later, still working for the department, all the while participating in a black-market organization that abducts, sells, and murders innocent women and girls. He needs to be fucking brought in now.”
“I understand your anger,” the man said in a placating tone. “But I would have thought you’d use this to your advantage, not come barging in here all bent out of shape about it.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means,” he said with a sigh. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it? Your connection to the head of the Plague? If we take Pierce down now, you risk losing that connection. You risk letting the head of the organization off the hook. The commissioner is never going to live up to his end of your deal if you don’t bring him the mastermind. He won’t give a rat’s ass about Pierce, and you won’t be reinstated.”
Rusty sucked in a breath when he realized what they were discussing. Somehow, at some point, she’d made a deal with the police commissioner to get her old job back. A deal that hinged on her bringing the department information on the head of the Plague. A deal she could only follow through on after convincing Rusty to help her bring down the organization.
Their conversation in the kitchen the morning after they’d rescued Megan Christianson slammed into him. As did her words just before she’d slid onto his lap and lured him into hot sex right on her kitchen table.
“Wouldn’t it be better to stop these people from ever traumatizing another girl than to try
to rescue her after the fact? We could make that happen. Together.”
The blood drained from his face. He didn’t hear any more of her conversation inside that room, couldn’t focus on the words. All he could focus on was the fact she’d used him. Used him to get what she wanted, which was her job back. She didn’t care about saving those girls. She didn’t really care about bringing down the Plague. And she didn’t care about him. He’d been a means to an end, and he’d fallen right into her trap.
The realization that he’d been stupid whipped through him. And the bitter reality that he’d been duped. The “something else” he’d seen in her eyes tonight wasn’t anything related to their relationship. It was pure and simple deception. A deception he should have picked up on a long time ago.
He wasn’t sure how he made it down the elevator and out of the building. Didn’t remember handing in his badge or crossing the road to his truck. All he could focus on was the sour taste of betrayal and the painful bite of his own foolishness as he drove. He should have known better.
Happy endings didn’t happen for people like him. And he had no one to blame for getting his hopes up but himself.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The cell phone on the edge of Andy Renwick’s desk buzzed, jolting him in his seat as he’d been trying to read a brief.
He hadn’t been able to sleep. After he’d dropped Maureen at the airport for her red-eye, he’d come back to the office and decided he’d get some work done. But now he wished he hadn’t. Now, as he eyed the buzzing phone as if it might burst into flames at any moment, he wished he’d stayed home, thrown the covers over his head, and ignored everything outside the safety of his walls.
There was no ignoring it, though. Swallowing hard, he reached for the phone with a shaking hand and flipped it over. One look at the number told him just who it was. Just as it told him he couldn’t ignore the call.
“Yes,” he said as he pressed the phone to his ear, trying to keep his voice level and smooth, cringing internally when he heard it crack.
“They know, goddammit!” the voice screamed into his ear. “They were at the facility in Hillsboro tonight! They took that fucking whore out of there before she was processed.”
Unspeakable Page 25