He shut down his laptop and returned it to his computer bag. He opened a bottle of wine, poured a glass. In part, he was celebrating his success. It felt good to have pulled off the hack, to have gotten in and out undetected.
But there was also a sadness in his drinking because, the truth was, he didn’t want to do what he would have to do tomorrow.
Don’t think about that. It’s the deal you made. Just do it and don’t think about it.
He finished the glass of wine and resisted the urge to have another. He still had an hour’s drive ahead of him. He was sure a second glass wouldn’t put him over the limit, but he didn’t even want to get close.
The hacker went down to the cellar to tend to one last piece of business. Then he locked up the house, tossed the laptop bag into his truck, and, with hands still shaking from the caffeine, fumbled with the car key until he got it into the ignition.
One. More. Day.
CHAPTER 22
Like Roland, Connor and Olin ran. The cop shouted for them to stop. Yeah, right. Connor didn’t know where Olin was parked, but Olin seemed to be veering off to the left. The closest lot in that direction was behind the tennis courts.
Connor, on the other hand, was parked on the street, which meant his car was quite a bit closer. His little piece of shit Ford Fiesta might not be fast, but it would be fast enough to get them out of there.
“This way!” he said to Olin. “Stay with me.”
Olin fell back in line. They reached the Fiesta seconds later. “Get in,” Connor instructed, right before he attempted to slide across the hood. He had seen it done enough times in movies, imagined it would be faster than circling around the vehicle. But an action star he was not. The slide turned into a roll and he tumbled to the cement on the other side.
Olin gave him a look when he got in the car but didn’t say anything.
Connor threw the gearshift into drive and took off. There was no one parked in front of him, thank goodness.
For the first two blocks, neither of them said a word. Connor wasn’t even sure he took a breath. He kept glancing at the rearview mirror. He didn’t know what he was looking for. It was foolish to think they were suddenly going to find themselves in a police chase. There was no cop in the world who was calling in an APB because he had failed to chase down a couple of kids. Especially when there hadn’t been a crime committed. (Well, maybe grabbing Roland like Olin had would count as assault, but Roland wouldn’t be pressing any charges.)
Squat brick buildings and storefronts swallowed the park almost immediately.
Olin spoke first. “Did you see how red his face got?”
Connor could hear the amusement in his voice. He looked at Olin, couldn’t believe he found any of this funny.
Olin’s grin stretched wider and he added, “I thought his head was going to explode,” as he started laughing.
Then, for some reason, Connor pictured Roland’s head exploding and he laughed, too. There still wasn’t anything funny about their situation. Maybe it was just a subconscious effort to break the tension. Whatever the reason, once the laughter had passed, things got serious again.
“We still don’t have any idea what he was up to,” Connor said.
“Yeah, I know.”
“But at least we know he wasn’t involved, and I guess that’s something.”
“What makes you so sure of that?”
“What he said. He sincerely wanted to know what Dad had asked me to tell him. He wouldn’t have asked that if he already knew they were missing.”
“So what now?”
It was a fair question. As much as Connor had been glad to discover that Roland wasn’t involved in the abduction, he had been hoping (almost certain, actually) that he would get something out of their meeting.
A part of him even felt like he had. But if that was so, what was it? Roland had been evasive throughout their entire conversation. Had he slipped up somewhere? Connor tried to remember.
And then, all at once, he did. It had happened when Olin had Roland in a bear hug and the cop was only feet away. Connor had almost missed the comment entirely. In his mind, he was already running back to the car, even though his feet were not yet in motion.
“We’ll see how your father likes it when Lee—”
There was only one thing that came to mind when he replayed Roland’s comment in his head, and that was Leewood Construction. His father’s employer.
“Maybe,” Olin said, when Connor made the connection for him.
“Maybe?”
“It could also have been ‘Leroy.’ Or, hell, maybe he didn’t say ‘Lee’ at all. Maybe he said ‘he.’ As in, ‘We’ll see how your father likes it when he has to bail you out.’ Or ‘the.’ As in, ‘We’ll see how your father likes it when the police call to tell him his son is in jail.’”
Connor had to admit that seemed plausible. But: “I still think he was talking about Leewood Construction.”
Olin, whose knees were pressed up against the dashboard, fished around under the seat until he found the lever to push the seat back. “Okay. You could be right. So what’s next? Should we call Olivia and tell her what we’ve got? You want me to call my guy?”
“Not yet. We still don’t know this is anything.”
“The deal was—”
“Like I said before, let’s make sure there’s something to this first. You saw how Roland reacted. Do you want to waste the police’s time with this if it turns out to be nothing?”
Olin crossed his arms over his chest, looked out the passenger window. After a while, he said, “I just want my parents back.”
Connor felt a pang of guilt for keeping the story about the parking garage fire to himself. But he liked having a partner work the case with him, and, as far as he was concerned, they would get farther together than Olivia would. Besides, he couldn’t say for sure Olin’s parents were dead. Maybe there was a third couple who had been taken.
“I know,” he said. “Me, too.” Then he remembered what Frank’s boss had said to him when he called: You’ll let me know if there’s anything I can do to help, okay? “Let’s go by my dad’s office. See if there’s anything there.”
Leewood Construction occupied a converted warehouse, complete with a large parking lot and a chain link fence. Connor had been here only once before. It had been a Saturday and the building, which was quiet on the weekend and surrounded by other warehouses that were equally quiet, had struck him as eerie. Frank had forgotten his laptop, he had explained, and said he needed to review a proposal before it went out on Monday morning. Some sort of big government job. Worth millions, if they got it.
Connor had been twelve at the time, and couldn’t understand the value of a multi-million-dollar contract. He just remembered complaining about being hungry and his father assuring him he wouldn’t be long.
Today, there was activity at all of the warehouses, and the lot at Leewood Construction was mostly full. Connor took a ticket from an automatic dispenser at the gate and found a parking spot for guests near the door.
The lobby was all old beige carpet and wood paneling. A receptionist, clacking away at her computer, asked how she could help without looking up.
“Is Victor in?”
Victor, aka Victor Leewood, owned Leewood Construction.
Perhaps it was invoking his name that got the receptionist to pay more attention to them than to her computer. Either way, she stopped the two-fingered hunt-and-peck clacking and looked Connor straight in the eye. “Who are you?”
He realized, now that he could see her face, she was older than he’d first thought. She had silvery white hair brushed back from her forehead and a coat of foundation thick enough to mask most of the wrinkles.
“Connor. Frank’s son.”
She placed a call from her desk and told them to wait. But with nowhere to sit, waiting meant standing.
There were no windows. On the wall behind them were a series of architectural photographs. Most were of tall glass b
uildings. There were also a few restaurants and retail locations. Connor recognized one—The Benchmark Diner—as a project his father had talked a lot about and assumed they were all Leewood Construction projects.
Fortunately, it didn’t take but a minute before Victor had emerged from the hallway behind the receptionist. He was wearing a plaid shirt and cowboy boots. Connor half-expected a “Howdy-doody” when he saw the man. What he got instead was “Which one of you’s Frank’s kid?” delivered in that same Brooklyn accent he had heard on the phone.
“I am,” Connor said.
Victor’s face crumpled in. He looked as if he was about to well up. He hugged Connor without asking or waiting for a cue that it would be welcome. Connor imagined this must be how Roland had felt when Olin had him locked in a bear hug. To avoid making it awkward, Connor hugged him back.
“I’m sorry,” Victor said. He let go, wiped his eyes with one knuckle.
At least he didn’t throw out a bunch of empty platitudes, Connor thought. He appreciated that.
“What can I do for you?”
“Do you mind if we check out my dad’s desk?”
“Sure. No problem,” Victor said, looking a little confused. “May I ask why?”
“It’s stupid, I’m sure. I just want to see if there’s anything there that could help us understand what’s going on.”
“I can’t imagine there would be, but . . .” Victor nodded. “If I was in your position, I’d want to look, too.” He turned around. “Come this way.”
Victor led them down a hallway lighted by buzzing fluorescents overhead. Every so often, one of them flickered like it needed to be replaced.
He turned a corner, silently passed a series of cubicles, then opened a door that Connor at first thought must be a closet. It wasn’t. The door Victor opened led to an office as big as Connor’s bedroom. It was furnished with an L-shaped walnut desk that faced the door, a small circular table with three chairs, a whiteboard mounted to the opposite wall, and a bookcase filled with unlabeled black binders.
“This is it,” Victor said. “Take all the time you need.” Then he left the boys alone and the door open.
Connor looked around the space. This was where his dad worked. It was a big part of his life, and there were little things everywhere that Connor could tell made this space uniquely his father’s. There were pictures of Connor and his mother on Frank’s desk. A collection of numbered and colored building blocks that were stacked on the bookshelf to make a pyramid (Frank had kept them since he was a boy and Connor remembered playing with them, as well). An anniversary card from Connor’s mom celebrating their first year together with “Two hearts, forever one” scrawled across the front in cursive.
It seemed like everywhere Connor looked, there was another reminder of his family and the love Frank had for them. Now he, too, wanted to cry. He pushed the emotion down. “Go through the binders. I’ll check the desk.”
“What are we looking for?” Olin said.
“I don’t know. Anything that seems out of the ordinary, I guess. Especially anything that’s got Roland’s name on it.”
“This seems like a long shot.”
Connor agreed, but he was going to look anyway. It couldn’t be a coincidence that Frank had met with Roland the same day he was abducted. Are you sure? asked a little voice from the back of his head. I’m sure, he answered, because whatever the two men had been up to, it couldn’t have been good if they didn’t want anyone to know about it. And just like one conspiracy theory makes it easier to believe another, bad things tend to follow bad things.
Sitting in the desk chair, Connor went through all four drawers, starting at the top left and working his way to the bottom right. In the first drawer, he found red and black pens, a roll of stamps, and a stack of small bills under a paperweight Frank had carved in the garage. The one underneath it had a box of Ritz crackers and a big jar of M&Ms. Top right: empty. Bottom right: a collection of manila folders that were named by project and included an assortment of blueprints, spreadsheets, and handwritten notes.
Then Connor moved the mouse to bring the computer to life, and found himself confronted by a request to log in. “Rickety Rat” wasn’t going to work here.
“What have you got?” he asked Olin.
“I’m not really sure,” Olin said as he flipped through one of the binders. “But nothing with Roland’s name on it.”
Connor got up to have a look. The binder contained the same sort of information the folders had, and he assumed that the binders were likely composed of completed bids whereas the folders represented those that were still in process.
“How about you?” Olin asked.
“Nothing.”
“Did you check the computer?”
“It’s locked.”
“Can’t you get in anyway? Aren’t you supposed to be a hacker or something?”
Connor had told Olin about his extracurricular activities on the drive over. “It doesn’t work that way.”
“Can’t you try something?”
Without answering, Connor returned to the computer and did his best to guess his father’s password. After three attempts, the computer locked him out.
“Finish going through those binders,” he told Olin. “I’m going to see if Victor has a way to get us around the login.”
CHAPTER 23
Olin found nothing suspicious in the binders, and Connor didn’t do much better getting his father’s password. Victor had said he would be happy to help, but their only IT person was out of the office and wouldn’t be back for a couple of hours.
A couple of hours seemed like an eternity right now. Maybe they would come back later.
“You said you found the information about Roland on the computer at home, right?” Olin said when they were back in the car.
“Yeah. And his phone.”
“Maybe there’s more.”
“I checked that computer. If there was anything else there, I would have found it.”
Olin shook his head. “Not on the computer. In the house.”
Connor thought about the money he had stashed in the back of his sock drawer. Was it possible there was more information about Roland offline? Connor doubted it. He and Frank had been careful. Then again, he also had nothing to lose by looking.
For a brief moment after they stepped through the front door, Connor worried Olin would judge the house as being inferior to his own. He wasn’t sure why he cared. This house had been more than enough for him growing up. Still, when Olin said nothing, he was glad.
They went through every room methodically. They looked under the furniture, examined every item in every closet, looked in every drawer.
By the time they were done, they had found exactly what Connor had expected to find: nothing.
They sat down at the dining room table. It was still littered with the items Connor had found in the box in his parents’ closet.
“What’s all this?” Olin said, leaning in to get a closer look.
“Pictures, mostly. Mom kept saying she would get around to framing them.”
Olin sifted through the items with one finger, sliding them around so he could see everything without moving much. “I take it you went through all this already?”
Connor nodded.
When Olin got to the plane tickets, his brow furrowed and he leaned in closer. Then he picked them up so he could get a better look. “Your parents went to the Czech Republic?”
“My mom’s family comes from there. She wanted to see it.”
“So did mine.”
“Your parents are from the Czech Republic?”
“No, but they went there.” Olin looked from one ticket to the other. “Right about the same time, too, if I remember correctly.” Then he looked at Connor. “Do you think they went together?”
Connor thought it was almost inevitable. The Czech Republic wasn’t exactly on the list of the top ten tourist destinations. Was that what tied these abductions together? Conn
or had his doubts. That trip had been so long ago, and his parents had never gone back. But it might mean his parents knew Olin’s parents. And that, like Frank’s relationship to Roland, would be something to look into.
“June 12, 2007,” Olin mumbled, his attention again on the tickets. “Yeah, I’m sure that’s when they went.”
“Wait. What was that date?”
“June 12, 2007. Why?”
Connor snatched the ticket out of Olin’s hand to see the date for himself. “I would have been four years old then.”
“So what?” Olin said, now looking more carefully through the pictures. “I would have been five.”
“Look at my mom’s last name.” He pointed to it. “It’s Jones.” He grabbed the other ticket off the table. “And here. This one. This is my dad. Frank Callahan.”
“What’s your point?”
“They weren’t married. I thought this whole time they had gone before I was born, but that’s not what happened.”
“That’s your big revelation? You do know you aren’t the first person who was born before his parents got married, don’t you?”
Connor was too wrapped up in his own thoughts to catch the sarcasm. “Of course. But she was married before. Maybe . . .” He trailed off, trying to make sense of the possibilities.
“You’re thinking she had an affair?”
“Maybe. But maybe I’m not Frank’s son. Maybe the guy who runs that website—TruthSeekers—maybe he was right. What if I’m Matt’s son?”
“But your last name is Callahan, isn’t it?”
“It is.” Connor leaned back in the chair, let the tickets fall onto the table. It didn’t make sense. He wished his mom was here so he could ask her to explain.
“Well, they definitely knew each other,” Olin said. Connor gave him a look, and Olin tapped one of the pictures. “Those are my parents. They’re younger here, but that’s them, all right.”
Connor leaned in to get a better look at the picture. There were six people in it, all standing together. “And those are mine,” he said, directing Olin’s attention to a different couple.
A Reagan Keeter Box Set: Three page-turning thrillers that will leave you wondering who you can trust Page 9