She pounded on the door, announced herself as police. Unconsciously, her right hand went to the gun holstered at her waist. She snapped open the strap that secured the weapon in place. Normally she kept her gun in a shoulder holster, but that wasn’t convenient when she was also wearing a bulletproof vest. Which was just as well, since it was harder to get to, and if Broderick Hansen—that was the name associated with the license plate—came out shooting, the time it took her to pull her gun might make the difference in whether or not she lived.
She heard the deadbolt turn. Her fingers closed around the gun’s handle. The door opened. Before Olivia could even see who it was, she was demanding to speak with Broderick.
“Hold your horses,” said the man who had opened it. He was wearing just a robe and had to be seventy, at least, Olivia thought. His eyes darted between her and the two uniformed officers. “What is this about?”
“Sir, we need to speak with Broderick—”
“I heard you. I’m not deaf.”
“Yet,” said a woman as she came up behind him. She was wearing a faded blue nightgown and looked just as old.
Olivia could tell she thought she was being funny and had no patience for it. “Sir!”
“I’m Broderick Hansen.”
This was not the man on the CCTV footage. Even though she had only seen him from the back, Olivia was sure of that. This man had the wrong build, the wrong posture, the wrong hair. She doubted they were even the same height.
“Sir, do you have an ID on you?”
“Sure.” He reached toward his back pocket. Olivia imagined he had a gun of his own. She could see him pulling it in her mind’s eye, braced for the chaos that would follow. Her fingers, which were still wrapped around the handle of her own weapon, moved slightly so that her pointer was on the trigger.
She was about to tell him to slow down, even though he was already moving slowly, when she saw the leather corner of a wallet appear from behind him. He opened it, took out his license, and held it up so she could see.
The name on the license was indeed Broderick Hansen.
Oliva relaxed a little. She let go of her gun, let her hand fall to her side. “Has anybody borrowed your car recently?”
“No.”
“I wish they would,” the woman said. “Borrow it and keep it as far as I’m concerned.”
“So the Mustang has been in your possession the whole time? You’re sure?”
“What Mustang?” the woman said, first to Olivia and then to Broderick. “Did you go buy a Mustang without telling me? Are you some kind of dummy? We can’t afford a car payment right now. Maybe if you got a job—”
“Who’s going to hire me at my age?”
“Mr. Hansen,” Olivia said, to direct the couple’s attention back to her. “Are you telling me you don’t have a Mustang?”
“I wish.”
Olivia recited the car’s license plate number.
“What about it?”
“That’s not your license plate?”
“That’s my license plate. One of them. So what?”
“So, you just told me you don’t own a Mustang.”
Broderick almost laughed. He waved dismissively at Oliva. “That’s no Mustang.”
“Excuse me?”
Broderick turned to the woman next to him. She hadn’t stopped glaring at him since the Mustang had first been mentioned. He didn’t seem to notice. “She’s talking about that old Honda we got under the tarp.” Back to Olivia: “Lady, those glasses you’re wearing might not be thick enough.”
Suddenly, Olivia realized what should have been obvious all along. But she wasn’t going to leave without being certain. “Show me.”
“What?”
“You say that’s no Mustang. Let’s go have a look.”
Broderick shrugged.
Olivia and the uniformed officers made room for him to step outside. They followed him around to the driveway. He grabbed one corner of the tarp and pulled. It slid off the vehicle all at once, landing in a crumpled heap beside the front tire.
The Honda Civic that had been underneath was a good twenty years old, and looked every bit of it.
“See. Like I said. No Mustang. I’m not even sure this thing drives anymore.”
Olivia walked from the front of the vehicle to the back. No license plate on either end. Shit.
“Stay right here,” she said to both the officers and Broderick. Then she went up the street for some privacy. She called the DMV again, gave them the license plate again. This time, though, instead of asking who owned the vehicle, she asked for the make and model.
They told her exactly what she feared they might: The vehicle associated with that plate number was a 1984 Honda Civic.
The plates had been stolen. She wondered if the Mustang had been stolen, too.
CHAPTER 28
There was something in Olin’s voice that Connor didn’t like. He quickly made his way to the other end of the hall, trying not to think about all the horrible things he might find beyond that door. But his mind went there anyway. Decaying corpses. Maybe his parents. Maybe Olin’s. Maybe weapons or torture devices or cages—God, what if there were cages? Or—and this scared him even more—what if it was something worse? (Because even though Connor didn’t think it was Dylan who had targeted both of their parents, Olin had gotten inside of his head, and he couldn’t dismiss the possibility entirely.)
But that wasn’t what he found. What he found was another bedroom. At first, all he saw was the mess. Clothes littered the floor and hung over the furniture. The bed was unmade and slightly askew. The walls were covered with posters of bands Connor didn’t know: The Mowgli’s, Jukebox the Ghost, Billie Eilish. There was a simple white desk with a mess of papers on it and, perhaps most importantly, a laptop.
Connor had not considered until now that this was the first computer he had seen in the house. He knew immediately this had to be the madness behind the TruthSeekers website, the secret self the rest of the house tried so hard to hide. He wondered if this was the only room Dylan actually lived in. It was possible, wasn’t it?
As if to confirm his suspicion, he then noticed a series of large foam stickers that stretched across several of the posters and spelled out his name. D-Y-L-A-N.
Then he noticed other things that didn’t sit with his assumptions. The foam stickers were all different colors and sprinkled with glitter. The sheets on the bed had unicorns on them. The clothes were too small for an adult, and on one tee shirt he could clearly read “Girl power.”
He stepped into the room, saw the posters and foam letters weren’t the only things stuck to the walls. There were also photos. Lots of them. Most were of happy kids posing together. Some silly, some less so. They posed in front of a Starbucks, with animals at a petting zoo, in various parking lots and shopping malls. Unlike the photos in Olin’s house, there seemed no rhyme or reason to them. Well, except for one thing. One important detail Connor didn’t notice until he had looked at enough of them up close. Of all the people, there was one who came up more than any of the others. A girl with red hair and freckles. She looked to be about fourteen.
Suddenly, it all came together.
Dylan wasn’t an unstable adult capable of kidnapping. He wasn’t an adult, at all. Or even a man. He—she—was just a child.
Olin grabbed Connor’s arm. “What’s that?” he whispered. He was looking straight ahead, but didn’t seem to be focused on anything in particular.
“What?” Connor responded, also whispering. He felt a little foolish about it, since they were the only ones in the house.
“Sounds like a car.”
“It’s just your nerves.”
Olin moved to the bedroom window, trying not to step on Dylan’s clothes as he went. It was a futile effort.
“Do you see anything?” Connor asked. Even from where he was, he could make out part of the driveway, so he knew the window faced the front of the house.
“No.”
; “Like I told you. It’s just your nerves.”
Then there was a much louder sound—a mechanical rumble. It lasted only five or six seconds. Connor and Olin stood frozen in place until it was over, then simultaneously looked at each other. Connor knew what it was and suspected Olin did, too. Still, he said it out loud just to make sure they were on the same page. “That was a garage door,” he whispered. Only now, whispering seemed to make sense.
“I told you,” Olin said.
The mechanical rumble started up again. It lasted another five or six seconds.
Door open. Door closed.
Olin looked left and right as if assessing an unseen enemy. “I knew this was a bad idea.”
“Relax. We’ll get out of here.”
“How?”
It was a fair question. There was no climbing out a window from this height. Then Connor had an idea. He peeked into the hall, heard a door open downstairs. Presumably, it was the one that led to the garage. “This way,” he hissed, as he hurried from the bedroom to the laundry room.
Olin cursed and followed him. “This is your plan?” he said, once they had crossed the hall.
Connor remembered the laundry room door had been closed when they had come upstairs, and he kept it open only a crack now. “Shhhh.” He had his ear pressed to that crack, trying to hear what was happening.
Someone treaded across the hardwood floors downstairs. The sound faded and transformed as that someone stepped into the kitchen, then disappeared completely for a minute. No one spoke—upstairs or down.
“I think, whoever it is, they’re alone,” Connor said.
“Probably not Dylan, then.”
Connor wasn’t sure if Olin intended the comment to be a verbal jab or if he was simply noting that she looked too young to have driven herself here. Either way, there was nothing to say to it. He kept his ear pressed to the crack between the door and the jamb.
The footsteps returned, moved somewhere else on the first floor.
“What’s the plan?” Olin said.
Connor had been hoping that whoever it was would come upstairs, disappear into one of the bedrooms for a while, giving them enough time for an easy escape. It no longer seemed like that was going to happen.
But then he heard a much softer sound. A rat-a-tat-tat he recognized. And at least he knew where in the house the person was.
When Connor and Olin had searched the first floor, Connor had come across a room to the left of the front door that, it seemed to him, had been converted from a formal living room into a library. Built-in bookshelves lined every wall, and every shelf was packed with books. There was also a desk dead center that looked out onto the foyer, but was bare save a Georgetown brass-finish desk lamp.
At the time, he had thought the room was mostly for show. But with the whole house maintained in pristine condition, he now knew better. That rat-a-tat-tat was the sound of a keyboard, and that desk was likely where Dylan’s parents sat when they worked from home. It was easy enough to imagine her father or her mother coming in with a laptop, stopping by the kitchen for snack, and then setting up at that desk for the remainder of the day.
They probably wouldn’t be moving anytime soon.
“This is our chance,” he told Olin, and explained what was happening. “If we go back down the stairs and out the way we came in, they won’t see us.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m open to better ideas,” Connor said.
Olin looked to the side, bit his lower lip, then nodded.
They crept out of the laundry room to the staircase and then started down, one stair at a time. Slowly. Carefully. Making sure every footfall was nearly silent.
Connor kept his ears open. More rat-a-tat-tat. The sound of the chair squeaking. Caster wheels rolling.
They moved carefully across the living room, back to the hall that would take them to the kitchen. Then Connor heard glass break behind him and whipped his head around. Olin was standing next to a half-moon table, his mouth and eyes wide with alarm. (They would have been comically wide if the situation wasn’t so serious.) By his feet lay shattered glass that had formerly been a vase.
Olin immediately began apologizing in a strangled whisper.
At the same time, Connor heard the rat-a-tat-tat stop, the caster wheels roll, the squeak of the seat as whoever had been sitting in it got to their feet. He didn’t bother to whisper. “Run!”
Olin did as instructed. They reached the back door, fled into the yard. They just had to get over that wall and they would be all right. Just like last time, Connor hoisted Olin up onto it.
“Oh, shit,” Olin said, looking toward the house.
“Give me your hand!”
Then there was the sound of a gunshot. The bullet drilled into the brick wall not a foot away. “You think you can steal from me?” A man’s voice. Had to be Dylan’s father.
Connor instinctively turned.
The man was holding a shotgun and had it aimed in Connor’s direction. “Stay right there! I’m calling the police!”
Connor reached up, and Olin grabbed his hand. He scrambled up the wall as Dylan’s father fired another shot. Then he and Olin fell over the top and crashed onto the ground behind the property.
They scurried back to the street as fast as they could and ran to the car. Connor hoped Dylan’s dad wouldn’t come out his front door shooting. Later, he would realize how crazy that idea was. The man was most likely on the phone with the police or checking his wife’s jewelry box to see if anything had been taken.
Once they were a safe distance away, Olin turned in his seat. “Why is it every time we follow your advice, we end up nearly getting arrested or shot?” He sounded winded.
“That’s only happened twice,” Connor said, and realized the absurdity of his response.
“I’m just saying—maybe we should start doing things my way.”
Connor got the message. He pulled his cellphone out of his pocket at a red light and scrolled through his call log until he found Olivia’s number.
CHAPTER 29
Olivia was pulling out of the pickup line at Lancelot Academy with her daughter in the back seat when her phone rang. Erin, who was only five years old, didn’t seem to notice. She was telling Olivia about the turtle her teacher had brought in today, and could barely stop long enough to take a breath, let alone for her mother to take a phone call.
“Honey. Honey, please. It will only be a minute.”
“But—”
“Please. Just a minute. I promise.” Then she answered before her daughter could say anything else.
“Detective Forbes. Hi. Listen, there’s something you need to know.” She recognized Connor’s voice. Another voice she didn’t know said something in the background. “All right, there are a couple of things you need to know. They’re about my parents’ abduction.”
She noticed he wasn’t using the word “murder” yet. She wasn’t surprised. It took some people a long time to come to terms with that. “What is it?”
“First. It’s about, um . . . It’s about my dad. There’s a guy named Roland Cooper. I don’t know what their connection is, but I found his name in my dad’s email and I tried to talk to him. You know, just to see if he knew anything that might help.”
Olivia wished he hadn’t done that. Connor should have come to her with the name and let her handle it. But she wasn’t going to interrupt, either. She wanted to hear what he had to say.
And, she realized, she had better take some notes. Just to be safe.
There was a Dunkin’ Donuts immediately in front of her. She pulled into the parking lot. Erin threw her hands up and cheered.
“Not yet, honey. You be good and we’ll get you a treat when Mommy’s done, okay?” Back to the phone. “Go on,” she said as she fished a notepad and pen out of her glovebox.
“Well, I don’t know. There might be nothing to it. But it seemed strange. He was being all covert-like. Didn’t want to talk to me. I thought, you know, m
aybe you would have more luck.”
“Is that it?”
“No. There’s something else, too. And this one seems pretty important. The guy who kidnapped my parents. He took someone else’s parents also. His name is Olin. . . . What’s your last name?” More mumbling in the background. “Wilson. His parents are Mark and Hillary.”
Olivia could hardly believe what she was hearing. “Slow down. There was another abduction? How do you know?”
“Same M.O. Van. Ski mask. Taser.”
“And he’s there with you now?”
“Yes.”
“Can I speak to him?”
There was a moment of silence, then another voice. “Ma’am?”
“Are you Mr. Wilson?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Your parents were taken, too?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Olivia was furious. She couldn’t believe she was just hearing about this now. “Who’s the detective working your case?”
There was a pause, and then Olin gave her a name. She wrote it down underneath Roland’s.
“NYPD?”
“Yorktown.”
“But there’s more.” Connor again. “These abductions—they’re not random. My parents. His parents. They knew each other.”
“So you two—”
“No, we had never met.” Connor seemed to have correctly guessed where she was going with her question.
“How did you find out about Olin’s parents? Or is he the one who found out first?”
Connor told her about the spot that would air on Uncovered soon, how the producer had told him about Olin’s parents, and she wished he had talked to her about that, too. Most shows like it stuck to cold cases. Uncovered was one of the few that went after crimes still actively being worked. Sure, she would have a lot of leads to follow up on after it aired, but most of them (probably all of them) would be garbage. In cold cases, that was okay. Any lead was better than no lead. But even though Connor’s case was at a dead end right now, it was still active, still being worked, and the time she spent following up on garbage leads could be better spent in other ways. Shows like Uncovered brought out a lot of crazies.
A Reagan Keeter Box Set: Three page-turning thrillers that will leave you wondering who you can trust Page 11