“I take it the bedrooms are just as bad as out here?”
“Might be worse,” he said. “These girls are pigs.”
“They’re also young and crazy busy,” I reminded him. I didn’t think I’d been the neatest person in my twenties either. Then again, I was certain I hadn’t lived like this.
Dutch nodded, but I think he did so just to move on. “You get anything from in here?” he asked me.
I looked around again, not at the mess but with the eyes of an intuitive. “There’s a bad vibe in here.”
“What kind of bad vibe?”
I shook my head, moving away from him and over to the living room. There was a sliding glass door mostly covered by venetian blinds. Pulling the cord to open the blinds, I hesitated in front of it. Dutch came over to me. “What?” he asked.
I saw that he was wearing gloves and pointed to the handle. “Try that, would you?”
“It’s locked,” he remarked, pointing to the small metal lever, which was in the upright position indicating the door was locked.
“Try it anyway,” I said, my radar buzzing like crazy. Dutch did and he let out a breath when the door opened easily. Bending down to inspect the catch, Dutch called out, “Cox!”
Another agent came over to us, and Dutch pointed to the handle and the lock. “This has been tampered with. Get the techs to fingerprint the whole door.”
Agent Cox nodded and went in search of a fingerprint tech.
I moved away from the door and noticed that Candice was keeping a watchful eye on me. I smiled at her—she always had my back—before moving toward the hallway leading to the bedrooms. I walked slowly and had to move out of the way twice so that agents could get past me. Stopping at the first bedroom, I let my radar extend outward, but I already knew that wasn’t the room to investigate.
I then moved on down the hall to the end, stopping in front of the open door that I knew marked Michelle’s room.
The bedroom was a mess. Clothes were strewn all over, and whether they were clean or dirty was anyone’s guess. The bed was unmade and there was something else, something that gave me the chills. The room had a sense of violence in it. I scrutinized the walls, the ceiling, the closet doors. No blood splatter or marks to indicate that a struggle had gone on here, but I was convinced one had taken place…recently.
I was also pretty sure that Dutch and his team simply looked at this space as a young woman’s messy bedroom, but not me. “Something happened in here,” I said.
“What?” Dutch asked. I’d felt him come along behind me as I navigated my way into Michelle’s room.
“There was a struggle. Michelle lost.”
“Someone attacked her?” Dutch asked. I looked at him over my shoulder. His gaze was roving all up and down the walls.
“Someone took her.”
Dutch put a hand on my shoulder. “You think she’s been kidnapped?”
I nodded.
Dutch scratched his head. “Then she’s not our bomber?”
“No, she’s our bomber,” I said. The dental records would take at least twenty-four hours to be matched with the body in the morgue, but I knew that Michelle was the girl from the beauty shop.
Dutch sighed. “None of this makes sense.”
“Tell me about it.” Turning on my heel to go back out into the living room, I found Cox there with the fingerprint tech and the sliding glass door was now covered in gray powder.
“Anything?” Dutch asked Cox when he joined me there.
Cox shook his head. “The door’s been tampered with, but other than a broken lock, we got nothin’, Agent Rivers.”
Candice was inspecting the handle herself and she had a quizzical look on her face. “Which is pretty strange, don’t you think?” she said. “There should be a few prints. Some from the two girls at the very least.”
My brow rose. “The handle has been wiped clean?”
“The handle and the wall next to the handle,” Candice said, waving her hand at the area beside the door handle, which was just one big black smudge.
“Abby thinks there was a struggle in the bedroom.”
“What kind of a struggle?” Cox and Candice said together.
“The kind that didn’t end well for Michelle,” I told them. “I think she was abducted.”
Dutch rubbed his face. He looked tired and stressed-out. His phone buzzed and he took it out to look at the display. With a groan he showed it to me. My shoulders slumped. I took his phone and answered it for him. “Hey, Cat,” I said, knowing my sister had likely called my own cell a half dozen times before trying Dutch.
“Where are you two?” she demanded.
“I’m fine. You?” I said.
“I didn’t ask how you were,” she snapped, completely missing my sarcasm. “I asked where you were! You guys are twenty minutes late!”
I was tempted to hang up on her. She’d been driving Dutch and me crazy with all this wedding stuff. Cat was our unofficial wedding planner. Unofficial only in our minds, however. My sister was taking the role very officially. “We’re at a crime scene,” I told her. “And we can’t break free.”
“What?” she exclaimed. “Abby! You do know you’re getting married in two weeks, right? I can’t keep rescheduling these appointments!”
“What’re we late for now?” Dutch asked.
“I have no idea.”
“I have the caterer, the cake baker, and the photographer here! You have to come!” Cat shouted. “And where is Candice? She was supposed to be at her final fitting appointment ten minutes ago too!”
I turned to Dutch. “Cat has the—”
“I heard,” Dutch said, waving at me to give him the phone. “We’ll be there in twenty minutes, Cat.”
“You want to leave?” I asked him when he’d hung up. “Now?”
Dutch looked around at his team. “There’s nothing here,” he said. “We’ve searched through everything, and there’s no bomb-making equipment, no incriminating notes, printouts, or books, and there’s nothing on Michelle’s computer except the usual college-girl stuff. I’ll have the techs go over her room to try to find any sign of a struggle, but for now, there’re no leads here, and I could seriously use a break from this.”
I eyed him doubtfully. “Do you think Gaston’s gonna let us go?”
“Go where?” asked a voice behind me.
I jumped a little and turned to see the director standing right behind me. “Dutch and I have an appointment for our wedding to go to, sir.”
“Ah, well, you shouldn’t miss it. Go on, you two, we can handle this.”
“Thank you, sir. I’ll keep my phone on,” Dutch promised. “Call if you need us back.”
Gaston nodded and said, “Take the afternoon, Rivers. We’ll handle it from here today.”
Candice led the way out of the house and I was still pretty surprised that the director had let us go so easily. “That was nice of him,” I said as we piled into Candice’s car.
“He knows he’s going to have to give you two up to the wedding soon anyway,” Candice said. “I mean, it’s not like he can ask you to postpone the nuptials.”
Dutch snickered like he thought that was funny. “I’m surprised he hasn’t asked us to do just that.”
Candice laughed. “Me too.”
But I looked out the window, trying to hide my disappointment that the director hadn’t asked. If he had, I knew I’d have taken him up on the offer, and that troubled me more than I could say….
T-Minus 01:05:48
Standing next to his car at the top of the hill, Dutch looked so pale and shaky that M.J. worried he might be ready to faint. Instinctively she moved closer to him and placed a steadying arm under his. “Stay with me,” she told him. “Breathe, okay?”
“How did this happen?” he muttered. And then he lifted his chin and searched M.J.’s face pleadingly. “Can you tell me where she is?”
M.J. bit her lip. She knew what the answer would be, and yet she asked his dead c
ousin anyway. Chase, she said, can you see where Abby is?
His answer came without pause. “He says he can see her, but he doesn’t know where she is. For the moment he thinks she’s alive.”
Dutch staggered backward to lean heavily against the car. “How much time do we have?” he asked.
M.J. asked, but Chase didn’t know. Dutch then shouted down the hill to someone named Rodriguez, and he came running up to them. “Who’s monitoring Banes’s phones?” he snapped.
Rodriguez blinked. “At the moment, no one, sir.”
Dutch put his hands on Rodriguez’s lapels. “I need you to find out if a call has come in to his line, Rodriguez. Do it. Do it right now!”
The poor FBI agent paled, and held up his phone. “Yes, sir. Right away.”
They waited anxiously while Rodriguez talked on his phone with his back to them. At last he turned around, his expression grave. “A call came in approximately fifty-five minutes ago, sir. It was from an unlisted number. Sounds like it was another one of those disposable cells.”
Dutch closed his eyes and M.J. knew he was battling mightily to keep it together so that he could think. She didn’t know what was going on until Candice said, “That means we have only one hour to find Abby before the bomb goes off.”
Dutch’s eyes flew open. “How the hell do we find her? Jesus, Candice! How do we get to her in time?”
Candice was silent, and M.J. knew she was trying to think quickly, but she’d already been through a lot that afternoon herself.
“This has something to do with the big case Abby wanted me to help you with, right?” M.J. asked them.
Dutch pulled his gaze away from Candice to focus on M.J. “Yes. So far, three other women have been abducted, forced to carry a bomb to a public location, and the bombs were then detonated, either remotely or by the device running out of time. The sick son of a bitch orchestrating this always puts two hours on the clock. And he always calls an ex-cop to warn him that the clock has been activated.”
“Then I think the place to start is at the beginning,” M.J. said. “Tell me everything as quickly as you can. Bring me up to speed and maybe I can use the info to fish out a clue about where Abby is.”
Candice and Dutch exchanged a look before Candice pointed shakily to the blue Mini Cooper at the bottom of the drive. “My valise is in the trunk of Abby’s car. I’ve got copies of everything in it.”
Gilley handed M.J. back her shoes. “You stay,” he said to Candice. “I’ll get it.”
No sooner had Gil taken off to retrieve the files than Dutch began to debrief M.J. He spoke quickly and efficiently, and midway through his speech when Candice was rifling through her valise pulling up files and photos, M.J. suddenly had another spirit enter the picture. Holding up her hand, she said, “Who’s Brody?”
Dutch blinked. “He’s a kid loosely connected to this case.”
M.J. shut her eyes to concentrate. “I don’t know if you guys will know this, but is there an older female connected to him—someone from the other side—with the first initial R? Like Roseanne, or Reanne?”
“Rita,” Candice said.
M.J. opened her eyes and saw that Candice had pulled up a photo of the deceased woman’s driver’s license. “And her middle name was Anne!”
M.J. nodded. “I have to talk to Brody,” she said. “Now!”
Chapter Six
I was on the phone with Brody, checking in with him to make sure he was doing okay, when Candice pulled up to the curb in front of Cat’s office building and parked so Dutch and I could get out before she headed off to her own appointment. “How’s he doing?” Candice asked as she put the car into park.
“Hanging in there. I think he’ll have a whole lot of bad days until the sharpness of his grief fades a little.”
Dutch was still gabbing away on his phone in the backseat.
The whole way over, he’d been filling Brice in on what we’d found—and hadn’t found—at Michelle’s place. He’d also let Brice know that I’d picked up on a possible abduction, and about the tampered lock on the sliding glass door.
Hanging up, he said, “Brice is coming over tonight after he wraps up searching the Padilla residence.”
“Did his team find anything?” I asked.
“Nope. Total bust.” Then turning to Candice, he said, “Care to come over for dinner with your fiancé?”
I saw Candice’s gaze slide to me. “Who’s cooking?”
I cut her a dirty look. For the record the only thing I know how to cook is an omelet. But it’s a mean omelet, all the same.
“I thought we’d spring for takeout,” he suggested.
“Perfect. Call me when you guys are done here and I’ll come pick you up.” With that, Dutch and I got out and headed in even though I was in no mood to deal with my sister. In fact I was in no mood to deal with any of this wedding stuff, period. “You okay?” Dutch asked as we loaded into the elevator.
“Fine.”
“Did you know that’s the most commonly told lie there is?”
I looked up at him. He was grinning down at me. “Huh?”
“The most often told lie is ‘I’m fine’ when asked how a person’s doing,” Dutch explained.
I rolled my eyes. “Well, I really am fine.”
“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” Dutch sang, but he reached for my hand and lifted it to give me a sweet kiss all the same.
I gave in to a smile. He had this wonderful way of making things feel okay even when they weren’t. “Please don’t ditch me or leave a place you’ve promised me you’ll stay put at again,” I said to him.
He wrapped an arm around me and squeezed. I felt the bulk of his bulletproof vest and was glad for it. “Okay, Edgar,” he said. “We’ll work this case together until the wedding, and then, if it’s not solved, we’re cuttin’ out and going on our honeymoon. Deal?”
“We could just cut out early and elope,” I said.
Dutch laughed. He thought I was kidding. The doors parted and I lost the opportunity to convince him, because standing in the hallway was Cat’s assistant, Jenny.
Jenny is a petite little thing, much like my sister, but unlike my sister, Jenny doesn’t dress to impress. She goes for a more efficient librarian look, with her black, brown, or gray business suits, brunette hair pulled back into a tight bun, and oversized round glasses constantly sliding down her perky nose. Still, she is a very pretty girl, and that’s impossible to hide, with her high cheekbones, deep-set eyes, and heart-shaped face.
I don’t exactly know what Jenny’s last name is, but I suspect it’s Makeanote. (You’ll see why in a minute.)
“Welcome, Miss Cooper, Mr. Rivers,” she said, and then she caught herself and blushed a little. “Sorry, Agent Rivers.”
Dutch smiled politely to show her no harm, no foul, and Jenny’s blush deepened.
I hid my own smile. Jenny had a crush on Dutch, and I felt for her, because he is truly a beautiful mountain of a man that I rather like climbing. I squeezed his hand and edged closer to him, just to make it clear to Jenny that this cowboy was taken.
Jenny dropped her gaze to the clipboard she held. She’d picked up on my body language. After clearing her throat, she said, “Miss Cooper, your sister is waiting for you in the conference room. If you’ll follow me, please.” With that, Jenny turned on her heel and we followed along obediently.
Cat’s offices are a grand affair, taking up the entire floor of the posh professional building. The joke is that it’s staffed by a total of nine people, so most of the individual offices we passed were empty. The place had that somewhat haunted ghost town feel to it. I knew that in the next several months Cat would be hiring more and more staff to fill the spaces, but in the meantime I privately thought it a somewhat depressing place to work.
We arrived at the conference room—a space I was familiar with, having been brought here against my will just a few weeks earlier—and it was much the same as last time, with the conference table covered in food,
party favors, fabrics, and photos. I got woozy just looking at it.
“There you are!” my sister exclaimed, untangling herself from several different-colored fabrics to come hug me fiercely.
“Hey, honey,” I said. “Sorry. We got tied up.”
“It’s fine,” she assured me, letting go to hug Dutch. “I’m just glad you two are here now.”
I had to hide another smile, because Cat’s embrace had obviously caught Dutch off guard, and I had observed that he never quite knew how to respond. Cat’s five feet two in heels, and Dutch is well over six feet, so when they hug, it’s more like she grabs him around the waist and he tries to hold his groin out of the way, while patting her awkwardly on the back. It’s a bit like watching a bear hug a bunny.
At last she released him, but snuck a wink at me, and I knew she was in on the joke. I had to press my lips firmly together to keep from chuckling. “Shall we get started?” she said, moving over to the table, where three people were already seated. I didn’t recognize a single one of them. Before introducing them, Cat said, “Jenny, make a note to call the florist and ask if the centerpiece sample I requested can be sent over by tomorrow. I want to make a final decision no later than then.”
I’d never heard my sister mention Jenny’s name without adding a “Make a note….” (Hence why I always mentally referred to her as Jenny Makeanote.)
Next my sister turned to the people already seated. “Alfie, this is my sister and her fiancé. Abby, Dutch, this is your photographer, Alfie Lockwood.”
We nodded to the lanky dark-haired man, wearing a crisp white shirt and a lazy smile.
Cat was already introducing the other two in attendance. “This is Esperanza Alvarez, your caterer, and Bridget Monroe, your cake baker.”
I nodded to each of them in turn and Dutch and I took our seats. “Now,” Cat said, her eyes bright with enthusiasm, “first, a few odds and ends to tidy up, and then we’ll make our final decisions with Alfie, Esperanza, and Bridget.”
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