17. Lauren
CHAPTER 17
LAUREN
N othing felt real for Lauren. This was a bad dream or something — it had to be. The idea that anyone would kidnap her mom was not one she had ever seriously considered. It just wasn’t possible. Her mind was on overdrive, speeding through all its denial in one trip. Perhaps this was an elaborate political stunt or some kind of joke? Maybe the news media was outright lying. But she knew that was all just a psychological mirage.
“We have to do something,” she repeated. “This can’t have been…” She got choked up before she could go on. “This can’t have been the last conversation I had with her.”
“What do you mean?” Wesley asked, turning to her for the first time since the screen had taken his attention.
“We were fighting.” She sobbed. “I said something terrible to her, something I never would have said normally. But she’d taken so much, and I was so angry, and I just wanted to see her hurt as much as I was hurting… So I hurt her.” Her tears were running constantly now, and Wesley had left her side to get her a box of tissue, which he then handed to her with a sympathetic look on his face. “I can’t believe those might be the last words I ever say to her.”
She was a mess. Wesley clenched his jaw, knit his brow, and then gave in to the urge he appeared to have been fighting to resist. He hugged her. And she melted in his arms. He was so strong — she could feel it in every muscle surrounding her now. In his arms, she felt safe, and that was something she hadn’t felt in a long time, not really. “We have to do something,” she whispered. “Please, I can’t just sit here and do nothing.”
Wesley’s hand came to rest on the back of her head. “Okay. We’ll do something. Let’s work through this backwards.” He pulled away and sat on his couch. Lauren sat beside him, her heart bouncing like a ping-pong ball in her chest. “She was still there when we left. So, it must have happened after we left, sometime in the last hour or two. They said she was headed toward her car, so we have the path she might have taken.” Lauren could see his mind working over the problem, and she suddenly felt like they had the chance to make a difference, no matter how unrealistic that belief might have been. “We could find out if there is any security footage.”
She perked up at the idea. “Do you think that would help us identify the people who took her?”
Wesley nodded. “When I was alerted to the potential danger of this group, I was told they had been careful to keep their identities and locations secret online. If I could get a vehicle identification, that might change things. It’s possible the group is just chronically online and got careless when they were out in the real world. It happens more often than you’d think. I could visit the stores around the area and see if any one of them has a view of the kidnapping. It’s a long shot, but it’s something I could do.” He took her by the shoulders and looked directly into her eyes. “But you have to promise me you will stay here, tell no one where you are, and keep a low profile.”
Lauren shook her head. “I can’t. I’m coming with you.”
“Absolutely not, Lauren. No.” He was dead serious, and Lauren couldn’t stand it. “You’re not going back to the scene of the crime just to make yourself into another target.”
But Lauren was determined to help her mom. She needed to do something. She needed to fight. She needed to make sure, with everything she had, that her last conversation with her mom wasn’t the argument they’d had back in her office. “I’m coming with you. Please. I can’t just sit here and wait. Anyway, you can keep a closer eye on me if I’m with you.”
Her attempt to reason with him didn’t seem to be having any kind of effect, but her more emotional plea appeared to have gotten to him. Wesley closed his eyes and sighed. “Fine. Let’s go.”
* * *
The street where her mom was kidnapped was quieter than Lauren expected it to be. Was everyone just trying to pretend it hadn’t happened? Sure, Anne’s office was taped off, but nothing else was. And everyone around Lauren was just going about their business. For some reason, it upset her just as much as the kidnapping itself. To Lauren, her mom had always been a giant in her life, the most important person by a long shot. The fact that the woman meant so little to everyone else was something that she may have known intellectually, but she’d never come to grips with it on a core, emotional level.
The shock of that idea slapped Lauren in the face with her mom’s vulnerability. The world wasn’t going to protect Anne Bartlett. Why would they? They had their own lives to worry about.
She and Wesley parked and walked the street, stopping into store after store. Wesley would show them his credentials, which probably shouldn’t have counted for anything, but people were compliant as soon as he pulled out his identification.
The number of security cameras that weren’t even in working order was something Lauren hadn’t predicted. But every once in a while, they’d come across one that had recorded the area at about the right time. One restaurant had a camera pointed at the street where her mom would have walked just before she was taken.
“Can we see the tape?” Wesley asked. His aura of authority was impressive and helpful.
“Sure.” The owner led them to a back room and woke up his computer. He queued up the clip, and they watched it sped up to catch the exact moment.
About fifteen minutes into their viewing, Lauren pointed at the screen. “There she is!” The footage was grainy, but she knew her mom’s coat. She’d seen her mom that day and knew exactly what she was wearing, how her hair was done, which purse she was carrying.
“Are you sure?” Wesley asked.
“One hundred percent,” Lauren answered.
The restaurant owner slowed the playback speed, and they watched as Anne Bartlett walked down the street, completely oblivious to the dark van pulling up beside her. The door of the vehicle slid open, an arm reached out, and someone yanked Anne into the van without it even coming to a complete stop. “Wow,” the restaurant owner said. “That takes some balls right there.”
“Is that van blue or gray?” Wesley asked.
Lauren squinted at the screen. The sunlight reflecting off the finish made it difficult to tell. “I think it’s like a really dark blue. Can we get a read on the license plate?”
The restaurant owner shook his head. “I don’t think the resolution is high enough.” He paused repeatedly in several different places, zooming in each time on the little white square, but the letters and numbers never got any clearer. “They’re probably using a stolen van and plate anyway,” he said. “It might not do you any good.”
Wesley ignored him. “Can we get a clear screenshot of the van?”
“Sure.”
Once they were given their screenshot, they went outside to hit up the next store over.
“Do you think they’re using a stolen van and plate like he said?” Lauren asked.
Wesley shrugged. “Possibly. But never ditch a lead under the assumption that your culprit is smart. They often aren’t. These guys were way too brazen in how they went about this. Let’s look at a few more security tapes.”
The next place they visited was a jewelry store. “Promising,” Wesley said.
Lauren agreed. “The security here has to be better quality than a restaurant, right?”
“Maybe.”
They found the manager quickly, and he took them into the back just the way the restaurant owner had. This system, though, looked remarkably more sophisticated. Lauren began to hope. She gave the manager the exact time where the van had appeared on the other tape, and together they watched the screen. Both the angle and the quality of this security footage was significantly better. Lauren could even see her mom’s expression change when she was grabbed, the fear on her face. She felt like the worst daughter in the world, but that only made her more determined to fix this.
“There.” Wesley hit pause before the manager could even reach for the button. “There’s the license plate. Can we get a screenshot of that?”
With a new image in hand, Lauren walked with Wesley back to his car. “Now what?” she asked.
“Now we get someone to run the plate.”
“Don’t we call the police for that?”
“Not unless you want to wait for a warrant. In this case, we don’t even know that this isn’t a stolen plate. We need to find someone who can do this under the radar for now. I have a connection. If we get an address, we can scope it out ourselves. It’ll be…a little illegal.” He glanced down at her. “I hope you’re okay with that?”
“I just want my mom back. I don’t care whether it’s legal or not.”
“Good.”
They drove together to a part of the city Lauren had never been to. It was a lot darker and dingier than the corner she called home. They turned down a back alley, and Wesley parked the car. Lauren followed him to a rusty door with a doorbell, which he rang. She didn’t hear anything when he pushed the button, but soon enough, she could hear someone unlocking the door from the inside and slowly pushing it open. On the other side stood a man who looked to be in his late fifties or early sixties, still dressed in his pajamas and sipping a mug of coffee.
“Jeffrey!” Wesley put out a hand, which the other man slapped and shook in a way that indicated the two had known each other for a long time. “I need a favor from you, if you don’t mind.”
Jeffrey laughed. “You know I mind every time, but I’ll do it anyway. What’s the favor?”
“I need a license plate run.”
“Not a problem,” Jeffrey said. “Come on in. Don’t mind the mess.” He opened the door and allowed Wesley and Lauren to pass through. “Who’s the little lady, by the way?”
“Oh, right.” Wesley gestured to Lauren as they made their way to a back room. “Jeff, this is Lauren Bartlett, daughter to Anne Bartlett.” Then he turned to Lauren. “And Lauren, this is Jeffrey Maddox, ex-cop and current hacker.”
“Um…” Lauren searched for the right words and finally just went with the most generic thing she could think of. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr.—”
“Jeff works.”
“Mr. Jeff,” she concluded.
Jeff sat at a desk with three monitors sitting next to each other. “Does this have anything to do with the recent kidnapping by chance?”
“You nailed it,” Wesley said. “We have security footage of the van that took the senator. One particularly clear image got us the plate numbers.”
“Perfect,” Jeff held out a hand. “Give me the straw, and I’ll spin it into gold for you.”
“Cute.” Wesley handed over his phone with the image of the license plate. “I was just wondering if you could get us at least one name and an address connected to the plate. If they’re around here, we might be able to get to them before the police show up with a SWAT team and put everyone in danger. Right now, I imagine they think they’ve gotten away with it. They’re holding Anne alive for some reason, I think. If that hadn’t been the plan all along, they would have just assassinated her. They haven’t released any demands yet, but I’m betting they do soon enough.”
“That sounds about right.” Jeff’s fingers flew over his keyboard as he brought up the tools he needed to perform the requested task. “Make yourselves comfortable. I’ll have your information in no time.”
Wesley led Lauren to a couch that sat against the far wall and removed the clutter from it so she would have a place to sit. Then he sat down beside her. “It’s going to be okay, you’ll see.”
Lauren wanted to believe him, but she couldn’t seem to relax. “I hope you’re right.”
The wait was probably no more than five or ten minutes, but to Lauren, it felt like a lifetime. She was a wreck inside, and Wesley seemed to notice because he took one of her hands and squeezed it reassuringly.
Finally, Jeff came over with a piece of paper, which he handed to Wesley. “There’s a name and address there for you.”
“Any indication whether it was a stolen vehicle or plate?”
“Neither of these were reported stolen,” Jeff said. “Yet. There’s a chance these people just didn’t take surveillance into account when they came up with their plan. Hardly seems like much of a plan, if you ask me. Taking a senator in broad daylight. They got lucky, I’m sure. It’s the only way I can see this working. If I were you, I’d bank on their carelessness. That van belongs to one of them.”
Wesley read the note Jeff had passed him. “Excellent,” he said. “Thank you so much, old friend. I knew I could count on you.”
“You know I’m here when you need me,” Jeff said. “I’d invite you both to stay for dinner, but I assume you’ve got a lot going on today.”
“You assume right. But I’ll be back around when we’ve taken care of this mess. Maybe I’ll bring you dinner, huh?” Wesley slapped his friend on the back as Jeff walked them back out.
“Well, you know I’d appreciate that,” Jeff said, opening the front door for them. “Seeing as I can’t cook.”
Wesley laughed. “See, I knew your pseudo dinner invitation was bull. I’ll be back around with real food soon.”
Back in the car, Wesley and Lauren sat in silence, thinking. Lauren was grateful for the moment to breathe, but she was also worried that they had an unknown time limit. “The address…” she began. “Can we find it?”
Wesley was already searching. She watched him zoom in to a map on his phone and hit street view. “Not a problem.” He shook his head. “It’s an apartment. There’s a chance they’re holed up there, or if they aren’t, they might have left some clues behind.” He reached across the seats and gave Lauren the best hug anyone could manage from a bucket seat. “We’re going to find her, princess. Believe me. These people are keeping her alive to make demands of the government. Jeffrey is rarely wrong about that. The police force lost a great mind when he left them.”
Lauren hugged him back. No matter what he’d said to her in the past, he was here now, and she was so grateful she wasn’t having to go through this alone. “Thank you so much, Wesley,” she said. “I know you didn’t have to do this.”
He shrugged her gratitude off. “It’s my job.”
“Protecting my mom is your job. But helping me save her after she did what she did to us? That tells me what your priorities are.” She let him go and smiled at him. “You’re a good man, Wesley Pierce. I’d put my life in your hands in any situation. Just… thank you for everything.”
The expression on his face looked like relief, and she had to wonder just how much their recent argument had affected him. Did he really value her that much? It surprised her in the very best way.
Wesley started his car. “Let’s go get your mom, princess.”