Chapter 22 #2
It didn’t take long for him to stop at his apartment.
Jennifer came upstairs with him, leaving Fred in her vehicle, and, after donning gloves, carefully put the pillowcase into a plastic bag.
She didn’t say much, which Obi-Wan was grateful for.
He felt like he couldn’t speak; all the words he might’ve said were stuck in his throat.
Edge followed Jennifer’s police vehicle as she drove like a bat of hell out of the city toward the scrapyard.
It was by the water, not too far from the naval base.
There was a fence around the property and a simple guard shack at the gate.
There was an armed police officer manning the gate, and he let them through without hesitation.
Obi-Wan felt a shiver go through him as they navigated the dirt roads on the property. He was a practical man. Didn’t believe much in otherworldly stuff. Wasn’t a fan of the occult or paranormal. But being here was…spooky. The air seemed different. Heavier.
Everywhere he looked, there were the skeletons of huge, empty ships. Some small, some enormous. There were also airplanes, a helicopter or two, and other military vehicles. Tanks, Jeeps, and sedans. It was a junkyard on crack.
But what really caught his eye was the huge aircraft carrier.
It was the biggest relic in the yard by far.
Now that he was here and seeing it, he remembered reading a news article online about how the ship had finally been fully cleaned out and stripped, all hazardous materials removed, and would be towed out to sea soon, sunk to the bottom and turned into an artificial reef.
It towered over everything else. Even the other big ships in drydock looked tiny next to the mammoth carrier.
“That would be the perfect place to hide something you didn’t want to be found,” Edge said, almost under his breath.
He wasn’t wrong. And that made every hair on Obi-Wan’s arms stand up.
“She’s there. She has to be,” he said after a moment.
“We don’t know that.”
“Look around, Edge. If you were Silas, and you brought her here, where would you put her?”
His friend frowned. “On that carrier.”
“Exactly. Especially since it’s slated to be towed out to sea.
No one would find her, alive or dead, if she was in there when that happened.
” The words made Obi-Wan’s nausea even worse, but they had to be said.
He was a realist. Had faced death more times than he could count.
But not the death of someone he cared about. Loved.
Suddenly impatient, he wanted to get onto that carrier now. He’d tear the place apart looking for Zita. She was there. He knew that as well as he knew his damn name.
Edge parked and they were out of the car in a heartbeat.
Jennifer was just opening the back door to her vehicle to let the Lab out as the rest of their Night Stalker team arrived.
Edge had called Casper while Obi-Wan was in his apartment with the deputy, which was more than all right with him.
The more eyes, the better. And there was no one he trusted more than his teammates.
They weren’t in the air, weren’t being shot at or dodging mountaintops, but this situation felt no less dire. That damn clock was still ticking in his head.
There were also several police and sheriff’s deputy cars. There had to be at least two dozen men, which made Obi-Wan feel a little more optimistic. It shouldn’t take too long to find Zita with that much help…he hoped.
“Give Fred five minutes,” Jennifer said, as she opened the plastic bag that held the pillowcase Zita had used two nights before. “He’ll find her scent and show us where she was taken. I guarantee it.”
Obi-Wan swallowed hard and nodded. He was nearly positive Zita was on that aircraft carrier but…what if she wasn’t? They’d waste hours looking when they could know within minutes by giving the search dog an opportunity to do what he did best.
It didn’t take five minutes. The second Fred got Zita’s scent, he was off like a shot. Zigzagging with his nose to the ground and in the air as he excitedly followed Zita’s trail.
As Obi-Wan suspected, the dog headed straight for the huge carrier.
It didn’t take them long to arrive at a rickety-looking dock, fashioned together from random lengths of wood. Fred pulled on his harness and leash, obviously wanting to go inside the ship so he could continue the search.
“I’m going with the dog,” Obi-Wan said.
No one disagreed.
“We’re all going with Fred,” Casper said firmly.
“I’ll coordinate the search out here,” one of the detectives said.
“We need to be methodical, not running around inside that ship like chickens with our heads cut off. Six of you,” he said, pointing at half a dozen police officers, “go with them. The rest of you fan out. Even if they find the vic, we still need to search the property, build a case against the assailant.”
“Zita. Her name is Zita,” Obi-Wan ground out.
“What?”
“Not vic. Her name is Zita Darlington.”
“Right. Sorry. If you find anything, any kind of evidence at all, don’t touch it, don’t disturb it.
Call it in. Tire tracks, bodily fluids, clothing, cigarette butts…
if it looks suspicious, call me. The crime scene guys are on their way.
They’ll photograph and collect anything we find. Let’s do this!”
Obi-Wan turned his back on the men dispersing into the depths of the property.
For a moment, he wanted to call them back, tell them to join everyone else on the aircraft carrier, knowing they couldn’t possibly search the entire thing themselves.
But they needed all the evidence they could get to make the case against Silas rock solid.
“The most obvious way in is through there,” one of the police officers said, pointing to a small hatch on the side of the huge hull.
“But how did he get her in there?” someone else asked.
Fred chose that moment to bark at a large board lying on the makeshift dock. It blended in, looking like another random piece of wood on the unstable structure, but it was obvious what it had been used for. No one needed Fred’s alert to tell them Zita had been on that board.
Edge and Chaos helped him extend it over and prop it up, one end inside the hatch, turning it into a walkway of sorts. An unsafe and wobbly walkway, but still a way inside.
He realized if Zita had been left inside, and she’d managed to find her way out, it would’ve been almost impossible to get off the damn ship without that board in place.
Obi-Wan’s hatred for Silas Graves increased with every beat of his heart.
With every second he spent in this place.
The thought of Zita fighting for her life, putting those marks on Silas’s face before she was forced onto this ship, physically hurt.
And he had no doubt the fight occurred here, because no one at the motel had heard a damn thing.
It was likely she’d been rendered unconscious upon opening the door, allowing Silas to steal her away with a minimum of fuss.
But once they arrived at the shipyard, she’d obviously fought like hell. Obi-Wan just hoped her resistance hadn’t ended in her death. That she’d been hidden away on this fucking carrier instead of murdered outright.
Obi-Wan could picture the scene in his head. His Zita refusing to do what Silas wanted, and the asshole taking great pleasure in telling her all about her impending fate. How the ship would be sunk soon—with her in it. It seemed like something the man would enjoy doing.
“You going to be okay going up that?” Edge asked Jennifer, doubt in his tone.
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?” she answered, as they watched a few officers go up the walkway first, to make sure things were clear inside and that it was a viable entrance.
“Because you have the dog. And it’s not stable,” Edge said.
Jennifer laughed. “You’re kidding, right? And his name is Fred, not ‘the dog.’ He’s used to walking on things like that. He’s a search dog. It’s what he does.”
Edge nodded. “Sorry. It’s just a long way down if he falls.”
“He won’t,” she said firmly.
As soon as the officers gave the all-clear, Obi-Wan was striding up the board as if it were a wide metal platform, instead of one-and-a-half feet of rotting wood. Fred followed him just as easily, with Jennifer and Edge hot on their heels.
The air inside the aircraft carrier was dank and musty, and it was dark. The second he walked too far away from the open hatch in the side of the ship, Obi-Wan couldn’t see a damn thing.
Jennifer reached into one of her pockets and took out a light. She clipped it onto her belt, then put another onto Fred’s harness, lighting the path in front of the dog.
“Here,” an officer said, handing Obi-Wan a flashlight. It was one of those industrial lights, heavy, the kind that could be used as a weapon if need be. The beam was strong and bright.
“If you’re going with us, keep the lights away from Fred’s eyes,” Jennifer warned. “He’ll be in front, but it’ll fuck with his vision if he happens to look back to check on me and gets hit in the face with that beam.”
Obi-Wan nodded.
It took another five minutes of instructions from the detective who’d joined them on their search of the ship.
Everyone agreed not to put all their eggs in one basket, so to speak, just in case—though silently, Obi-Wan put his money on Fred.
Still, the officers would stick together and methodically search behind every door as quickly as they could, level by level.
The Night Stalkers would go with Jennifer and her search dog.
They were given radios and ordered to check in every five minutes, and required to make note of where they were frequently, so they didn’t get lost in the huge ship themselves.
Finally, after everyone memorized where the hatch was, and how to get out of the ship in case something went terribly wrong, the officers began their search.
Obi-Wan and his team turned back to Jennifer and Fred.