Chapter 31
Tina was fairly sure she hadn’t been shot, but with the amount of adrenaline coursing through her system, who even knew. She kept moving, staying low, until she heard Jack’s shout.
“Get in!”
She peered over the grass to see their rented beige Sentra pulled up right next to her, with Jack leaning over to open the passenger door. “Duck down!” she yelled at him. The shooter was still out there, or up there, or wherever he or she was.
He obeyed, and she launched herself toward the car. Before she’d even finished climbing onboard, he hit the accelerator and headed for the exit. She quickly figured out why; he wanted to catch up with the Uber that was now racing toward the exit of the parking lot.
“What’d you see?” she demanded as she made sure every bit of her was inside the car, then closed the door.
“I don’t know who was driving, but I think Jessie might have been in the back seat. Can you call it in or something? Make them stop?”
“No probable cause. Sorry. Our best bet is to make them speed so a state trooper stops them.”
He groaned and slammed the accelerator even harder.
They almost lost sight of the Uber, then caught a glimpse of it about a mile down a winding back road, the kind Vermont was famous for, all splendid autumn foliage and a new bend in the road every few minutes.
The tires screeched as he took a turn. “What I wouldn’t give for my Audi right about now. ”
“You’re doing great. Better than I would. It took me three tries to pass my car chase driving skills test.”
“Is that really a thing?”
“Absolutely not. To be honest, it doesn’t come up that often in Harbortown police work.” She wasn’t sure why she was blabbing like this, except that her nerves were still wildly on edge from that near-miss. “Neither does getting shot at twice in one investigation.”
“Some vacation, huh?”
Nervous laughter spilled from her lips. She couldn’t stop it, even though it was entirely inappropriate at this moment.
They lost sight of the Uber again, and Jack stepped on the accelerator. Another screech of wheels as the road curved the opposite way. Up ahead, driving through shafts of light beaming through brilliant scarlet and yellow foliage, they caught a flash of taillights.
“Damn, he’s getting away from us,” Jack growled.
She checked her phone. “I don’t even have service here.
Better step on it.” A twinge of pain in her arm made her realize that she’d opened up the wound she’d gotten at the Bloodshot Eyeball.
If that was her only injury, she counted herself lucky.
She’d been a sitting duck out there in the open, an easy target for a sniper.
What a fucking idiot she’d been. She should have assumed that Celine would have another way to communicate with her brother, and that they would have figured out she wasn’t the one using Celine’s phone. They’d turned the tables on Tina and Jack and set their own trap.
Of course she’d considered that possibility, which was why they hadn’t waited in the Camry for Adam to arrive.
When they’d gotten to the parking lot, she’d scanned every inch of it, along with the hospital itself and every possible line of sight.
No weapons were allowed inside the hospital, so she hadn’t examined every window.
But someone had shot at them from the direction of the hospital, roughly the second floor of the western wing. That much she knew. And that meant that she’d failed. The only saving grace was that no one had been hurt.
A sinking sensation spread throughout her body and made her slump against the seat. All those emotions she’d suppressed ever since the Hooper incident—another massive failure—rushed through her. How could she have been so blind? Why hadn’t she picked up on his treachery sooner?
She ought to turn in her badge and find some other line of work immediately.
Mall cop.
Maybe she could handle that. If anyone would hire her.
Perhaps one of her parents’ friends needed a security guard at their place of business. She could keep an eye on any shenanigans in Felicia’s dim sum restaurant or Tiffany’s nail salon. Hadn’t her daughter just opened a chic gallery in Soho? That place must need guarding.
“Would you speak up?” Jack said, irritation threading through his voice. “Why are you talking about dim sum?”
Crap, she’d actually given voice to some of her self-flagellation. “I’m not.” Then she added, “Just considering some other job options.”
“Well, stop it. You have a job. And you better fucking focus because I need you.”
“Of course I’m going to focus,” she snapped. “We’re going to catch whatever his name is, get your sister back, and that’s it. After that, I’m done.”
He swung the wheel again. “Can we put a pin in this convo? This doesn’t seem like the right moment to make major life decisions.”
He had a point there, but tell that to her nervous system. For some reason, tears had decided to fall down her cheeks at this moment. She felt their wetness, but couldn’t stop them, and decided that wiping them away would draw unwelcome attention.
Familiar blue lights up ahead caught her attention. “I think we just got lucky,” she murmured. “Slow down.”
He pulled his foot from the accelerator and they both jerked forward. At a more legal pace, they took a few more bends in the road. Then—there it was, just as she’d hoped. The blue Honda CRV with the Uber placard had been pulled over by a Vermont state trooper.
Jack pulled up behind the police cruiser and put his hand on the door handle, ready to jump out. She stopped him with a firm touch. “Stay here. Let me see what’s going on first. I’m the one with the badge.”
As she said those words, something clicked into place inside her. Being the one with the badge was a responsibility, a solemn promise to do her best. Not to be perfect, but to act with integrity and in service to others.
Which she had the opportunity to do, right now.
She climbed out of the car and strode decisively toward the cruiser. Holding up her badge, she introduced herself and said, “I saw the flashers, figured I’d stop and see if I can be of any help. I saw this vehicle speeding and was just about to call it in. You got the jump on me.”
“Sure was, seventy-five in a forty-five,” said the trooper. He was examining a driver’s license. She caught the name Seth Baker on it. She bent to peek in the window. The driver turned his face away, but not quite quickly enough. It was definitely Lloyd/Seth/Adam, currently going by Seth.
“I bet people get carried away on this stretch of road all the time,” she said sympathetically. Taking a step to the side, she leaned in to check out the back seat.
It was a jumble of blankets, along with a sleeping bag and a pillow, as if he’d been camping out in the car. But she saw no young woman lying on that back seat, or any other human being.
Damn it.
Jack’s hopeful imagination had probably gotten away from him.
“Well, good luck to you, Trooper. Looks like you have this situation well in hand. This foliage, my gosh. It’s stunning.”
She stepped away from the car and drew her phone from her pocket. At a moment when Adam—no, Seth—had no choice but to look back at the officer, she discreetly took a couple of shots of his face.
If only she knew if someone had called in a “shots fired” report at Rutland General. If the officer knew about that, she could plausibly claim that the Honda CRV matched the description of a vehicle spotted at the scene. If no one had, she’d be way over her skis.
“I just came from Rutland General,” she began, but the officer gave no reaction to that. “You’ll probably catch a few speeders, that’s all I’m going to say. Carry on.”
On her way back to the car, she gave a small shake of her head, letting Jack know that she hadn’t seen Jessie in the back seat.
Unless…
Shit. Was she about to make an even bigger mistake than she already had?
She wheeled around and strode back to the officer.
“I’m sorry to interrupt again, but I was just passing the trunk and I heard a thump.
You might want to check it out. Back in Harbortown, we’ve been dealing with some dog thieves.
If you can believe it. Who would steal a dog?
It’s heartbreaking. Anyway, you don’t want to encourage that kind of thing in a peaceful community like this one. ”
“You say you definitely heard something?” The officer was making sure there was probable cause to open the trunk.
“It was like a mmmh.” She mimicked the sound. “You didn’t hear it?”
“There’s nothing in my trunk,” Seth growled.
“Oh well, then we have nothing to worry about.” She rolled her eyes at the officer, with an unspoken, Like we’re going to fall for that.
“Open the trunk, sir,” the officer directed.
Seth’s hands hovered over the steering wheel. Shit, he was going to make a run for it, thought Tina, ready to step back so her toes didn’t get run over.
The officer drew his weapon and aimed it at Seth. “Mr. Baker, open the trunk. Nice and slow.”
]Showing his palms, Seth looked around for the trunk release. “I’m not used to this car, it’s a buddy’s.”
Tina didn’t like the way he was feeling around the console, then down by his feet. What if he had a weapon stashed down there? She drew her own firearm, so now he was staring down two Glocks. Her heart beat slow and steady. Alert but calm.
This was the kind of moment that she’d trained the most for.
This was when you had to keep your head and not react in a knee-jerk way to something that wasn’t actually a threat.
This was the kind of moment when deep and hidden biases against non-white drivers could surface, when later the officer would say, “I feared for my life,” and they may have, even though the driver was just reaching for his inhaler or something like that.
In her view, it was an officer’s responsibility to train themselves for exactly this sort of situation, so innocent people didn’t pay the price for their unprocessed trauma.
She’d had this conversation many times with her fellow officers; some thought she was overthinking it, others agreed it was worth their attention.
Policing was a traumatic profession, after all.
And trauma didn’t follow rules of logic or proper engagement. It just acted.
The trunk popped open.
She heard the officer’s breath release, and felt her own arms relax. Leaving the officer to keep an eye on Seth, she stepped toward the trunk.
No Jessie. Damn it. The trunk held a case of motor oil, a jug of windshield wiper fluid, and a collapsible playpen, for some reason. And a hair. A long, reddish-brown hair. She collected it quickly, before the officer could see her, and closed the lid of the trunk.
“I must have imagined it, sorry for the trouble!” she called to the officer. He looked fit to be tied, but she didn’t give him the chance to yell at her. With a cheerful wave, she trotted back to their rented Sentra and slid inside.
“No Jessie,” she said in a low voice as she handed him the single hair she’d found. “But does this look like hers?”
He stared at it for a long moment. “I mean…maybe? It’s just one hair!
How am I supposed to recognize a single fucking hair?
It’s auburn, but it also looks a little gray.
Or is that dust? Jesus.” He scrubbed a hand through his hair.
“Fuck. If it’s hers, why is it in the trunk?
Is that where he had her? In the trunk of his car? ”
“Hey, we don’t know anything yet.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “But we’ve found our guy, so take heart.”
“Can’t you arrest him? Do something? He’s leaving. He’s just driving away!”
Exhaust spilled from the tailpipe of the CRV, and the Vermont officer strolled back to his cruiser. Jack started to turn the key, but she stopped him.
“I can’t arrest him. I have no authority here, and there’s no probable cause of anything. I was stretching it to get him to open the trunk. But it’s okay. Just take a beat. We got this.”
The CRV pulled away, immediately picking up speed—though carefully under the limit this time. In a few moments, it had disappeared from view.
“How? How do we got this?” Jack said frantically.
“Because I put a tracker in the trunk.”
She pulled up the app on her phone that synced with the tracker. “Bingo. He’s pulling into the road, he’s proceeding forwards. We’re good. He’ll think he got away from us and he’ll make a mistake.”
With a whoosh of breath, Jack sank back in his seat. “Did you see anything else in there?”
“I saw a man who’s in such big trouble, he’s about to do something desperate.”
“Why? What do you mean?”
“Pupils dilated, eyes darting from side to side, flushed skin, all the classic signs of someone under stress. Also, I saw something on his right hand that struck me as significant.”
“What?”
“Gunpowder residue. That man has been doing a lot of target practice lately. Like he’s preparing for a showdown.”
“Those sounds,” Jack said slowly. “In the background during that call with Celine. Maybe it was a gun range.”
“Is that what it sounded like to you?”
“Not really. I heard some hammering and some squeaking, like the sound a dolly makes. I forwarded the recording to our foley engineer on the show to see what he thought.”
“Has he answered?”
“I don’t know, I’ve been pretty busy,” he said dryly as he pulled out his phone.
He scrolled to his emails and clicked on one to open it.
“Yup, here it is.” He scanned it. “Josh says to him it sounds like packing crates being loaded onto a…holy shit.” He glanced up at her.
“A boat. He says he can hear a foghorn in the background. He isolated it for us. The hammering is the lids of the crates being nailed shut.”
“Our smuggling theory just got a boost.”
“The question is, what exactly is in those crates?”
She snorted. “I’m pretty sure it ain’t lobsters.”