Chapter 17
Seventeen
Cam trailed a fuming Nic into the observation room, closing the door a split second before the prosecutor’s long arm whipped out and cleared half the desk of everything, his calm, cool mask cracking to bits.
To her credit, Lauren, sitting at the other end of the desk behind her laptop and two screens, didn’t flinch. “He’s got her.”
“No fucking shit he’s got her,” Nic bit off.
“His biometrics were all over the place. Didn’t expect that from Mr. Cool.”
Stepping past Nic, hand coasting across his back, Cam peered over Lauren’s shoulder. “What’s that spike early on?” He pointed at the uptick in the readout on the left-hand screen.
“Your dig about Victoria.” She tapped her frosted nail at another spike later in the conversation. “And that’s when Nic nailed him on Harris.”
“How do those two things translate to that asshole having my sister?” Garrett asked from where he stood in the far corner, shifting on his feet. “I mean, I believe you that he does, but—”
“He didn’t react when we put the picture of the kidnapper on the table,” Cam said, straightening. “He’s supremely confident in that regard. That’s what we’re used to seeing when he’s guilty.”
“Well then, let’s go get her.”
Nic halted in his pacing. “Where, Garrett?”
“I have some possibilities,” Lauren said.
A flurry of flying keystrokes later, a map popped up on the right-hand screen.
Cam recognized San Francisco Bay in the middle, but the map’s area as a whole was much larger, stretching north to Humboldt County, east to Tahoe, and south to Santa Barbara.
And scattered all over the wide swath were little red dots.
“These are all of Vaughn’s northern and central California holdings.
Assuming his thug didn’t hop a plane with an injured hostage, which one, obvious, and two, I’ve got no record of that, including Vaughn’s private plane, these are the possible locations he could have traveled by car since the incident. ”
Garrett whistled low while Cam said, “We need to narrow it down. We can’t canvass that many locations.”
Nic hustled to Cam’s side, examining the map. “Remove the ones that are actively leased. Vaughn’s not going to hold a hostage in one of those buildings.” More than three quarters of the red dots disappeared.
Nic was right. Vaughn wouldn’t have his goons take a hostage someplace full of people where his true illegal underbelly might be exposed by FBI and SWAT teams beating down the door.
Along those same lines, Cam suggested, “Remove the ones actively under construction. Maybe those would work if he’d taken the hostage in the middle of the night but not during the day when there are workers around to see. ”
Nic nodded, Lauren entered the commands, and half the remaining dots came off the board. Better but still not great.
“Now, pull up GPS tracking,” Cam said. “Have any of the cars Jamie tagged to Vaughn and his associates, including the one at the scene, been to any of these sites?”
Within a minute, during which the two military men paced circles behind them, one of the red dots began to blink.
“Bingo!” Lauren declared.
Nic reappeared at Cam’s side. “Satellite map,” he ordered. “What is that?”
Lauren flipped the map to street view, the pin dropping on what looked like an abandoned building south of San Jose in Morgan Hill. Zooming in, the old bowling alley looked the part—sign half gone, fenced in, deserted—but . . . “Why would Vaughn own that?” Cam asked.
“He bought it for the dirt,” Nic said, and Lauren was speed typing again while he explained. “The Bay Area is expanding daily. Morgan Hill used to be the country, but now it’s another burb, a stop on the Caltrain even. And it’s affordable, relatively.”
“Guessing that’s why Vaughn has a change-of-use permit pending for a mixed-use complex of townhomes and retail on this property.”
“All right, let’s go, then.” Garrett turned for the door.
Nic shot out a hand, grabbing him by the arm. “G, no. We have to handle this carefully if we want to be sure she doesn’t get hurt.”
“What’s to say she’s not already?”
Cam stepped beside Nic, addressing Garrett. “That’s not in Vaughn’s interest.”
Garrett’s brows climbed his forehead. “Not in his interest?”
“Vaughn may be an asshole, even a sociopath, but he’s not psychotic.” Cam had seen what happened to hostages and kidnap victims held by those.
He couldn’t stop the mental reel of images from their case in Boston. Two different girls kidnapped by the same monster who’d also taken his sister. He might have stayed lost in those memories if not for Nic’s hand on his back, returning the earlier gesture and bringing him back to the present.
He shook off the memories and focused on finding Nic’s sister, hopefully in a relatively better situation. “In this case, the hostage is leverage to force Nic to do what Vaughn wants, which is pay him and make the case go away.”
“So you’re expecting a ransom demand?” Nic said.
Cam nodded. “The hostage—”
Garrett banged a fist against the observation glass, startling them all. “Lette. Her name is Lette.”
Thank fuck for reinforced glass, and for Vaughn and Patton being long gone from the interrogation room.
Nic crossed to Garrett, sliding the hand that’d been on Cam’s back over Garrett’s.
Cam felt the sharp sting of jealousy, no denying it, but he also felt an overwhelming wave of sympathy.
He knew exactly what these men were going through, what they were feeling with a sibling lost. Under the circumstances, he wouldn’t deny them any sort of comfort.
Or let jealousy compromise his efforts to find Nicolette.
“I’m sorry, Garrett,” Cam said, one hand raised. “It’s a distancing mechanism we’re taught, same as you probably were in the Marines. And I need it more than most.”
Garrett lowered his fist, listening intently.
“I’ve been where you are, except my sister didn’t come home.
That’s why I do this.” Cam gestured around the room and out at the bullpen.
“So don’t think for one second I don’t know how you feel.
How badly you want to find Lette. I don’t intend to let what happened to my sister happen to yours and Nic’s. ”
Short of a promise to bring her home—he tried not to make those—but a promise to do everything he could to make that happen.
Garrett’s tension eased a measure, somewhat reassured, and he let Nic guide him into the empty chair beside Lauren.
Nic knelt in front of him, a hand on his knee. “Lette’s no good to Vaughn seriously injured or dead,” he said softly, visibly swallowing hard around the last word. “He knows the stakes here too. That the whole force of the FBI and DOJ will be behind us.”
Lauren bumped Garrett’s shoulder with hers. “And he did love your mother. The spikes in his readout, his torn-to-shred cuticles, other cues . . .” Of course the trained analyst had been paying particular attention. “I think a part of him maybe still does. He won’t hurt Lette.”
Garrett took a deep breath and relaxed back in the chair. “Okay, so what next, then? Do we wait for the ransom demand?”
“No,” Cam said, leaning against the wall next to the glass. “We do recon on this location in Morgan Hill. Confirm she’s there. And if she is, we have a tactical game plan ready for extraction.”
Garrett shot right back out of the chair. “I want in.”
Nic was having none of it, stepping into Garrett’s space, attempting to loom over the shorter man. “So you can become another hostage? Hell no.”
Garrett was having none of Nic’s answer or his attempts at intimidation. He might have been shorter, but he outweighed Nic by a good thirty pounds, if not more. “I’m a fucking major in the Marine Corps.”
“Which is why you need to stay with Victoria.”
“So all the hostages are in one place for him to take?”
Cam would have laughed if he wasn’t so worried about the two shredding each other in a fight. And if Garrett didn’t have a very good point. “He’s right, Dominic.”
Blue eyes glowered at him.
Cam shrugged. “A compromise. Garrett, you can join the recon team, but if they’re there, and I make the call to go in, you stay back. That way all three hostages and the levers on you”—he gestured at Nic—“remain separated.”
“I can live with that,” Garrett said.
The door opened just as Nic asserted, “I’m going with you too.”
“’Fraid not, Price.” AD Moore’s charming smile was absent, his face hard and severe. Not someone Cam would want to cross when he was this obviously angry. “Deputy AG is on the phone for you. We’ve got a problem.”
Moore paused outside Aidan’s office, hand on the doorknob. “Bowers is on the line too, making the case against you.”
“I figured as much.”
“He’s also making the case that the entire Vaughn matter be dropped.”
Nic stepped closer, then noticing they were drawing curious looks from the bullpen, led Moore into Cam’s office and shut the door behind them.
Aidan’s raised voice echoed from his office at the other end of the conference room between them. Nic needed to get in there, defend himself and the case to Bowers and the Deputy AG, but if he couldn’t convince Moore first, he was in deeper shit than he realized.
“Of course Bowers wants the case dropped. You’re up to speed. You know what he stands to lose if Vaughn goes down and he gets exposed.”
“And you have just as much, if not more, to lose, Price, if you’re making the wrong call. And the rest of us will lose too if you’re gone from the US Attorney’s Office when this is over.”
Nic felt like he’d been slapped. “You think he’ll convince Jack.”
“I think I worked hard to build this case for longer than you’ve even known about it, sacrificed parts of my life for it, and I don’t want to see all that go to waste.”
Nic wondered if maybe it wasn’t only the lack of seasons that had caused Moore’s ex-wife to leave him for the East Coast. “El—”