CHAPTER 25
THE NEEDLE IN THE HAYSTACK
GRIMM
Fuck is right,” Midnight laughed as she jumped on the table next to Hannibal, and the kid winced.
~ Call me stupid, but I think he’s afraid of her.
“So, if we assume she’s the daughter of a drug lord, we can also assume something happened to make her leave and change her identity, something her father is guilty of, otherwise he would have never allowed her to go. That’s where we start,” she patted him on the shoulder. “Look for tragic events in Colombia in the last twenty years, give or take.”
“But why would her father kidnap her?” Damiano interrupted her, and she giggled like a child offered candy.
“Let’s say you have a daughter, not that there’s a woman on this planet who would carry your child, but hypothetically speaking. You give her a way out of your dangerous criminal world, but you keep an eye on her because, after all, she’s your daughter, you want her to be safe, right?” she began.
“Right,” he said hesitantly.
“Fast forward some years, your sweet little daughter ends up dating this guy,” she pointed at me. “The fucking Grim Reaper, what do you do?”
“And he also starts killing every bodyguard you sent to protect her,” I added.
“I kill him,” Damiano said with a shrug, grinning at me.
“Right, because instead of being smart, you’re just a pretty boy, aren’t you?” she rolled her eyes. “Killing him would start a war with the Bratva, what are the odds of you winning that war?”
It was my turn to grin.
“Okay, tesoro, I get it,” he raised his arms defensively.
“I’ll go take another look at her apartment,” Klaus stood up and placed his palm on my shoulder. “Are you going to be alright?”
“Yes,” I reassured him.
“Promise not to kill anyone?” He raised his index finger at me in a scolding way.
“Fuck right off,” I shoved him away, and he laughed as he turned and walked towards his motorcycle.
Damiano stood up and lit a cigarette while he eyed Midnight, as if he didn’t know if he wanted to kill her or eat her. I wasn’t sure, but she didn’t give him a second glance and leaned over Hannibal’s shoulder and said something to him that I couldn’t hear, to which the boy just nodded and went back to his computer.
It was clear that Midnight and Hannibal were familiar with each other because they had probably talked during some, or maybe even all, of her missions, since the kid was the only hacker to ever keep up with us.
“Did you go through her things?” she asked out of nowhere.
“Yes, I tore open all the boxes in my apartment and found nothing.”
Except for her smell.
It was everywhere.
I could sense it in my nostrils as if she constantly passed me, flipping that long hair and swaying her beautiful hips, but it was different from what I felt when she was physically next to me. It wasn’t peaceful anymore.
Her ghost greedily haunted me, not allowing me even a second of quiet, turning me back to what I was before I’d touched her for the first time. No. Worse than him.
“She worked at Northwestern Memorial, right?” She turned her back to us and lifted her T-shirt, revealing the burn scars on her back, but she quickly covered up after she took out two guns and threw them onto the table.
I didn’t ask what happened to her, because it wasn’t any of my business and I knew she wouldn’t have told us anyway, but Damiano froze in place, his eyes wide and his body tense, but if Midnight noticed his staring, she didn’t say anything.
“Did you pick her up that night?” she asked as she started pulling knives out of all sorts of places on her body.
“Yes,” I said, frowning.
“Did she have a box of her things with her, you know, how people usually do when they’re fired?”
“No, what are you doing?” I asked as she lifted her leg, placing it on Damiano’s thigh.
My eyes widened when she started pulling ninja stars out of her boots, throwing them on the table over the entire arsenal she apparently carried with her everywhere.
“We need to check her locker, maybe she kept something in there,” she said as each piece of sharp metal clinked against the table.
Then, she took a long needle and wrapped her hair around it, pinning it in a bun, and turned to me.
“I’m driving,” I said, grabbing my jacket.
“My God, woman, where did you keep all of these?” Damiano asked as he picked up one of the ninja stars and nicked his finger in the process.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” she winked at him.
The dynamic between the two was tiring me, though it might’ve been interesting to watch at any other time. It seemed like the start of a dangerous game, and I didn’t want to find myself in the middle of it, but I kept my mouth shut. If I wouldn’t have been so preoccupied with finding my heart, I would’ve probably been amused by them, and as long as their bickering didn’t affect their clarity and didn’t endanger my mission, they could slit each other’s throats for all I cared.
The ride to Northwestern Memorial was rather quiet. I drove in silence while Midnight paid attention to her phone, reading each of Hannibal’s updates to me, and all I could think about was her.
How is she doing?
Has she eaten anything today?
Is she hurt?
Is she thinking about me?
I missed her more than I ever thought I would miss someone. It felt as though a vital organ had been forcefully ripped from my body, and now I was slowly dying in her absence.
Missing her was the cruelest form of torture.
I rubbed my eyes with my hand, then reached for the bottle of vodka I had stashed under the passenger seat, but Midnight took it out of my hand and threw it out the window, smashing it to pieces.
“What the fuck?”
“I’m not going to sit here and watch you drown your sorrows. You’re going to rule the Bratva one day, so fucking act like it,” her gaze pierced through me, and a shiver ran down my spine. “I get it. You’ve realized that you’re not actually a psychopath and that you’re capable of human emotions. Good for you. Yay, love,” she mocked, waving her hands in the air. “But love comes with a fuckload of pain, Grimm, it brings insecurities, and it makes you question everything you thought you knew. Love is the definition of uncertainty. The sooner you come to terms with that, the sooner you can fucking fight for it.”
“Oh, so you’ve been in love before, huh?” I quipped, rolling my eyes.
“No, I haven’t, but I wish I had…” she averted her gaze, and before I could read the emotions on her face, they were gone and covered in thick ice.
She got out of the car without waiting for another come back and walked towards the entrance. Luckily, one of my steps equaled three of hers, and I caught up to her pretty quickly.
“How are you supposed to get to her locker?”
“Oh, not us, big guy,” she raised her arms. “I stay on guard, and you go.”
“Great,” I huffed out a breath as we entered the emergency room.
I hated this place. Not just because they had fired the best doctor they could ever dream of, but also because it smelled like chlorine and death. Not that I had anything against death, but chlorine turned my stomach upside down.
A tall woman approached us, and I recognized her as the doctor who had a lot of crap to say about Arella, and also the woman who had been an accomplice to that sleezy bastard and his lies. I had to slam the brakes on the instinct of bashing her face in with my fists, and I wasn’t a man who harbored violent thoughts against women, but the one in front of me managed to awaken my murderous instincts. She was one of the people responsible for her kidnapping. She lied to get my Snezhinka fired, and she deserved the same fate as the director.
“Arella doesn’t work here anymore,” she said, a little too excitedly.
~ Don’t tempt me, wench.
“I know,” I gritted my teeth. “I’m here to pick up her things.”
“I can’t let you go to the women’s locker room; she has to come and pick them up herself,” she crossed her arms in front of her chest.
“I can go,” Midnight interjected, shrugging her shoulders.
“And who are you?”
“Someone who doesn’t like that question,” Midnight rolled her eyes. “I’m a woman, I know the combination, so… be a doll and show me the way,” she smiled in a dangerously innocent way.
“Why can’t she come and get it herself? Is she too ashamed to show her face?”
I clenched my jaw so hard I thought I was about to break my teeth, and my hands balled into fists as I forced myself to stay calm and not put a hole between her eyes.
~ With a power drill, very slowly.
“God, you’re so full of questions it bores me.”
Midnight ran her fingers through her hair and pulled out the needle she used to pin her bun with, then stepped to the side to be obstructed from view and pushed the thick, pointy needle into Lana’s nostril, the image giving me far too much satisfaction.
“How about this? You show me to Arella’s locker, and I won’t give you a live lobotomy right here,” she smiled.
“I’ll call security,” the brunette breathed out, her body frozen in place.
“You’ll drop dead before you even open your mouth,” Midnight said calmly, “so let’s go for a walk,” she hooked her arm with Lana’s, then left me to watch her six.
~ God, this woman makes you look like a saint. Are we sure she’s not another half-sister?
Ten minutes later, Midnight came back by herself, casually strutting down the hallway, carrying a cardboard box, which she promptly pushed into my arms as her eyes went left and right.
“Where’s the Wicked Witch of the West?” I asked as I looked at the contents in the box, nothing standing out right off the bat.
“It’s my understanding that she helped that asshat of a director with firing your girlfriend, right?”
“Yeah,” I answered rather reluctantly, raising an eyebrow as we walked towards the exit.
“Well, let’s just say I’m not a big fan of women who put down other women, and since you haven’t sent her to hell yourself because of what I assume is an inherited sense of care towards women, no matter how putrid they might be, I thought I’d do you a favor and put the bitch down myself,” she shrugged.
I grinned, shaking my head as I put the box on the backseat of my car, then got behind the steering wheel.
*
Back at the warehouse, Klaus had returned from Arella’s apartment, where he didn’t find anything relevant.
I was going through the stuff from her locker, feeling like a creep for invading her privacy.
~ Get off your moral pedestal, asshole. You did this for six years before you finally got the guts to speak to her.
There were a lot of pens, notebooks, assorted paraphernalia, a fucking doll with removable organs, scrubs, her name tag, a set of scrubs, and underneath it all… a red, rectangular velvet box.
That red box I thought I saw when she put her gun back in the safe, the box that wasn’t there when I searched her apartment, and I wondered where it had gone.
~ Why would she carry it around with her and leave it in her work locker?
“I think I found something,” I said as I took it out, feeling like I was pulling the hope out of Pandora’s box and holding it in my hand.
“What is that?” Klaus asked as he came closer.
“The red box,” I whispered.
“No shit, Sherlock, any more obvious crap you want to share with us?”
I frowned at him and opened the box that held nothing but a single old photograph. The paper had frayed at the edges with time and the color was slightly worn, but I could make out the focal points.
It was a family photo. There was a beautiful young woman with long blonde hair, a tall, massive man whose face had been scratched off with a black pen, who had an arm around her, and two children at their feet. A boy and a girl, both smiling broadly at the camera.
I would have recognized her anywhere. The little girl with pigtails tied in pink ribbons was Arella, ever the one with the innocent eyes, and I found myself imagining a copy of her running around our penthouse, her bare, chubby feet slapping against the marble, throwing fucking pink glitter at my face.
I had to close my eyes for a moment to stifle the tears that threatened to come out. I didn’t have time to cry, even if every second hurt worse than the last one.
~ And you’re not crying in front of that conceited Italian wanker. Don’t make a fool out of yourself.
I’d never wanted to have children. I never wanted to bring life into an already overcrowded world that was infested with danger, waiting for innocent souls to stray out of their path, but seeing Arella as a child made me wonder what I would be like if I ever had one. Ever since we had that conversation in her bed, when I tried to get her to see her beauty, images of toddlers started invading my mind as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
Hannibal took the photo out of my hand and I shook my head, pinching the bridge of my nose and trying to wipe thoughts of blonde braids and little pink shoes as I watched him get back to his computer.
“I can work with this,” he said as he scanned the image.
“Can you run it through facial recognition?” Damiano asked when he stopped glaring at Midnight.
“Obviously,” he replied simply as he started typing.
I sat on the concrete and pushed my fingers through my hair, fisting it as I prayed – again – for him to find something, anything.
I did a lot of things that were out of character for me, from hoping to praying to saints and demons, to devils and gods. I was a sea of anger and uncertainty, and I took out my phone to get another look at her, fucking wishing that her smile would calm the waters.
“Nothing,” said the kid. “I swear to God, it’s like they don’t even exist.”
I bit my tongue until I tasted blood as Midnight took the pack of cigarettes from Damiano’s hand, lit one, then shoved the pack in her pocket, smiling innocently at him as he grinned like a cat in heat.
“Can you look for the house in the background,” Klaus suggested.
“Um, I can try.”
His hands flew over the keyboard while I was ready to rip my fucking hair out. I couldn’t see anything anymore, I couldn’t hear anything except my name falling off her lips, as if she was calling for me from the depths of the abyss, begging me to pull her out of there, but I didn’t know where there was.
~ You’re going crazy.
~ No shit.
~ You seriously need to get laid. I don’t like you very much.
~ What a shame.
“There are two thousand three hundred and forty-six Baroque-style houses in all of Colombia, and over sixty percent of them are in or around Bogot.”
“Okay, so we focus on Bogot,” Damiano intervened.
So, we had an approximate location, and I was already prepared to leave and turn Colombia’s capital city to fucking ashes if that got me closer to finding her.
“We have to assume that it’s in a relatively remote area, far from prying eyes.” Midnight bent over Hannibal’s shoulder, making him blush.
She kissed his cheek and ran her fingers down his neck, but she wasn’t even looking at the kid, but at Damiano, who was close to boiling in his seat.
I’ve had it with these two.
“It wouldn’t be smack in the middle of the city,” I said as I stood up and approached Hannibal, staring at the photo as if I waited for it to talk back to me. “Can you do a search using the hills behind the house?” I asked, biting hard on the inside of my cheek.
“What the fuck is a hill going to give us, genius?” Damiano exploded. “It’s a waste of time.”
“Hills are formed by tectonic activity, or as a result of erosion and weathering over thousands or sometimes even millions of years, which makes each one unique in one way or another.”
“So, you’re saying that if we find that hill...” Midnight exhaled a deep breath, her mouth hanging open for a second.
“We find that house,” I pointed at the photo.
“That’s going to take a while. Even with all the search engines, we’re looking for a needle in a fucking haystack,” Hannibal approved, then got to work.
I lit a cigarette as adrenaline exploded inside my body. Klaus put an arm on my shoulder in an attempt to reassure me, but I was a long way from feeling calm.
A few hours.
I was able to wait a few hours if that meant I was going to receive a possible location. A lead, something to follow.
I took the photo from the table and put it back in the box, refusing to leave her things scattered around the place as if they weren’t important.
“Klaus?” A thin, weakened voice sounded in the garage, and all heads turned towards it.
Fleur stood at the entrance to the hallway that led to Klaus’ apartment, wearing one of his red T-shirts. But that wasn’t the strange thing about this picture, the blood that flowed down her legs and the ghostly whiteness of her face were, and my brother ran towards her as if his life depended on it.
Everyone turned their heads in their direction, watching as my brother picked her up and kissed her forehead, then whispered something to her as he walked towards his car, giving me a long look, almost as if he was begging.
I knew what he was asking, even though he didn’t say it.
“Go,” I nodded from my spot. “We’re good here.”
He nodded and carefully sat her in his car, then left, probably to a hospital, because whatever was happening to the redhead looked bad.
As soon as they were out of sight, everyone returned to their previous activities as if nothing happened, focused on the task at hand no matter how fragile Fleur’s situation seemed.
“I think I found it,” Hannibal shouted, standing up from the chair so fast it fell to the floor with a loud thud. “Those particular hills, thanks to Ripper’s knowledge about fucking geology of all things, are in La Calera,” he said as he opened a map on the biggest screen.
“La Calera?” Damiano frowned.
“Yeah, it’s a town about eleven miles from Bogot,” the kid explained.
Damiano swore through his teeth in Italian and pulled out his phone, then walked outside as he called someone, an action which made me fucking suspicious, but I pushed my criminal instincts to the side and turned my attention back to Hannibal.
“If we measure the apparent distance and the size of the hills in the photo, that puts the house approximately five kilometers away, but I can’t figure out the angle, so we have a ten-kilometer radius to cover.”
“Can’t you do a satellite search?” Midnight asked.
“I’m good, beautiful, but not that good. Nobody fucks with those guys. It would take me weeks to hack into their system without them jumping us in the next second, and we don’t have that much time to spare.”
“Can’t you use that street-view thing?”
“If you were a cartel member, would you allow anyone to put your house on the map? Those aren’t publicly available records, just like this warehouse doesn’t appear anywhere.”
Ten kilometers. I could work with ten kilometers.
“Looks like I’m going to La Calera,” I said as I put the cigarette out under my boot.
“I’m coming with you,” Midnight nodded.
Damiano came back from outside, swearing in Italian, as he angrily threw his phone at the wall.
“What got your panties in a bunch, pretty boy?” Midnight asked.
“You said La Calera, right?” The Italian turned towards our hacker.
“Yeah,” Hannibal answered.
“I know why you couldn’t find any tragic events when you looked for that,” he laughed without amusement and lit a cigarette.
“Fucking fuck, just spit it out,” I yelled at him.
“It was my father,” he ran his fingers through his hair, then rubbed his face. “I was a teenager back then. He didn’t take me with him to these things, but he told me about it later. He was at war with the
Snchez cartel because they refused to do business with us. A meeting for a truce turned into a bloodbath, and the leader’s wife was accidentally caught in the crossfire,” he shook his head as he took a long drag out of the cigarette. “She wasn’t supposed to be there, none of them were supposed to be there…”
“What the fuck are you saying?”
“I think the woman who died in that field back then was your girlfriend’s mother, and she witnessed it, that’s what I’m saying. And if that’s the case, I have to remove myself from this equation.”
“Why? That happened years ago, and your family isn’t at war with anyone right now, from what I know,” Midnight’s eyebrows drew together.
“No, but my family can’t step foot in La Calera since then, those are the terms that stopped the massacre that followed.”
I clenched my fists, fighting the urge to jump and rip out his throat. He just admitted that his family was responsible for Arella’s mother’s death, and that she witnessed it, that she saw her mother lying shot as she took her last breaths.
His family was responsible for her nightmares, for the fact that she changed her identity, for all the suffering that I knew burned inside her.
~ It’s also the reason you met her.
~ That too.
I lit another cigarette and laughed nervously, grabbing Damiano’s collar and pulling him closer to me.
“Did you know her? That’s why you said she was delicious after you stabbed my brother?” I wrinkled my nose in disgust, remembering how he licked his lips that day.
He shook his head.
“No. I told you; I wasn’t there. If we didn’t find the location, I wouldn’t have even thought about it,” he raised his arms defensively.
At least the motherfucker knows how to pick his battles.
“They erased every trace, didn’t they?” Midnight asked, but it was more of an affirmation than a question, and she grabbed my arm, urging me to let go of him.
“Yes, Snchez is hand in hand with every institution. Those people respect him as if he gave them life or something. He isn’t just a drug trafficker, Grimm.”
“Do you know where the house is?” I asked through my teeth, aggressively pushing him.
He nodded.
“I’ll send you the coordinates, but it’s a fucking fortress. You two don’t stand a chance alone.”
“Watch us,” Midnight huffed, then stepped away from him as if she was disgusted.
“I’m having a hard time containing my anger right now,” I said as I stepped back from him. “You should leave, Damiano.”
He rolled his eyes, adjusted his shirt, then turned on his heels and walked to his car. The engine roared to life when he started it, and my phone vibrated in my pocket before he left.
“So, what’s the plan, Ripper?” Midnight turned to me.
“We’re going to pay my future father-in-law a visit.”