Chapter 11 #2
O’Shea dismissed Drake, then, after removing the phone from the bag, handed it to Weathers.
A few taps at the screen and then Weathers handed it back to him.
O’Shea’s wince was all the warning Carter needed to know it was bad.
An agent of O’Shea’s experience didn’t visibly react otherwise.
He passed the phone to Lincoln, and Lincoln’s gasp echoed the sound that wanted to escape from Carter’s own throat as he viewed the picture over his partner’s shoulder.
The emaciated blond woman appeared to be barely hanging on to life.
Probably even before someone had stripped her naked, gagged and tied her to the bed, and beaten her.
She was still alive—the color of her skin, the slack in her fingers, her eyes open and focused—but she wouldn’t stay that way much longer, injuries untreated and struggling to breathe.
Despite his initial surprise, Lincoln recovered quickly, putting two fingers to the screen and zooming in. But not on Stacy. He shifted the picture instead and Carter immediately caught on to what he was doing.
“Do you know where this is?” Carter asked Weathers.
“No, it didn’t look familiar to me.”
“Why would it?” Lincoln said. “It’s a generic motel room.
” He moved the picture around, pointing out to Carter and O’Shea the hideous hotel bedspread that had been tossed on the floor, the channel guide next to the phone with a few extra buttons, and the plastic-wrapped cups on the bedside table.
“There’s a logo printed on the plastic wrap,” Lincoln said.
“But I don’t have the resolution on here to read it. ”
“Let me see if we can clean it up.” O’Shea handed him the evidence bag before turning toward the door.
“Check the channel guide too,” Lincoln called after him. “The station numbers can narrow the location.”
“On it,” O’Shea said with a nod, then ducked out of the room.
Lincoln was still examining the photo, so Carter resumed questioning their suspect. “Did you recognize the voice on the call?”
“It was disguised, like with one of those voice modulators.”
“Then how do you know it was a man?”
Weathers’s face crumpled, his shoulders hitched, and he lifted his hands, covering his face and muffling his sobs.
Beside Carter, Lincoln lowered the phone.
He looked uncomfortable, to put it mildly, but also like he wanted to reach out and comfort Weathers.
The parent in him maybe, which if Carter’s math was right, he hadn’t had in his toolbox the last time he’d been in the field.
Carter held the evidence bag open, Lincoln dropped the phone inside, and before he could object, Carter pushed Lincoln’s rolling chair closer to Weathers.
There was a second of flailing—Carter would pay for this later, no doubt—but Lincoln recovered with barely a squeak and leaned forward, moving directly in front of Weathers.
“We’re sorry for making you go through this again, Mr. Weathers, but if we’re going to find Stacy, we need all the details we can get.
I can find a lot, that’s what I’m good at.
Carter too. But there are some details, like that call, that only you know.
Can you tell us about that? So we can try and bring Stacy home. ”
Much better at this than he gave himself credit for.
Weathers lowered his hands and took a deep breath. “I can’t know for sure.” He swiped at the wetness under his eyes. “But even with the distortion, the voice sounded deep.”
Carter slid closer. “And he told you to torch the station?”
“The records room. He said if I did that, he’d let Stacy go. But that was yesterday morning, and I haven’t heard a thing since.”
Not a good sign for Stacy, especially considering that picture could have been taken days ago, well before the call.
Weathers knew it too, wringing his hands in his lap despite the pain it must be causing him. “I did what he said, what he wanted, and now—”
Lincoln laid a hand over his. “Back to the details, Mr. Weathers. That’s how we find her. Did he say anything else? Want anything else?”
The other man calmed enough to sniffle out, “No. That was all.” He sucked in another breath. “Can you help me find her, please?”
“Where’s your sister usually stay at?” Carter asked.
Weathers recited an address that Carter punched into his phone. Mapping it, the app placed it a ways outside of town. Unincorporated Apex, by the looks of it. “You been out there?” he asked Weathers.
He nodded. “Torn apart, and her car was gone too.”
Her car. The same car they were looking for?
Lincoln was on the same wavelength. “What kind of car did she drive, Mr. Weathers? Make and model, if you know it? Color?”
“Ninety-five Honda Accord.”
Lincoln deflated, and Carter likewise felt the wind go out of his sails.
But then Weathers kept talking. “I gave it to her a few years back. I thought for sure she’d flip it for drugs, but she cherished that old junker. Just had it painted. Custom. Dark blue with holographic flake.”
Not so deflated anymore. “That’s the car,” Carter said. “He’s in her car.”
“Who?” Weathers asked.
Lincoln’s right leg was bouncing a club rhythm, but he kept his attention on Weathers. “Do you have a license plate number, Mr. Weathers?”
“Yeah, I still pay the registration on it. Least I can do for her.” He rattled off the numbers and letters and that was the end of Lincoln’s patience. He shot out of the chair and bolted for the door.
Weathers’s eyes tracked him the entire way. “Y’all know where she is?”
“No, but this helps,” Carter said, rising as well. “Did he say anything else? Anything at all?”
“There was one thing . . . I argued with him at first, and he said something about being on the clock. His clock, and how I was going to make him late. But I don’t know who he is.”
Carter bet he did, though. “All right, Mr. Weathers.” He squeezed the other man’s shoulder. “Just sit tight.” He followed the path his partner had taken, closing the door to the imaging room behind him.
Phone in hand, Lincoln paced the short length of the control room while O’Shea stood in the door to the hallway. “You’re looking for a ninety-five Honda Accord, Virginia tag,” Lincoln told the person on the other end of the line. “I texted you the tag number and owner name. Stacy Weathers.”
“That’s what we needed,” Kirk said, the call on speaker. “We’ll add this to the BOLO.”
Carter raised a brow, requesting the update he’d missed.
“They’d issued a BOLO for vehicles matching the custom paint color,” O’Shea said.
“We’ve been chasing leads all night,” Kirk said. “Nothing, but with this, now we know exactly the car we’re looking for. This is real good, L.”
“We’ll run Stacy’s cards on this end,” O’Shea said. “See if he used them.”
“And it’s definitely a copycat,” Carter said. “On the call with Stacy’s brother, the kidnapper referenced ‘his clock.’ Guessing that’s Dr. Fear’s clock he was talking about, and that we were right about the timeline.”
“Fuck,” Kirk said. “We gotta move, then.”
“Keep us updated, Ollie,” Lincoln said. “We’ll be standing by.”
The line went dead and a second of stunned silence followed. They’d gone from tenuous leads to leads destroyed to the lead that might rescue Ruby and Chase in the span of twelve hours.
O’Shea was the first to kick back into motion, hustling toward the door. “I’m going to get the team on the cards and see if we can track down where this call came from, digitally and otherwise.”
Lincoln resumed pacing. “Fuck. If he’s on Dr. Fear’s clock, there’s no time left. Not enough—”
Carter stepped in front of him, cutting off his circuit and clapping his shoulders.
“This is good, L. They’ll make it in time.
” He said it as much for his own benefit as for Lincoln’s.
He wanted to be there in DC, running down this lead himself, but he had to trust Kirk’s team, that the senator’s own personal stake in the outcome would lead them to do everything possible to bring Ruby and Chase home alive. And their work here wasn’t done.
Motion to Carter’s left drew both their gazes toward the imaging room, where Weathers had hopped off the table. “What about for Stacy?” Lincoln asked as they watched Weathers move from the side of the table to the chair, then back to the table. Likewise nervous. As he should be.
“Chances aren’t as good.” Carter ran through the timeline. “The copycat kept her alive long enough to be useful, but she was just a means to an end. Ruby and Chase were the target. Once he was done with her . . .”
“He’d either kill her or just leave her there to die.” Lincoln dragged a hand through his hair, glancing back at Weathers. “You think he’s playing us? He could be Dr. Fear.”
Carter took another good long look at Clyde Weathers.
Blond hair, middle-aged but fit, and seemingly genuinely upset by the prospect of losing his junkie sister.
Who he’d given a car to and met up with each week to visit their mother.
“I don’t think so,” Carter said. “He doesn’t fit any of the profiles Kirk, you, or we’ve developed. I think he’s telling the truth.”
“Why did the copycat want him to burn the records? Because we’d find the car?”
“Likely, which means he somehow got wind we were getting close.”
A mole was the last complication they needed. “Who—”
“Agents!” O’Shea’s thundering footsteps drew them both toward the doorway. “We have a location on Stacy!”
“That was fast,” Lincoln said.
O’Shea handed them a photo, the resolution of the plastic-wrapped cups cleaned up.
“Mountain Top Motor Lodge,” Carter read.
“It’s a few exits north on 81. Confirmed it using the channel guide like you suggested, Agent Monroe.” O’Shea split a glance between them. “What do you want to do? This is your case, your call, agents.”
They could sit and wait for news on Ruby and Chase, or they could follow this lead and try and save another life in the process. No question. “Let’s go!”