CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Cooper knew Bianca was officially missing when his third call to the recently revamped phone went straight to voicemail.
She always answered him, even when she was angry with him.
By the fourth call, the storm had swallowed half the signal bars, and dread had settled into the room before anyone dared name it.
Ham stood over the dining table at Belle Fleur with both hands braced against a map of New Orleans. Rain struck the high windows behind him.
“We found her going into the airport hotel,” said Ham. The others started stand but he lifted his hand. “But she left the airport hotel via an Uber which was supposed to be here forty minutes ago.”
“Then we start with the route,” Rush said. He had already opened three laptops, their screens casting a blue pall across his face. “Every traffic camera between the hotel and this house. Every toll reader. Every private system we can legally get someone to show us.”
Diego was on the phone before Rush finished. He spoke to a contact at the airport, then another at a rental-car desk, his Spanish clipped and urgent. Across the room, Abe filled a legal pad with times, names, plate numbers, and every place Bianca might have stopped.
Another dozen men moved through Belle Fleur like a search unit assembled in a nightmare. Two took the airport. Three went to the hotel. Others split among gas stations, pharmacies, late-night groceries, parking garages, bus terminals, and the roads leading out of the city.
Cooper called Bianca again. This time he listened to her recorded voice all the way to the tone.
“Bianca, it’s me. Don’t explain anything. Just tell me where you are.” He ended the call and stared at the phone as though he could force it to ring.
The hotel manager resisted until Ham arrived in person.
Ten minutes later, Ham was in a cramped office behind the front desk, watching security footage jump backward in gray, stuttering fragments.
Guests appeared and vanished. Elevators opened on empty halls.
Rain shivered across every exterior lens.
At 1:24 a.m., Bianca crossed the lobby in a hooded coat, pulling her green suitcase. She stopped beneath the awning and looked at something in her hand. Then a dark sedan rolled into view and blocked the camera’s angle.
Ham leaned so close to the monitor his breath clouded the glass.
“Run it again.”
The manager replayed the clip. Bianca stepped outside. The sedan stopped. A man in a hat moved through the rain, but his face never turned toward the lens.
“That wasn’t her Uber,” Ham said.
Rush compared the hotel timestamps with Bianca’s ride receipt. Her assigned driver had canceled seventeen seconds before pickup. A substitute had never been confirmed.
“Someone intercepted the request,” he said. “Or they knew enough to look like they had.”
Diego found the real driver parked beneath an overpass, furious and frightened. The man claimed an anonymous caller had warned him that the passenger carried a weapon. Diego sent the recording to Cooper. Behind the driver’s voice, thunder sounded like distant artillery.
Abe built the sedan’s path one broken image at a time. A convenience-store camera caught its taillights. A pharmacy camera showed the passenger-side profile. At an intersection, a traffic camera recorded the car entering through yellow and leaving beneath red.
The plate was unreadable in every frame. Mud or tape covered the center characters, and rain turned the rest into white smears.
“Professional?” one of the men asked. Abe shook his head. “No. Angry men can be careful, too.”
Cooper moved between the screens without sitting.
“Check the airport again. Arrivals, departures, garages, baggage claim. I want every face near her from the moment she landed.”
The airport team returned with hours of footage and nothing that resembled mercy. On a distant camera, a man stood near a column watching the same baggage carousel. His features dissolved when the image was enlarged.
They searched shops along the hotel corridor. A cashier remembered Bianca because she paid cash for a charger and asked whether the road to Belle Fleur flooded. At the mention of the name, the cashier had warned her not to travel there in a storm.
“Did anyone hear her?” Cooper asked over speakerphone.
“A man near the back,” the cashier said. “He left without buying anything.”
The search widened. Men checked train platforms and bus depots, private hangars and rental lots, emergency rooms and police intake desks. Every negative answer tightened something in Cooper’s chest. The city was enormous when it wanted to hide someone.
By three in the morning, Rush had covered the dining table with printed stills. The sedan appeared in eleven of them, always half obscured, always moving away. Then it vanished near a flooded interchange where three roads split and only one camera worked.
Ham returned drenched, carrying the hotel’s copied footage on a drive.
“Give me four trucks,” he said. “We take every road from that interchange and search until sunrise. She was headed back here and he has no idea who or what she’s coming to.”
“Sunrise is too late,” Diego said. His voice had gone quiet. “If this is who we think it is, he didn’t take her to talk.”
No one answered. Rainwater ticked from Ham’s coat onto the floor. Abe circled the last clear image of the sedan until the paper tore beneath his pen.
Cooper looked toward the black windows and made his decision.
“Wake every contact we have. Call the sheriff. Call the state police. If they won’t move, we move without them.”
Chairs scraped backward. Keys, flashlights, radios, and weapons disappeared into coats. The dozen men converged on the front hall with the grim, breathless energy of people ready to tear a city apart brick by brick.
Then the gate alarm sounded once.
Everyone stopped. The monitor beside the door flickered from black to grainy gray, showing the narrow service road curling through the cypress trees. It was not the public drive. No delivery driver knew it, and no guest had ever been given the code.
A strange sedan crept into view with its headlights off. Water streamed from its hood. Cooper leaned toward the screen.
“Only family knows that road,” said Rush. “Including Bianca.”
Then the car stopped just beyond the reach of the gate camera. The obsidian night and darkness of the sheets of rain blocked their view. But they knew. They all knew exactly who was in that car.