CHAPTER TWELVE
Liam
I left the house long before Nora woke. For several minutes I stood beside the bed, watching her sleep.
I knew if she opened her eyes before I walked out of the room, there was a very good chance I wouldn’t leave at all.
Yesterday had changed something between us that neither of us had expected.
Seeing her asleep, without the constant tension that was usually on her face, made walking away difficult.
She deserved one morning that belonged entirely to her, one morning where she could wake up without being reminded of the danger she was in.
By the time I reached the operations office, the building was already awake.
Phones were ringing somewhere as keyboards clicked steadily from offices. Several members of my team were moving between desks carrying folders, and it seemed like no one slept the night before. Around here, people only worked through the night when progress was being made.
Paddy walked behind me, carrying the thick brown folder he’d taken from the house earlier, and everyone gradually made their way to the conference table.
Michael was already standing beside one of the monitors with a laptop open in front of him, while two other analysts sorted through printed surveillance photographs that covered almost the entire polished surface.
I looked around the room before pulling out a chair.
“I take it nobody called me here just to admire your filing system.”
A few quiet smiles appeared around the table before disappearing almost immediately. Whatever they’d found, it was important enough that nobody remained distracted for very long. Michael closed the laptop halfway and slid several photographs toward me.
“We’ve spent the last forty-eight hours going back over everything connected to Miss Walsh. Most of it led nowhere.”
I nodded. “That usually means you’re about to tell me the part that did.”
He exchanged a quick glance with Paddy before continuing.
“Originally we believed the man who came asking questions about Miss Walsh outside the nightclub and the people who carried out the kidnapping might not be connected. The behavior was different, the timing was different, and the people involved looked like they came from completely different worlds.”
Paddy opened the folder and removed another sheet covered in columns of numbers.
“Turns out they had one thing in common.” He placed the page in front of me. “A burner phone.” I studied the list without interrupting him. Michael reached across the table and pointed toward two entries highlighted in yellow.
“This number appeared outside the bar on the same evening that man started asking questions about Nora.” His finger moved lower. “It appeared again within range of the street where she was almost taken.”
For several seconds nobody spoke. I read the number twice before looking back at the surveillance photographs lying beside it. On their own, none of them meant very much. Together they painted a picture I didn’t particularly like.
“They were watching her together.” That answer was good enough for me. I leaned back in my chair, letting the information settle while my eyes moved from one photograph to the next.
Somewhere between the first man asking harmless questions about Nora and the group that had tried to kidnap her, somebody had been following her routine closely enough to know exactly where she would be and when to strike.
“They didn’t choose her because an opportunity presented itself,” I said quietly, more to myself than anybody else. “They created the opportunity.”
“Exactly.” Michael turned the laptop back toward me and brought up a digital map of Boston.
“We kept pulling the phone records after we found the connection. Whoever owned the device knew what they were doing, because it stayed dark most of the time. It wasn’t being used for conversations.
It only appeared briefly before disappearing again, but then it made one mistake.
” He enlarged the map. “Yesterday afternoon it connected to a cell tower for less than a minute.”
Paddy picked up the explanation without missing a beat. “Forty-seven seconds. Long enough to trace.”
Several markers appeared across the map before narrowing steadily until only one remained. The flashing point settled near the old industrial district by the waterfront—an area full of abandoned warehouses, empty loading yards, and buildings that had outlived whatever purpose they once served.
I stared at the location for longer than anyone else in the room. Something about it bothered me. Not because it was impossible…because it was almost too convenient. Paddy must have noticed the expression on my face because he folded his arms and spoke before I could.
“You think it’s bait.”
“I think somebody who’s spent months covering their tracks doesn’t suddenly become careless enough to reveal their location.”
Nobody argued. Around this table, instinct carried almost as much weight as evidence, and mine had kept enough people alive over the years that nobody dismissed it lightly.
“So what do we do?” Michael asked. I kept looking at the blinking marker on the screen while the answer settled in my mind.
“We go without a team. A team will take too many vehicles and announce we’re coming before we even arrive. If somebody really is waiting for us, I’d rather they underestimate how many people they’re dealing with.”
“You still think there’s a chance the phone is genuine?”
“I think there’s a chance somebody wants me to believe it is.”
The room fell silent again. Paddy sighed softly before reaching for his jacket. “I had a feeling you’d say that. I’ve been trying to keep you alive for too many years not to.”
***
The moment Michael showed us where the phone had last connected, my instincts had already started pulling in the opposite direction. Whoever we were dealing with had shown too much patience to make a mistake that obvious, if it was a mistake at all.
Neither Paddy nor I wasted time talking during the drive across the city. There was nothing left to say.
The investigation stopped being about theories and became about whatever was waiting for us at the other end of the journey.
We would find answers inside that warehouse or discover that someone had gone to considerable trouble to make us believe they were there.
Either way, a conversation wasn’t going to change the outcome.
The industrial district looked abandoned.
Many warehouses stood empty, shoulder to shoulder, their windows broken, surrounded by weeds which had long since claimed the cracked concrete.
Paddy parked two streets away from the phone’s last location.
We climbed out, closed the doors as quietly as we could, and continued the rest of the distance on foot, moving with the kind of caution that had become second nature after years of doing this together.
Neither of us carried a weapon where it could be seen, but both of us kept a hand close enough to reach one without thinking.
My attention never remained in one place for more than a second.
The warehouse Michael had marked stood near the end of the street, with one side of its door hanging crookedly from broken hinges while the other remained attached by a single chain that scraped lazily across the concrete whenever the wind found it.
There were no fresh tire marks outside, no discarded cigarette butts, no footprints leading in or out that suggested recent activity, and yet none of that reassured me.
If anything, it made the entire place feel deliberately staged.
Paddy stopped beside me and studied the entrance for a few seconds.
“Do you still want to go inside?”
“I didn’t come here to admire the architecture.”
We crossed the remaining distance without another word, slipping through the half-open doorway into air thick with the smell of damp concrete. I found myself slowing down without consciously deciding to. Everything appeared abandoned, yet nothing felt abandoned.
Then I noticed the phone.
It rested on the concrete floor near the middle of the warehouse, where it would have been impossible to miss, and that made me suspicious enough to stop walking.
Instead of approaching it directly, I crouched several feet away, beside an old oil-stain, and examined the layer of dust covering the floor.
Fresh footprints crossed it in several directions, but they told a story that made less sense the longer I studied them.
Whoever had moved through the building hadn’t made the slightest attempt to hide their tracks, and that struck me as far more suspicious than if they’d tried to erase them altogether, as they’d done outside.
The phone hadn’t been dropped during a hurried escape.
It had been positioned exactly where someone wanted it to be found.
I let my eyes travel slowly around the warehouse once again, studying every dark doorway.
Paddy followed my gaze before quietly admitting that he didn’t like any of it, and I answered him with nothing more than a nod because there wasn’t anything else to say.
The feeling pressing against the back of my mind had already become certainty by then.
I closed the remaining distance, stopping beside the phone without touching it.
The screen had been smashed beyond recognition, and when I nudged it carefully with my boot, the damaged casing shifted just enough for the crushed battery beneath it to become visible.
Whoever had left it here hadn’t simply wanted to discard it.
They’d wanted to make absolutely certain that nobody would ever recover a single piece of information from it.
I looked down at the ruined device for another second before lifting my eyes to the empty warehouse around us.
“There it is,” I said quietly.
Paddy looked from the phone to me, unable to understand what I meant. “The phone?”
I shook my head slowly, never taking my eyes off the shadows stretching across the upper levels of the building.