Chapter 15 Realizations #2
They heard muffled, indistinct voices through the speaker, then Tag said, "Young will park where the car is not visible, and I'll follow on foot. I've got night vision and thermal imaging."
"Good. Glad those are coming in handy. Fucking expensive enough. Keep your comms open," Hamm said.
"Will do."
As Tag's footsteps and shallow breaths crackled through the connection, Cade glanced at Tristan, noticed his frown, and on instinct, reached over and covered the other man's hand with his own. Those amber eyes flicked to his, and the small smile made his heart skip a beat.
Tag's whisper hissed through the phone, "There's a long driveway, lots of trees. The van is parked in front of a two-story house. The front door opened, and a big, ugly guy came out. They're talking, but I can't hear what they're saying. The driver is heading to the back. Oh fuck."
"What?" Hamm demanded, his tone harsh.
"They're transferring a girl. Jesus, these bastards. She's on her feet but bound and gagged."
"What does she look like?" Tristan asked, his voice taut.
"Long dark hair, petite. The driver pushed the girl inside the house, and the ugly dude is handing over money, I think."
"Son of a bitch," Hamm cursed.
"It confirms they're holding girls there. There's a good chance that's where your sister is," Cade reassured Tristan, who then nodded and returned his attention to the phone.
"Driver is back in the van. He's leaving. There's no more activity outside."
"I've got eyes on the van, it's heading back toward the city," Annabeth chimed in. "I should be able to ID him from the plates, but I'll keep tracking him. When he stops somewhere, we can pay him a visit."
"Do it," Hamm instructed. "Tag, what about the house? Can you tell how many people are in there?"
"Switching to thermal imaging."
Cade kept his eyes on Tristan as they both leaned toward the phone, listening intently.
"I see eight, wait, nine heat signatures, five on the upper floor and four on the ground floor. If one is the new girl and one is the ugly guy, that leaves seven others."
"I'm guessing they don't need more than one hired gun per captive, so what, three perps? Maybe four?" was Hamm's assessment.
"Yeah. No more than four," Cade concurred.
"Okay, excellent work, Tag. Come on back. We've got what we need."
"Understood," Tag said, then disconnected.
Tristan turned to him, his voice pleading. "So we're going to get my sister now, right?"
Cade shook his head as Hamm's voice came over the speaker. "Not yet. We need to formulate a plan for extraction."
"What kind of plan do you need?" Tristan objected, his voice strained. "You go in, you shoot the bad guys, and you get my sister."
"We can't do that," Hamm responded evenly. "We need to familiarize ourselves with the house's layout, then plan the extraction carefully. Recklessness can get my guys killed, and we also have to think about the hostages at the other locations."
"Can't we get them later?" Tristan's voice rose an octave.
Cade reasoned, "Once we hit one target, it will alert the traffickers at the other sites. The girls there might be in more danger, or they could move them, and we could lose them forever."
"But we don't even know where the other locations are!"
"Not yet, but we'll keep looking and hopefully find them soon."
"But that could take too long! What about the auction?"
"If we can't identify the other locations, we'll go into this location before that and hopefully get your sister," Hamm said, his voice steady and sure. "Tristan, I know this must be extremely difficult, but try to trust us. We all want to save the other victims too, if we can."
"Remember," Cade reassured him, squeezing his hand, "They're not going to do anything to her until after Saturday night, and this is only Thursday."
Tristan sucked in a breath and let it out his nose, then nodded curtly.
"We'll conference with the whole team tomorrow morning at ten hundred," Hamm said in a voice that left no room for argument.
When they disconnected, Tristan threw himself against the back of the sofa, his expression drawn and resigned. He blankly stared at the ceiling as Cade sat nearby, wondering yet again what to say.
Finally, Tristan said in a hoarse voice, "I keep thinking about her. How scared she is."
Hoping they were the right words, Cade replied, "I know it's awful, but we'll get her before the auction. Just hold on a little while longer, then this whole nightmare will be over."
Tristan's chin dipped in a jerky nod, but his lips remained pressed tightly together.
He watched the rest of the baseball game without commenting, then announced he was going to bed.
Cade was about to settle himself down for a long night on the sofa, but he heard the soft plea, "Come with me. Please."
The words reached his ears, filling him with an unfamiliar warmth that he was tired of questioning, and he followed the other man to the bed.
Cade woke before the sun, and from the quiet comfort of the bed, watched the light progress from the moonlit haze of dawn to the burning orange of sunrise to the full brightness of morning.
Tristan lay curled up beside him, his face relaxed in sleep, faint freckles dusting his cheeks like a distant galaxy. Cade briefly considered pulling him close and lounging in bed all morning, but he was restless and craving movement after too many lazy days.
Climbing out of bed, he threw on clothes and shoes, and once outside, stretched lightly before breaking into a steady run. As he skirted the tree line around the cabin, he tried to clear his head of worries about the case and the gorgeous, exasperating man in his bed.
His wandering thoughts drifted back to the first time he tried running as a skinny, awkward ten-year-old.
When his foster father had invited him on a run, Cade had been nervous about keeping up, but Marshall had maintained a doable pace, and soon Cade relaxed into a groove, listening to only the slap of their shoes on the pavement and the early morning bird songs.
It was the first time he understood the idea of companionable silence.
He supposed he liked running after that, not only because of the company, but because, when you ran, you weren't expected to talk.
He'd never been much of a talker.
Before going to live with Marshall and Cindy Walker and their teenage son, he'd rarely spoken.
He'd been a broken, traumatized child who thought that if he was quiet, he wouldn't make waves, couldn't provoke the yelling that made him shake with fear.
His silence had protected him, let him fade into the background.
Made him invisible.
Maybe that was why no one ever adopted him.
After spending more than a year with the family, playing basketball with Seth, eating Cindy's French toast breakfasts, and bonding with Marshall over baseball and running, he started to feel more secure, and though no one would ever consider him talkative, he opened up to them.
He started to feel safety, acceptance, and maybe even something bordering on happiness.
But when Marshall told him he and Cindy were divorcing, that he was moving to another state and couldn't take Cade with him, the words vanished again, strangled by the familiar ache of loneliness and the fresh pain of betrayal.
After that, the new placements meant no more running, no more baseball, just his belligerent silence fueled by rage.
Before the Walkers, his muteness had been defensive, but now he wielded it like a weapon, preventing anyone from getting close, using it to anger and provoke, to even instigate the yelling he hated as a child.
It turned out to be an effective way to escape placements he didn't like, especially the one with that creepy pervert.
On the streets, he found his voice again, but he didn't start running once more until after he met Hamm. As a gangly, underfed seventeen-year-old, he ran to build his endurance and muscles, to get stronger and faster.
No longer weak and out of shape, running allowed him to maintain his equilibrium, to meditate, to calm his thoughts and anxiety. It usually cleared his head, let all his worries fall away like a trail of breadcrumbs in his wake.
But things were different here at the cabin, he realized, both today and a few days ago when his entire run had been consumed by mortification over his perimeter blunder and fear of fictitious, rabid rodents.
Here, in these isolated woods, a persistent buzz had filled his head, his thoughts of Tristan a near-constant companion, a brainworm that he couldn't shake.
With worries over the case weighing on him as well, his mind had been churning overtime, resistant to the mental relief he normally got from this exercise.
That sucked because, with everything going on, some clarity of mind would have been helpful.
As he finished his run, he managed to focus on calming his breathing and stretching his muscles, but when he entered the cabin and saw Tristan strewn over the bed sans covers, his thoughts immediately scrambled again.
The redhead looked relaxed and alluring, with pale skin and lithe muscles on display, and images of him — some innocent, some decidedly not — flooded Cade's head.
Shaking off the ridiculous truth that his brain short-circuited simply from seeing his housemate in bed, he poured himself a glass of juice and sat at the table, picking up his phone to concentrate on anything except those invasive thoughts.
While he scrolled through his phone, it buzzed, and he answered, expecting Annabeth.
"King, it's Hamm."
Cade's heart dropped when he heard Hamm's voice.
"Is Annabeth okay?"
"She's fine, just sleeping. She's also a fucking genius. She found the other nine sites."
"What? How?"
"She was up half the night cross-referencing data on the laptop with info on the house, van and driver.
The coordinates of the house Tag and Young found were the key, and once she identified them in the data, she was able to backtrace the other nine locations.
We verified they are all residential homes in remote areas, just like the one Tag found, so we're pretty sure we have our targets. "
"Great. What's the plan?"
"If we're going to hit all ten holding sites at once, we'll need help. I'm pushing back the conference call to thirteen hundred so I can call in some favors. If we get the necessary backup, we can go in tonight."
"Understood."
"Also, we've got the driver."
"Did he give up any intel?"
"No. I'll brief you and the others during the call."
"Okay. Talk to you at one."
Disconnecting the call, Cade wondered if he should wake Tristan to tell him, but because there was nothing either of them could do right now, he ultimately decided to let him sleep.
For the sake of all the victims and their families, including the sleeping man across the room, he was glad the rescue would be soon.
But the sensation burning his chest and crushing his lungs reminded him they were one step closer to the conclusion of this case — and the day Tristan would vanish from his life.