A Tracers Trilogy

by Laura Griffin

  She looked at the man again. There was something vaguely familiar about him, but maybe it was just because he resembled George Costanza from Seinfeld.

  She’d go back to the gym tomorrow and shop these pictures around. She’d bet her right arm Steroid Boy could put a name to the blonde in about two seconds.

  A thud sounded across the apartment. Alex whirled around.

  Nathan?

  It wasn’t even eleven yet. She listened, but heard only the soft pitter-pat of rain on the roof above. Maybe she’d imagined—

  Thunk.

  The hair on the back of her neck stood up. Fear trickled down her spine. Alex spied her purse on the floor, beside her still-packed duffel bag. She crept over to it and pulled out her SIG. Slowly, cautiously, she tiptoed across the room. In bare feet, she moved quietly, the faint whisper of her satin pajama pants the only sound. Gripping the pistol, she peeked her head around the door frame and peered into the darkened hallway.

  The apartment was still. Light from the porch seeped through the curtain on her door and cast a pale yellow glow on the living room carpet. Alex’s gaze skimmed over the familiar silhouettes of her sofa, her armchair, her television. In the kitchen, the icemaker grumbled briefly, then stopped. She kept listening, kept looking, but detected nothing amiss.

  Still, something tickled at her consciousness. Clutching the pistol in both hands now, she stepped into the hallway, crept past the bathroom, and poked her head around the corner.

  Thunk. She jumped at the sound. Thud, thud, thunk. The noise came from the front door. Then a plaintive mew.

  Alex blew out a breath. Sugarpotomous. Probably wanting in out of the rain.

  She crossed her living room and parted the curtains. Sure enough, a sopping wet cat gazed up pitifully from the welcome mat.

  She reached for the door latch—

  And froze.

  The keypad on the wall was dark. No green light. No alarm.

  Alex sucked in a breath. Her hand dropped away from the latch. She stepped back from the door.

  She turned.

  He lunged.

  They crashed to the floor. Air whooshed out of her as he landed on her back with bone-crushing force. He gripped her wrist and smacked it against the floor. Her gun went flying. Pain ricocheted up her arm, and he stuffed something in her mouth. She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t see. Something tasted sour, and her eyes burned with tears.

  She kicked and twisted, tried to breathe, tried to scream, but all the air was gone and she was flattened by the weight. Her lungs tingled. Her arms wrenched back and she couldn’t breathe. Something pinched her wrists. She tried to move her arms, her head, her legs, but everything started to go numb, and then the whole world turned gray.

  She hadn’t waited up.

  Nathan closed his car door and gazed up at the dark apartment. He didn’t blame her, really. It was late. She’d been tired. But she’d just have to get untired. He almost hoped she’d answer the door ticked off at him so he could take her straight back to bed and make it up to her.

  He hiked the stairs to her apartment and knocked on the windowpane.

  Not a sound. He cupped his hand to the glass and peered through, then knocked again, louder.

  A dog barked somewhere down the block.

  His gaze landed on the door frame. Fresh gouges in the white paint.

  Nathan yanked out his Glock and turned the knob.

  “Alex!” he shouted, thrusting open the door. He swept the room with his gaze, his gun.

  “Alex, you here?” He groped for a light switch, found one.

  And his blood ran cold as he took in the scene.

  “Alex!” He raced to the back of the apartment and checked the bedroom, the bathroom, the closet. Nothing. Back into the living room, where there had obviously been a struggle. Fear tightened his gut as the detective part of his brain calmly catalogued the signs: overturned chair, kitchen table askew, black scuff mark on the linoleum.

  Bump.

  He ran to the bedroom again, gun raised. Had he missed a closet? Maybe under the bed—

  An opossum stood on the desk.

  Scratch that. It was a giant, butt-ugly cat. With damp gray fur and a wet, wiry tail. Nathan lowered his weapon and the animal scrambled off the desk, knocking something to the floor.

  Alex’s cell phone.

  She wouldn’t go anywhere without it.

  A hard lump rose up in his throat as he carefully lifted the phone and placed it on the desk. He scrolled back through the call history, doing his best not to mar any prints. The Delphi Center, the Delphi Center. His number. His number. His number. Nothing else since the afternoon.

  Something on the floor caught his eye. A slip of paper. Two. He picked them up.

  And the world fell out from under him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY - EIGHT

  Alex’s head pounded.

  She opened her eyes, then winced in agony at the blinding light beaming down from above.

  Where the hell…?

  Coghan.

  Her apartment.

  She shot up, then sagged back again as pain burst behind her eyeballs.

  “Wake up, bitch.”

  Her skin turned to ice. She knew that voice. She forced her eyes to open and gazed up at the giant black shadow looming beside the spotlight. She lifted her hand to shield the glare.

  It wouldn’t lift. Metal clattered as she tried to pull her arm up. She glanced around. She was handcuffed to a pipe. She was naked. She jerked her knees to her chest and darted a frantic look around the room.

  God, she was in a bathroom. A big fancy bathroom with giant glass shower and a Jacuzzi tub in the center. She was next to a bank of cabinets, and the doors were missing. Her hand was cuffed to the metal pipe beneath one of the sinks.

  “Getting the picture here, Alexandra?” Her name rolled off his tongue, and her stomach heaved. She thought she might puke.

  He stepped closer, eclipsing the spotlight with his huge body. She looked down. Her knees were bleeding. With her free arm, she pulled them closer to her chest.

  He sneered. “I’ve seen it already. Not much to look at, but we’ll have to make do, huh?”

  Alex swallowed and discovered that her tongue felt thick, cottony. She tried to open her mouth, but it wouldn’t move.

  He reached down. She cringed. Then a loud rip, and her face caught fire.

  She gasped for breath. He crumpled a ball of duct tape and tossed it aside.

  “You can scream now, if you want. No one’ll help you.” With this news, he sank onto the side of the tub, rested his elbows on his knees, and leaned forward. He smelled like stale beer and sweat.

  “We got some business to take care of, you and me.”

  The scent of cigarette smoke mixed in with the rest, and she felt a fresh jolt of fear.

  As if reading her mind, he dug a pack of Marlboro Reds from the pocket of his olive green cargo pants. He slapped the pack a few times against his palm, then tapped out a cigarette.

  “So,” he said conversationally.

  Alex darted her gaze around. Were they alone? Was there a guard?

  Was he even armed?

  She remembered her SIG skittering across the floor. She remembered the terrifying breathlessness, the weight, the bitter taste. Had he drugged her? Had he raped her?

  He slid closer, and she spotted a Glock resting on the side of the tub. Looked just like Nathan’s.

  Nathan. Had he come over yet? Was he looking for her?

  Coghan bent closer, and the stench intensified. The ice cream float she’d had for dinner was a cement ball in her stomach, and she leaned away from him, as far as she possibly could, while something hard and painful dug into her back.

  “I got a question for you, Alexandra.” His voice was low. Taunting. “We’re gonna sit right here until you answer it.” He dug a lighter from one of his pockets, flicked it open, and held the flame to his cigarette.

  Her heart beat wildly.

  He suck
ed in a drag. Exhaled through his nostrils. Leaned closer.

  “Where. The fuck. Is my wife.”

  Sophie awoke to the thunder. She flipped onto her stomach, pulled the pillow over her head, and tried to reenter her dream.

  More thunder. Getting louder.

  She opened her eyes and sat up. She brushed the hair out of her face and looked around groggily.

  The rain had stopped.

  “Police!” Pound, pound, pound. “Open the door!”

  Police? She scurried out of bed and glanced at the clock: 1:34.

  The pounding continued as she snatched a robe off the chair and hurried across her apartment. She shoved her arms into sleeves, switched on a lamp in the foyer, and checked the peephole.

  Nathan Devereaux. And an enormous, soaking wet man who could have been a lineman for the Dallas Cowboys. Sophie undid the latch and jerked open the door.

  “What on earth—”

  Nathan strode past her into the apartment.

  “Sorry to disturb you,” the big guy said from the doorway, “but—”

  “Alex is missing.”

  Her gaze snapped to Nathan. “She’s… missing?”

  “Someone broke into her apartment, from the looks of it.” This from the lineman.

  Nathan thrust a cell phone at her, and Sophie recognized the lime green case. “I need you to get into that program she uses. That GPS thing. Can you do that?”

  Sophie took Alex’s phone and glanced up at him. Rain clung to his hair, his lashes. Little rivulets of water ran down his black leather jacket. He seemed oblivious to all of it, and his blue eyes pinned her like laser beams.

  She looked at the phone again, her pulse racing now. “I can try. I—”

  “I need you to do it. Now.” Nathan flipped on the overhead light, and the living room brightened. Sophie gazed down at the phone again in dismay.

  “The thing is, I don’t really know how to work her phone.” As the words left her mouth, Nathan cursed vividly. “But I can do it on my computer,” she said.

  “You can?”

  “Sure, all I need is an Internet connection,” she said, and he was already across the room, jabbing at the computer sitting on the desk beside her futon. “Here, let me do that.”

  Sophie hurried over and settled into a chair. She was immediately conscious of the two large, intense males peering over her shoulders. She brought the system to life and took a moment to pull the lapels of her robe together. It was black and gauzy, and it actually revealed more than it covered, but these guys weren’t paying attention.

  Nathan leaned closer and rested a fist on the desk as Sophie keyed in the address for the GPS tracking service Alex used. An hourglass popped up as the site loaded.

  Nathan’s fist clenched tighter. He swore.

  Sophie’s heart was thudding now. “Are you sure she’s really missing?”

  “Coghan’s involved,” Nathan snapped. “We have to find his truck, ASAP.”

  The program opened up, and Sophie recognized the home page. A window requesting a password hovered in the center of the screen.

  “Shit!” Nathan pounded his fist, and the desk rattled. “What’s the password?”

  Sophie stared at the screen. She bit her lip. If Alex was really missing, if she was really with Coghan, this might be their only chance of finding her. It could be too late already. Surely these guys knew that.

  “The password, Sophie!”

  She flinched. “Okay, okay. Let me think for a second.”

  “Shit, you don’t know?” Nathan looked desperate now.

  “Relax, Dev. She knows it.” The big guy fixed her with a look that was calm but no less intimidating than Nathan’s. “You do know it, right?”

  Sophie gulped. “Not exactly. But I have some ideas.”

  Alex tried to come up with a response. Her mouth moved, but it wouldn’t form words. She ran her tongue over her burning lips.

  “I don’t know,” she finally said.

  “Wrong answer.” He took another casual drag on the cigarette. Alex held her breath, watching.

  His hand shot out and clamped around her arm. She tried to wrestle herself away from him, but his grip was like a vice. Metal clanged as she clutched the pipe with one hand and tried to wrench her other arm away. It was futile. A meaty hand squeezed her wrist and twisted her forearm, tender side up. He plucked the cigarette from his mouth and held it to her skin. Flesh sizzled.

  And then the pain hit, and the only sound was her screams.

  Fear burned in Nathan’s gut as they raced down the highway in the Mustang. Ninety. Ninety-five. Ninety-eight. He would have traded his soul right now for his battered Taurus.

  “This thing won’t make triple digits,” Hodges said from the passenger seat.

  Nathan glared at him. “How much farther?”

  He consulted Alex’s phone. It had taken Sophie half a dozen tries to come up with the correct password from the many Alex used around the office. Since then, Hodges had managed to log onto the tracking site from Alex’s phone, and they were now using it to navigate. “Twenty miles, it looks like.”

  Nathan’s knuckles whitened on the steering wheel.

  “It’s good, you know. That he took her to some house in bumfuck nowhere.” Hodges—who wasn’t normally a talker—continued the speech he’d been giving since they’d shot out of Sophie’s parking lot. “If he just wanted to, you know, eliminate her, he could have done that back at the apartment.”

  It didn’t take much imagination to come up with plenty of reasons he might have taken her to some isolated house on the shores of Lake Buchanan. Ditch evidence. Dispose of a body. A cold layer of sweat broke out all over Nathan’s skin.

  The yellow lines were a blur as they rocketed down the highway. Nathan flashed his brights and swerved around a pickup doing a sluggish seventy-five.

  “You sure you don’t want to call for backup?” Hodges asked.

  Nathan shot him a glare.

  “I’m just saying. Coghan’s not operating alone. We got no idea who’s with him, and—”

  “I’ll tell you right now who’s with him! Probably half the badges in Travis County! Who we gonna call?”

  Hodges didn’t answer. The hum of the Mustang’s V-8 was the only sound.

  “You realize the implications, don’t you?” Hodges asked. “Of those pictures at Alex’s?”

  Nathan gritted his teeth until his jaw ached. “Cernak’s had a hand in every homicide case that’s come in over the last five years,” Hodges went on. “If the man’s on the payroll of some drug cartel, and if the D.A.’s office is involved, too… Shit, we’re talking mistrials. Overturned convictions. And who knows how many guilty people got off scot-free. It’s a fucking mess.”

  Nathan pressed harder on the gas pedal. He focused his white-hot rage on the highway stretching out before him. It was nearly two. Traffic was light. That was about the only good news he could think of at the moment.

  “And you really think it’s Nicole?” Hodges asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because her face was turned away in that photo,” Hodges said. “With that ball cap on, how can you really be sure?”

  “Because I fucking lived with her for five years!” He pounded the steering wheel. “I know what she fucking looks like, all right? So just shut the fuck up and help me find Alex!”

  The car fell silent as Hodges checked the digital map again. Nathan glanced at it and saw the green blip, which was them, slowly edging closer to the red blip, which was Coghan’s truck.

  Or so they hoped. Maybe he’d found the snitch and dumped it somewhere. Or put it on someone else’s car. Maybe they’d find Coghan’s truck, or even Coghan, but not Alex.

  Nathan clenched his jaw. He floored the pedal. He said a silent prayer that Alex—wherever she was—was still alive.

  Every cell screamed. Every nerve ending burned. How could something so small make her h
urt everywhere?

  He took another break, and leaned back, smiling.

  “Ready yet?”

  She sucked in a breath. Blew it out. In. Out. In. Out. Her face was wet with sweat and tears, and she knew he was enjoying this.

  She cradled her arm to her chest and gazed down at it, shocked. Six little circles. Melanie had had so many more on her neck. How could six little burns hurt so much?

  Maybe because he’d lined them up neatly on top of her fresh pink scar, the remnants of her last encounter with him back in New Orleans.

  “Hey, bitch.”

  She glanced up. With a shaking hand she wiped the snot from her nose.

  “This is getting boring.” He leaned closer. “I want information. Now.” He reached onto the counter and pulled out the long, shiny thing he’d brought in earlier, when he’d gone to get that last beer. He set it on the side of the tub, and Alex got her first good look at it.

  A wire.

  It was thick. Silver. With patches of rust or… blood along it. The ends were twisted, and she tried to imagine—

  “Where’s Melanie?”

  She glanced up at him.

  “I know you know where they put her.”

  Alex didn’t say anything. She’d already told him she didn’t know where the safe house was. But this wasn’t really about his getting information. He had to inflict pain. On her. The woman who’d helped his wife leave him.

  She wished her brain would function better. She felt dizzy. Disoriented. She was almost sure she’d been drugged. But she needed to shake it off. She needed a plan. Alex kept her eyes trained on his face, but she focused her mind on that Glock sitting beside him on the tub. If she could just get her hands on it—

  He took his pack off the counter and lit another cigarette. One drag. Two. He leaned toward her, and she flinched.

  He smiled.

  Then he leaped up and grabbed her by the hair. He jerked her head back and jammed the burning ember against her neck.

  Nathan blew past the private driveway, pulled off the road, and cut the engine.

  “We got about half a mile to the house,” Hodges reported.

  “We’ll hoof it from here,” Nathan said. “We’re probably outmanned and outgunned. Surprise is the only thing we got going for us.”