Brown and de Luca Collection, Volume 1

by Maggie Shayne

  He nodded. “We’ve already got an APB out on that pickup. The minute we get a hit on it, we’ll go. No point in leaving sooner when we could be heading in the wrong direction.”

  “We won’t be heading in the wrong direction. They were going that way.” I pointed. “Everyone on this side of the highway is going that way.” Hell, he was looking at me, but not really seeing me. He was in full cop mode.

  “They could’ve got off the highway at the next exit. They could’ve pulled a Uey in the next turnaround and headed east.”

  “They say once a bloodhound is onto a scent, he’ll follow it right off a cliff if you don’t hold onto him. Are you in bloodhound mode, Mason?”

  His blinked twice. I thought I saw the normal-guy light come back on behind his eyes. “I’m sorry. We’ll go soon. Just give me a few more minutes. I don’t want to miss anything the forensics guys turn up.”

  I rolled my eyes and stomped back to the Monte Carlo, got into the passenger side and pulled out my phone to check the photo Amy had taken. “What about that truck made you so nervous, Amy?” I studied it, enlarged the photo as far as it would go and then scrolled around it, looking for details. There were two men in the shot. One was sitting on the passenger side, nothing showing but the back of his head, and that was in shadow. I thought his hair was short, neat and dark—though that could be the shadow—and I could extrapolate from the shot that he was a tall guy. I stared at him, mentally slotting in Mel the plumber like a transparent overlay in my mind. It could be him. It could also be about a million other guys of similar build and coloring.

  I could see a little bit more of the driver. He’d been in the process of opening his door and getting out when Amy had taken the shot, so one arm was extended, and he was leaning out a little, one foot on its way down to the road. His hair was thick and dark brown, tufts of it sticking out from under a navy-blue knit hat. His face was in profile, aiming downward. A little blurry. I made the photo smaller for a clearer look, and then the details were too small to see. I needed to get the thing onto a bigger screen. Not that I expected to recognize the guy. There was nothing familiar about him.

  The truck itself was an older model, an off-white—or maybe once-white—Chevy. With the tailgate up I couldn’t see if anything was in the bed, but the plates were clear as day, which was a plus.

  “Her credit card was used last night at a gas station five miles back,” Mason said without preamble as he opened the driver’s door and got in. “We need to head back there.” I saw the troopers run past, so I guessed they were coming, too.

  “I don’t think it’ll help,” I told him as he pulled onto the highway, sped up to the next turnaround and made U-turn to cross the median and head back the other way. “She obviously used the card before whatever happened, happened.”

  He drove a little farther, but I was getting more and more uncomfortable with every tenth-mile marker we passed. “This isn’t right,” I finally said. “Mason, this isn’t freakin’ right.”

  Apparently, my tone got to him, because he frowned at me. And then I guess my expression got to him, because he slowed down. “Talk to me, Rachel. What’s going on? You having a…a vision or something?”

  “No, I’m not having a fucking vision. I don’t have visions. I have dreams. Or had. Past tense. I had dreams because I got your brother’s eyes, and the guy who got his heart was killing people. Period. It was a fluke, and it’s over. How many times do I have to tell you? I’m not psychic. I’m not one of those airy-fairy lunatics who tell the cops they’ll find the missing corpse near a body of water. Jesus, Mason.”

  He pulled the car over onto the shoulder, stopped and gripped the steering wheel, then seemed to choose his words with care. “Just tell me what you want me to do,” he said at length.

  “You don’t have to go back to the gas station?” I was feeling bad for snapping at him. He’d given up his Thanksgiving to help me find Amy. I shouldn’t take my gut-churning fear out on him.

  Ever.

  “I’m not officially on this, Rache. I’m off duty and out of my jurisdiction. The troopers will tell me what they find out as a professional courtesy, though. And just for the record, the reason for going back to the gas station is because that’s where she might have caught the wrong people’s attention. Someone who works there might have noticed that truck and whoever was in it. But we can do whatever you think is best. So just tell me. What do you want me to do?”

  I drew a deep breath, trying to figure out how to do it without looking completely batshit, and then decided it didn’t matter. Hell, he’d seen me sleepwalk straight to a crime scene. If he hadn’t run screaming by now, he wasn’t going to.

  “I want you to turn around and drive the other way. The way we were going to begin with.”

  He looked at me for about three seconds, then nodded and said, “You got it.” He pulled the car out and hit the next turnaround, and the tight feeling in my chest immediately started to ease up.

  I sighed in reaction and relaxed in my seat a little, and he noticed because he noticed everything. Everything.

  “Better?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Thanks.” I moistened my lips and added, “And thanks for not asking.”

  “Oh, I’ll be asking. Just not right now.”

  * * *

  I don’t know what the hell was going on and I didn’t want to think about it just then. Hell, when I was having visions—no, not visions, dreams—of serial murders, the one thing I had figured out was that there was no figuring it out. I could drive myself crazy, and damn near had, trying to understand why it was happening or how the hell it could be happening at all. None of that had helped. What had helped, finally, was just shutting up and paying attention. Looking for details in the dreams and following where they led.

  This wasn’t the same thing. It wasn’t a dream. It was just a feeling. A lot like the feelings I get when I talk to people. The way I can tell when they’re lying and what kind of emotion is compelling them to: guilt or shame or pride or whatever. I can tell a lot about people. Some of it from the little telltale wavers and warbles and pitch of their voices. Some of it from something else. The energy they give off or whatever. It wasn’t ESP. There was no such thing as ESP. It was just the result of having been blind for twenty years, and having to learn to rely on my other senses.

  This felt very similar. I knew Amy was in trouble just as sure as I’d known her boyfriend Mel was a lying sack of shit the first time I’d set eyes on him. And I also knew she was in the direction we were now heading. Now, maybe that was a little harder for me to explain. Maybe being blind for twenty years shouldn’t turn me into a human Amy detector. Maybe it made no sense at all. But it was happening, and I didn’t have time to try to make sense out of it right now. It had a logical explanation. Everything did. I’d figure it out in time.

  Right now all that mattered was finding Amy before those two assholes in the pickup murdered her and dumped her in a swamp somewhere.

  “Hey.” Mason put a hand over mine where they were folded in my lap. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “You’re trembling.”

  “I do not tremble. I’m shivering. Turn up the fucking heat, why don’t you?”

  He complied, even though he and I both knew I was shaking from fear, not cold. I could talk a big game, and he would always let me. It was one of the things I loved about him. Liked about him, I mean. His phone rang. He picked it up fast and hit the speaker button. “Detective Brown,” he said.

  “Trooper Simpson,” the other guy replied. “Your MP bought gas here at 9:36 p.m. last night. Security footage shows that pickup was here at the same time. Two men in it, just like in the photo. There was no interaction between them. Ms. Montrose left alone. The pickup pulled out a minute and a half behind her.”

  Mason looked at me. I looked back.
“Anything else?” he asked.

  “Yeah. One guy got out of the truck briefly. Walked out of camera range. But neither of them ever went into the store or bought anything.”

  “They were following her,” I said.

  “Looks that way, ma’am.” Then, to Mason, “We’ll keep you posted, Detective. You’ll do the same?”

  “Absolutely. Thanks for the info.” Mason disconnected.

  “What the hell is going on?” I wasn’t really asking him. I was asking…I don’t know. Fate. The universe. God.

  “I don’t know. But it’s looking now as if this was premeditated. Which means it was probably someone she knew.”

  “Mel. She probably threatened to tell his wife about them, like you theorized. He probably got some friend to help him shut her up. Or hired a pair of thugs to—”

  “You still feel like we’re going the right way?”

  I nodded and realized that he was trying to distract me from where my dark thoughts were heading. I also realized that it was getting superhot in Mason’s car. And that I was still shivering.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  While we drove, Mason talked to his boss, Chief Subrinsky, a man I’d grown to respect, even though he was everything I usually hated. A rule book—quoting, frequently shouting, type-A personality who wouldn’t know a Zen moment from a Zumba class. But he was all about the job. Doing it right. Doing it well. Doing it honestly. And since the job was protecting and serving the public, he was a damn hard guy to hate. Even if he did yell too much.

  The chief was presumably filling Mason in, and I didn’t even bother asking why Mason didn’t put him on speaker. He was protecting me. Making sure no shocking information got blurted out without sufficient preparation. Like that they’d found Amy’s body or something.

  And since that wasn’t the kind of thing I wanted to hear blurted out, I didn’t give him a hard time about acting as my personal defense system. It was kind of touching, which was kind of weird, because if any other male had played the I’ll-protect-the-delicate-female card, I’d have coldcocked him.

  When he hung up, Mason relayed the gist of the conversation to me. “They’ve searched her apartment, and they’ve got a digital forensics expert going over her laptop. So far there’s nothing that seems like it might relate. They also had a detective talk to Mel’s wife. She says he was home all night, from 9 p.m. on.”

  “Did they tell her why they were asking?”

  “Chief didn’t say. I didn’t ask. It doesn’t really matter to us at the moment.”

  “Amy left her place at eight-fifteen,” I said. “That’s forty-five minutes when dickhead was unaccounted for.”

  “I thought of that.”

  “And?”

  “The pickup was at the gas station at 9:36. Amy’s photo was taken at 9:43. He couldn’t have been in the truck if he was home with his wife more than an hour away at 9 p.m.”

  I nodded slowly, my brain turning in circles. “I wish I could’ve asked her myself. I’d know if she was lying.”

  “So do I. That’s why I had Chief Sub text me her number.” I blinked at him. “Think you can read a person from a phone call? Even when you’re not face-to-face?”

  I shrugged. “One way to find out. Give me your phone.”

  He handed it over. I located the text message and started keying the number into my phone, but he dropped a hand over mine. “Use mine. Let me talk and I’ll put her on speaker. At least I have an official reason to call her. You don’t.”

  “And you’d get in trouble for giving me her number, huh?”

  “Unless you were an official police consultant.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You’re like Myrtle with a steak over this, you know that?” At mention of Myrt, I looked into the backseat. She was sitting up, snout out the back window, tongue lolling, happy as hell to be taking such a long car ride, though she was going to need a bathroom break soon.

  I tapped the keys of Mason’s phone, but before I finished dialing, it rang. I hit the speaker button and held the phone toward him.

  “This is Mason Brown,” he said.

  “Mason, they’ve got a hit on that pickup. It’s parked at a motel off the highway.”

  “Where?” Mason asked.

  “Hilltop Motor Lodge in a town called Harry’s Hill.”

  I looked up when he said it. We were driving past a sign that read Harry’s Hill, 10 Miles. We were practically there. Minutes. Minutes away from Amy. She’d damn well better be okay when we got there.

  * * *

  Mason floored it, and even then it was the longest eight minutes of my life. But eventually we were pulling into the motel parking lot. We were the closest, because we’d already been heading in the right direction. The troopers were still miles away. On their way, but another fifteen minutes out, Mason said. He chose an empty parking spot a good distance away from the white truck. I saw him check his gun as he got out.

  “Got a spare for me?”

  “No.” He was a liar. There was one in the glove compartment. I made note of which pocket he put his keys in, in case I needed to snatch them and head back here to grab it. He didn’t lock the car, but I knew he kept that glove box secure. It was locked. No question.

  We got out and walked carefully closer to take a look at the pickup, watching the area around us and trying not to be obvious. It had various tools in the bed. Hammer. Chains. When Mason felt the hood for heat, he dragged his hand over it real slow. It was almost 2 p.m. Checkout time, according to the big sign out front, was two-thirty. Odd checkout time, if you asked me, but it was a little hole-in-the-wall place. Not a chain. If they were still here, and they must be, they’d be coming out soon. But which room? There were three doors close enough to where the white truck was parked to qualify. And if they were trying not to be found, they might not even have parked near their own room.

  “Go to the office,” Mason said. “Ask which room is assigned to this plate number.”

  “You go,” I said. “They’re not gonna tell me anything. I don’t have a badge.”

  “You do now.” He pulled out his badge and tossed it to me. I caught it. Damn him.

  I jogged over to the motel office, went inside and hit the bell on the counter nonstop until a woman with curly white hair arrived and sent me an I’ve-never-seen-anyone-so-rude look. I flipped the badge open and said, “I don’t have time to mess around. Which room is assigned to that white pickup out there?”

  The woman blinked and altered her attitude. She flipped open her registration book and ran her finger down a column. “The Whites. Mr. and Mrs. She waited in the truck. Is something wrong? What’s going on?”

  “One man?” I asked. “I was told there were two.”

  “No. One man, all alone, and a woman, like I said.”

  One man. So the other one was either hiding or had been dropped off along the way. “Was the woman okay? When’s the last time you saw her?”

  “Last night, when they checked in. I told you, she stayed in the truck.” Then she frowned. “She in trouble?”

  “Can I have a spare key to room two?”

  Nodding, she scrambled to take one from a drawer that sounded full of them. She was alarmed. Her pupils were wide and her cheeks red. I could tell that she was already regretting that she hadn’t noticed anything amiss, thinking she should have. “Thanks, ma’am,” I said. “You stay inside now.” I sounded like a real cop just then. I headed back outside, key in hand, marched right up to Mason and handed it to him. “Room two.”

  “All right. Stay here.”

  “Give me the car keys. I want to put the heat on for Myrtle.”

  “For crying out loud, Rachel, I can’t let you have a gun. Someone gets shot with my gun in your hands, it’ll be my shield.”

  “All right, all right
.” Damn him for knowing exactly what I was up to.

  I moved up beside the door to room two. I put my back to one side and he put his back to the other, his gun raised. Then he knocked.

  “What the fuck, Mason? You’re knocking?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Open up. Police.”

  No response. Mason stuck the key in the lock, turned it and shoved. The door swung slowly inward. He held a flat hand toward me and mouthed Wait here. Then he swung around and into the room, gun first.

  When I didn’t hear anything, I ignored his warning and moved in behind him, but I knew as soon as I stepped through the doorway that the room was empty.

  I could feel it.

  Amy wasn’t there.

  * * *

  The bed was rumpled. A nylon gym bag sat on the floor beside it, unzipped and gaping. Inside I glimpsed some clothes, maybe a shaving bag. We’d go through it later. Or the cops would.

  On the nightstand there was a half-eaten bag of chips, barbecue style; an open Pepsi can, probably from the machine outside the office; and an overflowing ashtray. The closets and drawers were empty. Apparently the kidnappers liked living out of their bags.

  Then we went into the bathroom. Its tiny window was open, curtain flapping in the breeze. I frowned as I turned to look at Mason, but my eyes fell instead on the toilet—more specifically, on the water pipe that led from the floor up to the toilet tank. Because there was a set of handcuffs attached to it. One end was locked around the pipe. The other end lay open on the bathroom floor.

  Mason saw me staring and turned, then dropped to one knee over a small bent piece of shiny metal on the floor near the cuffs. “What the hell is that?”

  I bent, too. Then I smiled a little. “It’s Amy’s nose ring.” Everything snapped into place. “She must’ve convinced him to let her use the bathroom in private. He probably cuffed her to the pipe. She took out her nose ring, straightened it out, and used it to pick the lock. Then she climbed out the window.”