“Let me see them.” Marc grabbed his suitcase and duffel bag and let Jake take the laptop, then followed him inside.
“How was your trip?” Natasha stood in the doorway off the living room leading into KFA’s business office. She looked pale and her eyes were puffy, as if she’d been crying.
“Long,” he said, dropping his luggage by the couch, then tousling her hair when he followed Jake into the office. “How long have they been gone now?”
“We got the latest batch of pictures last night. None of us were home, so I couldn’t say when they arrived, but they’re like all the rest.” Jake crossed his arms over his chest as he scowled at Marc. “Dad and Mom went to a movie and didn’t come home. The note in the pictures says they’re gone.”
“Three sets of pictures, huh?” Marc stared at the packages laid out on Natasha’s desk. All three packages were handwritten, addressed to the Kings with their personal street address. “And you think Dad and Mom were taken before the last set of pictures arrived?”
“What do you think?” Jake slid one of the packages toward Marc.
He dumped the pictures out and stared at two glossy eight-by-tens. They were in color, taken by a fairly expensive camera if the detail caught in the snapshot was any indication. The first shot was of Mom with two men he didn’t recognize walking on either side of her. She glared at the camera, pissed as hell. Both men had their heads down, making it hard to identify them.
Marc lifted the other picture, one of Dad. He also appeared livid. The way his hands were behind his back, it looked as if he might be handcuffed. The hateful stare he gave whoever took the picture would have many men shaking in their boots. There were two men on either side of Marc’s father, again with their heads down, and dwarfed with Greg King walking between them. Marc would guess the men to be about six feet tall, since his father was six feet, four inches.
“This is the note that was with those two pictures.” Natasha handed him a plain white piece of paper.
“‘As promised, your parents are gone. Let the game begin!’” Marc read out loud, and stared at the simple Comic Sans font with the two-line message typed in the middle of the page. “‘Game begin’? What does that mean?”
“Well, if there is a connection between these pictures and Marty Byrd’s game he mentioned to Dad before Byrd died, then someone has picked up where he left off,” Jake said, repeating what Greg King had said to Marc on the phone the other night.
“Where’s the other note?” Marc asked, moving the pictures around on Natasha’s desk. The shots his brother had described were even spookier to stare at in person. Shots of his mother and father on their cruise and pictures of Mom and Natasha shopping went beyond an invasion of privacy. Marc had seen pictures taken by private dicks when they were out to bust a cheating spouse. These weren’t intimate shots taken through a window or from the end of some dark alley. They were taken in public settings with Marc’s family members happy and enjoying time spent with each other. They weren’t doing anything wrong.
A moment of their lives was stolen by some asshole. These pictures were sent to flaunt how close their captors were prior to taking Mom and Dad. It was all Marc could do to maintain the violent rage threatening to rush his insides.
“‘Say good-bye to your mother and father. You’re never going to see them again,’” he read out loud, his teeth clenched as he fought to focus and not rip the paper to shreds.
Greg King was a rock, the one solid, impermeable part of their lives growing up. He was also one of the best bounty hunters in the nation, his reputation as solid as his nature. Their mom was just as strong a woman as their father was a man. It scared the crap out of Marc that someone was able to kidnap both of them. Marc remembered his father “letting” himself be captured when they’d been down in Mexico just so he could learn more about what Marty Byrd was up to. He couldn’t imagine his father doing the same thing again, especially when Marc and Jake’s mother was abducted, too.
“They were threatening us and flaunting how close they were with these pictures,” Natasha said, voicing Marc’s thoughts. “Uncle Greg was outraged the moment he saw these.”
“I can see why. I would have been, too,” Marc said. “Hell, I am pissed. Who would take the two of them, and why?”
Marc compared the first and second notes. Same font, typed in the same location on the page. The notes were identical other than the message. “This is fucking insane,” he snarled, slapping the first note on top of the other on Natasha’s desk.
“No shit,” Jake agreed.
“I noticed this,” Natasha said, shoving her long, thick black hair over her shoulder as she leaned across her desk and rested her elbows against it. She tapped a fingernail on one of the shots. “Look at this,” she said. “See those buildings behind where Aunt Haley is walking with those men?”
“What about them?” Marc leaned forward as well, realizing at that moment how similar Natasha’s long black hair was to London’s. He needed to call London as soon as possible and should have done so when driving home. He’d been so infuriated and shocked when Jake called after he’d left London’s and told him Mom and Dad never came home from their movie the night before and now weren’t answering their cells, Marc had headed home without hesitating. If it weren’t for the note and new set of pictures saying they were gone, Marc might have believed the two of them simply took off for some alone time. He’d rushed out of there, filling out the quick checkout form and slapping it in the hands of the night auditor before racing out the back door of the lodge.
Maybe Marc had intentionally avoided London when he left, knowing she would have been pissed and hurt. He wasn’t done with her. That much held strong in his gut. But he needed to know what was going on with his parents. Marc wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he stayed there, falling hard for a beautiful woman, instead of jumping on all clues around his parents’ abduction while the clues were fresh.
He refused to believe leaving without saying good-bye had anything to do with how fast his feelings for her were growing. It would do them both good to slow down, and learning what the hell had happened to his parents took precedence over anything else.
“We’ve been there before. I know we have.” Natasha snapped him out of his thoughts as she tapped her finger on the glossy photo paper. “I don’t think this is Photoshop. So either whoever took these are willing to give us clues to allow us to go after them or they’re idiots.”
“Or both,” Jake hissed.
“I vote for the latter, and let me see that.” Marc reached for the picture and Natasha handed it to him.
His brother and cousin stood on either side of him as Marc stared at the picture. “You’re right,” he told Natasha without looking at her. He held the picture up so it was in front of all three of them. “We’ve been there before. Let me think.”
Silence grew in the room as the three of them studied the shot. Marc grabbed the picture of his father between the same two men and held both of them up, catching the same buildings at different angles. The background wasn’t as obvious in the picture with Greg and his captors, assuming that was who the men were, because the camera had zoomed in closer to the men. They blocked the view behind them but not completely.
“It’s cold, wherever they are,” Jake said, breaking the silence. “The men are wearing long coats and Mom is hugging herself. Dad is too pissed to be cold,” he added, but no one laughed at his comment.
“Where have all of us traveled together?” Marc asked.
“When we were kids we all went camping.” Jake started pacing, walking to the entrance to the KFA office facing the street, then back to the desk.
“We did? I went with you?” Natasha scowled and pressed her finger against her lips. “Wait. You’re right. God, we were all kids. Where did we go?”
Marc leaned against Natasha’s desk, glancing from one picture to the next while his younger brother and cousin brainstormed on all of the vacations they’d taken together o
ver the years. Natasha had been included in almost every family vacation the King family went on. Uncle George would drop her off, Natasha with her suitcase in hand and a book tucked under her arm.
Marc continued studying the pictures, growing angrier by the minute. His dad didn’t give him a clue, not any indication something of this magnitude was going down. If he’d been here instead of parading around in the mountains and snow, maybe he would have picked up on something. The goddamn pictures were left practically under their noses. If he’d been here he could have seen something, someone, picked up on a clue. Instead, now all they had were these fucking pictures mocking them.
“Wait! I’ve got it!” Natasha rushed to Marc’s side and almost ripped the picture from his hand.
“What?” he demanded, still feeling the rage boil inside him.
“Remember when we all went to see all those ghost towns? God. Was it in Arizona?”
“Natasha, you’re right.” Marc faced her desk and spread the pictures out, leaning over and staring at the two where his parents were walking in front of the buildings. “What are the fucking odds?” he whispered under his breath.
“What do you mean?” Jake asked, moving in alongside Natasha’s desk and pressing his fists on top of it as he leaned in as well.
“That they’d take our parents to a place we’d all been to before.”
“Let me make sure,” Natasha said, scooting in around her desk. She sat and started typing. “Is that when we stayed at that bed-and-breakfast?”
Jake snapped his fingers. “That’s right! Mom insisted we stay at this huge old house and the owners were all over the three of us.”
“They thought because we were teenagers we would be nothing but trouble,” Marc remembered. “I swear that old bitch followed me around with a frying pan in her hands, threatening to knock me upside the head with it if I ran through her house or made too much noise.”
“Remember when the three of us went outside and she was sure we were out there smoking?”
Jake made a snorting sound. “Yeah. She thought we were smoking those funny cigarettes.”
“That was the vacation from hell,” Marc grumbled. His parents had fought all the way through it. “I almost became a bookworm just like you in order to hide from everyone.”
Natasha made a face at him but shifted her attention back to her computer screen before speaking. “There were advantages to always having my face in a book. Everyone left me alone.”
Marc was pretty sure Natasha read all the time to escape from her home life. Her father was more interested in playing the field than raising a daughter, and her mother had taken off on them when Natasha had been really young. Marc knew his parents included Natasha in their family outings as often as they did because Uncle George pushed them to take her off his hands.
Marc wondered if London had been an ugly duckling as a kid the way Natasha had been. It wasn’t until his cousin turned sixteen or so that Marc started wishing they weren’t related. They had been short-lived fantasies. Natasha was his cousin, had been practically raised as a sister, and thinking of her any way other than that just didn’t work in his brain.
London, on the other hand, refused to leave his brain. Even as he stressed out on his parents not being there, she was in his thoughts just as much. He really needed to call her, let her know he didn’t walk out on her and definitely planned on seeing her again. At the moment he wasn’t sure when, but he knew he didn’t want to go too long without seeing her again. With it being less than twenty-four hours since he’d held her in his arms, he already knew he’d go nuts until he had her next to him again. London wouldn’t start meaning less to him as time went by as other women in his past had. He accepted there was more with her, but now wasn’t the time to figure out what that might be.
“So check out bed-and-breakfasts in Flagstaff,” he told Natasha, forcing his thoughts off London.
“I’m already there,” Natasha said, chewing her lower lip as she clicked her mouse. “Wait. Here it is. Let me see those pictures.”
She grabbed the pictures as Marc and Jake both walked around her desk so that they were standing behind her. Natasha held the pictures up next to her monitor.
“Bingo,” Jake said under his breath.
“What time was this movie they went to yesterday?” Marc studied the pictures. “It’s daylight in these shots. Flagstaff is a good seven hours from here.”
Jake glanced down at Natasha and she looked up at him.
“I wasn’t here,” Jake began. “Dad sent me over to Ace Bondsman to pick up a check.”
“I was here.” Natasha twisted in her chair to face both of them. “Uncle Greg and Aunt Haley left here yesterday afternoon. They had a few errands to run and then were going to the movie.”
“And these pictures showed up last night?” They would have had to have driven a hundred miles per hour to get there before dark.
Jake shrugged. “I couldn’t say when. They were on the front doorstep first thing this morning. I didn’t realize Mom and Dad weren’t here until I read the note, then checked if they were in their bedroom.” Jake ran his fingers through his mop of curls. Although two years younger than Marc, he stood an inch or two taller. At the moment, his green eyes flared with emotion the way Mom’s always did when she was upset. “Of all nights that I went to bed early. If I’d been awake I might have heard someone at the door.”
“Dad told me about the pictures of the two of them when they were on their cruise.” Marc shook his head, walking around from behind the desk. He needed space and began pacing the way Jake had been a few moments before. “I was so damn set on getting this place out of my system for a while.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Jake interrupted. “I’m the one who dropped the ball.”
“If I had been here I would have sensed the seriousness of the matter a lot sooner. I could have made Mom and Dad—”
“Are you saying you would have sensed something I didn’t?” Jake countered, turning on Marc.
“Would the two of you cut it out?” Natasha snapped. “Would have, could have, should have. None of it matters now. What happened yesterday, or the day before, or last week isn’t as important as right now.”
“She’s right,” Marc cut her off before she continued with her rant. He wasn’t in the mood for a lecture anymore than being chewed out by his younger brother. “Okay. So now we act.” He pointed at Natasha. “Get me the address of that bed-and-breakfast. Program it into the GPS. Is there gas in the Avalanche? Or do we take my car?”
“Whatever you leave here will be my wheels,” Natasha pointed out.
“When are you going to get a car?” Marc was teasing, and the way Natasha rolled her eyes at him let him know she knew that.
“When I get a fucking raise at this place,” she said, tilting her head defiantly.
“You drove all day and night,” Jake said unnecessarily.
In spite of the adrenaline and anger rushing through him and feeding him with aggressive energy, Marc was more than aware of how stiff his body was and how tired he was.
“You can drive,” he told Jake with a wave of his hand. “I don’t know how long we’ll be down there, but I would pack well either way.”
*
It was after midnight when they loaded into Marc’s car and headed out. His eyes burned and every muscle in his body screamed when he climbed into the passenger seat. With any luck he would get some sleep in spite of how cramped he felt.
The way he figured it, whoever took his parents would have a forty-eight-hour lead on them. If they were abducted yesterday afternoon, they could have been in Flagstaff last night. Somehow after the pictures were taken, someone altered them to make them appear as if they were taken in the daylight. The only explanation Marc could figure there was that they lightened the pictures so it would be clear who was in each shot. Now, if he and Jake made good time, they would be exactly where his parents were two days later. Marc hoped that was not too long of a time fr
ame for someone in the area to remember seeing his parents.
It was their only shot. These weren’t the kind of odds Marc liked dealing with. As he’d showered and Jake had packed, Natasha had done some more searching online. She found a picture of the bed-and-breakfast, Two Guns Bed-and-Breakfast. It wasn’t the most appealing name to entice guests to stay there, but it was under the same ownership. The place was appropriately named.
There was a sporting-goods store two doors down from Two Guns Bed-and-Breakfast that had a Web site. The storefront was on their site and it was a direct match to the building two doors down from the bed-and-breakfast in the picture. The only fact Marc and Jake had at the moment was that they were definitely going to the place where those last pictures were taken. Whether Mom and Dad were still there was another story altogether. His parents’ captors would have to be idiots to give away such blatant clues and not think Marc and Jake would be on them immediately. Marc prayed the assholes, who had the nerve to abduct Greg and Haley King, were complete imbeciles. It would make finding his dad and mom a lot easier.
Marc tried several times to stretch out comfortably in the passenger seat. He made sure the seat was all the way back and tilted the seat so he was somewhat reclined. It seemed he was destined not to be comfortable.
“Don’t grind the gears,” he grumbled, glaring at his brother’s hand gripping the gear shift.
“How fast will it go in under a minute?” Jake shot him a crooked grin.
Marc growled and let his head fall back on the seat. Jake would treat his Mustang with kid gloves—or he’d die.
The moment his eyes closed, London appeared in his thoughts. Marc didn’t want Jake overhearing his conversation when he called London. He wouldn’t text her. That would be insulting, and the last thing Marc wanted was to fight with her. He tried relaxing as he began playing out his reunion with London. He couldn’t wait to feel her soft body pressed against his again, her long silky hair brushing over his skin.
“Do you want to stop for anything before we hit the interstate?” Jake asked, yanking Marc out of his daydream with London.
Get Lucky Page 13
