by Dale Mayer
None yet. All things are possible.
Do parents know she’s missing?
Yes, father contacted us to find daughter.
How did he find out?
Unknown to us but he refused our additional security services to protect him as he had his own private security.
Mother?
She knows but doesn’t have any further info to be of assistance in this matter. Father has deployed security measures of his own to watch over mother, even though they are divorced.
More family?
Only child.
Aunts, uncles, cousins?
None.
At that, Kerrick’s eyebrows raised because it was very unusual not to have any extended family. But who knew? It was what it was. While he read more of her expanded dossier, the chat sent a couple more links, which Kerrick immediately pulled up and read. I need information, he typed.
About what?
Her coworkers. Is she close to anybody in particular at work? The state of her actual research. Is she truly close to making a breakthrough, or is that just media hype in the newspapers? Is she working for any special funding group?
Back in five. And then whoever was on the other end of their chat left.
Frowning, Kerrick quickly returned to reading everything else he had been given on Amanda and realized that she’d been seen in a blue four-door vehicle, not the lorry that had taken her away initially, yet both had been on the ferry. Or at least he thought the original lorry used in the kidnapping had been with the blue car on the ferry. Somebody had tried to track her using the car’s license plate, but the vehicle was lost on the other side of the ferry crossing at Dover.
He reviewed the other photos in the brown envelope but saw none from the ferry crossing. Supposedly, she’d been laid down in the back seat and covered up, as if asleep, to give her an almost normal appearance, so as not to alert the ferry authorities. And that made Kerrick wonder just how correct their intel was.
In the chat box, he quickly asked that question and then sent a second question about tracking the vehicle itself. When the responses came back, an image was attached, showing a birthmark high on her cheek, near her right eye. It correlated to the same facial mark found in his file.
Both vehicles lost almost immediately in Dover, the lorry and the blue car. License plates no longer visible, so we assumed they were switched. Either switched vehicles or switched license plates.
Kerrick nodded. All too often, that was an easy option.
Not close to any coworkers. Works solo on her own research. Reliable sources state she is on the verge of finding a cancer cure. While she has been awarded several grants over the years, her current funding group is her employer, Scion Labs.
Well, that was not much.
As he learned more about the kidnapping victim, who this woman was, he found nothing in the files or in his research to dislike. She was known as a champion of lost causes—being a member of both the dance club and the genius club in her school years as a teenager—which led to her being very popular, as she helped everybody to meet and to organize various social parties, trying to get the wallflowers off the wall and onto the dance floor.
He smiled at that. Of course she’d been a social butterfly type coming from her political family of origin, but obviously, as an adult, she could be an introvert too and have hidden depths if she was also a chemist, working on cancer research. And that sent him down another rabbit hole. He went to the chat box again. What prompted cancer research?
Best friend died in college.
Name?
Alice Durnham.
Should have been in the dossier.
Ask and you shall receive.
He snorted, wondering if this was still Grumpy but reformed, or if Kerrick was getting bounced between five different people, like some call center located wherever on this planet. Regardless he resumed his own research into Alice Durnham. And, indeed, she had struggled with breast cancer as a young woman, not knowing she had the disease until it was too late to treat.
It had affected Amanda deeply. She had lost a lot of her bubbliness since then, and she had changed the direction of her research to find a cure for cancer. Something interesting in that same vein had been how she had also lost another friend. It was briefly touched upon, but this other mutual friend had introduced her to her future husband. Kerrick searched for the name of the friend and couldn’t find it. He typed in the chat box once more, and the reply came one minute later.
Bridgette Hampton. Died in a car accident. Ruled an accident. No reason to consider otherwise.
How soon after introducing the husband?
One month.
Would help the bonding.
Yes.
Any connection from ex-husband to any extremist groups?
Under investigation but nothing points in that direction at this time.
Aah, so the chat box people didn’t have all the answers. He frowned because he really didn’t want to find limits to what he needed to know. He quickly typed in another question. Any connection to anything suspicious?
Lots.
Such as?
He received a list of associations that the ex-husband had dabbled in. Everything from vegan groups to gun groups to divorce groups. He frowned as he thought about that. That’s a lot of nothing.
Yes.
Cover?
Possibly.
Location of ex-husband and whereabouts for the last thirty to seventy-two hours?
Was at work Friday. Went missing over the weekend. Has a new lady friend. Possibly they went on a trip.
It’s Monday.
Hasn’t shown up for work.
Suspicious.
Yes.
Father?
Looking into potential blackmailers.
Should have had a ransom note by now.
Not necessarily.
Let me know if you find the ex or if the father gets a blackmail demand.
Okay.
And it went on and on as Kerrick kept delving in, trying to get more and more information. We need a location in England. She was being followed by someone, who reported it to her father, I presume. Do we have that info? Can we contact the security detail?
No. Not available. We have nothing else.
He sighed and groaned. She could be anywhere.
Yes.
That’s not helpful.
No.
Tracking device on her?
No.
Tracking device on the blue four-door?
No.
Health issues that might necessitate her needing medication?
No.
He groaned. Satellite?
Absolutely.
I want to see the image from the day she was taken, and I also want the camera feeds from the bridge as she came off the ferry. I want to follow those two vehicles.
Just a moment.
Also need weapons and tactical gear.
When the response came he stared. Already loaded in car.
Really? He didn’t want to check now. He’d have to continue to trust. He continued to go through the paperwork that he’d been given and realized that he should have picked up food before he came here. He got up, walked over to the window, and stared around at his nearby surroundings. A small diner was at the end of the block. That would do. Grabbing food, he typed in the chat box. Back in ten.
Then he quickly locked up the motel room and headed across the street and into the small diner. There, he ordered a meal to-go, coffee, and picked up several muffins and some doughnuts. Sugar was always good for a hit of energy as long as in moderation. Back in his room, he still had no answer from the chat window. He sat down with the laptop in front of him and ate. Then he cleaned up his garbage and sat back, doing more research.
Time was wasting, but, if they didn’t have any intel, even England was way too damn big for Kerrick to start knocking on doors. When his laptop beeped, he clicked his computer to see the satellite feed. Then he c
licked on the chat window. I need remote access to an imaging program.
There was silence for a long moment while he continued to study the feed, and then he was given a set of logins and a link. He quickly hit the link and logged in. Opening up that video, he zoomed the images to a much higher pixel count to see exactly what he needed to look at. Sure enough, the woman “asleep” on the back seat of the car under surveillance had a scar on her right cheek. The mark was on one of the earlier photos of Amanda that he had, but he had missed it on the first go-around because he had only looked at the background in her picture, taking in the scenery behind her head. But on further examination, there was a definite triangular or kind of heart-shaped scar on her right cheekbone, high and close to her ear. It happened to be that side of her facing up in the photo too. She appeared to be drugged. He did a quick perusal, studying the vehicle, writing down the type and the make and that a rear light was broken.
Check for an accident report, he typed into the chat box. Then he kept on searching the satellite feed, going through every angle on that ferry, trying to get something on the driver. But all Kerrick got was dark hair on a hairy arm by the open window. He was the only other person in the vehicle.
No accident on file regarding ferry passengers for that date and time using data available and as reported.
Single driver with “sleeping” passenger confirmed by birthmark as Amanda Berg, he typed into the chat box.
But then he stopped and wondered about the lorry parked right behind the car on the ferry. He zoomed out, taking a look at the distance between them. A transport truck would make a lot more sense for a kidnapping, where she wouldn’t be visible. So, was this the lorry that had first taken her? Then, before reaching the ferry, they had moved her to the blue car, like she was sleeping, instead of remaining in the back of a lorry, where an unconscious woman would look particularly suspicious, should the ferry authorities demand a search?
And then the kidnappers transferred her back into a lorry—or the lorry—after the ferry landed? Or was this lorry just a decoy? Either way, these kidnappers had done this before. Kerrick pressed Play on the video feed, moving it forward, and the car went ahead, exiting the ferry, with the lorry following. They both took the first exit, and then another vehicle jumped in between the car and the lorry, making Kerrick even more suspicious. Or it could be a total random event.
As he kept watching, the video feed cut off.
He immediately asked via the chat box for access to the transit cameras at that intersection. Their chat continued with more links followed by more links. He kept looking, following the car, but, for at least one mile, blank spaces and blind spots filled the camera feed. The transit cameras could only do so much.
He kept following the video until he found yet another blind spot, and, when he came up on the other side of that suspicious part of the feed, the car was gone. So was the lorry and the middle car. He backtracked and looked at the online map he had pulled up into a new tab to see where else the car could have headed. He kept on searching down the optional roads on various feeds and then asked for another feed. He quickly clicked on the new feed and reviewed it.
He needed to grab all these logins to put into a master file to memorize for other cases. He didn’t want to keep asking for access. Almost at this train of thought, the chat window’s new message read Watch your back and then disappeared.
Chat was gone. To the empty room he whispered, “Thanks for that.” Luckily he had some feeds still open on his laptop.
He studied the blind spot and noted another road heading off to the side. He picked up the next transit camera intersection four blocks away, but he saw no sign of the blue car anywhere in the next hour’s worth of feed. That bothered him, but he couldn’t get a view of that corner. It was about forty minutes away from where he sat. He quickly packed up his laptop and the rest of the equipment that he had, as well as his ready bag, just in case, and then headed out to his rental vehicle.
He drove to the point where the blue car had been lost in the traffic feeds. He still had the camera feeds up on his laptop, so he could double-check the area around him. He drove forward and around several blocks. Then, with his instincts prodding him, he pulled off onto the shoulder and got out. It was now three o’clock in the afternoon, Monday. Damn it! Where had the time gone?
He noted traffic was everywhere, and it was a hell of an intersection to try to disappear into. But, at the time of the supposed kidnapper’s Dover crossing, it would have been about 7:00 that Sunday evening. So, if this were truly the kidnapper’s car driving outside of London, about 9:00 p.m. that Sunday, as evidenced by the time stamp on the satellite feeds and on the street cameras, then that vehicle pulled safely off the shoulder here. Kerrick walked up and down the first hundred yards from where the camera went blind, checking on both sides of the road. He stood for a moment with his hands on his head, swearing.
What had happened to the car? It hadn’t gone forward, and it hadn’t been seen on the other side. But then he remembered the lorry. How big was that damn lorry?
He got into his rental and searched his feeds and confirmed his initial assessment—it was a large lorry, like a moving truck. And then he knew what had happened. He quickly zoomed in on the feeds, picked the ID number off the lorry and its license plate number, and ran a search. Because, of all the things, if the blue car wasn’t here, and he couldn’t find any sign of it, that meant it wasn’t here. There was no ravine to have gone down; there was no cliff to have gone over; there were no houses with garages. Nothing but straight traffic thoroughfares.
There were subdivisions all around, but no exits here accessed them. Which meant the lorry had pulled ahead, and the car had driven up on a ramp into the back and could even now be inside that damn lorry. He needed help. He picked up his disposable phone and quickly dialed its only saved number. When the other voice asked for his identification, he gave it and said, “I need the chat.”
Instantly the chat window opened up, and he gave them the license plate and the lorry ID number. Find that sucker. Then he typed alongside that The car’s inside it.
The chat box disappeared for a long moment while he drove around and parked on higher ground, where he could get a better view of the overlaying area. The lorry could have driven for another eighteen hours across country, but he suspected—now that the car had been hidden inside the lorry—that the kidnappers were close to their true destination.
So they had driven to another place near London, where they were probably safe to park and able to work there. But where did one park a huge lorry like that? It had a company’s logo on one side, but, as he saw from the various video camera feeds, it had a different logo on the other side. So it had been repurposed from its original intent, which made a lot of sense but would also throw people off.
Different witnesses would give differing reports to the authorities, sullying their veracity. Smart move, from the criminal’s mind-set. He hadn’t seen anybody try that before, but it made sense. It also gave credence to his working theory that the lorry had swallowed up the car. Using the live camera feeds, he backed up the feeds and then quickly searched through them for the appropriate time stamp; he needed to see where that sucker went.
There. And it did drive down near here. It headed through that intersection, then picked up again on the main route, and headed forward. It was slow and painstaking to get through these rudimentary street-camera feeds. The software used for a video game for home use had more viability than these city street cameras. Kerrick shook his head at that.
Just then the chat window offered a new link. He quickly tapped on it to see the lorry turning off into a large parking lot, and its corresponding street address popped up below. A trucking company. Another good idea. Hide one lorry among many other lookalikes. He immediately entered the company’s address into his GPS and drove. He didn’t know where the hell that vehicle was now, but he needed to find it. The kidnappers might not have unloaded the car yet, b
ut they sure as hell would have unloaded the passenger—unless she was already dead.
Chapter 4
Amanda woke up bitterly cold, her body shivering, trying to warm up in her cool cell by rubbing her hands along her arms. She followed the innate wisdom of her internal clock and deemed this the next morning. But how could she tell for sure? It could be just the continuation of what she had earlier deemed as her second day here. Or … hell. Still her first day here. Actually that made more sense. Time would drag by here, she suspected.
She shook her head. The drugs and lack of light messed with her senses.
She had to once again get up to relieve her bladder. And found that the pot had been emptied. Did they do that at night, when she slept? That gave credence to this being a new day, Day 2? Or Day 3 of captivity for her?
She frowned; somehow she’d slept through the night and hadn’t even heard her visitor. That wasn’t good. But her next thought was not any better. The only way for that to have happened was either the room was gassed or her food had been drugged.
Surprise, surprise.
She didn’t know how much longer they were planning on keeping her here. There hadn’t been another sound or another voice crying since she’d heard the first one. That was disturbing.
Then she turned bitterly cold, both inside and out. She laid here for a long moment, distracting herself by listening intently, but there was nothing to hear. She got up and systematically walked from wall to wall, trying to listen to the other side, tapping to see if she could find a hollow space in the walls—or to hear tapping in return from another captive like her. But she found no weakness in the walls and no neighbors.
Then, back at the door, she held her ear against the wood and could hear something banging outside. She tested the doorknob, but it was locked. There was no opening or window in it, so she had no way to see out. She studied the door hinges, wondering if she could take it apart. But she didn’t have any tools. Nothing here could even possibly undo those screws. And they were pretty intense-looking screws. A drill would be required, and, if the screws were really old, like the rest of this place seemed to be, then they were probably rusted, and she couldn’t do anything with them anyway. The pins were also long and deep and rusty looking so no budging those.
