Snatched Super Boxset

by Hunt, James

“He said sixty of the users actually completed all of the coursework. He also confirmed that Craig Johnson was on the list, and so was Parker Gallient, the one who took Annie Mauer. He traced Parker’s truck outside of a restaurant on Seattle’s south side,” Mocks answered.

  “Not the friendliest place for us,” Grant answered, then gestured to the fist that held the Bic. “You all right?”

  “Yeah,” Mocks answered, tucking the lighter back inside her inner jacket pocket. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Lunchtime traffic had picked up in the city, and it added an extra twenty minutes on their way to the restaurant. It was a seafood joint, but in Seattle, seafood places were a dime a dozen. Whenever one went out of business, three more took its place. Rick loved seafood. Mocks figured she was the only person in Seattle that hated it.

  A heavy scent of fish blasted Mocks’s senses the moment they stepped through the doors, and she gagged in her mouth loud enough to catch the attention of the table of middle-aged women to her left. They stopped eating, but Mocks simply followed Grant to the kitchen with the hostess, where the smell only worsened.

  Once past the sautéed shrimp, steamed clams, and baked salmon, Mocks shoved Grant and the hostess aside and burst out the back door. Outside, she lifted her face to the sky and inhaled deep breaths.

  “Thought you’d be used to that smell by now,” Grant said, side-stepping a very shocked hostess, who looked at Mocks like she had grown a second head. “You’ve lived in Seattle for what? Four years now?”

  “Three years, five months, three weeks, two days, thirteen hours and some change,” Mocks answered, sucking in another deep breath of cold coastal air. “But who’s counting.”

  “This the truck?” Grant asked.

  The hostess nodded. She wore all black, and her blonde hair had matching dark roots. “I didn’t see who dropped it off. I asked around and none of the kitchen staff saw anything either.”

  Mocks finally lowered her face, the queasiness in her stomach easing now that she wasn’t surrounded by fish fumes. She walked over to the truck, the doors closed. “You found it exactly like this?”

  “Well, no,” the hostess said, playing with her hands. “The door was open. I just thought maybe someone left it open by accident. So I just shut it.” She took a step back. “Does this have to do with all those kids going missing?”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Grant said. “We’ll let you know if we need anything else.”

  Mocks walked around to the passenger side and slipped on a glove. She opened the door, then the glove compartment. “Nothing but trash.” She checked under and behind the seats. Nothing but rusted tools and more fast food wrappers.

  “Anything?” Mocks asked.

  “Nope,” Grant answered, shutting the door and peeling off his own glove.

  “Grant,” Mocks said. “I think we need to start looking at this realistically.” She stepped around the truck’s hood and leaned against the driver side tire-well. “There could be another dozen kids that are taken within the next twenty-four hours, or some that were taken that haven’t even been called in yet. Whoever is behind this meant for it all to happen today.”

  “You think someone is pulling the strings?” Grant asked.

  “Whoever built that website for all of those creeps to use had a specific purpose.” Mocks watched Grant mull it over.

  “You think it’s a diversion?” Grant asked.

  “Sleight of hand, right?” Mocks answered. “We need to figure out why all of this is happening today.”

  “All right,” Grant said. “We’ll canvas the street and see if anyone saw anything. Look for security footage, maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  “After today, I think all of our luck might be out,” Mocks said.

  * * *

  One of the detriments of being a detective in this century was technology. It was a gift and a curse. Their Cyber division could do so many things with tracking digital footprints. But in the self-absorbed age of selfies and social media, one hardly looked up from their phones. And that made finding witnesses hard. No one saw anything. Maybe Mocks was right. Their luck had run out.

  Forensics arrived shortly after their canvas of the area, and the team looked used and abused. There were a limited number of forensic field units, and with the sudden influx of abductions, they were being called all over the city. Grant and Mocks left the team to their devices and drove back to the station.

  Grant kept stealing glances at the timer on his watch. They were already past the four-hour mark. Time was tight. Time was always tight.

  “You keep checking that thing like it’ll tell you where to find our missing kids,” Mocks said, her gaze cast out toward the window.

  “It helps keep me on my toes,” Grant said. “You have any secret theories you’re keeping to yourself?”

  “I think Rick is cheating on me,” Mocks answered.

  She tossed it out in the open so casually that it took Grant a minute before he could wrap his head around what she’d just said.

  “Why do you think—”

  “We haven’t had sex in over a month,” Mocks said. “We fight constantly. It’s like I’m living with someone I don’t even know anymore.”

  Mocks finally turned away from the window, and Grant got a look at her face. No tears. No lines of grief. Nothing more than a plain, stoic expression of realization. She’d been thinking about this for a long time. He’d thought something was off with her, and now he knew the cause.

  “What are you two fighting about?” Grant asked.

  Mocks twirled the Bic between her fingers. “He wants kids.”

  “And you don’t?”

  Mocks sighed. “It’s complicated.”

  “You need to talk about it,” Grant said. “This isn’t one of those instances where you can just sweep it under the rug.”

  “We’ve tried,” Mocks said. “I’ll admit that I’m the one who gets defensive about it, but I just—I just…” She curled her fingers, shaking her hands, and then dropped them into her lap, lifeless. “I’m scared, Grant.”

  “Is Rick working today?” Grant asked.

  “No,” Mocks answered.

  Grant flicked on the blinker and took the next left he could make.

  “Grant, we don’t have time—”

  “If there is one thing you know about me, Mocks, it’s that I am a master of time.” Grant swerved between parked cars on the side street and looped back around to the highway that would take them to Mocks’s apartment. “Before Ellen died, there were hundreds of times where I could have gone home for lunch, left work early, gone to work late, and the world would have kept on spinning. We get so caught up in fast forward that we forget to appreciate the pause button. And trust me when I tell you that now is one of those moments to hit pause.”

  “The clock doesn’t stop for those kids,” Mocks said.

  Grant saw Mocks’s high-rise in the distance. “I’m more than capable of researching the Internet by myself, and when I figure something out, you will be my first call.”

  The rest of the trip, Mocks remained quiet. She only said two words when he pulled up to the curb of the sidewalk outside her building. “Thank you.”

  “Talk to him, Mocks,” Grant said. “Rick wouldn’t cheat on you.”

  “How do you know that?” Mocks asked, looking at him with eyes as big as saucers. She’d never looked more like a kid than she did right now.

  “Because Rick looks at you the way I looked at Ellen,” Grant said.

  Mocks smiled, shut the door, and disappeared inside the building. The action provided a small piece of hope that Grant clung to on the way back to the station. It was a hope that helped block out all the painful memories from his own past. The daily struggle to keep moving never ended.

  The old phrase ‘time heals all wounds’ was only half true. Yes, they did eventually heal. But they also changed you; twisted you into something different than you were before. Everything was still functional and you were
alive, but you were not the same. Scars never disappeared. They lingered until your last day.

  The precinct was still surrounded by the press when Grant arrived, and this time he avoided their questioning altogether by parking in the compound lot around back. It was fenced off, and only authorized personnel were allowed inside.

  Grant did a quick check in with Sam to see if he was able to pull anything else from the website, but he said he was still trying to get through some of the firewalls and that he needed more time.

  All that was left was to research what Mocks had brought up. It was a brilliant theory, and it made sense the more thought he gave it. He opened a handful of tabs on his browser and went to work on finding what was so special about today.

  Grant started small, staying strictly within Seattle, and then when nothing came of that, he expanded to the entire state of Washington. The only note of value he was able to find was his own ceremony that had taken place that morning. No other large-scale events had made the news, no meetings or large gatherings. Today was just another Saturday in late March.

  The chair squeaked as Grant leaned back. He drummed his fingers on the desk. There had to be another connection, something else that tied them together. They had three confirmed cases, if you included the Givens case, where the abductors took this class. So what connected them?

  Grant stopped drumming his fingers. Spiders.

  Grant cross-referenced spiders and Seattle, and he received several hits, many of them from Seattle arachnid groups, which there were more of than he would have guessed. But there was only one hit that connected what Mallory Givens had said to Grant’s current predicament.

  A gang from the Philippines had made their way to the western shores of the United States. And Grant knew just the man he could talk to about it.

  6

  When Mocks pressed the tenth floor button on the elevator, a million thoughts raced through her mind. Her left hand moved and she looked down to see it holding the Bic lighter. She stared at it a moment and then returned it to her pocket. If Rick was having an affair, if there was some woman in their bed, then she needed to face it without the crutch of her past.

  Mocks had been clean for a year when they met. And it was around the time when her therapist and sponsor thought it would be okay for her to enter a relationship. She’d done the plant thing, then the animal thing, making sure she could keep both of them alive before setting her affections on anything human. Her sponsor had also recommended abstaining from sex for at least six weeks after the start of a new relationship.

  She slept with Rick on their first date. It was one rule she didn’t care that she broke.

  And as luck would have it, Rick turned out to be the last new person she’d ever sleep with, though she didn’t see it that way in the beginning. She remained guarded in their first few months together. The sex helped though. A lot.

  Rick never pried about her past, but she knew he had questions. After all, she couldn’t hide the scars on her arms from years of needles. When the day finally came for Mocks to reveal her past, it exploded from her lips in a stream of breathless, run-on sentences. Once she finished, she thought Rick might take off. She had prepared herself for that. But he didn’t. He stayed. But it wasn’t easy.

  Mocks put Rick through every hell that she experienced. The backlash from all of those years she abused herself were thrust onto him. But no matter how dark it got, no matter what she said, no matter what she did, he stayed. And finally, those walls she’d built cracked. And while they didn’t come tumbling down, a doorway formed, and Rick was finally allowed inside.

  Through it all, Rick never pushed harder than she wanted. Anytime she said stop, he stopped. Anytime she told him she needed space, he waited. Whenever she got so angry she broke something of his, he kept quiet until she calmed down. He was the most patient man she’d ever met. She never understood why he stuck around. Probably the sex.

  Their engagement was short. When Mocks was ready, he asked, and she didn’t want to wait. She had found someone with an unshakable foundation, and there wasn’t anyone else she saw spending the rest of her life with.

  But the move to Seattle when she was offered a detective’s position had taken its toll. The hours were harsher than she expected them to be, and the added celebrity that came with being a former addict, along with a partner with Grant’s history, only added to the gossip.

  The rest of the officers at the precinct eventually accepted her regardless of her past. She knew Grant had a lot to do with that. Everyone in the department respected him. When they were first paired together, the stories they told about his career in homicide aired on the side of legend. But when she finally met the man behind the myth, she realized that he was mortal like the rest of them. A very talented detective, but still a man.

  And Grant was right. This talk was long overdue. When Rick had the kid conversation with her a few months ago, she didn’t handle it well. And they’d both used work as an excuse to put it off. He’d been pulling doubles, and their only time together were the few hours when they shared a bed where the space between them grew larger every night.

  The inertia of the elevator’s stop made the bundle of nerves in Mocks’s stomach rise, and then settle. The doors opened, and Mocks hesitated. She didn’t want to take that first step. But that’s what it took. That’s how you did the hard things. You just placed one foot in front of the other. One at a time.

  Mocks entered the hallway, her footsteps silent on the carpet. She passed her neighbors until she got to apartment ten-nineteen. They picked it because it had a beautiful view of the city, though she found herself admiring it less these days.

  She fished the key out of her pocket and leaned against the door to listen for any movement inside. She heard nothing. The key went into the lock slowly, and in one quick motion, Mocks unlocked and opened the door.

  A tiny hallway led into the kitchen with new stainless steel appliances and marble countertops. Rick liked to cook, but they’d eaten a lot of takeout the past month. Her heart pounded as she passed the kitchen, the front door still wide open.

  Mocks examined the living room for any clothes. She expected to find a bra or lacy thong that wasn’t hers, but there was nothing.

  She turned from the living room toward the bedrooms and bathroom. The spare bedroom door was open, the same with the bathroom, but the master bedroom door was half closed.

  Mocks froze at the low murmur of a moan. It was a woman’s moan, soft and breathless. With a shaking leg, she took one step. Then another. And another. The noises grew louder the closer she moved.

  Rage, fear, and adrenaline funneled through Mocks’s veins, and by the time she reached the bedroom door, she held her pistol then kicked the door open.

  “Jesus Christ!” Rick said.

  Mocks kept the pistol at her side, and hot tears burst from her eyes as she heaved her chest up and down. “Wh—What are you doing?”

  Rick frantically clicked out of the window pulled up on the computer screen and then hiked up his pants that were dropped at his ankles near the wheels of the desk chair. He tucked his manhood away and then turned to face his wife. His cheeks were flushed and slightly sweaty.

  Mocks looked from Rick to the computer, then to their neatly made bed. She shook her head, the ball of nerves slowly unraveling in her stomach. “I thought… I thought…” She couldn’t spit out the words.

  Rick pointed to the Glock in her hand. “Were you gonna shoot me?”

  Mocks stared at the gun, then holstered the weapon. “I thought you were sleeping with someone.”

  “What?” Rick leaned forward, scrunching his face in disbelief. He was about Grant’s height, a little taller actually, but more muscular. His hazel eyes shied away from hers in embarrassment. He gestured toward the computer behind him, then shut his eyes and shook his head. “I didn’t think you were coming home.”

  With the adrenaline gone, Mocks sat on the end of the bed. Her shoulders hunched forward and lo
w, and she rested her elbows on her thighs. “I wasn’t. Grant said that we needed to talk.” She chuckled. “We probably need to do more than that.”

  Rick covered his mouth and stifled a laugh. He sidled up next to her, and his added weight bounced her up and into him. “I guess we haven’t really been as upfront with each other like we normally are.” He shook his head. “You thought I was having an affair?”

  Mocks rested her head against his arm. “Sometimes I think it’s hard for you to remember what it’s like for the rest of us mortals who aren’t accustomed to taking the high road. My mind just wandered.”

  He wrapped his arm around her and pulled her close. “We could not talk or not have sex for the rest of our lives as long as I knew you were still my wife. Though I would prefer at least a little sex.”

  “I feel like an idiot,” Mocks said, burying her face into his shirt. He smelled like work. That heavy musk of sweat and thick wool from his fire jacket. She loved that smell.

  “Hey.” Rick turned toward her and cupped her face with both hands. “I love you. That is never going to change. No matter what. Do you hear me?”

  “I hear you,” Mocks said, and when she reached up to kiss him, they fell back onto the bed.

  * * *

  Grant suspected it would be easy to get an audience with the ambassador. And he was right. A portion of Mujave’s schedule was cleared within the hour. On his way toward the embassy, he called Mocks. After a few rings it went to voicemail, so he left a message. “Hey, I found a link between what Mallory Givens said about the spiders and the abductions. I’m heading over to the ambassador’s residence to find out more. Hope everything’s okay.”

  Grant tucked the phone into his pocket and then flipped on the lights in his undercover sedan, traffic parting on the highway as his speedometer tipped towards ninety.

  When Grant called the ambassador’s office, he retained a level of secrecy for the meeting’s purpose. He thought the ambassador would be more willing to meet with him under the premise that Grant had reconsidered the job offer.