Operation Alpha

by Justine Davis

  He glanced at the animal. He’d tried to play it as if he were just retrieving his dog before continuing to search for Ria, but both Emily and Dylan were smart kids, and they’d sensed something was up. They were both worried about their teacher, but he hoped they didn’t realize Dylan’s father had anything to do with it. Not yet, anyway, at least until the juvenile officer showed up.

  There was a crackle of static and then Quinn’s voice in his earpiece, less clear over the sound of the helicopter. “We’re overhead. Nothing yet.”

  Cutter nudged his phone again, oddly no differently when it was Quinn than Ty. This time Liam had to grab the device to keep it from hitting the floor. But he was focused on the road ahead as they neared the bridge.

  “Copy,” he said to Quinn.

  “We’ll keep looking.”

  Liam acknowledged the words, but he had little hope. The thickness of the trees that gave this part of the northwest much of its beauty also made tracking anything from the air hit or miss at best. The only thing they had going for them was that the damaged car would stand out if they spotted it in the breaks in the trees. And the fact that Teague had become a damned good chopper pilot, nearly as good as Quinn.

  They stopped at the light at the turn for the bridge. Cutter yet again nudged the phone with his nose.

  “What’s with you, hound?” He glanced at the dog and found those amber-flecked dark eyes fastened on him in that intense way that signaled this was not some casual distraction. Very pointedly the dog nudged the phone again and then looked at him.

  Halfway across the floating span and far too belatedly it hit him. Barton Oakley might be a technophobe with a decade-old flip phone, but Ria was not. A series of images flashed through his mind, of her in jeans, slipping her phone into her back pocket rather than into the slot on her big purse. At the time he’d been more focused on the sweet curve of her backside than the phone.

  Your friend called 911.

  Could she have? Could she have made that call and put her phone in her pocket, not back in her bag, which was in her abandoned car?

  He swore but followed it with a fervent “thanks, buddy” to Cutter, whose tail wagged faintly.

  “Ty!” He knew the tech genius was also monitoring their channel in real time, and the answer came back quickly.

  “Here.”

  “Ria might have her phone on her.”

  He rattled off the number, knowing he wouldn’t have to tell Ty to ping it.

  “Copy.” It was all Ty said, but Liam knew he was on it. Dunbar could get them the clearance they needed to do it, since Ria had in fact called 911.

  “Thought they had her car and purse,” Quinn said over the speaker.

  “A lot of times she puts it in a pocket.”

  Under the circumstances, he knew he wouldn’t have to explain why he hadn’t thought of it before, or how he knew her phone habits or how her number had been etched into his memory from the moment she’d first given it to him. Foxworth knew when things had to be all business, and they damned sure had to be now.

  “Worth a shot,” was all Quinn said.

  They were across the bridge now and coming up the hill on the other side. He had a couple of minutes before he hit the first turn that would head north to Port Townsend, which also meant the ferry that had likely left ten minutes ago, with the next not for at least a half an hour, putting him even farther behind them. He was tempted to entreat God, fate and the world at large that they hadn’t gone that way, but the other direction wasn’t much better given the suspicions that were eating at him. The thought that Oakley might be headed to the same area where his wife had died was even more unsettling.

  He resisted the urge to push harder. Ty was the best and already going as fast as was possible on both tasks before him—tracking the car and finding Ria’s phone. There was a second, more frequently used road that was a bit faster another eight or so miles along; Liam could take that if the answer was north, but he had a gut feeling that if Oakley was going that way, he’d want off the main highway as soon as possible. Teague was already following that road overhead, and there were several open spaces where the car might be spotted but only if the timing was exactly right.

  “Got the signal. Don’t turn!” Ty yelped.

  Liam didn’t know if he felt better or worse. “Where?”

  “Midway between Sequim—” he pronounced it right this time because Ty was a quick learner “—and Port Angeles. And he’s slowing.”

  Damn. He was going there. He was really going there.

  The tension built in him until his knuckles whitened as he gripped the steering wheel. Rafe had talked once, on one of those very rare occasions when he was feeling expansive, about human ties and how they could blind you to what needed to be done. Liam had understood, but he’d never really experienced it until now. Because he’d never had that kind of tie to anyone, except his family.

  But somehow Ria had done it, snuck past his defenses and wrapped herself around him in a way he’d never known before. And now she was in deep trouble, life-endangering trouble, because he couldn’t keep his head in the game. And some part of him—that scared, illogical part of him that had been born the day Jessica had drowned—was screaming.

  She was going to die, like the others had, because of him.

  * * *

  “You’re sure?” Liam asked before he got out of the truck.

  “Positive,” Ty said. “It’s held steady since I told you it stopped. That phone isn’t moving.”

  Liam didn’t need to look around. He already knew he was in one of the wildest areas near the border of the Olympic National Park. Thanks to Dunbar, he also now knew that the car he was tracking had been purchased just yesterday, with cash, from a private seller who hadn’t had time yet to change the registration out of his name. The buyer, who answered Oakley’s description, had paid more than the car was worth, so the guy hadn’t asked many questions. He’d also told him there was no rush on the paperwork; he’d be working on it for a while.

  He buys an anonymous car without any GPS, tells the guy to take his time on the paperwork because he won’t be driving it and then drives it—after forcing Kevin and Ria into it—to a place all too near where his wife died.

  He didn’t like any of this. Every instinct he had was screaming at him.

  Once Ty told him he was practically on the location, Liam parked the truck. He turned to the dog, who was watching him intently.

  “Okay, hound, it’s up to us now. Both of them are depending on us.” His throat tightened as he remembered other times and how they had ended. “Maybe you can make the difference, this time.”

  Cutter whuffed softly and nosed at him, swiping his tongue over Liam’s knuckles. It was oddly steadying.

  “Let’s roll, buddy.”

  He slid out of the truck, grabbed his Colt M1911 from the truck’s door holster and slipped it into the clip holster he fastened on his belt. He took the smaller go bag and slung it over his shoulders. It wouldn’t interfere with his draw and if he needed more than what was in it, then he had really lost control of the situation. And lastly he added his classic Remington .243 rifle, the weapon he’d been shooting since he was twelve. It wasn’t as powerful as some, but he was deadly accurate with it. If it came down to keeping Ria safe, he wanted the weapon he knew as well as his own hands. He wanted it to be so instinctive he didn’t even have to think. He wouldn’t trust her life to anything less.

  It didn’t take him long to find the set of tracks in the soft ground on the west side of the road. Cutter apparently agreed, because he took off along the faint trail eagerly. Liam barely had time to wonder if he somehow knew what track they were on, which seemed impossible, or if he’d caught some scent on the breeze—maybe that sweet touch of roses that meant Ria.

  He slammed the door in his mi
nd, closing up the box that held all things Ria. If he let them out, he’d lose focus again, and he had to maintain it. Everything depended on it.

  He’d barely gotten out of sight of the paved road when he heard a single bark from Cutter. The bark that was his signal he’d found something. Liam picked up the pace and pushed through the ranks of trees, knowing that if anyone was around, Cutter would have told him with a different bark.

  The car he’d watched so intently on screen sat slightly cockeyed and at an angle, as if it had skidded to its current position half off the narrow track. It seemed slightly odd to see it in person, in three dimensions.

  “Got the vehicle. Empty,” he said.

  “Copy,” Quinn’s voice said in his ear. “En route.”

  He’d known the car was empty long before he got up to it, both by the way Cutter was acting and his own gut instincts. Ria was not here, and yet her phone signal was stationary. Had she left it? Had Oakley found it? Had he hurt her in the process?

  Again he had to clamp down; his imagination had never run wild like this before and he was having trouble corralling it. He focused on Cutter, who was circling the vehicle like a wolf circling prey, his nose to the ground. When he reached the passenger side, the dog stopped, sat and gave an urgent whine.

  Liam gave up his own visual inspection of the car, which so far had yielded little, and went to where the dog was. There was a scrabble of tracks and marks all over the ground on the passenger side of the car. He studied them, ignoring for the moment what Cutter had found, that Ria’s phone lay in the dirt. Those tracks told a story, and he needed at least the gist of it before he proceeded.

  “Hold,” he ordered Cutter, who was clearly anxious to be off. This alone told Liam they had a trail. But he had to assess this first.

  Two main sets of marks, adjacent to the front passenger door and back near the hatch. Smaller, tighter arcs and sprays near the back. Kevin had fought. He must know now something was very wrong with the man he’d thought of as his father.

  Near the front passenger door, the ground was less disturbed. Enough so that he saw at least one clear footprint. Saw the pattern of the shoe tread. The simple leather slip-on mocs Ria had had on. The ones she had kicked off so easily last night.

  He managed to quash the rising boil more easily this time. He was on the hunt now, and instinct and experience were giving him that half step back he needed.

  Less disturbed here. She hadn’t fought? He glanced at the other, more roiled pattern. No. Oakley had used the boy against her. Threatened him, to gain her cooperation.

  He turned to where Cutter was sitting, practically trembling with his eagerness to get moving, yet held by Liam’s command as surely as if he were chained to that spot. A prince of a dog, as his father would say.

  He studied the object near Cutter’s front paws. The screen was broken, dented, as if someone had dropped or thrown it down and then stomped it. Sounds like something the tech-averse Oakley might do, underestimating what it took to put a device designed to withstand a lot of abuse out of commission. It had brought him this far, but it was of no further use now.

  “Phone’s here, broken,” he said into the live connection. “We’re on our own now.”

  He left the phone untouched. He wasn’t sure what Oakley had planned, only that, whatever it was, he didn’t want to or couldn’t do it here. Still, if Oakley happened to come back to the car, Liam wanted no sign anyone had been there, didn’t want him to know he was after him. He sent Cutter a few feet up the trail, ordered him to wait and then took ten seconds to brush out what he could of the dog’s prints. He doubted Oakley would notice them or think they were anything other than local wildlife, but he was taking no chances when Ria’s and Kevin’s lives could be at stake.

  He started toward the dog, who was again trembling with eagerness. But then Liam noticed something else, something completely unexpected. A couple of feet away, there were two more sets of scratches and furrows in the dirt, in the softer, damper ground off the path, under the trees. One looked similar to those at the back of the car. The other was very different. They weren’t random.

  They were a sign.

  A dollar sign.

  He frowned, puzzled. It had to be Ria, but what was she trying to say? That Oakley had done this for money? He knew her family was successful but doubted they ran to the kind of money a kidnapper was usually after. Besides, Oakley wouldn’t know anything about her, other than that she was Dylan’s teacher. And why drag along his own son?

  Except... Kevin wasn’t his own son.

  He stared at the markings in the dirt. Realizations slammed into him, one after the other.

  Kevin had started to struggle again.

  Oakley had had to stop to deal with him.

  Ria had taken advantage.

  She had left him a clue.

  He found himself smiling. “That’s my girl,” he whispered, completely forgetting about the three men who could hear every word.

  And then, for a brief moment, he forgot about everything as the impact of two last things hit him.

  She’d known he would come for her.

  And he’d meant it. She was his.

  The old panic tried to rise, but this simple evidence of her nerve, her trust, wiped it out.

  This was not going to end that way.

  “Find her, Cutter. Find Ria.”

  Chapter 32

  Ria hung back, dragging her feet as if she were exhausted. Oakley snapped at her yet again, although she noticed sweat beading up on his forehead. Probably, she thought, from having to wrestle with the stubborn Kevin, who might not understand exactly what was going on but wanted no part of this trek. Maybe he instinctively realized what was happening.

  She wondered if the boy knew this was near the place where his mother had fallen to her death. Hoped he didn’t; he’d be even more scared. Liam had told her the police and ranger reports had seemed pretty cut-and-dried, there had been no sign of foul play and there was that witness who had been talking to Oakley several yards up the mountain when his wife had screamed as the trail had given way under her feet. Ria no longer cared what the reports said, hadn’t from the moment Oakley had made that slight, small slip back in the car that had made the situation clear to her.

  Amazing what a difference three little words could make.

  When I collect.

  It was all she’d heard, in the middle of a tirade when Kevin once again had begun to struggle, but it was enough.

  When I collect I’ll be out of here the next day.

  Collect.

  Was there any context in this where that didn’t mean money? So he thought he was going to get money out of kidnapping them? She had news for him—her family didn’t have that kind of money. Yes, they owned a few hardware stores, but almost everything they made over costs went back into the business. And Kevin...it would have to be his mother’s family, and Dylan had told her long ago she had no family but an elderly uncle somewhere.

  But he’d said I. Not we. Did that mean he was going to abandon Dylan, as well?

  It didn’t matter, she told herself. Why he was doing this didn’t matter; she had to deal with the simple fact that he was. She didn’t want to believe any of this was happening. But she had no choice. She had to believe it. And act accordingly.

  They reached a nexus of three trails, one going straight and level, one veering to the right and up, one to the left and steeper still. Oakley never hesitated in choosing the left. He clearly knew where he was going.

  She looked around for something, anything, to mark the trail with. She’d dropped her car key, the only thing she had left in her pockets after he’d found her phone, at the first fork in the trail. Here she couldn’t see anything handy that would make it look different than the other two, at least not that she could do with
out drawing Oakley’s attention. He was focused on Kevin, assuming—correctly—that as long as he had the power to hurt the boy, she would stay with them.

  She needed something that would look wrong, out of place, and she had nothing. She—

  She did have something. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  She prayed she was right in believing Liam—and Cutter—were as good as Quinn said they were.

  * * *

  Cutter never wavered. He went up the trail at a steady trot, Liam imagined as quickly as he could go and not overrun the scent.

  They were moving steadily upward. At the first fork in the trail Cutter hadn’t hesitated; he kept going straight. Liam had found Ria’s car key—he was certain because of the carabiner-style holder she used, which she’d said had come from the flagship Connelly hardware store—a few feet farther on, far enough to make it clear which path they’d taken.

  Always thinking—that’s my girl.

  He didn’t even react to the phrase this time. Whether he’d accepted the truth of it or was too focused on the pursuit for it to really register, he didn’t know or care. All that mattered was finding her and Kevin, and breaking the hideous pattern that had marred—and controlled—his life for so long.

  Early in his time at Foxworth, he had asked Rafe about it once, without revealing why he wanted to know. Had asked how he lived with all the death. The man had simply stared at him for a very long time, with those eyes that could make any man wish himself elsewhere. Liam wished he hadn’t started it, but he had, and he made himself hold that gaze, despite the urge to run.

  Liam had already known that Rafe was not the sort to talk about himself or his past, but he hadn’t realized yet how deep it went. But apparently the taciturn man had somehow sensed this was more than casual or morbid curiosity. Or he appreciated that Liam hadn’t turned tail and scampered away like a scared rabbit, even though that’s what he wanted to do.

  “Every kill,” Rafe had said, his voice inflectionless, “saved many more.”