Sadie Colton was missing.
He’d sworn to her family he’d find her, but the continuously ticking clock—one that came with no answers to her whereabouts—had him working overtime with no solution in sight.
And the increasing fear he wouldn’t get to her in time.
As dark images flashed through his mind, Tripp pushed them aside, just as he had for the past few days. Just as he had pushed aside his attraction for Sadie these past several years. His full focus needed to be on finding her.
Despite the increasingly dark thoughts that clouded his mind, he remained equally hopeful Tate Greer was playing a bigger game. Why kidnap her if the man wasn’t going to use it to his advantage? Sadie was only a bargaining chip if she were alive, and Tripp held on tightly to the fact that Greer knew that.
Only, Greer hadn’t reached out yet, outlining his demands. Nor had he given any indication he was going to.
That left Tripp right back at square one.
Sadie was missing, in the hands of a dangerous madman, and he was no closer to finding her than he had been thirty-six hours ago when she’d been first taken.
Her sister Vikki had fired the warning shot over the bow, convinced her twin was in trouble despite the repeated checks the GPRD had made on Sadie in that safe house. Although he trusted his team, he trusted the Colton family, as well, and Vikki Colton was known for her cool head and her love of her family. Tripp and his team had moved in the very night Vikki had sounded the alarm and were too late.
Too damn late. He uttered a dark curse before he stood and marched over to his office wall and the oversize map of Grand Rapids and the surrounding county. No matter how scared he was for Sadie’s safety, he had to think. Really think, instead of giving in to the continued self-recrimination that had kept him company for two days.
He’d been working the RevitaYou case for several months now; the various marks on that map reflections of what he’d already learned. “Think, McKellar,” he muttered to himself. “What do you know?”
His gaze scanned the map once more, following a radius around the safe house. He still hadn’t figured out how Greer had found it, which would be his next order of business once he got Sadie back. He’d already dealt a few months ago with a corrupt cop in his department. Joe McRath’s death had sent some serious ripples through the GRPD, and they were still dealing with the emotional fallout and loss of trust.
Corrupt cops had a way of doing that.
And now he had a problem with a department safe house? How the hell were some of the worst criminals in the county getting their hands on sensitive information like that?
It was an urgent problem, but one he had to deprioritize until he found Sadie. And while he’d like to bring in help to uncover the mole, he didn’t know whom he could trust to ferret out the answer.
A problem for a different day, he reminded himself as the frustration threatened to swamp him. In the meantime, he had to go on the information he had.
Several points on the map were marked with red pushpins, representative of Capital X crimes. The thugs rarely took out hits in public. Rather, they enjoyed preying on their victims then taking them to a secure location to rough them up. That was how the Coltons had gotten involved in the first place. Brody Higgins, a young man who’d been a part of their family after moving through the foster care system, had gotten in with the Capital X crowd. He hadn’t known the depth of Capital X’s depravity until it was too late. What started as a demand for money a mark had inevitably borrowed with no ability to pay back, slowly morphed into an exercise in torture and abject pain.
But it also meant there was very little creativity with respect to where the bodies were dropped.
Thinking about their torture methods—and the immediate danger to Sadie, who had been engaged to their boss—had his stomach curling, but Tripp pushed it back. What was on this map he could use? With that foremost in his mind, he evaluated the red pushpin locations again. Once they’d narrowed in on Capital X as a crime organization, they’d begun to understand some of their patterns. With each layer of investigation, they’d added more pushpins to their map.
There were three clusters. One near the spot where Capital X henchman Gunther Johnson had been captured. One in a run-down public park on the outskirts of the city. And one at a large lake outside of Grand Rapids.
Was it possible?
Tripp quickly calculated the distance between the safe house and the lake, and estimated there couldn’t be more than about fifteen miles between them.
Had Sadie been that close all along?
With an image of the lake and surrounding area filling his mind’s eye, Tripp snagged his coat off the back of his chair and slipped it on, covering the holstered weapon strapped to his back. The clutch piece at his ankle was an additional weight of security as he headed for the door.
They still had one of Capital X’s henchmen in custody. It looked like it was time to have a little talk with Gunther Johnson.
* * *
Sadie stared at the walls of the small room she’d been in for who knew how long and counted off what she knew in her head. Tate’s unexpected arrival had been the start of this ordeal. She’d been fed three meals since then, and another two today, so two full days hadn’t yet passed.
Nor had she seen Tate.
A tactic or something else? Was he out making misery on others? Worse, was he plotting and planning against her family? Against the GRPD?
Thoughts of her coworkers filled her mind’s eye, from the dispatch staff to the detectives’ squad to her fellow crime scene investigators. She meticulously cataloged each of them in her head, saving the best for last.
Tripp McKellar.
Whether it was the despair of the past few days or an inability to hold her mind back any longer, she’d finally given her thoughts of their tall, imposing lieutenant free reign in her mind.
She cared for him and always had. Perhaps he was unattainable, but that didn’t make her feelings any less real. Or her attraction to him any less powerful. How funny that with Tate’s true nature revealed, it only served to highlight even further what a good man Tripp McKellar was.
No flashy persona or bad-boy good looks like Tate. Instead, there was raw honesty, framed out in a square jaw, dark blond hair and blue eyes that had seen sadness yet had never become bitter. He was full of strength without being hard-edged. There was power in that, Sadie acknowledged to herself.
Real power.
It also left her with a very real, very tangible, counterpoint to Tate Greer. The pill of his betrayal had been terribly bitter to swallow, but she’d spent a lot of time thinking about their relationship during the long, lonely days in the safe house. She’d dissected it, forcing herself to really look deeply at what choices she’d made, voluntarily.
It had also given her time to think about the things she’d overlooked.
* * *
“You couldn’t have known, Sadie. No one could have.” Vikki’s voice was gentle but the grim set of her face carried the same conviction Sadie had felt since the moment Tate’s true nature had come to light.
“I’m a trained cop. I should have known,” Sadie shot back.
“How? Is clairvoyance in the job description for either role?”
“No, but I do know how to consider the angles. How to evaluate data and pull clues from it, no matter how little evidence I have to go on. Yet I allowed Tate Greer into my life—” Sadie flung a hand wide “—into all our lives. And for what? Because I was so damn happy to finally have a man?”
That look of fierce protection on her twin’s face shifted, remolding itself into a mask of pure and utter fury.
“Don’t talk about yourself that way. I won’t hear of it or tolerate it. You’re a good person, Sadie. You’ve got the biggest heart of anyone I know. More, I know you. Know who you are and how you see the world. D
o not let some jerk like Tate Greer, a man who has proved himself to prey on others, taint that. Or make you question yourself.”
* * *
The remembered conversation winked out of her mind, replaced by the breath-stealing fear she’d never see her sister again. Although their conversation at the safe house suggested Vikki and Flynn had a lot to figure out, her twin had fallen for Flynn Cruz-Street, the US MP who worked on the same Army base as Vikki did. After he was attacked on base by his captain, who had discharged his weapon, Vikki had been immersed in the case as the JAG paralegal.
All because of RevitaYou…
Sadie considered that, turning it over in her mind.
Some wonder drug. A supposed miracle pill that was killing people.
A shady operation helmed by her ex-fiancé, masterminding it all.
And all of it unraveling, right here in the hands of Colton Investigations and the Grand Rapids PD.
Sadie let out a hard sigh.
How had they missed it for so long? A question Tripp was no doubt asking himself. They didn’t know each other well, but she had no doubt this case was causing him lost sleep and a level of personal heartache only someone who demanded so much from himself professionally could manage.
Even now, she could picture the hard set of his jaw as he worked through the problem. She’d talked to him a few times since the RevitaYou case had broken, her own family deeply integrated in the investigation. Her oldest brother, Riley, the head of Colton Investigations, had been working the case since former foster kid Brody Higgins had come to them for help.
The Coltons had taken the misguided eighteen-year-old in after he’d aged out of the foster system but wasn’t quite ready to be on his own. Her father had believed in Brody’s innocence of a deadly crime, but had been murdered before he could prove it. Even with Graham Colton’s pull as the district attorney, it had been a hard fight to see Brody proven innocent. It had been a tough road, but it had made them all appreciate their father’s life’s work that much more.
And, whether by accident or fate, it had led to the formation of Colton Investigations.
It might now be her brother’s life’s work, but all of the children of Graham and Katherine Colton took part. The fight for justice, instilled in them by their father, ran deep in the blood.
So when Brody had come to Riley back in July, confessing his part in the RevitaYou scheme, their collective, underlying desire was to berate the young man they’d all come to see as a brother. But as the case wore on, and Brody had disappeared after being attacked by Capital X—Tate’s—goons, Sadie had come to realize it was something else entirely.
RevitaYou was not only a pyramid scheme, it was killing people. Good people, like Teri Joseph, the wife of Flynn’s former captain. And several other victims whose names had been linked to the drug and whose photos, even now, she was sure were pinned to Tripp’s crime board at the police station.
Brody had found out about the negative aspects of RevitaYou far too late. He’d fallen for the sales pitch and the mind-bending results the drug produced in the first few weeks of use. Because of it, Brody had rushed to invest, taking funding from Capital X to support his “investment.” Only there wasn’t any investment to be had, only a pyramid scheme and a violent organization waiting at the other end to collect. One that used the darkest corners of the internet to do its work.
Sadie shuddered, the image of Brody being brutalized at the hands of Tate’s men spearing through her.
He was still alive—it was hard to get money out of a dead mark—but Capital X sure loved making life miserable for those who couldn’t pay. Since that was the essence of their business model—either pay back a loan at exorbitant rates or get your fingers broken, one by one—their operation was never at a loss for capital.
Or, apparently, marks to do their bidding.
And she’d missed it all. Missed Tate’s romancing her to get close to Colton Investigations as well as the GRPD.
Missed the fact that he’d disappeared for stretches at a time that she’d chalked up to a businessman needing the space to run his business.
And she’d sure as hell missed every single sign that suggested he was a violent sociopath whose need to control everything and everyone around him went bone deep.
Now she was here, and her family knew she was missing, and Tripp was trying to solve the case, and it was all a raging mess. One with violent undertones that—as the hours passed—she convinced herself had no pathway to a good end.
“Way to be a defeatist, Colton,” she muttered to herself. And just as tears threatened, she heard her father’s voice in her head.
What do you know, Sadie Pie? Not what you think, but what you know…
With her father’s reassuring voice still ringing in her head, Sadie pushed down—hard—on the idea that she’d never see her twin sister or her family or anyone else she cared about. Instead, she forced herself to go through what she knew.
Because she might not be guaranteed a happy ending but she sure as hell wasn’t going to willingly proceed even further into a nightmare.
That meant she had to think. She had to be smart. And she had to quit worrying about all the reasons she was in this mess and start thinking of ways to get herself out of it.
Although Tate and his henchmen had subdued her the other night at the safe house, they hadn’t drugged her. That had given her a rough estimate in her mind of how long it had taken them to arrive at wherever she was now. She wasn’t any more than fifteen or twenty minutes from the safe house.
With a map of the county spreading out in her mind, she worked it through, the safe house the epicenter of her mental images. Fifteen to twenty minutes one direction took her to downtown Grand Rapids, but it had been too quiet outside for her to think they were in the city. With one direction checked off, she analyzed the others. As she worked it slowly in her mind, a vague memory of the drive to summer camp shot up to surprise her.
She hadn’t wanted to go that first year and the drive to Sand Springs Lake had seemed over before it had barely begun. Her mother had assured her that not only would Sadie have an amazing time at camp, but if she needed anything, her parents were only twenty minutes away.
Twenty minutes away…
Was it that easy? Was she really that close?
Willing her pounding heart to slow, she ran the map through her mind’s eye once more, following the various directions to the land formations that stretched out. And came up with the same conclusion the second time around.
She remained absolutely certain she wasn’t downtown. And she’d bet anything she was nowhere near the suburbs that speared off in another direction from the safe house. That only left Sand Springs Lake or more distant suburbs broken up by farmland in the final direction. A secluded lake in December made a heck of a lot of sense.
Sadie searched her memory for any conversation she and Tate might have had about the area surrounding Grand Rapids, her summer camp experiences, holiday vacation cottages, or anything else that might have been said in passing conversation. In retrospect, that should have been another clue—that she and Tate really hadn’t talked about anything. As the urge to berate herself welled up again, the tiniest fraction of a memory hit her full-on.
* * *
“My loathing for the great outdoors started early in life. Summer camp to be exact.”
Tate smiled before running the tip of his finger over her hip. “Not a nature girl?”
“So not a nature girl.”
“Like I couldn’t have guessed that.”
Sadie heard the slight sharpness through the joke but pushed it down. Did she have to take everything so seriously? Ignoring the prick of discomfort, she laid a hand over his, lacing their fingers. “Well, you can thank Sand Springs Lake for beating any sense of natural adventure out of me. From archery to rowing, I hated it all. I can still i
magine all the creepy things floating on the bottom of that lake, just waiting for me if we accidentally tipped our canoe.”
“There’s not much in that lake. A few secrets, maybe.” He leaned in then, pressing a kiss to her neck and distracting her from the conversation.
* * *
He’d done that a lot, she’d realized in her month-long, mental, deep-dive dissection into the sad, tragic tale of Sadie Colton’s engagement to Tate Greer. If he hadn’t been asking her questions, he’d been distracting her with sex. And in her naïveté she hadn’t even been aware it was happening.
She’d had a lot of time to think about that, too. It was uncomfortable emotional work, but she’d made herself look at her responses to Tate—and her willingness to ignore signs—assuming it was due to her lack of prior relationships. While it had become comforting—and way too comfortable—to wallow in those memories, she had to acknowledge this one paid dividends. Not only had they discussed Sand Springs Lake and Tate had made that weird comment about secrets, he had swung back around to that discussion after sex. And he’d mentioned loving the lake and spending time there as a kid.
If he’d loved it then, it stood to reason he’d love it as an adult. And he’d equally recognize that a lake used by summer camps didn’t have a lot of need for the area once the weather turned cold.
A secluded lake would be highly beneficial for his purposes. It kept him close enough to Grand Rapids to get in and out of the city for business, and it kept him secluded enough to manage his dirty deeds far away from the notice of law enforcement.
A heavy thud echoed through the walls and Sadie heard the harsh laughter of Tate’s goons. She still hadn’t gotten names for either of them so had dubbed them Fred and Barney for lack of anything better. The names had fit if for no other reason than one was big and brutish-looking and the other was spark-plug short, with a round barrel chest and empty eyes.
She’d filed away other details, too. They spent minimal time with her, bringing in her food and ignoring any question she asked. It was eerie how they were able to be present yet completely absent.
Harlequin Romantic Suspense December 2020 Box Set Page 2
