They somehow got out of the shower without molesting each other again or making themselves late. When they got to work and Rhys wasn’t there, they weren’t alarmed.
At first.
When nine o’clock rolled past and there was still no sign of Rhys, that’s when they started trying to call him.
A dark, sickening feeling pulsed through Manny’s gut. Her instincts screamed at her to get in the car and go check the house. That this wasn’t a simple case of him forgetting to set a hotel alarm and oversleeping.
She suspected despite what she’d told him last night, despite her admonishments, he’d stayed home.
The look on Korbin’s face as he tried—and failed—to reach Rhys on his phone told her everything she needed to know.
For comfort, she reached behind her and touched the bulk of the gun in its holster under her shirt.
By nine twenty she’d waited as long as she could. She grabbed her purse. “Come on.”
He looked up from his desk, where he’d just tried, again, to reach Rhys. “Where?”
“Your house.”
“You said he went to a hotel.”
“No, I said I told him to go to a hotel, and he told me he would. I’d be willing to bet he stayed at home.”
A grim look washed over his face as he jumped up and raced for the office door.
Morning traffic had mostly lightened by the time they left campus. He pushed it and they made the turn onto their street in just under twenty minutes.
The dark, sickening feeling in the pit of her stomach took a whale-sized roll and threatened to return-to-sender the bagel and cream cheese she’d eaten for breakfast when she spotted Rhys’ car sitting in the drive.
“Fuck,” Korbin muttered.
She didn’t wait for him to shift the car into park. As soon as he’d pulled in next to Rhys’ car, she had the passenger door open, jumped out, and had her gun drawn as she headed for the front door in a crouch.
On the doormat lay a bulky, padded manila envelope with Korbin’s name written on it in a spidery hand in black ballpoint pen.
Korbin came up behind her, and she held up an arm warding him back. She pushed the doorbell and waited.
Nothing.
Trying the front knob, she found it unlocked and gently pushed the door open. The alarm didn’t beep.
“Rhys?” she yelled.
“What—”
“Shh!” She listened and heard nothing, but saw one of the dining room chairs was tipped over.
And Rhys’ glasses lay on the floor.
“Stay here,” she said.
“Do you want—”
“Stay the fuck here, keep quiet, and don’t touch that envelope!” She kept in a crouch and darted through the door, pointing the gun, clearing the entryway. There was no one in the living room area.
She ran through to the kitchen, staying low and glancing down the hall.
No one.
The back sliding glass door was also unlocked. There was a towel lying discarded on the floor.
Ducking down behind the counter, she checked the safety on the gun again. “Rhys? You in here?”
Nothing. Her gut told her the house was empty, but she would clear it methodically, ensuring he wasn’t lying hurt in one of the rooms…
Or dead.
With her pulse racing so fast it felt like one solid beat, she quickly swept through the rest of the house. Dirty clothes lay on the floor of Rhys’ room, clothes he’d had on the day before at work.
Fuck.
She set the safety again and reholstered her gun before returning to the front foyer.
Korbin must have read it in her eyes. He shook his head. “Fuck!”
She pinched a corner of the envelope and picked it up from where it lay on the front mat. Inside, a hard, small bulk with a little weight to it.
“Do we call the police?” he asked.
She stared at the envelope. “Not yet. Come in and close the door.”
After walking over to the table, she righted the chair and laid the envelope on the table. “I need either latex gloves or a zip-top bag or something and a very sharp knife.”
“Why?”
She glared at him, sending him scurrying to the kitchen. He returned a moment later with a filet knife and a gallon-sized zip-top bag. She slipped her left hand into the bag and used it to hold the envelope steady. Working slowly, she stuck the tip of the knife under the flap and sliced the end open. Then she grabbed the other end of the envelope and tipped it, allowing the contents to slide out onto the table.
A flip-type cellphone, a prepaid disposable one, with a yellow sticky note attached to it in the same handwriting.
Check the pics, video, and texts. We’ll be in touch. No cops or he dies.
Working carefully with her covered left hand, and with Korbin looking over her shoulder and telling her what to do, she opened the phone and hit the menu button and navigated to the media menu.
In the pictures they saw Rhys tied to a chair, not at the men’s house, his face bruised.
The video opened with him tied to the chair. In the background, offscreen, they heard a woman’s soft voice say, “It’s going.”
It only lasted for fifteen seconds or so. Just enough time for Manny to feel a toxic coagulation of rage and fear mixing in her gut and wanting to explode.
“Do we call the cops?” he asked.
“Not yet,” she whispered.
He told her how to navigate to the texts. There were three, from a number she suspected also led to a prepaid phone.
We want Artemis. Copy it onto external hard drive.
Text us at this number when you have it.
We will trade him for the hard drive. Cops and he dies.
Her hand trembled so badly she had to set the phone down on the table.
“What do we do?” he asked.
She fought the urge to let out a visceral, howling scream of rage and fear. Forcing herself to keep her voice low, she said, “We go talk to Don Aster.”
Chapter Twenty
She didn’t know what her next step would be if Aster wasn’t home. Korbin refused to stay in the car and followed her upstairs to the apartment.
Without any finesse, she pounded on the door with her left fist while drawing her gun with her right. When he opened the door, she brought the gun up into Aster’s face and marched him back into the apartment.
“Where is he, you fuck?”
His eyes went wide, hands up. “What? What the fuck? What the hell? Korbin? What’s going on?”
She backed him up against the wall beside the kitchen doorway, the muzzle of her gun touching his nose. “Rhys. Where is he?”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about!”
From the front corner of the living room, she heard a baby let out a squeal. She let her gaze dart to the playpen before refocusing on Aster.
“Korbin. Take the baby in back.”
“What?”
“Take the goddamned baby into the back of the apartment. A bedroom or something. Now. Get him out of here.”
He ran over to the playpen, scooped up the little boy, and raced from the room.
“Now,” she said, pressing her gun into the center of his forehead. “We got the little fucking message you and your asshole buddies left at the house last night. I want to know where the fuck Rhys is, and I want to know now, or so help me to fucking god I will paint the wall with your brains. Don’t think I won’t.”
“I don’t fucking know! I swear! I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
Korbin returned and held up the phone. They’d forgone worrying about fingerprints. If she didn’t end up in jail for pulling a gun on Aster, then tampering with evidence was the least of her concerns.
If it meant they got Rhys back safely, she’d gladly face prosecution for it.
“You don’t know anything about this phone?” she asked.
“No! Jesus, please don’t hurt me!”
Kor
bin opened it to the text messages and showed them to him. She allowed Aster to turn his head just enough to look, keeping the muzzle of her gun pressed against his temple to ensure his compliance. Then Korbin showed the picture of Rhys.
He gasped. “Fuck! I swear, I don’t have anything to do with this!”
“Play the video,” she said.
He did. When the woman’s voice spoke, Aster gasped again. “Oh, shit.”
“What?”
“Play it again.”
Korbin did.
“Tell me,” Manny ordered. “What did you hear?”
“I swear, I’m not involved in this…but I think that sounds like Kim.”
* * * *
She let Korbin bring the baby back into the living room and put him in the playpen, but she made Aster sit in one of the chairs. Aster had a roll of duct tape in a kitchen drawer, and Manny took a few turns around his torso, legs, and arms to bind him to the chair. She kept her hand on her gun in its holster as a reminder that she wasn’t fucking around.
“I swear, I don’t know what’s going on,” Aster said. “But I know where Kim was as of last night.”
“Where?”
He nodded toward a notepad sitting on the card table. On it, he’d written an address in Largo. “She called me late last night. Told me I had to come get Cullen from her. Wouldn’t say why. She sounded scared. When I got there, she came outside and wouldn’t let me in the house or tell me what was going on.”
“You’re sure that’s her voice on there?”
He nodded. “I’m pretty sure, yeah.”
“What now?” Korbin asked.
She didn’t want to leave her gun with Korbin. Not only didn’t he know how to shoot, she knew she might need it for the next stage. “You stay here. He tries to get free, you fucking beat the shit out of him. Give me your keys.”
He fished them out of his pocket. “Where are you going?”
“I’m not going to tell you. Plausible deniability.” She headed for the door, but turned before leaving. “If I’m not back in two hours, call Ormond, tell him to call my boss, Rob, and tell him where you are and what’s going on.”
“But I don’t know where you are.”
She nodded toward the notepad. “They’ll figure it out. Don’t worry.”
She flew down the stairs to the parking lot and jumped in Korbin’s car. She had to make sure. She had to know he was there instead of wasting time on a wild goose chase that might get Rhys killed.
The neighborhood was an older one, with most of the homes built between the sixties and early seventies. Mature jacaranda and oak trees provided a moderate amount of shade in some places while old queen and sable palm trees stood tall in others.
The houses ranged from well cared-for homes to places that looked like they’d benefit from a bulldozer and a flamethrower. A few of the yards sprinkled here and there were showcase-worthy, predictably attached to the better-kept homes. The rest were just average, or even in desperate need of TLC.
She cruised past the house first. It was one of the homes closer to the bulldozer category. The garage door was rolled down but sat slightly askew with a good foot-tall gap at the higher end, meaning it’d probably been years since a car had seen the inside of the structure. Four cars—two of them beaters that looked to be on their last legs but bearing current tags—sat parked in the driveway. Manny tossed any distant hope she’d had of trying to rescue him herself.
The rest of the neighborhood looked relatively workday deserted. Most of the other houses in the immediate vicinity didn’t have any cars sitting in the driveways. Knowing she had to verify it, she picked a house with an empty driveway three down from the target house and pulled in.
She had no good cover story as, heart pounding, she walked up to the front door and rang the bell. If anyone answered, she’d say she was answering a Craigslist ad to buy something and then check her phone and pretend to have gotten the address mixed up.
Fortunately, she didn’t have to go that far. No one answered after she rang again, and then knocked. No dogs barked inside, either.
The house on the other side, closer to the target, sat with a for sale sign in the yard and an empty driveway. Three free papers in plastic bags lay in the driveway. She ducked between the houses and headed behind the vacant house. One house lay between her and the target. Fortunately, the backyards weren’t fenced in, and behind them was a wooded swale separating them from the houses behind that. The house between them had an overgrown and unkempt backyard. Three different bougainvillea bushes towered nearly as high as the eaves, and a sea grape bush even higher than that.
Moving fast, she kept low and hurried to crouch behind the sea grape bush.
The house now sat within ten feet of her. All the blinds were closed in the windows closest to her. The screens of the small back porch were ripped and slowly waved in the morning breeze. Grass stood knee-tall in the back, even though the front yard looked like it had been mowed in the last week or so.
She listened for voices or any noise and heard nothing from the house.
A debate waged within her. Go to the front door and use the Craigslist excuse again and risk them either recognizing her from any surveillance they might have done, or risk spooking them just by showing up at all. Or…not. Or take a chance skulking around the back of the house and see if she could find out anything that way and risk them seeing her.
She had to be sure.
As if making up her mind for her, her feet started forward toward the back side of the house. She quickly ducked around the back porch and pressed herself against the dirty stucco wall and waited to see if any alarms were sounded inside.
Nothing.
Creeping slowly, she worked her way toward a large set of windows just past the sliding glass doors attached to the back porch. That probably indicated living room.
Now she could hear a TV inside, either news or a talk show, she wasn’t sure. Below that, the sound of at least two or three men talking, she wasn’t sure.
And a woman’s voice.
The next window over was smaller and higher, but not frosted. The brown, cheap plastic horizontal blinds were bent and malformed, as if a spastic cat had tried to catch a fly through them, and drawn open. Probably a kitchen window over a sink. She slowly worked her way toward it and stood. She would just barely be able to see inside it.
Taking a deep breath, she slowly leaned in, just enough that she could look through with one eye. To her left, where she’d guessed the living room was located, four men and a woman sat or stood, talking, facing a TV. Off to the side, Rhys sat tied to a chair, duct tape over his mouth.
Her pulse exploded in her veins as she ducked low again, out of sight. Before she realized it, her gun was in her hand.
No.
Forcing herself to stay still for a moment, until the rage subsided a little and she could think again, she remained in place.
It wouldn’t do anyone any good, especially Rhys, if she kicked in the sliders and got herself shot by the bastards.
Or got Rhys shot.
After sliding the gun back into her holster, she raced across the backyards and returned to her car.
When she burst into the apartment, Korbin wheeled around to stare at her.
“Well?”
She nodded at Korbin. “Now we make calls.”
After making the calls, she released Aster from the chair. In less than thirty minutes, she had Rob and Ormond standing in Aster’s living room. Korbin played the video for them.
Manny didn’t like the grim look on Rob’s face, but she understood it. “You should have called the cops as soon as you found this, Manny. You know that. And then when you got the confirmation from Aster, and then when you went to the house. Three times you handled stuff you should have called law enforcement for.”
“Yeah, and have them fumbling around taking reports and scaring everyone underground and possibly getting Rhys killed!”
“Manny, a word in privat
e, please,” Rob said, leading her back to a bedroom. When they were alone with the door closed, he asked in a low tone, “What’s going on between you and Temple and Gilyard?”
She felt her face heat, something she loathed. “It’s…personal.”
“You were a cop. You know the laws, or, at least, you should. We have to call the sheriff’s office and get the official ball rolling.”
She nodded.
He let out an aggravated sigh. “I’ve got a friend, a detective. I’ll call him and get the report filed, get a hostage team dispatched.”
She nodded.
Twenty minutes later, all of them were heading toward a shopping center less than a mile from the address, where the deputies would prepare to stage their raid. Aster and Cullen, the boy in his car seat, rode with Rob.
Manny drove Korbin’s car. On the ride over to the shopping center, Korbin reached across the seats and laid a hand on her thigh. “It’ll be okay.”
She covered his hand with hers. She didn’t have the faith he did.
It took a nerve-wracking fifteen minutes to go over everything again with the captain in charge of the operation. They waited while he interrogated Aster and confirmed the house’s location and layout on a map with Manny.
They all had to stay behind with two other deputies, listening to radio traffic as the team went in and scoped the house.
Then the call to make the entry, along with a suddenly flurry of activity over the radio.
“Shots fired! Shots fired!”
Manny didn’t realize she was gripping Korbin’s hand until she looked down and saw his fingers clasped around hers.
After a couple of minutes, another call. “All clear. Need ambulances. Two suspects DOA, two suspects injured. Another suspect in custody.”
She closed her eyes and fought the urge to hold her breath until she heard the information she desperately needed to know. Rob walked over and placed a hand on her shoulder and squeezed.
Aster, holding Cullen, walked closer and waited with the rest of them, listening.
Another long minute later, “Subject successfully recovered. Pass along he’s injured, but ambulatory.”
Manny didn’t bother holding back her tears of relief.