Striking Distance (31 page)

“I’ll get on the phone with Miami and Detroit now.”

“I’m catching a cab to the newspaper. I’ll stay with Laura until we can figure this shit out. Whoever he is, he’s still out there, and that means she’s still in danger.”

Javier ended the call, then dialed Laura’s cell.

No answer.

He left a message. “Laura, stay at the newspaper. Don’t go anywhere. Stay away from the windows. The man in the footage is not Edwards. I say again, stay at the paper. I’m on my way.”

He checked his Walther PPS and secured it in his shoulder holster. The fit wasn’t perfect, but since he didn’t have his SIG, it was going to have to do. Then he grabbed the spare key that Laura had left him, picked up the CD, and headed down to the street.

* * *

LAURA LET THE
call go to voice mail, the traffic on I-25 demanding her full attention. Holly had a theory that Denver’s infamous Mousetrap was actually a psychology experiment gone awry, and this morning, Laura thought Holly might be right. There certainly seemed to be enough road rage going around.

“Hey!” She braked to avoid colliding with a car that had just cut across three lanes of traffic, heading for the I-70 exit. “Idiot.”

Twenty minutes later, she found herself staring at an expanse of undeveloped land. Surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, it had probably once been pastureland. Now it was simply vacant, its scant cover of grass dry and brown. Realizing she must have made a wrong turn, she read through the directions once again, only to find that she’d followed them precisely. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time that her browser’s maps app had been incorrect.

She stopped the car and saw that the call she’d missed had come from Javier, who had left a voice mail. Afraid she was going to be late to her meeting with Mr. Hollis, she dialed Joaquin first, hoping he’d had better luck with his GPS. His phone had just begun to ring when she heard the sound of an approaching engine. Thinking it might be him, she looked up—and saw a black van hurtling directly toward her.

There was no time to react, no time to be afraid. The van hit her head-on with bone-crunching force, knocking the breath from her lungs, as something hit her hard in the face—the air bag.

Stunned, she struggled to regain her breath, reaching for her cell phone, which had flown out of her hand and lay on the passenger-side floor along with the contents of her purse, including her loaded SIG.

Then a man jumped from the van.

In his hand was a rifle.

CHAPTER

29

JAVIER REACHED THE
newspaper to find that Laura wasn’t there. With a knot of dread in his chest, he tried to reach her on her cell again.

No answer.

He looked out across a busy newsroom. “I need to know where Laura is.”

No one seemed to be sure.

Sophie looked over at him, still typing. “She left about a half hour ago. I think she went to meet Joaquin for a photo shoot with one of the soldiers for her VA story. Try reaching her on her cell.”

He felt his teeth grind with the effort not to shout. “I need to find Laura
now
. Her life is in danger, and she’s not answering her cell.”

That had their attention.

Javier was used to giving orders and having them obeyed. He instinctively fell back on that. “Sophie, call Joaquin. Find out whether Laura is with him and where they were supposed to meet.”

Sophie nodded.

Javier walked over to the desk he assumed was Laura’s—the one with balloons—and looked for a notepad that might have an address or phone number. There were several manila folders, pages of transcribed interviews, handwritten notes and spreadsheets, but no address. He roused her computer from sleep and found what he was looking for—a maps application showing an address and directions. “Is this hooked up to a printer?”

“It should come out there.” A red-haired man pointed to a bank of laser printers on the other side of the room.

Javier clicked P
rint and retrieved the page from the printer, half-listening to Sophie, who was speaking with Joaquin now.

A big man with curly gray hair stepped out from behind a closed office door labeled “Editor.” Laura’s boss.

“What’s going on out—”

Javier met his gaze, held up a finger for silence, then looked over at Sophie, who’d just ended the call. “Sophie?”

“Joaquin says she went to meet with a veteran named Ted Hollis, but he can’t find the address she gave him. His GPS says it doesn’t exist. He admitted he hasn’t updated for a while. He’s tried calling Laura, too. No answer.”

Javier didn’t like this.

Wherever she was, Laura was alone.

He needed to get to her now. “I need to borrow a vehicle.”

“Someone want to tell me what the hell is going on?” the editor asked.

Sophie answered, her face pale. “Laura may be missing.”

Alex stood, tossed Javier a set of keys. “Take mine. It’s a black Chevy Tahoe. I gassed up this morning. There’s body armor and an AR-15 and two loaded thirty-round mags in the back.”

Javier wasn’t even going to ask why Alex carried all that shit. An asshole like him probably needed it for self-defense. He caught the keys. “Thanks.”

He was on his way downstairs when McBride called.

“You with Laura?”

“No. She’s not here. She left a half hour ago, and she’s not answering her cell.”

“Son of a bitch!” McBride brought him quickly up to date—and the news wasn’t good. “I pulled up the files on the other men involved in the shakedown scheme and called our Miami and Detroit offices. While I was on the phone, Edwards’s social worker caught sight of the files and pointed to one of the men—Theodore Kimball.”

“He’s the one who was declared dead.”

“Right, but his remains were never recovered. The social worker swears she saw him at Edwards’s place a few weeks back. He said he was Edwards’s old army buddy. She says he introduced himself as Ted, but didn’t give a last name.”

¡Puñeta!
Fuck!

Javier’s heart gave a single hard knock, fear flooding his veins like adrenaline. “The man Laura was supposed to meet is named Ted Hollis. I’ll bet my ass that’s him. I’ve got the address, and I’m on my way there now in a borrowed vehicle.”

Javier gave McBride the address and directions.

“That’s north of Denver in an undeveloped area of Adams County,” McBride said. “Hang for a minute, and I’ll pick you up in my car.”

“I can’t wait. If he’s got her, Laura doesn’t have much time.”

As he ended the call, the thought jabbed at him, a splinter in his mind.

She might already be dead.

* * *

“WAKE UP, LAURA.
Rise and shine. It’s time to die.”

At first, Laura thought she was dreaming, but dreams didn’t come with throbbing headaches. She struggled to open her eyes, panic threading sluggishly through her veins. The voice was familiar. But something wasn’t right.

Someone pulled her hair, forced her head up, and gave her head a little shake, pain making her scalp tingle and temples throb. “Open your eyes.”

A man’s blurred face swam into view, blue sky and steel beams above him.

Where was she?

She’d been on her way to meet Joaquin. She’d gotten lost. There had been open fields and then . . .

The black van.

It had struck her car, and a man with a rifle had come for her. Ether. He’d drugged her and dragged her away.

She’d been abducted again.

Blind terror surged through her, her heart slamming painfully in her chest, her eyes coming open. But she must still have been drugged. Nothing she saw made sense.

She was sitting tied to a chair in a room that had no ceiling, a building without a roof, nothing above her but steel girders and sky. In front of her was a partial wall with openings in the shapes of a wide door and windows that looked out onto a lake.

Was it some kind of partially constructed building?

A hand slapped her cheek, the pain sharp.

“There you are. Come on. Snap out of it.”

Ted Hollis.

She recognized his voice now.

He loomed over her dressed in olive-colored workman’s coveralls, blue nitrile gloves on his hands, and a baseball hat on his head with little lights sewn into the bill.

Infrared LEDs. The sniper.

Ted Hollis was the sniper.

Her pulse thrummed against her eardrums, fear making her sick to her stomach. Or maybe that was another side effect of the drug.

He reached for her face. “I guess I can take this off. There’s no one out here to hear you scream anyway, except for me, of course, and I enjoy that.”

He tore something from her mouth, pain making her gasp.

A piece of duct tape.

She swallowed, her mouth dry, whether from the ether or terror, she didn’t know. “Wh-where have you taken me?”

He smiled. “Don’t you recognize me, Laura?”

“Mr. Holl—”

“No, that’s just an alias.” He smiled, clearly satisfied with himself. “I’m Theodore Kimball, one of the soldiers whose lives you destroyed.”

Her mind raced, trying to put the pieces together. Wasn’t one of Edwards’s coconspirators named Theodore Kimball?

Yes.

So Ted Hollis was Theodore Kimball.

She fought her fear. She’d been through this before, and this time she was not going to let it break her. If this was her last hour on earth, she would live it as much on her own terms as she was able, no matter what he did to her. He wanted the satisfaction of seeing her afraid, the control of hearing her plead for her life, the thrill of seeing her buckle under his cruelty. Well, she wouldn’t give it to him.

And with that decision, she felt herself relax, her mind clearing.

“I understand now why you didn’t want Joaquin to take your photo.” It was perfectly clear in hindsight. “You were afraid I’d recognize you. There was no reason to worry. You have a forgettable face.”

“You may have forgotten my face, but I haven’t forgotten yours.” He took her chin roughly in his hand. “All these years of living off the grid, pretending to be dead—I thought about you every day.”

She jerked her chin away. “It’s a good thing you’ve had so much practice being dead, because by tonight you’ll be dead for real.”

He backhanded her, the blow leaving her dazed, the taste of blood filling her mouth. “Don’t threaten me, Laura. I’ve been a dozen steps ahead of the cops this entire time. They still haven’t figured out half the shit I’ve done to cover my tracks.”

“Like framing poor Ali Al Zahrani?” The startled look on his face told her she’d been right about that. “They know. They just haven’t made it public yet.”

He glared at her. “You’re lying.

“I was the one who figured it out. Those searches all took place when Ali was at work. He couldn’t have been responsible for them.”

There was a spark of alarm in Kimball’s eyes, but he quickly hid it behind a grin. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves. I haven’t yet told you what I plan to do with you. Aren’t you curious?”

Another attempt on his part to regain control.

“Let me guess. You want to kill me. Is that supposed to be a surprise? You’ve been trying—and failing—for weeks now.”

“Oh, much longer than that.”

A shiver slid down her spine at the tone of his voice.

“You and I are going to have a little conversation. After that, I’m going to kill you and set this house on fire. All of this is wired to blow at a touch of a button.” He held up a device with a gray button in its center and gestured toward gasoline cans she hadn’t noticed before. There were dozens of them, including one on each side of her chair. “Out the windows behind you, I have an unobstructed view of the only road into this development, so if the cops
do
show up, I’ll have to push the button early and let you burn alive. Either way, by the time help arrives, you’ll be incinerated.”

The thought of burning alive revived her fear, left her fighting panic. “You really need to listen to me and leave here while you can.”

“Did you give Al-Nassar a hard time, too? I doubt it.” Kimball leaned down and caught Laura’s face between his palms, forcing her to look straight into his eyes. “I’m the one who handed you over to him. It was me, Laura. Every time he raped you, every time he beat you, every time he humiliated you, that was
me
.

“
I
did those things to you.”

And Laura realized she was staring into the soulless eyes of a sociopath.

* * *

JAVIER CAME AROUND
the corner and saw Laura’s car just ahead.

¡Madre de Dios!

The front end was crumpled, the driver’s-side door wide open.

He glanced around, saw nothing and no one, just open fields. He drew his Walther and stepped out of the SUV, moving in on Laura’s vehicle. He knew he’d find one of two things—Laura’s dead body or nothing at all.

Keeping his distance—her car might be rigged to blow—he circled the vehicle. It was years of working as a special operator that kept steel in his spine, kept his stride deliberate and even. The SEAL part of him responded tactically, even while the man inside him wanted to shout for her, to tear the world down in a mad rush to find her.

She wasn’t there.

The breath left his lungs in a gust.

There was still a chance she was alive.

Hang on,
bella
.

He moved closer to the car, looking for blood or any sign of explosives. McBride had called him to fill him in on the details of Kimball’s service record. It seemed the bastard had tried and failed twice to make it into Army Special Forces before Laura’s investigation had ruined any chance he’d had of getting beyond regular enlisted ranks. Javier was willing to bet Kimball considered himself quite the operator—a strategist, a badass, a cold-blooded warrior. He did have some skills. He’d managed to fake his own death, to disappear and stay hidden for almost seven years. But he lacked experience and discipline—something Javier could use to his advantage.

Javier spotted Laura’s handbag on the passenger-side floor, her cell phone and .22 SIG beside it. And his hope that they’d be able to use her cell phone to locate her vanished.

¡Coño!
Damn it!

He noticed something on the dashboard—a wad of gauze. He reached for it, raised it to his nose, and caught the faint scent of . . .
ether
.

He called McBride. “I found her car at the address I gave you, but she’s gone. Her car is totaled. Her cell phone is here and her firearm, too. It looks like someone struck her head-on, then drugged her with ether. I see traces of black paint on her hood and front bumper. There’s no blood. I’m guessing he snatched her and ran.”

“Son of a bitch! I’ve already contacted the Adams County sheriff and put a BOLO out on Kimball. I’ll have units there in twenty minutes.”

“Does that social worker have any idea where he might be staying?”

“No, but we’ve been contacting every lodge, hotel, and no-tell motel in the Denver area in search of anyone fitting his description. So far we’ve found nothing.”

And then it struck Javier.

“You said this location is in Adams County. Where have I heard Adams County mentioned before?” Before McBride could answer, Javier remembered. “The dynamite. It was stolen from a construction site in Adams County, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, I think you’re right.”

“How far is that construction site from where I’m standing?”

“It’s going to take me a minute to dig that up.”

“Call me back when you find it. Send me that address as well as some kind of overhead view of the area.”

He ended the call and walked back to Carmichael’s SUV. In the rear storage compartment, he found a halfway decent Kevlar vest, an AR with seriously fucked optics, two loaded magazines, and about fifty spare rounds of 5.56. He carried them to the front seat of the vehicle, removed his shoulder holster, and strapped into the Kevlar. He’d just adjusted the shoulder holster and fastened it in place when his cell rang.

“Yeah.”

“The site is about a mile north of you, and, Corbray, I think you’re right. I diverted an Adams County traffic helo to do a distant flyby, and they spotted what looks like a black minivan parked between two of the houses.”

Laura was there. Javier knew it.

If she was still alive, she needed him now. If she wasn’t . . .

He couldn’t even consider the possibility.

Javier fought to stay on top of his own adrenaline, his own fear, checking the firearms. “I need to know more about that site.”

“The development is an old gravel mine that’s being converted into a lakefront community with luxury homes. The mine pit itself has already filled with groundwater. The houses aren’t completed yet. I’m sending you a satellite image now.”