Dream of Danger (A Brown and De Luca Novella) Read online

  When he hung up, Mason relayed the gist of the conversation to me. “They’ve searched her apartment, and they’ve got a digital forensics expert going over her laptop. So far there’s nothing that seems like it might relate. They also had a detective talk to Mel’s wife. She says he was home all night, from 9 p.m. on.”

  “Did they tell her why they were asking?”

  “Chief didn’t say. I didn’t ask. It doesn’t really matter to us at the moment.”

  “Amy left her place at eight-fifteen,” I said. “That’s forty-five minutes when dickhead was unaccounted for.”

  “I thought of that.”

  “And?”

  “The pickup was at the gas station at 9:36. Amy’s photo was taken at 9:43. He couldn’t have been in the truck if he was home with his wife more than an hour away at 9 p.m.”

  I nodded slowly, my brain turning in circles. “I wish I could’ve asked her myself. I’d know if she was lying.”

  “So do I. That’s why I had Chief Sub text me her number.” I blinked at him. “Think you can read a person from a phone call? Even when you’re not face-to-face?”

  Fto m"” I blI shrugged. “One way to find out. Give me your phone.”

  He handed it over. I located the text message and started keying the number into my phone, but he dropped a hand over mine. “Use mine. Let me talk and I’ll put her on speaker. At least I have an official reason to call her. You don’t.”

  “And you’d get in trouble for giving me her number, huh?”

  “Unless you were an official police consultant.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You’re like Myrtle with a steak over this, you know that?” At mention of Myrt, I looked into the backseat. She was sitting up, snout out the back window, tongue lolling, happy as hell to be taking such a long car ride, though she was going to need a bathroom break soon.

  I tapped the keys of Mason’s phone, but before I finished dialing, it rang. I hit the speaker button and held the phone toward him.

  “This is Mason Brown,” he said.

  “Mason, they’ve got a hit on that pickup. It’s parked at a motel off the highway.”

  “Where?” Mason asked.

  “Hilltop Motor Lodge in a town called Harry’s Hill.”

  I looked up when he said it. We were driving past a sign that read Harry’s Hill, 10 Miles. We were practically there. Minutes. Minutes away from Amy. She’d damn well better be okay when we got there.

  * * *

  Mason floored it, and even then it was the longest eight minutes of my life. But eventually we were pulling into the motel parking lot. We were the closest, because we’d already been heading in the right direction. The troopers were still miles away. On their way, but another fifteen minutes out, Mason said. He chose an empty parking spot a good distance away from the white truck. I saw him check his gun as he got out.

  “Got a spare for me?”

  “No.” He was a liar. There was one in the glove compartment. I made note of which pocket he put his keys in, in case I needed to snatch them and head back here to grab it. He didn’t lock the car, but I knew he kept that glove box secure. It was locked. No question.

  We got out and walked carefully closer to take a look at the pickup, watching the area around us and trying not to be obvious. It had various tools in the bed. Hammer. Chains. When Mason felt the hood for heat, he dragged his hand over it real slow. It was almost 2 p.m. Checkout time, according to the big sign out front, was two-thirty. Odd checkout time, if you asked me, but it was a little hole-in-the-wall place. Not a chain. If they were still here, and they must be, they’d be coming out soon. But which room? There were three doors close enough to where the white truck was parked to qualify. And if they were trying not to be found, they might not even have parked near their own room.

  “Go to the office,” Mason said. “Ask which room is assigned to this plate number.”

  “You go,” I said. “They’re not gonna tell me anything. I don’t have a badge.”

  “You do now.” He pulled out his badge and tossed it to me. I caught it. Damn him.

  I jogged over to the motel office, went inside and hit the bell on the counter nonstop until a woman with curly white hair arrived and sent me an I’ve-never-seen-anyone-so-rude look. I flipped the badge open and said, “I don’t have time to mess around. Whi Ks a sench room is assigned to that white pickup out there?”

  The woman blinked and altered her attitude. She flipped open her registration book and ran her finger down a column. “The Whites. Mr. and Mrs. She waited in the truck. Is something wrong? What’s going on?”

  “One man?” I asked. “I was told there were two.”

  “No. One man, all alone, and a woman, like I said.”

  One man. So the other one was either hiding or had been dropped off along the way. “Was the woman okay? When’s the last time you saw her?”

  “Last night, when they checked in. I told you, she stayed in the truck.” Then she frowned. “She in trouble?”

  “Can I have a spare key to room two?”

  Nodding, she scrambled to take one from a drawer that sounded full of them. She was alarmed. Her pupils were wide and her cheeks red. I could tell that she was already regretting that she hadn’t noticed anything amiss, thinking she should have. “Thanks, ma’am,” I said. “You stay inside now.” I sounded like a real cop just then. I headed back outside, key in hand, marched right up to Mason and handed it to him. “Room two.”

  “All right. Stay here.”

  “Give me the car keys. I want to put the heat on for Myrtle.”

  “For crying out loud, Rachel, I can’t let you have a gun. Someone gets shot with my gun in your hands, it’ll be my shield.”

  “All right, all right.” Damn him for knowing exactly what I was up to.

  I moved up beside the door to room two. I put my back to one side and he put his back to the other, his gun raised. Then he knocked.

  “What the fuck, Mason? You’re knocking?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Open up. Police.”

  No response. Mason stuck the key in the lock, turned it and shoved. The door swung slowly inward. He held a flat hand toward me and mouthed Wait here. Then he swung around and into the room, gun first.

  When I didn’t hear anything, I ignored his warning and moved in behind him, but I knew as soon as I stepped through the doorway that the room was empty.

  I could feel it.

  Amy wasn’t there.

  * * *

  The bed was rumpled. A nylon gym bag sat on the floor beside it, unzipped and gaping. Inside I glimpsed some clothes, maybe a shaving bag. We’d go through it later. Or the cops would.

  On the nightstand there was a half-eaten bag of chips, barbecue style; an open Pepsi can, probably from the machine outside the office; and an overflowing ashtray. The closets and drawers were empty. Apparently the kidnappers liked living out of their bags.

  Then we went into the bathroom. Its tiny window was open, curtain flapping in the breeze. I frowned as I turned to look at Mason, but my eyes fell instead on the toilet—more specifically, on the water pipe that led from the floor up to the toilet tank. Because there was a set of handcuffs attached to it. One end was locked around the pipe. The other end lay open on the bathroom floor.

  Mason saw me staring and turned, then dropped to one knee over a small bent piece of shiny metal on the floor near the cuffs. Kr t-1"“What the hell is that?”

  I bent, too. Then I smiled a little. “It’s Amy’s nose ring.” Everything snapped into place. “She must’ve convinced him to let her use the bathroom in private. He probably cuffed her to the pipe. She took out her nose ring, straightened it out, and used it to pick the lock. Then she climbed out the window.”

  “Amy knows how to pick locks?”

  “Yes. And way not the point, Detective. When her kidnapper figured it out, he must’ve gone after her.”

  I didn’t need to tell him that. He was already leaning out the window, examining wh
atever signs they’d left behind. Then he took me by the hand and ran back through the motel room and out the door and around to the back. “There,” Mason said, pointing. “You can see where the grass is trodden down.” He took off running, and I ran along behind him.

  As I tried to keep up, I looked all around us and it hit me how isolated this place was. There was the motel, but not much else in sight. A scrubby weed patch beside it and a wooded lot beyond that. Far in the distance, I could see a big Mobil gas station sign, standing on a tall pole so it could be seen from the highway, but it had to be a half mile away.

  I tried to think what I would do in Amy’s situation, and realized I would head for cover first and people second. First the woods, then from there I’d make my way toward that gas station or whatever else might turn out to be closer.

  We hit the scrub lot and headed across it. I poured on the speed and caught up with Mason. “She’ll head for the trees, then the gas station, and she’ll zigzag to try to confuse him.”

  “She’s smart, then.” He glanced back at me as we entered the woods. “Like you.”

  And right then, while he smiled at me as if he meant it, something crashed down onto Mason’s head. As he collapsed and my blood went cold, I looked up to see a man standing there holding a tire iron. The man I’d seen in Amy’s photo, getting out of that pickup truck.

  “Dammit, I think you killed him.” I dropped to my knees, laying my body over Mason’s and making a whole lot of female hysteria type sounds while I slid his gun from his hand and up underneath my coat, tucking it into my jeans in front and pulling my sweater over it to hide its presence. “You did, you killed him! You killed him!”

  Mason was breathing. His heart was beating. But his head was busted up pretty badly, and he was bleeding. The guy had hit him with a crowbar. A fucking crowbar. I wanted to rip out the bastard’s tonsils.

  The attacker grabbed my shoulder. “Get up, woman.”

  I straightened, mentally counting the minutes between us and the state cops, and wondering if they’d figure out where we were. Should’ve sent them a text or something. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

  “Turn around, lemme have a look atcha.”

  I turned slowly. The guy was short and solid as a brick. Dark brown hair in messy tufts. I watched his face. He wasn’t nervous. In fact, he seemed happy. His smile was slow. “Two for one,” he said. “Come on with me.”

  “Where the hell is Amy?” I asked him. “What have you done with her?”

  He made a big show of thinking, his lips tightening in a big thoughtful pucker he probably thought was cute but wasn’t. “Who the hell is Amy?” I frowned, but he just shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Come on, youwere K onught was cre comin’ with me now.”

  That was exactly what I planned to do, because he was going to take me to Amy, and then I’d get her the hell away from him, come back here and get some help for Mason.

  He grabbed my arm and we started walking, but then Mason groaned and the guy stopped in his tracks. “I thought you tol’ me he was dead?” Turning and pulling out a huge handgun at the same time, he leveled it on Mason.

  I clasped my hands together and brought them up from below, hitting his arm so hard his shot went skyward. I had Mason’s gun barrel pressed to his forehead before he could bring it down again. Not bad for a formerly blind chick, I thought, thanking the fates for adrenaline-enhanced reflexes. Reaching up with my free hand, I took his weapon away, pushed the safety and stuffed the gun into the back of my jeans.

  “On your knees, fuckwad.”

  He dropped to his knees.

  “Where is Amy?” I still had the gun to his head, and when he shook it and shrugged, I said, “The girl you kidnapped. The girl who outsmarted you and escaped out the bathroom window. Where is she?”

  “Oh.” Then he nodded in the direction we’d been heading.

  I looked that way. Something was shuffling around in the brush, and I heard muffled sounds. “Amy?”

  Something moved in my peripheral vision. My prisoner, lunging upward and swinging his arm in a deadly arc, a giant fucking bowie knife in his fist. I tried to duck and bring the gun back around at the same time, but it was as though everything was happening in slo-mo. I had this brief moment of knowing this was it. This was how I was going out. It had been such a short run.

  Suddenly there was an earsplitting gunshot and the guy jerked forward, landing right on me, knocking me flat onto my back. And then he just laid there, bleeding all over me.

  A second later he was dragged off. Mason flopped him onto his back, checked for a pulse, shook his head, then took my hands and pulled me to my feet. “When you take a prisoner, you always pat him down for weapons. You always secure him with cuffs. Rope. A belt. Duct tape. Whatever you can find. And you never, never turn your back on him.”

  “Got it. Where the hell did that gun come from?”

  “Always carry a spare weapon.”

  “I’m gonna need to write all this down.”

  He smiled softly, hands on my shoulders now. “You okay?” He started brushing twigs off my back and out of my hair, eyeballing the blood on my jacket. The worry in his eyes was real, and it hit me where I lived. He really cared about me.

  “It’s his blood, not mine,” I said, my voice all gruff and gritty. “And yes, I’m okay. You?”

  “I think I need my head examined. Hurts like a bitch.”

  “You’ve needed that for a while now, so it’s as good a time as any.” I looked at his head, then his eyes, worrying his skull was fractured or he’d die or something, and thinking how much I’d hate that. “Thanks for saving my life,” I said. “Again.”

  “Thanks for saving mine. Again.”

  He stared into my eyes for a long minute. I thought he was going to kiss me. But then that shuffling sound came again, and we both turned to see Amy, hog-tied with tape over her mouth, moving inchworm style into Krm th our line of sight.

  “Amy!” I let go of Mason and ran to her, then hugged the shit out of her before I even began untying her.

  Chapter Eight

  At seven forty-five on Thanksgiving night, we delivered Amy, safe and sound, into the bosom of her family. Her mom had held off on serving dinner until she arrived. Amy was bruised from fighting nonstop with her abductors but only a little worse for wear. And fear. The second man had been dropped off shortly after they’d taken her at knifepoint from the side of the road. Mason thought her abductors had probably done something to her tire at that gas station, when one of them had been out of camera range for a while. The guy who’d taken Amy to the hotel had been waiting for something. Or someone. He’d called her Venora once, then got all kinds of pissed off when she said her name was Amy. Otherwise, we had no clues. But we’d keep digging.

  Meanwhile Amy was safe and, technically, home in time for dinner, just as I’d promised.

  So Mason and I sat at a food-laden table with cranberry-scented tapers burning between us as the turkey was passed around. And I knew, now that Amy was safe, that we were going to have a hard time keeping our hands off each other on the way home. And I knew, too, that it was no better an idea now than it had been before.

  I walked him to his Monte Carlo with dessert still on my breath.

  The clouds had cleared. It was the starriest night I had ever seen. Literally. He turned around and leaned back against the driver’s side, crossed his arms over his chest and gazed up at the sky.

  “You’re staying the night here, aren’t you?”

  My damn heart hurt. “Amy asked me to. I think it’s for the best, don’t you?”

  “You mean because if you ride home with me we’re gonna wind up having sex again?”

  “That’s a clinical way to put it.”

  “How do you want me to put it?”

  I heaved a giant sigh, then leaned back against the car beside him. Like him, I looked at the stars. “We can’t work together and keep our hands off each other.”

  “No, probably not,” he conceded.
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  “So you get why there’s no point in me applying as some kind of consultant.”

  “I get it.” He turned sideways. I did, too. “Doesn’t mean I like it.”

  “I just need time.”

  He put his hands on my shoulders. I put mine on his waist. “I know you do,” he said. “So do I.”

  “So we agree, then.” He pulled me right up against his chest, and I felt like a peanut butter cup on a sunny dashboard. “We’re not ready yet.”

  “No, we’re not.” I tipped my head up and closed my eyes.

  “Not just yet,” he whispered, warm breath on my lips.

  He kissed me. It was heaven and hell all wrapped into one. I told myself to take my time. Three months I’d had my sight back, give or take. Three months he’d been his mother’s only son, his nephews’ surrogate father and the cop who’d hidden the suicide note-slash-confession of the most notorious serial killer ever to hit Broome County. His brother.

  We needed time.

  He pulled his mouth from mine. I felt like crying. “You’re no good for me, Detective. You make me feel like some kind of hormonal teenager.”

  “It’s mutual.” He took my chin in his hand. “Happy Thanksgiving, Rache.”

  “You, too, Mason.”

  And then he got into his car, started it up and drove away.

  I stood there looking at the horizon long after it had swallowed him up.

  “Hey, Rachel!” Amy called from somewhere near the front porch. I couldn’t look away from the last spot I’d seen that ugly Monte Carlo’s ass end. In another second or two she was standing next to me, anyway. “That Thanksgiving you were secretly wishing for just...happened. Did you notice that?”

  “It sorta did, didn’t it?”

  She nodded. “It’s almost like some of that stuff you write about is actually true.”

  I shrugged, noncommittal. I was feeling something new tonight. Something small and deep, like a seed just starting to split open. I didn’t want to stop feeling it to focus on anything else.