Innocent Prey (A Brown and de Luca Novel) (20 page)

He shrugged.

“And I was thinking that you
don’t
want it. And you wouldn’t be happy in it. And that if you were anybody else, I’d have been telling you to follow your heart. To do what you really
want
to do and not what you’re being told you should. But instead, I’m the one telling you what I think you should do, and I feel bad about that.”

“So...?”

I shrugged. “Do what’s gonna make you happy.”

He seemed to be waiting for me to say something more, but I didn’t know what, so I let it go at that. After a minute he nodded and returned to watching the boys.

“Will she be safe?” I asked.

“Who? Vanessa?”

“Yeah. How’s this gonna go down, Mason? I’m nervous as hell, not knowing.”

He frowned like he was surprised I wanted this level of detail, but then he said, “She’ll be safe. We’re outfitting her to look a little younger.”

I nodded. “Jeans, a T-shirt, cross trainers or army boots instead of anything remotely presentable.”

He blinked at me. “Where are you getting that?”

“Nieces, remember?”

“Oh. Well, not exactly. She’s gotta look young, but hooker young.”

“Hooker young,” I repeated, trying to visualize what that meant so I could costume myself appropriately when I took Cantone’s place. “So you’re just gonna... What? Drop her off on the corner and let her stand there all alone?”

“She won’t be all alone. We’ll be parked nearby. And we’ll follow when they pick her up.”

“So she’ll be...wearing a wire?” I had no idea if that was actually the correct term for it, or whether all the cop shows had it wrong.

“No, they might find a wire, and that could get her dead. But she is gonna plant a GPS on the vehicle as backup.”

I nodded. “How does she do that? Plant a GPS?”

“It’s magnetized. All she’s gotta do is slap it onto the vehicle someplace it won’t be seen right away.”

“Right. As they grab her.”

“Or right before. They don’t know that she knows she’s about to be abducted. She’s gonna lean over any cars that stop and proposition ’em like any hard-working street girl would do.”

“What if the guy’s a real john and not the kidnapper?”

“She pretends to change her mind or gets a phone call or something, and backs out of the deal. If he lets her walk away, he’s a regular perv looking to get his rocks off. If he
grabs
her, he’s our boy.”

“Or girl,” I said. “That nurse... She was a woman.”

He looked at me sharply. “That couldn’t really be verified from the footage. It was grainy, out of focus. Could’ve been a guy in drag.”

“If it had been a guy in drag, I think I’d have picked up on that. It’s unusual enough that it would’ve tripped my triggers.”

“But it didn’t.”

“No. So when he grabs her? Then what? You just let him?”

“Well, yeah. We’re close. We follow. But yeah, we have to let him take her to wherever they’re going so we can—” He stopped there, tipped his head a little bit. “You’re awfully interested in all this.”

“Well, of course I am.” I lowered my eyes, using my milk shake as an excuse. After a long pull, I said, “I’m an official police consultant. It’s my case.”

That made him smile, just as I’d intended. He wanted me to get excited about sleuthing. Or consulting. Or whatever it was I was doing. It was his passion, after all, solving crimes, protecting the innocent, tracking down the guilty. Rescuing damsels.

But it wasn’t mine.

And I wasn’t warming to it as I had led him to believe just now. In fact, the more I worked around crime and death and darkness, the better I liked making my living writing happy-happy, joy-joy books from the peaceful, safe haven of my own home.

* * *

Several hours later I was knocking at Vanessa Cantone’s hotel room door with two cups of Dunkin’ in a tray with a bag in between them. The DD approach was kind of becoming my all-purpose solution to any problem. I was supposed to be with the kids. But I’d pawned Josh, Jeremy and Myrtle off on my sister, Sandra. Misty had been delighted by the excuse to hang with Jeremy again so soon, and Sandra didn’t mind too much. She liked Jere. Had even told me she wished
he
had a twin, because the boys Christy had been bringing home lately were trouble with a capital
T.

When Cantone opened her door and peeked out at me, she lifted her brows, looked past me—for Mason, I knew—and then at me again. “What are you up to, de Luca?”

“Peace offering?”

“I didn’t know we were at war.”

“Even better. And since you liked the coffee so much, I brought you a pound.” I held up the bag. “And a couple of doughnuts for good measure.”

She pursed her lips, and I knew that she knew better, but she opened the door anyway. I walked in, looked around. No sign of anyone but her. That was gonna make this a whole lot easier. I set the coffee on the table in the corner of her hotel room. She’d made up her bed. There was an empty Walmart bag on it, with price tags and stickers on top of it and the clothes that went with them laid out nearby. A pair of skinny jeans, capri length. A super low-cut green cami, a push-up bra and a torn-up T-shirt that was either designed that way or bought secondhand from an extra in a zombie flick. I was betting on the latter. There was also a framed photo on the nightstand. A woman who wasn’t Vanessa, pretty and blonde and very pregnant, and standing beside her, the little girl I’d heard on the phone. I knew it without asking. Lilly.

“She looks just like I thought,” I said. “Is that your sister?”

“That’s my partner.”

I sent her a surprised look before I could cover it, and she muttered, “Some psychic.”

“You got that right.” I looked at the photo again and refrained from asking, “You’re having another baby?” because I didn’t want to hear “No, she swallowed a hot air balloon.”

Then I started to laugh and shook my head. “Damn,” I told her. “I was afraid you were gonna try to get into Mason’s pants. ‘Some psychic’ is right.”

“I read somewhere that negative, petty emotions block a person’s natural gifts,” she said, grinning now, relaxing a little.

“That sounds like something I would say,” I told her, wiping my eyes.

“You did. I’ve been reading you on my phone. Trying to figure you out.”

“Welcome to the club.” I picked up my cup, held it up to her. She picked up hers, tapped it against the rim of mine.

“Did you come to try to warn me not to go tonight?”

“Would it do any good?”

“No.”

“Then I’m not gonna try. But I figured I could still tell you anything I’ve seen that might help.”

“Seen? You mean...?” She tapped her forehead with a short, clean nail. “Seen?”

I nodded. “There are three girls. Stephanie and Lexus Carmichael and one I’m pretty sure is Sissy Dunham. I looked at the photos of all the missing girls, and she looks most like the one I...
saw.
” I had snapped pics of the file photos of Lexus and Sissy with my phone, and I showed them to her even though I knew she’d seen them before. Hell, I needed some kind of legitimate excuse to be here. “And there are two men. One just lurks out of sight, but I know he’s there. I feel him. That’s probably Jake Kravitz. And then there’s the one the girls call the Asshole, who seems to be doing most of the hands-on work from behind a ski mask. He’s white. Average build. You know, not lean and toned, but not fat, either. Five-ten or so. Always has a gun on him, and he’s real careful not to give the girls access to it. He doesn’t get too close to them.”

She was with me, intense and interested. She sipped her coffee and sat down on the bed opposite me. “This is good intel, if it’s accurate.”

“And harmless if it’s not.”

She reached for a little notepad by the phone, but I didn’t want her hands occupied, so I was ready for that. I tugged a folded piece of paper from my pocket, showed her, but didn’t give it to her. “I wrote it all down for you.”

She set her pen back down. “You get anything about where they are?”

“It’s underground. But not a cellar or basement. There’s no house over it. It’s kind of...round. I know that sounds unlikely, but...” I shrugged. “It’s in my note there.” Then I drank my coffee. Subliminally triggering her to drink hers. Half-gone. It would be enough.

“That’s all I’ve got.”

“If any of this pans out, I’ll pass out from shock, de Luca.”

She was going to pass out, all right. But not from shock. “Well, you know, some of it probably will and some won’t. It’s hit-and-miss with this stuff.”

She sighed, looked at her watch. “I gotta finish getting ready for this thing. I need to leave in...”

“About an hour. You want to ride over there together?”

She looked surprised that I had asked. “Sure. I’ve gotta hit the shower, though.” She slugged down most of the remaining coffee in a single gulp.

“Go ahead. I’ll wait in the lobby.” I got up to go.

“You can wait here if you want.” She opened the bathroom door and looked back at me, like she was more curious than before about what the hell I was doing here. Then she seemed to change her mind, went into the bathroom and closed the door.

“Some FBI agent,” I muttered.

As soon as I heard the water turn on, I went through the clothes she’d been wearing earlier in the day. I found her rental car key in her pocket and threw it into my purse. I didn’t think she’d make it even as far as her hotel room door with the amount of Ativan I’d put in her coffee, but better safe than sorry. Besides, if Mason saw my car pulling up when I was supposed to be home with the boys, he’d be on to me.

The pills had been Amy’s, prescribed right after her abduction last Thanksgiving to help with the post-traumatic stress. She’d brought them with her to house-sit for me in February, and then she’d left them in my medicine cabinet. I guess she hadn’t needed them again. I’d forgotten all about them until rummaging for something I could use to knock out Cantone, sure I’d find nothing and have to settle for Benadryl or just sabotaging her car. That little brown bottle had appeared like an answer to a prayer.

“Wish and it is granted,” I said softly. I’d done a little internet research to figure out how much to use. Risking my life to save hers wouldn’t be worth a lot if I killed her in the process. Besides, I only needed her out for an hour or so.

I rummaged through her purse, found the little electronic box she was supposed to attach to the bad guys’ vehicle and took her cell phone, too. Just for good measure, I unplugged the landlines and took the cords. She would never know what had happened until it was too late.

Then I changed into the clothes that were laid out on the bed. The jeans were skintight but otherwise comfy. The bra gave me cleavage I never knew I had, and the torn-up T-shirt hung strategically off one shoulder and had what looked like claw marks across the breast area to reveal said cleavage. Subtle. Not.

I used the Walmart bag to carry my own clothes and grabbed one of the doughnuts for the road. I heard the shower turn off, a little movement in the bathroom, and then it got really quiet in there, so I opened the door to take a quick peek.

Cantone was wrapped in a towel, sitting on the floor, sound asleep. I took pity and shoved a pillow between her head and the wall, and draped a blanket over her.

On my way out of the room, I hung the Do Not Disturb sign on her door.

* * *

About thirty minutes later I arrived. I’d driven Agent Cantone’s rental car. My brown hair was pulled around to one side, and my face was hidden beneath the low brim of a funky painter’s cap with a sequined peace sign on the front. I stayed out of the light, and pretended to study my fingernails as I waited for kidnappers to come and abduct me.

And I was shaking like a stray dog in a thunderstorm. How the hell had I reached the conclusion that this was the only solution? I didn’t fucking know. I knew that Vanessa Cantone’s little girl needed her mommy. Both of her mommies. Not to mention they had a baby on the way. And I’d seen Vanessa die. I’d seen it. I was never wrong.

Well, almost never. And not about things like that.

I’d made the right call. I’d seen what I’d seen for a reason, and here it was, handed to me on a silver platter. A reason. So that I could save the life of Vanessa Cantone. Mother and, who the hell knew, maybe soon-to-be Binghamton chief of police. And I wasn’t risking
my
life, because I hadn’t seen
me
getting killed in this thing.

Then again, I hadn’t seen me
not
getting killed, either. The way I figured it, you couldn’t ask for things, demand things, have them handed to you and then refuse to take them. Could you? I’d asked for there to be a reason for this. I’d asked to understand
why me?
And here were my answers, being handed to me.

* * *

Mason was inside the van with Rosie and Chief Sub, watching the GPS monitor, when Vanessa’s car pulled over a block away.

“Here she is,” Rosie said. “And here she comes.”

Vanessa’s car door opened and she got out, locked it and then started walking up the sidewalk. She didn’t wobble in the heels at all the way he’d expected her to.

After five steps he got a real good notion why.

“That’s not Cantone,” he said.

The other two men looked at him. He watched her move, the sway of her hips, the length of her stride, the swing of her arms, the bounce of her hair. He knew them all. Intimately. “That’s Rachel.”

“What?” The chief was looking at him like he was crazy. “Rosie, call Cantone.”

Mason started to get up, but Chief Sub clapped him on the shoulder. “Just wait. Rosie?”

“It’s ringing.” He held out the phone he’d used to dial Cantone’s number and hit the speaker button.

Mason watched the woman he knew better than any other stop walking and fumble inside the little purse on the long chain. She brought the phone to her ear. “Yeah?”

Mason snatched the phone from Rosie and yelled into it, “Rachel, what the hell are you doing?”

“I’ll explain later. Someone’s coming.” She clicked off and headed up the road toward the corner where Carlotta was supposed to have set up shop. A pair of headlights caught her, and a van slowed down and veered toward her.