The Doll (20 page)

Physical confirmation that they’d finally picked up Logan’s trail brought on the same adrenaline rush as the first crack of weapon fire in a combat zone.

Miles Bradford backed out of the bathroom doorway.

Jahan’s head ticked up in acknowledgment, and they tag-teamed the return, left everything undisturbed, and didn’t bother relocking on the way out.

In the vehicle, moving away from the office as quickly as was legally permissible, Jahan said, “What the hell? Why go through the trouble of wiping down the walls only to leave the pants in the bathroom?”

“Hurry, maybe. Or because they can come back and get the pants without worrying about leaving permanent DNA evidence.”

“Maybe they forgot them,” Jahan said. “Incompetent idiots, although they took whatever they’d had covering the floor. Tarp, I think, from the size of the area.”

Bradford rubbed palms over eyes. While he and Walker had been scoping out Veers Transport and the nearby warehouse, chances were Logan had been stashed at the office, and they’d missed him by only a few hours. “Bread crumbs,” he said. “A nice little fuck-you gift because they know someone’s coming after him.”

“You?”

“Yeah, who else?”

Jahan said, “If he’s being kept on the move, we could play musical hiding places for days and still not catch up.”

Bradford drew a breath and mentally rewound. Started from the beginning. Tore at the facts, the threads, allowed them to unspool and haphazardly pile. After a long while he said, “Based on the video footage, he’s not in any condition for them to keep moving him. I think they just held him at the office temporarily.”

“How so?”

“That wasn’t the way station,” Bradford said.

“Why take him there at all, then?”

“I don’t know. Logistics, maybe?” Bradford pointed right. “Stop at that gas station, will you? There’s a pay phone.” Pay phones: In a world of cell phones and wi-fi, they were a whole hell of a lot harder to find than they used to be.

Same as he’d done after finding Logan’s place trashed and bloodied, Bradford called in an anonymous tip. The chance of latents getting pulled out of Akman was definitely higher than in Logan’s place, but still iffy. At the least, the blood should match—assuming that with no obvious sign of foul play in the Akman office, the two city police departments would connect the dots in the first place.

Jahan, as if reading Bradford’s thoughts, said, “One of us could lay the map out for them, take the heat to see what they come up with.”

Bradford shook his head. “I can’t afford to lose anyone right now, and even if the prints do ping back, knowing who they belong to isn’t going to get us any closer to Logan.”

“We try the house?” Jahan said.

Bradford nodded. Last of the possible places to find Logan was the four-bedroom house, another fifteen minutes north. His gut told him going there would be a waste of time, because wherever the trafficking victims were stashed between buyers, it wasn’t going to be a house—at least not in the kind of neighborhood they were headed. But riding one wave of burnout after another meant he wasn’t thinking straight and so the need to be thorough overrode instinct.

Valley Ranch was to residential what Las Colinas was to business: a master-planned development, new and clean and cookie
cutter, further up the tracks and a continent away from the bare and toy-strewn yards that had backed onto Veers Transport. Jahan navigated turn by turn through streets of two-story brick facades, and tightly clipped lawns, yards treed with young switches that might, in a decade or two, provide some relief against the searing summer heat.

A block from their target, Jahan slowed. “Think they’re in?”

“Doubt it.”

Jahan said, “Front door, back door?”

“You’re in a suit,” Bradford said. “You get front. You can be Jehovah’s Witness.”

Jahan stared at him for a half-beat, turned back to the road, and said, “That’s fine, but you wear the tutu if we get anywhere near a dance studio.”

In response to the imagery, against his will, against the pressure inside his chest, the corners of Bradford’s lips turned up.

Jahan stopped the vehicle at the alley entrance. Bradford got out. “Meet you halfway,” he said, and stared after the SUV just long enough to ascertain where it went so he could find the getaway car in a hurry if needed. Then he turned and jogged the length of the alley to the back of the house, where an eight-foot board-on-board shielded the yard from prying eyes.

Bradford tapped randomly on the fence, testing for a bark, a growl, something to indicate a guarded area, but as expected, he was answered by silence. Veers Transport. Akman. Trucks. Slave trafficking. Not a whole lot to point to the kind of people with lives stable enough to provide even the basic nurturing needed to keep a yard dog alive, and there was nothing like a starving animal left outside, howling from hunger, to draw unwanted attention from the community.

Bradford tried the gate.

Locked.

No trees or shrubs peeked out from behind the fence planks, and the two-car garage door was shut. Using the back fence as leverage, he pulled himself eye level to the narrow slits of glass that functioned as garage windows. The inside was bare. No storage. No vehicles.

From his ear piece came Jahan’s voice, confirming approach.

Bradford waited for the knock, and when it came, hoisted up
over the fence, using notches in the gate for footing. Dropped into a crouch and waited again. The yard was overgrown grass with a weather-worn umbrella table and two chairs on an uncovered patio. Cigarette butts littered the area. Windows and a back door faced the yard and were covered by closed blinds.

Another knock in Bradford’s earpiece.

Silence.

Doing this the right way, he should have done more than put his ear to the glass to check for occupants, but hyped up, brain fried, running against the clock, and taking Logan’s bloody pants as a deeply personal insult, Bradford moved as quickly as possible, out of the gray area of trespassing into full breaking-and-entering.

He tried the door.

Secure.

Waited for Jahan’s third knock, and when it came, with no sound or response returned from inside, aimed boot at door, and kicked it in.

He didn’t have Jahan’s skill in scrubbing locks, and what the hell, whoever had Logan knew he was on the hunt, so it was no big secret there. He moved into the house a second before Jahan opened the front door.

Weapon drawn, Jahan cleared the foyer as Bradford took the den.

Somewhere in the house a chime beeped, signaling an armed keypad waiting for input. Forty to sixty seconds tops before the master alarm went off. At best, another two minutes after that before the alarm company sent the police to the house.

“Your left,” Bradford whispered. “I’ll take the right.”

Jahan stepped out of view.

Door by door, Bradford moved through the house.

The place was lived in, every room used, the whole of it functional and perfunctory, missing a touch of permanence in the transient home-but-not-really of a dorm. Bradford made it down the hall and through two bedrooms before the alarm screamed, an ear-splitting howl that would surely be heard several neighbors down.

Most would be at work.

Through the master and into the bathroom, Bradford continued, and then the house phone rang: alarm company call number one. He backed out the way he’d come, scanning floors and walls, eyes
roaming over the few furniture pieces, counting seconds in his head.

Didn’t want to be anywhere near the place when the patrol car arrived.

Here, like at Veers Transport, nothing pointed to Logan or a way station, and Bradford, brain in the overdrive of frustration, said, “Let’s move.” Was on his way to the rear of the house as Jahan’s footsteps worked toward him; out the back door at the same time Jahan closed the front. Outside, the house alarm was audible but not as ear-shattering as it had been.

Door to patio to yard to fence, Bradford went up and over the gate and then strolled down the alley, the opposite of run, head down, as if not seeing his face would make any difference if one of the neighbors was asked to point him out of a six-pack.

At the road he turned away from the house, kept walking, eyes to the pavement, until the rev of the engine caught up with him. Bradford climbed into the SUV and latched his seat belt. Jahan tossed a lump of leather into his lap. “They seem to like wallets,” he said.

Bradford flipped the billfold open and, seeing Logan’s ID with the one-of-a-kind first and middle name combo, shut it again.

Sherebiah Gospel Logan.

“Everything’s there,” Jahan said. “Except for the cash if there’d been any, and I figure there was—probably why they brought it back in the first place.”

“They always take the cash,” Bradford said. “My guess is the smirking guy went out on the plane and we’re dealing with a few levels down. Thugs more than thinkers.”

“You still think they’ll keep him in one location?” Jahan said. “Because if he was my trophy and I knew someone had the drop on me—and I would have known about four minutes ago—I’d already have him on the move again.”

“What if you had him in a place you were certain he wouldn’t be found? Certain because you’d been hiding in plain sight for years and nobody had noticed?”

Jahan shrugged. “That might be different. Would depend on the place. So far we haven’t come across anything like that.”

“Because we’re still shooting in the dark,” Bradford said. “I
don’t think he was ever at the house. Just the wallet.” He shook his head, trying to shake the fog, feeling instead the same itching frustration that had been tugging at him since the early-morning foray, something he’d overlooked and couldn’t quite pin—a very clear and simple unknown inside a big red circle, tapping at the periphery of his consciousness, waiting to be noticed, but which he couldn’t find through the haze of exhaustion.

Bradford reached for his phone to reactivate sound and vibration before checking in with Walker but instead gaped at a list of missed calls and texts from the war room. Fighting back the rush of panicked excitement, voice strained and with far too much vibrato, he said, “The phone drop in Italy triggered.”

“When?” Jahan said. “Is it her? What’s the message?”

Bradford brushed him off in favor of dialing Walker. “Drive,” he said, “to the office.” He was connected to the war room before Jahan had time to punch the gas.

Thumb to one ear, phone to the other, Bradford blocked out Jahan’s surge into traffic and the resultant horn blasts. Somewhere in the distance, police sirens wailed.

“Slow the fuck down,” Bradford said. He’d meant the instruction for Jahan, but Walker slowed as well, and struggling as he was to make sense of her garbled talk, he was glad for it.

She was speaking English, but the words were crazy. He had her repeat everything and said, “We’ll be there in thirty minutes.” Before his thumb even reached the end button, Jahan said, “Was it her?”

“The recording ran for a full three minutes,” Bradford said, “and then shut off. There’s no talking, just ambient noise.”

“But the digital transfer came through?”

Bradford nodded. “Seems like. She said there didn’t appear to be any technical problems.”

“Ambient noise?”

“Yes.”

“She describe it?”

“Yeah, wind and humming, and occasionally arrhythmic thumping, like going over speed bumps. She thinks the call was dialed from inside a moving car.”

Eyes to the road, Jahan said, “Speed bumps.” Paused. Smiled. And then he chuffed. Gurgled a choking sound, the beginning of
one of his suppressed laughs, as if he was in on a private joke, a slap-happy sound that wouldn’t have been nearly as infuriating if they weren’t both so drunk on caffeine and adrenaline burnout.

Bradford glared. Oblivious, Jahan chuckled again. When there was a break in traffic, he turned to catch Bradford’s eye and instead caught the mood, and the laughter stopped. “You don’t see it, do you?”

Silence.

“Oh, man.” Jahan sighed. “You need sleep. Okay, think,” he said. “You put Michael at a table and you give her a problem. Something to chew on, what does she do?”

When Bradford didn’t answer, Jahan tapped the steering wheel with his thumb.
Thump thump
pause
thump
.

“Aw, shit,” Bradford said and, unable to help himself, smiled—almost laughed. He picked up the phone again and said to Jahan, “You’re a fucking asshole. You know that, don’t you?”

Jahan nodded. “You’re welcome.”

Bradford redialed Walker.

“Morse,” he said. “The rhythm is Morse. No, I don’t care if it’s difficult to distinguish from the background, that’s what it is. Break down the recording, filter through the elements. Do what you can, Jack will take over as soon as we get there.”

P
AYING MORE ATTENTION
to his phone than to where he was going, Bradford stumbled and nearly tripped over two days’ worth of boxes sitting in the middle of Capstone’s reception area: just another day in the endless slew of mail delivery for his boys abroad. However sexist it might be, Walker was way better at keeping the front office organized than any of the guys, and that she was pulling double duty elsewhere was showing here, big-time.

Bradford shoved the largest offending box with his foot and moved beyond it to the wall opening Jahan had already passed through.

The door closed behind him with a solid click.

Walker was waiting on the other side, in the hallway, a piece of paper in her hand, nervous energy buzzing around her, bouncing on her toes in a way that made a mockery of her unwashed, unruly hair and the dark circles under her eyes.

“It’s her,” Walker said. “It’s gotta be. If I captured it right, it’s Michael, for sure, for sure.”

Bradford took the paper. “Coffee much?” he said, but his heart pounded so fast and heavy he felt his skin might burst, and his hands shook with the effort to hold himself together. He leaned into the wall, was forced to hold the note with both hands to keep steady enough to read Walker’s block printing: ALIV FND LOGN IN OFC R HSE FND LOGN SAV LOGN