Not a good sign for Stacy, especially considering that picture could have been taken days ago, well before the call.
Weathers knew it too, wringing his hands in his lap despite the pain it must be causing him. “I did what he said, what he wanted, and now?—”
Lincoln laid a hand over his. “Back to the details, Mr. Weathers. That’s how we find her. Did he say anything else? Want anything else?”
The other man calmed enough to sniffle out, “No. That was all.” He sucked in another breath. “Can you help me find her, please?”
“Where’s your sister usually stay at?” Carter asked.
Weathers recited an address that Carter punched into his phone. Mapping it, the app placed it a ways outside of town. Unincorporated Apex, by the looks of it. “You been out there?” he asked Weathers.
He nodded. “Torn apart, and her car was gone too.”
Her car. The same car they were looking for?
Lincoln was on the same wavelength. “What kind of car did she drive, Mr. Weathers? Make and model, if you know it? Color?”
“Ninety-five Honda Accord.”
Lincoln deflated, and Carter likewise felt the wind go out of his sails.
But then Weathers kept talking. “I gave it to her a few years back. I thought for sure she’d flip it for drugs, but she cherished that old junker. Just had it painted. Custom. Dark blue with holographic flake.”
Not so deflated anymore. “That’s the car,” Carter said. “He’s in her car.”
“Who?” Weathers asked.
Lincoln’s right leg was bouncing a club rhythm, but he kept his attention on Weathers. “Do you have a license plate number, Mr. Weathers?”
“Yeah, I still pay the registration on it. Least I can do for her.” He rattled off the numbers and letters and that was the end of Lincoln’s patience. He shot out of the chair and bolted for the door.
Weathers’s eyes tracked him the entire way. “Y’all know where she is?”
“No, but this helps,” Carter said, rising as well. “Did he say anything else? Anything at all?”
“There was one thing . . . I argued with him at first, and he said something about being on the clock. His clock, and how I was going to make him late. But I don’t know who he is.”
Carter bet he did, though. “All right, Mr. Weathers.” He squeezed the other man’s shoulder. “Just sit tight.” He followed the path his partner had taken, closing the door to the imaging room behind him.
Phone in hand, Lincoln paced the short length of the control room while O’Shea stood in the door to the hallway. “You’re looking for a ninety-five Honda Accord, Virginia tag,” Lincoln told the person on the other end of the line. “I texted you the tag number and owner name. Stacy Weathers.”
“That’s what we needed,” Kirk said, the call on speaker. “We’ll add this to the BOLO.”
Carter raised a brow, requesting the update he’d missed.
“They’d issued a BOLO for vehicles matching the custom paint color,” O’Shea said.
“We’ve been chasing leads all night,” Kirk said. “Nothing, but with this, now we know exactly the car we’re looking for. This is real good, L.”
“We’ll run Stacy’s cards on this end,” O’Shea said. “See if he used them.”
“And it’s definitely a copycat,” Carter said. “On the call with Stacy’s brother, the kidnapper referenced ‘his clock.’ Guessing that’s Dr. Fear’s clock he was talking about, and that we were right about the timeline.”
“Fuck,” Kirk said. “We gotta move, then.”
“Keep us updated, Ollie,” Lincoln said. “We’ll be standing by.”
The line went dead and a second of stunned silence followed. They’d gone from tenuous leads to leads destroyed to the lead that might rescue Ruby and Chase in the span of twelve hours.
