Lia’s heart seized. Oh…no. But she tried to smooth it over for Gard. “Well, she’s with Dani. That’s…not terrible. It could be worse. Maybe you could call Dani.”
Gard didn’t even look at her. He kept talking to the woman. A detective, Lia thought, if she was reading all the context clues.
“I called for help, Laurel, but I’m going to be looking for my niece,” Gard said, an edge of temper starting to creep into his voice. “You’re working with Beckett on that trafficking case coming out of Hardy, right?”
At the wordtrafficking, everything jangling around inside of Lia like fear and worry and nerves turned into cold, sharpice.
“Trafficking?” she echoed.
But Gard was still ignoring her, or maybe he didn’t even hear her. Deep in cop mode, he was ignoring everything except what he needed to do. “Dani was with that guy in that security footage of the drug deal. I want to know everything about him, what connections he has. If Dani was with him, he has to know something about where she’s been and where she might have taken Sammy.”
Lia thought back to everything Gard had told her about Dani’s disappearance. The job offer at the diner. The abandoned house with drug paraphernalia. But he hadn’t mentionedtrafficking, and it made too many things click into place.
Particularly that text conversation that Lia couldn’t be convinced was actually from Dani now. Which made her blood run cold.
“Gard.” She curled her fingers into his shirtsleeve. “I need to talk to you.”
He didn’t respond. She didn’t think he was ignoring her on purpose. He was just deep in crisis, and she was just…a civilian in his way. He was used to shutting everything out that didn’t accomplish getting the job done.
Except she…she knew things, understood things. About everything they were talking about. And everything was starting to coalesce. The things he’d told her he’d found out about Dani the past few months.
The things she’d experienced years ago.
“Gard. Please.” She tugged on his shirt. “Somewhere private.” Maybe it was theplease, or the fact her voice cracked, but he finally looked at her, blinked like coming out of a trance.
“Okay.” He took her hand and squeezed. “Get her description out,” he told Laurel.
Who nodded. “I will. Then Hart and I will interview theater employees after he’s done getting the girls’ statements. We’ll watch that footage too, once it’s ready. Get a read on anyone who might have been involved.”
Gard nodded and then let Lia pull him away from the hubbub into a quiet little alcove.
She should have told him the truth earlier, when they had time. But now there was no time.
Not if she was going to help Sammy.
Gard wasn’t panicking. He’d been a cop too long to panic.
Or so he told himself.
“I need you to listen to me and not worry about questions right now,” Lia said quietly, and very,veryseriously. “We can answer questions later. Right now, we need to focus. This job offer Dani got. You know who offered it, right?”
He frowned at her. She sounded like…a cop. And he didn’t have the first clue why she’d be talking about Dani’s job offer. Still, he answered her since she clearly had some reason for pulling him aside. “I have a name, yeah.”
“You need to—ortheyneed to—go get that guy too. He’s your target as much as whoever was with her in that drug deal. The guy who offered the job at the diner will know something. I guarantee it.”
He didn’t want to be curt, because he knew Lia meant well, but he didn’t have time for this. “Lia, no offense but—”
“I know a thing or two about human trafficking, Gard. I know what it looks like.That’swhat it looks like. Job offers to the right targets. Addresses that are seemingly abandoned or vacant. Then pulling more people in.”
He blinked. She had a serious expression on her face and those words were hard. Knowledgeable. Cop-like.
I know a thing or two about human trafficking.Not like she’d read a book or seen a movie, like sheknew.
“And the fact of the matter is,” she continued. “Those text messages might have come from Dani’s phone, but that doesn’t mean they necessarily came from Dani.”
He could only stare at her, those words not quite making sense in the way he knew they should. But this was… Lia. And… “Lia, what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that this has all the hallmarks of a kidnapping. And if you’re working on a trafficking case, and Dani is connected, Sammy would be an obvious and easy target to be pulled into that.”
