Axel kept his hands steady on the keyboard. “Possibly.”
He pulled up the map around the dispatch location. US 20 cut through open country, long stretches of sagebrush and fence line with only a few roads branching away from the highway. Domasked about cameras, and Axel shook his head. “There aren’t many cameras out there.”
Axel widened the map. A railroad line crossed the highway about ten miles from the Corolla’s location. A crossing meant cameras. Low resolution, poor angles, bad maintenance. Better than nothing.
He hacked into the railway camera feed and searched the hours before the dispatch call. He was looking for a woman walking the shoulder. The image was poor, washed out by sun and dust, but the shoulder was visible enough. Reese didn’t appear.
A white Ford Transit with a ladder rack passed the crossing heading east about an hour before the dispatch call. It looked exactly like Wade’s work van.
Axel froze the frame at the clearest moment and pulled it into the plate tool he used for bad surveillance footage. He isolated the rear plate, stripped the color, corrected the angle, and ran the contrast until the glare broke into separate characters. Three came back clean. Two were probable. The last one was noise.
He ran the partial against Washington commercial registrations. One white Ford Transit with a ladder rack matched. It was licensed to Sutton Residential Contracting.
His jaw tightened. But he made himself keep working. Axel opened Reese’s intake file and pulled up the financial authorization she had signed during the first week of the case.
She had a joint checking account with Wade at Spokane Federal Credit Union. Reese Marie Sutton and Wade Allen Sutton. Reese had stopped using it when she left Spokane, but her name was still on the account. During intake, she had given Axel permission to monitor Wade’s purchases through the account.
He opened the bank portal through a secure browser and entered the access information Reese had provided. The account opened. Dom stood behind him and said nothing.
Reese hadn’t used the account since spring. Wade had. The recent activity filled the screen. The older activity showed the drive south: fuel in Spokane, The Dalles, then Bend. After that, the pattern tightened around central Oregon. Groceries in Prineville. A hardware store purchase. An ATM withdrawal near Paulina. Then a pending charge from a Bend rental management company.
Axel clicked the charge.
The transaction details gave him the company name and a reference number but nothing else. He opened the company’s website. It was for rural cabin rentals.
Axel found the management portal behind it. The software was cheap, the security was weak, and there was no two-factor authentication. He got in within minutes.
The reference number from Wade’s bank charge pulled up an active reservation. Wade A. Sutton. Three-week cabin rental. Cash balance due on arrival.
The property address was listed beneath it, along with GPS coordinates and access notes.
Axel put the map on the center monitor. “He’s rented a cabin south of Paulina for the next three weeks. It’s at the end of a nine-mile gravel road. That must be where he’s taking her.”
Chapter
Twenty-One
They’d been drivingfor about half an hour when Wade pulled onto a gravel road. Reese braced one hand against the metal wall and the other over her belly as the van bumped over the uneven terrain.
Her shoulder ached where she had hit the floor. Her hip throbbed. One wrist burned from Wade’s grip. The cargo area had no seats, no windows, and the handle was locked from the outside.
Finally, the van stopped.
Reese was breathing hard through her nose. The engine idled for a moment, then shut off. She heard Wade’s door open, and his boots hit the gravel outside.
She pushed herself up off the floor and checked the back and side doors again. They were still locked. Her heart hammered so hard it made her sick. The side door slid open while she was still yanking on it. Reese jerked back.
Daylight cut into the cargo area. Wade stood in front of her, calm and effortless, like nothing terrible had happened. Panic shook her whole body.
“Get out,” Wade said.
Reese shook her head and shoved herself farther back, wedging one shoulder against the metal wall and one foot against the ribbed floor. There was nowhere to go, but her body tried anyway.
“Don’t make this harder.” Wade sighed, calm as ever.
He reached for her. Reese kicked at his hand, then at his chest, then at any part of him close enough to hit. Her heel struck his forearm. Wade caught her ankle and shoved it down. She grabbed the floor ridge with one hand and tried to twist away, but her belly got in the way, and her bruised hip screamed.
“Stop fighting me,” Wade said.
