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Twenty-Four
DARIO
Three hours passed. Three hours where roadblocks were set up, traffic footage reviewed, fingerprint teams dusted powder over everything, and a bunch of LVPD officers stood around with their dicks in their hands. They had nothing. No fingerprints except for his and Bell’s. A face sketch that wasn’t worth the paper it was drawn on. No vehicle description or other leads. The Realtor—the real Realtor—was useless. She’d been walking through the house, turning on lights, the front door unlocked, when someone had come up behind her. Slapped duct tape over her eyes and mouth, easily controlled her attempts to fight, and carried her into the bathroom and dropped her in the tub, injecting her with a sedative of some form. The woman was strong. They knew that. The rest was one giant fucking question mark.
Dario tore the car through the streets, then parked diagonally across two spots outside the police station. Let them fucking ticket or tow it. He plowed through the door, ignored the desk attendant, and moved down the side hall, beelining to the room that housed the FBI task force.
Fucking feds. He’d hated them when they’d stormed The Majestic six years ago and tried to pin shit on them, and he hated them now. Hated that frazzled look that Agent King shot him, as if he didn’t have time for Dario, or want his help. Fuck all of that.
He stopped beside the board, a giant map of Las Vegas and the surrounding hundred miles, and stared at the circled areas. “Tell me what you’ve got.”
Agent King sighed, turning around and grabbing at a folder, flipping it open and pointing to the first red circle on the map. “This is our best possibility. He purchased the raw land six years ago and built a twenty-thousand square foot structure on it. Place is pulling a fair amount of electricity per month, so something is happening there, we just aren’t sure of what. Drones are headed that way to see what kind of heat signatures are coming from inside.”
“This is your best possibility. How many do you have?” Dario asked.
“Four that look promising.”
The agent worked through each one of them. Number two was an old car parts factory, eight miles outside of Vegas, on the edge of an abandoned exit. Number three was a horse farm with a ten-thousand square feet barn and underground bunker. And the last one was thirty-seven miles outside of Vegas, a property listed as a water filtration plant and squatted in the middle of a two-hundred-acre lot.
Dario took a deep breath, struggling to cool his head and find some bit of control. He needed to get to Bell. But all he could see was red. Pure fury, something he had to harness amidst Hawk’s barbarity. He focused on the list, forcing himself to close out the pain and use the anger productively.
Dario looked over the options. “The horse farm isn’t it. Gwen and I went by there a few years ago. She wanted to have a ranch closer to home. It’s a glorified shooting range. Which isn’t to say that Hawk hasn’t done some fucked up things out there, but the barn was practically a tear-down, covered in cobwebs and dust. He wasn’t using it then, that’s for sure.”
He pulled the folder from the man’s hand and flipped through the pages. “And the car factory isn’t right.” He pointed to the property map of the factory, his finger tapping on the adjacent parcel. “That’s a military base. He wouldn’t be that close to someone who pays attention.”
He focused on the map, his hands flipping through to the aerial shots of the two remaining prospects. Both isolated parcels, no neighbors close by. Both buildings large, set in the middle of the land, with no trees or cover to hide behind. It would be a bitch to sneak up on either, which would be perfect for Hawk’s needs.
The FBI agent circled the perimeter of each lot with the tip of his index finger. “They’re both fenced in lots. High, military-grade fencing. The sort that would cause the average lost or nosy visitor to wander away.” He nodded to the discarded options. “For the record, your opinion on those two just helps to confirm our own thoughts. The likelihood is, one of these two locations is where they’re at. The pencil pushers are running dry on any other options, and they’ve looked at just about every industrial structure in the state.”
He met Dario’s eyes. “You know, these warehouses could be unrelated to Bell Hartley’s disappearance. We could find the girls, and not her.”
“I know that.” Dario stared at the map. The pieces had to be connected. They’d find the warehouse, reunite him with Bell, arrest that woman … and they’d get the answers. For now, he needed to focus on one task at a time and forget any other, less optimistic, possibility.
