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She didn’t respond.
“Oh, fuck,” someone whispered. A few people, including Caro, were quietly weeping.
More thuds and thumps and the distant sound of someone muttering—the male voice.
Caro pushed the button. “There’s another ten minutes of what might be road noise,” she said softly. “I did a trace on Shelby’s car as soon as 9-1-1 sent it over.”
“This was recent?” Raj interrupted.
Caro nodded. “The call happened over ten hours ago,” she said softly. “I was going through records to log last night’s calls.”
Ten fucking hours. After quashing the desire to throttle whoever sat on this for ten hours, I tried to run through what I knew about the Arcanid abductions conducted by the Ordo: James Harding and the others. Most had been knocked unconscious—which seemed like what had happened to Sabrina Estevez—so it was hard to say how long between when they disappeared and when the Ordo killed them.
But we might still have a chance. A tiny one, but a chance.
“Raj—”
“I know,” he replied. “Where’s the car, Ms. Little-Bruneski?”
“Hanover county.” She pulled up a window and showed us a map.
I leaned for a closer look.
“Fucking plantations,” I muttered. From what I could see, the car was at an estate house.
An estate house almost exactly like the Harrod estate.
“Raj, we have to gonow.”
He blinked at me, started. “Hart—”
“The other victims were taken to a goddamn country estateexactly like this oneand fucking stabbed to death, Parikh,” I snapped. “And I’m not about to stand here yapping while they do it again!”
He nodded once. “I’m driving.”
“Fucking fine with me.”
* * *
It tookus forty excruciating minutes to reach the estate, although Shelby’s car had left about ten minutes after we’d left the precinct, according to a still tearful Caro who had called my cell directly—Raj had put a moratorium on anything related to this case coming over the radio. I watched the oncoming traffic to see if a black and white passed us going the other way, but I didn’t see one.
That didn’t help my agitation.
Neither did the fact that I’d asked Caro to go up and take care of ‘Anubis’ for me so that Raj and I could leave immediately. I felt a little bad leaving him there, but on the extremely off chance Sabrina Estevez was still alive, we needed every minute.
Raj peeled through the turn onto the estate’s drive, and I was glad that the damn thing at least didn’t have a gate. Sure, we could have demanded entry or just driven through it, but I didn’t imagine the FBI was any happier about dinged up cars than the RPD, and every minute mattered.
Or it might matter.
That was the worst part. If she was still alive, we had a chance of saving her if we could just get there fast enough.
But if she was dead—and the fact that Shelby was gone made me think that they’d probably already done to her whatever they were going to do—then those minutes no longer mattered. But until you knew… you had to operate as though they did.
You always had to operate as though what you were doing was going to matter, to make a difference. Especially in a job like this one. Because you had to convince yourself that the work, the sweat, the blood, the pain, all of it, was worth it.
Otherwise, what was the fucking point?
It was a question we all had to answer at some point. Usually multiple times.
