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“She give you anything?” Daniel motioned him out of the room, at Heather’s warning glare at the both of them. She had the boy almost asleep in her arms now.
Jarrod and Daniel stepped out into the hall. “Basically confirmed what Gunnar said. Four men grabbed her right off the street. There was also a driver. They roughed her up. Said a few things about the two of you. Haldyn was insistent some of the voices were familiar, and one guy said something about seeing her with you. She said they drugged her in that damned van. Then she woke in that kid’s race car bed. She spoke to good old Handy Handley for a while. Then the bodyguard drove them to the TSP. But the bodyguard had a blindfold over her eyes. He dropped her and the kid off two blocks from the TSP. She carried the kid the rest of the way. Said Barratt told her he needed her to help him save Beck from the only life Handley was providing him.”
“That’s it? He was just there? What about the guys who took her? Anything about them?”
“Masks and generic work uniforms. Probably secondhand. She said no…sexual assault. Barratt told her he’d followed the van for twenty minutes before they got to a place he could have his driver safely run them off the road. Five men, thirties to forties, but one, possibly fifties, was driving.”
“How long was she in the car with the bodyguard and the kid?”
“Just under thirty. He was going a normal rate of speed and took several turns, she said.” Which meant no more than fifteen, twenty miles from the post. In any direction.
“So within half an hour of the TSP. That is a large area.”
“But Handley’s this side of the border. We know that now.” And this was the closest Jarrod had been to catching him in three years.
“We need to find who took her first. That’s more important. Then…Barratt. But for now, I want her as safe as she can be.”
“We need to find out why they wanted both her and that realtor. Because she seems pretty certain the driver said the boss was going to be pissed that they didn’t get them both. She told Heather one guy said they’d been watching her and the realtor for a while, trying to grab them together.”
“Hell, what could someone want them both?”
Jarrod didn’t know, yet. But he wasn’t going to stop until he found out.
9
Little Hallie Harris hadn’t deserved that. He was getting too old for this bullshit. The money—it just wasn’t worth the risk. Or the hurt. Or the damnation to his soul.
Was this what had become of him?
Detective Sol Kimball, head of the assault division of the greater Major Crimes unit at the Finley Creek TSP, looked down at his hands. He had blood on them. He knew that.
Shit, did he know that.
His knuckles hurt. He’d banged them against the window when those bastards had rammed the van. There would be bruises showing there soon. He deserved them. Black ones, like his soul. Rotten.
He’d have to cover them up. Before someone at the TSP put it together.
Bruises everywhere. His knuckles. Little Haldyn Harris’s face.
Haldyn. Hallie. His old pal Gordon Harris’s little girl.
Sol had hurt his friend’s little girl. For money. For money.
Money hadn’t gotten him anywhere. Hadn’t made him happier. He still lived in the same cruddy house, in the same cruddy neighborhood, as he had for decades.
It was worthless to him now.
Nothing. He had nothing to show for what he had done. Even less than he’d had when he’d started.
No wife. No daughter.
Not now.
He swore. Grabbed another beer from his refrigerator. There were photo albums on the cheap kitchen table he’d picked up at a secondhand store after his wife had left him six years ago. The albums? He hadn’t seen them in years. Sol didn’t want them now either, damn it. Those albums taunted him.
Haunted him.
His ex? She’d asked him for a key when she’d stopped by the precinct to check on him a few days ago and all. So she could drop off things from their life together before. Things she didn’t want around reminding her of what they’d lost. She must have left that album there. To torment him.
