Cold Silence (A High Stakes Thriller) (22 page)

"Nothing would shake off this chill except Ryan."

"Well, it's good for the brain. You want to eat by that danged machine?"

He meant the computer. He'd been calling it that since the beginning of their bug search. She nodded.

"Go get a bowl and some napkins and we'll take it up."

Normally she would have told a stranger to go to hell if he spoke to her that way. But she had to appreciate the colonel's gesture. And she'd had about all she could take of being alone staring at the computer.

She got a bowl from the kitchen cabinet. For a while she'd continued to be cautious about getting her prints on things. Why go to all the trouble of cleaning things off just to dirty them again? But it had quickly become too cumbersome to constantly watch where she set her hands. She wished she had another photo of Ryan or Mark nearby, but the only ones she had were on their way to a P.O. box in Austin, Texas.

Cody led the way to her office, the colonel following behind with the Tupperware container. She sat down at the computer and took the stacks of printouts, collated them, and set them aside.

The colonel set the Tupperware container down and pulled a chair from the corner of the room. He opened the container and poured stew into a bowl, then handed it to Cody.

The smell reminded her of something her mother had loved to make. There was a hint of ginger or maybe cinnamon. She pushed the thought away.

Nodding to the pile of pictures, he said, "What you got going over there?"

She stirred the spoon in the stew, letting the smell of beef and onion hit her nose. She was hungry. She took a bite and swallowed, her mouth burning from the heat.

"It's hot; watch it."

She set it down to cool a bit. "It's good, though. Thank you."

He nodded. "Told you it would be." He stood and picked up the pictures. "You find anything else?"

She shook her head. "Nothing I can do without some professional help."

The colonel pulled his chair to the table and picked up the first picture, showing the upper left corner of the photo. He ran his hand over what looked like the very corner of a brass wall light.

"Looks expensive, right?" She took a bite of the stew. It was damn good.

The colonel gazed at the photo. "I was just thinking something like that."

"The carpet's clean, the walls look freshly painted," she continued, taking another bite of stew before setting the bowl down.

She lifted the rest of the pictures and flipped to the one that showed the corner of what she had guessed was a table. She offered it to the colonel. "And see this one?"

He pulled a pair of bifocals from his breast pocket and set them on his nose. He whistled.

"You think it's a table?"

"I think it's a nice table." He turned the picture sideways. "Hard to say, but it looks like it could be carved."

She nodded, staring at the way the corner sloped back on itself as it disappeared from the edge of the photo. "I wasn't sure about whether that was just an edge or if it was something more elaborate."

"Not enough to say except that it looks nice to me. I've got an old friend who collects wood pieces. We can ask."

She looked back at the photo, hesitating at the idea of showing it to someone else. She'd already run the keywords "Peter Landon" and "I've got Peter" through the biggest search engines and come up with nothing. Her hope was that the maker of the site was trying to keep it as low-profile as she was. But the fact that they were still without a ransom note had started to make her wonder.

"Maybe we'd best wait until we see what this guy does next."

She nodded. She hoped it would be soon. She ate more of the stew while the colonel looked through the rest of the photos. "You saw the twig?"

He found the picture and studied it.

"Can you make anything of it?"

He shook his head. "The sawfly tells us more."

"So you think it's the sawfly?"

"Yes."

"But it doesn't give us a narrow enough region to start looking."

He set down the picture. "Afraid not."

"That's what I figured." She set the empty bowl down, feeling less nauseated than she had in more than twenty-four hours. She couldn't believe how much had happened in such a short time.

"You should eat more."

"I don't think I could, Colonel." She turned her arm wrist-up and glanced at her watch. It was already five-thirty and she'd have to leave in less than a half hour. "Besides, I've got to get going."

"Where to?"

She explained briefly about Landon's investigator.

"McCue? I knew a McCue once. He in the forces?"

"I don't know anything about him yet."

"You want me to come with?"

She turned back to him and smiled. "I think I'll be okay."

He splayed his hands on his knees. "No doubt about that, but will they?"

"I'm not worried about them." She picked the bowl up off the table and turned toward the door.

The colonel was still sitting beside the computer. "Should I shut this thing off?"

She glanced over her shoulder. "No. I leave it on."

"Holy mother of Jesus," the colonel swore. "Will you look at that."

Cody looked back. "It doesn't hurt it—" She looked up at the screen. She made a small sound like a grunt as the bowl slipped from her fingers.

She heard it crash to the floor before she could get her feet to move beneath her.

Chapter 21

Jennifer Townsend stomped into the front hall, unwrapped the heavy scarf, and dumped her winter boots and jacket by the door. She rubbed her hands together, adjusted the heat, and then headed up the stairs.

In the office, she flopped into her chair and tossed a couple of case files down onto the wooden desk with a thunk. She had spent the afternoon in a quiet conference room at the Bureau, making phone calls and trying to stir up help. And she'd been remarkably successful. Though a lot of the Bureau staff worked Monday to Friday, there were always resources on hand. And today, she'd contacted a few of them, including the department who could access information on calls coming into the Bureau and the research group. She was making headway on finding Megan Riggs and she hadn't felt so good in months.

From the clock on the wall, she knew she had to hurry. She had less than two hours to get through the files and make some calls before Dmitri showed up to take her to a late dinner. They were going to one of their favorites: Gene & Georgetti's. G&G's was an institution in Chicago and had been especially popular with the Italian mob for a long time. Recently she had seen more Russian mob than Italian, but she enjoyed the food and Dmitri loved the atmosphere. She always dressed in her sexiest outfits so Dmitri could show her off. And they always had wild, wonderful sex after a dinner at G&G's.

She really should have stayed home to work, but he was insistent on taking her out. It was their seven-year anniversary of dating the next week, and he thought he might have to go on a quick trip to Europe. He'd tried to convince her to come, but she couldn't possibly get away from work.

She set aside her thoughts and picked up the phone to check her work messages. She had one from early that morning.

"It's Eddie de la Cruz calling. We were able to track that incoming call. It came from a cell phone."

She grabbed a pen and threw her notebook open. She scrawled the number down as he spoke it and then backed the message up and checked her notes. She had it. She'd found Megan Riggs. She threw her head back and laughed out loud and then rewound Eddie's message and, grinning like a Kodak ad, she listened to it again.

"It's a Michigan number, but it bills to a P.O. box in South Carolina. I had the P.O. box tracked, but now we're working with the postal service, so it's going to take a subpoena and all that. I'm still working on the location of the call's origin, and we're getting closer. It wouldn't have worked with one call, but because there were two—the one to your phone line and the one to your pager number—I think we can pinpoint the location pretty well. It'll depend on the phone's tracking system. If it's got a built-in GPS receiver, we'll be able to get it down to between sixty and two hundred twenty-five feet or so. If it was good, we could have a block or less. They've got systems now that use DGPS and you can pinpoint someone to about three feet."

Eddie continued his techno babble.

"No promises, though. And remember, if the phone doesn't have the GPS receiver, all you'll get is what city the roaming was in—could be as big as an area code. I hope to have an answer by tomorrow or Monday at the latest."

She saved the message and hung up the phone. Megan Riggs's call had triggered a spark of the possibility of freedom from Oskar Kirov, and Jennifer was desperate to fan the spark and make fire. Even if the best Eddie could do was an area code, she was still very close to finding Megan Riggs.

Now if he'd just hurry up. Even a day would seem like forever to wait to find Megan.

There was still work to do. Even if Eddie found a specific street location for the call's origin, Jennifer still needed to find Megan. And the media was her best bet.

She heard a creak below and strained to hear if Dmitri had come early. She wasn't quite ready to surprise him with the news yet. Ideally, she'd hand him Megan's address and tell him to go get it over with. She could just see his reaction. He'd be thrilled. Maybe things would even settle down a bit. If she could just get Dmitri some distance from his father, maybe they could live in peace for a while.

She opened to the first in a stack of news articles that had been culled for her. If Megan had called Jennifer's pager, it meant there was trouble. Since Jennifer would have known if Oskar had found her because she was helping Dmitri, she assumed the trouble was something else. And Ryan was the only thing she could come up with. So as soon as she'd arrived at work, Jennifer had ordered news scans for any cases related to a child between the ages of seven and thirteen. Though Ryan was eight, Jennifer knew it was possible that Megan had altered the records of his age in their move.

Jennifer read each story, watching for clues that would indicate it could be Megan. A single son. An unmarried mother. The woman would be not well known in the neighborhood. She'd do something like contracting work or maybe computers, something with little people interaction. Each was an assumption to some degree, but Jennifer had known Megan long enough to make solid guesses. She couldn't imagine Megan married again; couldn't imagine her in a job that had any kind of profile. She was too cautious, too meticulous.

The stories were mostly atrocities. That was what made the news. The boy who'd been discovered dead in his home after being chained to a bed and left by his mother who went off with a new boyfriend. Drive-by shootings, rapes, fires. They were depressing, but none of them seemed right. What was she looking for? Kids taken hostage in a school or a kidnapping. She paused. What else would make Megan risk calling the FBI?

Perhaps some sort of medical emergency. She looked back down at the articles. A medical emergency wasn't going to make news. But why wouldn't Megan have called again? Had she solved the problem? It seemed unlikely. After what had happened in New Orleans, the Bureau would have been Megan's last resort.

Jennifer picked up the phone and dialed the cell phone number for her data contact at the Bureau.

"Steve," he said, his voice echoing as though she was on a speakerphone. Steve was tall and thin, with thick blondish brown hair and olive skin that looked tan no matter what time of year it was. He had brown eyes like a teddy bear and he was the nicest person she knew. He could literally find a source for anything, and he'd bailed her out of more tough spots in her career than she cared to think about.

"Where are you?"

"At home. Working on a drawing. I've got you plugged in so I'm hands-free. Sorry if it echoes."

"It's fine. Sorry to call on the weekend." She wondered what picture he was working on, but decided to mind her own business. She knew he was incredibly creative. One time they'd had coffee and he'd borrowed a five from her. The five-dollar bill he'd given back had been painted and colored so incredibly, she'd been unable to spend it. She used it as a bookmark now. He said he was an artist in his spare time, and when she thought about him, she occasionally wished she were someone totally different. Someone Steve might have been interested in.