Pitch Black: A Romantic Thriller (Blackwood Security Book 1) (33 page)

While I waited on hold for one of my contacts to dig out some information, I idly flicked through the emails Sloane had flagged for me. I needed to start pulling my weight in the company again. My husband’s death had left me as majority shareholder, with my fifteen percent and his forty combined. Nate owned thirty-five percent and Nick the remaining ten.

There had always been four of us splitting the administrative burden, but Nate and Nick had been carrying the can by themselves for over three months now, which I didn’t think was helping our relationship. If I’d had that lot dumped in my lap, I wouldn’t have been happy about it either.

I skimmed financial and operational reports—we needed more staff in the Japanese office, and we’d won a big new contract in LA. Worse was the news my husband’s Aunt Miriam was taking legal action over his estate. Basically she wanted it. A letter from her solicitor gave me thirty days to file his will for probate, a deadline I’d missed, oh, twenty-seven days ago. I added a note on my “to do” list to call my own lawyer.

“Emmy,” Nye called from across the room.

I looked up.

“A gardener working three doors up from Luke’s house reckons he saw a transit van a few days before Tia got taken. I’m going to send someone to speak to him.”

“Forget that—I’ll go.” I was sick of sitting on my ass, waiting for something to happen.

Despite its size, the BMW was surprisingly speedy. It wasn’t long before I arrived in Lower Foxford. Could this be the break we needed?

No, was the answer. The guy saw a white van drive past a couple of times a week previously. It could have been the kidnapper, or it could have been a lost courier. He was almost sure the driver was a man, but the only description he managed was, “I think he had brown hair.”

Along with half the population. We were back to square one.

As I stomped back into Luke’s house, I needed coffee. Lack of sleep was getting to me.

“Oi, love, could you sign for this?” a voice called from behind me. The postman ambled up the drive, whistling tunelessly.

“Sure.” Anyone else want to keep me from the caffeine I so desperately needed?

He handed me a padded envelope—small, brown, nondescript. Alarm bells rang as I flipped it over. There was no sender’s address.

I scribbled something unintelligible on the postman’s pad and backed into the house, clutching the mystery package.

“What you got, boss?” asked one of the men stationed there.

“No idea, but at least it’s not ticking.”

Chapter 32

I RAN MY gloved fingers across the package. What was inside? A small bump in the bottom left-hand corner told me it wasn’t simply a letter.

I pulled out my phone. “Nick, can you find out whether Luke’s expecting a package? Something small in a padded envelope?”

“Have you got something?”

“Maybe. Can you ask him?”

“Gimme a second.”

Muttering followed then Nick came back. “The only thing he’s expecting is a portable hard drive, and that’s being sent to his office.”

Unless this was Barbie’s portable hard drive, it looked like we had a problem. “Can you get the lab on standby?”

“I’m on it. How long will you be?”

“Leaving now.”

We had our own forensics lab in the basement at the office. It didn’t do the flashy stuff, we contracted that out, but the small team could cover most of what we needed. As I pulled into the car park, Nick was waiting.

“Where is it?”

I held up the envelope between a thumb and finger. “Let’s go.”

In the lab, the head technician, pushed back his chair and sauntered over. He went by the name of Test-tube. I’m sure that wasn’t what his mother called him, but I’d never known him as anything else.

“All right, boss?” he asked.

“Just peachy. Let’s see what we’ve got, then.”

He ran the package through a scanner, much like the ones at airports. An indistinct blob showed up in the corner. What was it?

Test-tube donned a pair of latex gloves, gingerly sliced through the flap, and peered inside.

“Well?”

He looked up at me. “Have some patience.” He’d known me too long to take my shit.

I nearly snatched the bloody thing off him, but I forced my hands to my sides as he tilted it over a tray. Something tumbled out. I took a step closer.

“Oh fuck.” It was a fingernail. As in a whole fingernail, yanked out at the root. The gaudy paint job, shocking pink with silver and black stars, spoke of happier times for its owner.

“Tia’s?” Nick asked.

I swallowed down the lump in my throat and nodded. There was no doubt about it. My toes sported the same design, painted by her last week as we’d watched a movie. I borrowed a pair of tweezers and angled the nail under the light. Yep, I even recognised the wonky star where the brush and her language had both slipped. Luckily Luke hadn’t been around to hear her turn the air blue.

While I planned which parts of the kidnapper’s anatomy I was going to remove, Test-tube fished around in the envelope and extracted a note. One line, typed on plain white paper:

Further instructions will follow.

Relief jostled with my anger. We had another chance.

Test-tube dug out evidence bags and gathered everything up. “I’ll take this lot for analysis.”

He’d cover all bases, but I doubted we’d find anything. Everyone and their dog watched CSI nowadays and knew not to lick the envelope, and I couldn’t believe we’d be that lucky.

“Where was it posted?” I asked.

Test-tube turned it over. “Penge, South London.”

Two minutes later, I was back in the car.

Traffic wasn’t kind, and it took me almost an hour to reach the post office, a tiny kiosk at the back of a convenience store.

“Hi.” I smiled at the kid sitting behind the counter, and he looked at his hands. “Were you working yesterday?”

He shifted nervously on his stool. “Hang on, I’ll check the rota.” He made a show of flipping through a wedge of papers. “Uh, yeah.”

If he couldn’t remember whether
he
was there yesterday, how was he going to remember if the kidnapper came in? I should have brought a shovel to dig for his IQ. His answer to my question about the package was an echo of the gardener’s. 

“It might have been a man that posted it.”

I dropped a tenner onto the counter. His eyes lit up, then rolled back in his head as he tried to remember.

“His hair might have been brown.”

Arrrgh!

“I don’t suppose you’ve got CCTV?”

He shook his head. “Do you want to post a letter?”

I refrained from suggesting he return his brain to sender and left before I kicked something. A quick walk along the residential road didn’t reveal a single camera. This was a game of snakes and ladders, and I’d just slid all the way down a boa constrictor.

We were back to square one again. I ground my teeth, something I hadn’t done since my teenage years. The kidnapper had promised further instructions, so all we could do was wait.

I ate dinner on my own in the office. I told myself I needed to stay in case we got a break in the investigation, but I was lying. In a quiet corner of the canteen, there were no reminders of the husband I’d lost. At home they were everywhere.

The rest of Sloane’s saved emails held nothing of interest, and my calendar stretched ahead, empty. My mind had nothing to distract it from memories of my husband and Tia, fighting it out for prime position. As I’d told Sloane I wouldn’t return to the States until Tia was found, I’d have to live with that. When I returned to the control room, Nye had gone to get some sleep, and Tom, who was running things in his absence, took one look at me and told me to do the same.

“I should stay. What if something comes up?”

He gave me a gentle push towards the door. “We’ll deal with it. If this becomes a rescue situation, we need you ready to do what you do best.”

At the moment, the only things I felt capable of were drinking coffee and staring into space. “Fine. Promise you’ll call if you need me?”

“You know I will. Now get out of here.”

I drove home, sticking to the speed limit for once as I wasn’t looking forward to getting there. Luke was pacing around the kitchen when I arrived, and my heart seized when I saw him. Not because he was upset, but because his hands held my husband’s mug. It was nothing special—oversized china with “black is the new black” written on it—but it had been his favourite, and I wasn’t ready to see another man drinking from it.

As Luke turned, tea sloshed out and hit the tiles. “Why the hell aren’t you doing more? This’ll be the fourth night she’s been gone. What’s that maniac doing to her? He ripped her nail out for fuck’s sake. She must be in agony.”

Dan and Nick looked on, silent, and it was me who spoke. “I know it’s not easy, but believe me, we’re doing everything we can. There’s so little to go on, we don’t have much choice but to wait.”

“Believe you? Yeah, right. How would you like it if your nail had been ripped out?”

Been there, done that. “It hurts, but it’ll grow back. He could have done a lot worse.”

I’d seen everything from fingers to ears being sent to parents. One poor bastard got sent their kid’s foot, still stuffed into the tiny Nike trainer he’d got for his birthday the previous weekend. A fingernail was getting off lightly compared to that.

Which may have been true, but it was the wrong thing to say to Luke.

“How can you stay so calm? I suppose it’s because it’s not your sister that’s been abducted. You’ve got me stuck here in this bloody palace with this pair…” he jerked his thumb at Nick and Dan, “who could be doing something far more useful than babysitting me. I should have called the damn police.”

“I’m calm because getting worked up won’t solve the problem,” I answered, although at that moment I felt anything but calm inside. “We’ve got over fifty people working on this. Most of them were cherry picked from the police or military for being the best in their field. We’ve chased down every lead as it’s come in, but there’s been precious little to go on.”

Luke paused in his steps to glare at me.

I continued, “Nobody’s got a good look at the kidnapper, and if I hadn’t followed you to the woods, you’d be lying dead, and I’d be the only one who even knew Tia was missing.”

His eyes softened slightly, but he remained silent. I’d had enough. I walked from the room with a parting shot of, “If you don’t want to be here, Dan will call you a car and you can go home.”

Yes, the bitch was back.

I wandered the house aimlessly, ruing an awful day. Even though people surrounded me, I felt horribly alone. Running again was oh-so-tempting, but I chased that thought from my head. While it might have helped my sanity, I’d done quite enough damage when I left the first time, and I needed to look for Tia.

On the first floor, my feet carried me to the study I’d shared with my husband. Small and cosy, we’d used it as an alternative to the control room downstairs when we needed peace.

I hadn’t been in there since he died, and it looked like nobody else had either. Reminders of him lay everywhere. His favourite pen still sat in the middle of his desk. A book he’d been reading sat on the coffee table, the bookmark showing there were a quarter of the pages he’d never get to finish. One of his jumpers hung over the back of the couch under his favourite painting.