The Doll (2 page)

From across the room Jahan said, “Looks like those digits belong to valid Fire-Rescue plates. I can’t say for sure with only half of them, but they seem to check out.”

Bradford turned from the whiteboard wall. “Is it a stolen vehicle?”

“Not that I’m showing, although it might not have been reported yet.”

“What about a trace on the GPS? Can we figure out where the ambulance ended up, maybe where it’s been?”

Jahan swiveled his chair around to face Bradford and then shifted a couple of inches to the right, then left, and back again in a maddening fidget. “I
might
be able to do that,” he said, and stopped. “When do you plan to let us know what’s going on?”

Bradford sighed. Walked to the nearest blank spot on the whiteboards, picked up a red marker, and drew the beginning of a diagram. Wrote:
Michael—passed out or taken down?

He turned. “That’s all I’ve got.”

Jahan’s mouth opened for a full second before he spoke. “You’ve gotta be kidding.” And a beat later: “What did you see?”

“Not enough.”

Jahan’s index finger moved toward the whiteboard. “But enough for that?”

Bradford’s posture sagged and he glanced again at the diagram.

Given Munroe’s lifestyle, it was more than enough, but there was nothing he could point to for confirmation. The nine months since the infiltration in Argentina had been quiet, her initial week in Dallas had turned into months, the occasional overnight stay at his place lengthening into more, until she, who had no home of her own, gradually grew comfortable in his. He’d offered her security contracts as a way to delay the inevitability of her leaving, but they’d been small and relatively inconsequential—the longest had been a month in Abuja, Nigeria, which had evolved into an adult baby-sitting gig—definitely nothing to write home about, nothing he could connect to today.

The intercom crackled. Walker said, “I’ve got a Michael Munroe at the emergency room at Medical City.”

Jahan raised his eyebrows; Bradford shook his head.

“It’s too soon,” he said.

Jahan’s head tilt was subtle, an acknowledgment of trust rather than agreement. Bradford reached for the key rack, lifted off a set, and moved toward the door space. “Keep an ear for the phones, will you? I’m closing down the front and taking Sam with me.”

Bradford and Walker took the elevator down to the ground floor and crossed to the parking garage, to an Explorer, one of three vehicles Capstone kept on hand. Bradford got in behind the wheel. Walker slid into the passenger seat, buckled up, and kept her focus beyond the windshield, biting back, he knew, questions she wouldn’t ask.

Her silence now was part of the same dance of avoidance that had descended on most of the team when Munroe had first come onboard. Suspicions of preferential treatment tainted the waters. Bradford had brought Munroe into the company, it was no secret that he was sleeping with her, and he’d already dropped everything once before to watch her back. Until proven otherwise, this little jaunt to the hospital was Bradford’s overly paranoid, overly protective private mission, and as such, a waste of company resources.

T
HE EMERGENCY ROOM
at Medical City, like most emergency rooms, was harshly lit and filled with depression. Seating took up the bulk of the waiting area. The next-of-kin story got Bradford and Walker beyond the wide swinging doors that divided the helpless from the helped and into the hallway, where the smell of antiseptic filled the air and the glare of fluorescent tubing illuminated nothing Bradford wanted to see and everything he didn’t.

He found the room and passed through the curtained entry, only to back out as quickly as he’d gone in.

Walker, close behind, nearly collided with him in the process. She jumped sideways to avoid impact.

“What the hell?” she said, and when his only response was to search out the room number again, she gave him
that
look and continued past.

The room held one bed, an assortment of medical equipment, and a small space to move about. Bradford joined Walker beside the bed, where, expression clouded over, she stared down at a stranger, bloodied, stitched up, and doped.

“You want me to check with the nurses?” she whispered. “Find out if there’s been some mistake?”

Bradford drew the curtain fully around, and motioned for her to keep watch. Belongings lay to the side of the bed and he searched through them, rifling through clothing, shoes, and purse until he found a wallet.

Munroe’s wallet.

There was nothing else to indicate who this person was—no notebook or gadgets, no phone or identifying items. Only the folded leather that had, until this morning, been in Munroe’s back pocket. Bradford flipped through it and pulled out the ID, turning it toward Walker long enough for her to get a good look, then nodded his head toward the exit.

She turned and left.

He continued past the driver’s license and credit cards, which were still there, searching for the emergency numbers and the cash, which should have also been there but were not. Bradford pocketed the wallet, lifted the sheets slightly to see what lay underneath—a violation of privacy to whoever was in that bed, but he needed to confirm what he already suspected—and then having done so, slipped out.

Walker waited for him at the Explorer, arms crossed and leaning against the hood, and when he was within hearing distance she straightened and said, “The woman was brought in at about ten-twenty this morning. Michael didn’t leave till eleven-thirty. The timing doesn’t work.”

“Except Michael got to the office around ten,” he said. “The timing works if they were waiting for her to arrive, if they knew they’d get her on her way out.”

“They’d have to be watching your place,” Walker said.

“Maybe they are.”

Bradford opened the doors and slid in behind the wheel, a hundred questions charging through his head, all of them superseded by guilt. Munroe would never have been found if she hadn’t been in Dallas, and she’d stayed in Dallas for him.

Samantha Walker was five-foot-two, brunette, buxom, wide-smiling, and naturally tanned. She was the type of inviting cliché that men in bars mistakenly groped and called “honey,” only to later call “bitch” after she’d broken their nose.

Walker was a military brat: an only child, a dual citizen with a U.S. Marine sniper for a father and a Brazilian exotic dancer for a mother. At twenty-six, she was not only the youngest member of Bradford’s nine-man team but also the only woman, besides Munroe, who was temporary.

It was easy to mistake Walker for Capstone’s mercy hire—the token female brought into a man’s world to appease civilian workforce standards—or for eye candy, especially when she sat behind the front desk, but those were ignorant assumptions based on not knowing Walker—and on not knowing Bradford. At Capstone, where an assignment often meant life or death, egoism, sexism, and racism were wastes of time. If you could do the job, you got the job, end of story. This was the internal culture that kept the team tight, and as far as Bradford was concerned, Walker was one of his best—which was why he’d brought her with him to the hospital.

She sat in the Explorer, eyes closed and thumb pressed to the bridge of her nose, doing that thing she did: remembering, retracing
steps, imprinting details that meant nothing in the moment but which she might need later. Bradford took the Explorer out of the parking lot, pulled the phone from his belt clip, dialed Logan, and was once more connected to voice mail.

On an average day, Logan not answering would be an understandable oddity, but today the silence screamed of complications. Bradford tossed the phone onto the front console, yanked a hard left on the steering wheel, and swerved. Cut across two lanes to pull a U-turn. A lady in a red Mazda hit the horn and let it blow. The guy behind her was more explicit and gave Bradford the finger.

Walker grabbed the hand bar for support and through clenched teeth said, “Where are we going?”

Bradford swung tight and punched the gas. The Explorer lurched forward just fast enough to keep from being rear-ended. “Logan’s not answering his phone,” he said, and though Walker wouldn’t fully grasp the implications, she knew enough to save him an explanation.

When they were once again moving with the flow of traffic, Walker said, “Why the body double in the hospital? Why’d they even bother to plant the wallet?”

Bradford looked away from the road and stared at her a second too long. Shifted his focus back to the traffic and answered with an audible growl. Twice now, so intent on getting to Munroe, he’d run in the wrong direction, hadn’t seen the maze before Walker asked him to.

She answered for him. “They knew we’d come looking and gave us a distraction, not for long, just long enough, because they had to know as soon as we got to the hospital the ruse would be up.” She paused. “You asked Jack to run plates, right?”

“Yeah.”

“What’d he get?”

“Valid Dallas Fire-Rescue,” Bradford said. “Nothing reported stolen.”

“But your gut says the paramedics weren’t the real deal.”

Instinct told him many things, none that he wanted to articulate. He said, “At this point, it’s all conjecture.”

She was quiet for a moment, then said, “If they were real, we’ll find her eventually, so let’s agree they weren’t and that Jack is right. Where’d they get the ambulance? Emergency vehicles aren’t exactly
easy to drive off with, not without causing a commotion we should be able to pick up.”

“I’d use an out-of-service unit,” Bradford said. “The city’s got to keep them stored somewhere.”

“It’s a lead.”

He reached for the phone and tossed it to her. “Get Jack on it,” he said, and swung the vehicle down a semideserted industrial strip.

F
AR ALONG THE
street on either side and in both directions were squat block buildings, businesses divided one from the next by narrow windows and truck bays. The signage on one, scripted in large metallic block letters, read
LOGAN
’
S
, and Bradford pulled to the front of it.

The parking area was empty, and from the ground level the building appeared quiet, if not deserted. Concrete steps under a roofed walkway led up to a mostly glass front door. Beyond the entry, all was dark, and daylight reflecting off the glass created a mirrored effect. The door’s latch rested against the frame as if someone in a hurry hadn’t realized the spring was broken.

Bradford reached for the weapon holstered under his arm and toed the door open. Walker, following suit, went in behind him.

The hallway was a straight, empty shot forty-five feet back to another door, which led to the warehouse area. Off the hall on both sides were the four rooms that made up the entire office—two in the front for workspace, two to the rear that had been used as a kitchen and a bedroom for as long as Logan had leased the place. At the moment, the only light was what filtered through the front door.

The interior was silent, the floor littered with glass shattered from one of the large framed posters that had once hung high and now lay disjointed at the base of the wall. Bradford stepped beyond the shards, moved from one room to the next, staying in each just long enough to confirm it empty.

The primary evidence of a struggle was in the kitchen, where the table was broken and dishes lay shattered on the floor. Dried blood streaked across the floor and counters. He found a light switch and elbowed it on, adding a garish illumination to the mix, and then, seeing what he needed to see, backed out, nodding for Walker to take a look.

She stopped just before the chaos, and after a moment her eyes cut to his. He continued down the hall to the door that led to the warehouse and the restrooms, though he knew he’d find nothing out there. Whoever had done this had come for Logan, found him in the kitchen, taken him, and left.

The warehouse, double the width of the front office, was spaced with machines, tools, and storage. Bradford stood in the oversize area listening to the buzz of electricity that ran through unseen wires to powerful lights. In the silence, he holstered the weapon, then turned a slow circle and willed the facts to come to him.

The events of today were too connected to be coincidence, were too well informed to be new. There was a history that pulled everything together, something from their past, someone who would have known where to look and who to grab, and somehow all of this tied in to today. The events of Argentina tumbled inside his head.

He pushed past Walker, who guarded the egress.

In Logan’s bedroom, he dug through dressers and drawers, scanned the walls and surfaces, added almost as much to the mess as those who’d come before him, searching for photographs, artwork, personal touches, anything that would lead from Logan to Hannah, Logan’s daughter, who’d been the catalyst for Munroe’s infiltration in Buenos Aires.

He found nothing. Like Munroe, Logan was careful not to leave anything that traced back to the ones he loved, and this one relief was drowned out by several more destructive possibilities. Bradford paused, then looked up to find Walker studying him. He straightened, ignoring what she left unsaid. No matter how it might appear to her, his weren’t the actions of a man who’d witnessed the abduction of his girlfriend. Walker didn’t know Munroe’s history, didn’t understand how Logan factored into the equation, and without having seen it, lived through it—survived it—she could never understand the place from which his fear was born.