Kidnapped

  Gary obviously bought a lot of film and development supplies. But the cash trail for those hadn’t been discovered yet either, which suggested there was another bank, another account somewhere. But where? Luke returned to the search.

  * * *

  It felt odd being home. Caroline took a mug of hot chocolate out to the back deck and sat down to watch the night sky. The forecast spoke of rain in the next few days, but tonight the sky was clear and the stars bright. The sleep she desperately needed was so far away.

  Where was Sharon? Caroline had sat out here with her sister so many nights, talking about life and laughing together.

  Jesus, I’ve survived the first punch of this storm, but it is not letting up and it’s like being in a hurricane. I don’t know how to cope anymore. I’m losing hope that this will ever end.

  Luke kept moving through this, one step at a time, his emotions held just below the surface. She, on the other hand, just felt overwhelmed. She couldn’t match Luke’s control, but she had to find a way to do so. How long, Lord? Will we find Sharon tomorrow? in a few days? Does this go on for weeks? She didn’t know what to prepare for.

  Luke will do anything he has to in order to save my sister. For that matter, so would I. And I’m scared for him, for what this might require before it’s over.

  The awareness sat just below her conscious thoughts through the days, as she watched Luke, as she saw him focused on finding Sharon. Caroline knew with each unexpected turn in this case, the odds increased that Luke might be hurt before this was over. We need this to end, Lord. We need Sharon home.

  What happened if Sharon didn’t come home? Caroline thought about Benjamin, about what it would be like having to step into Sharon’s shoes for a while—to help Mark with the day-to-day routine, to watch Benjamin after school. What did she know about being a mom?

  She could be an aunt, keep an eye on Benjamin, help him with schoolwork, listen to his day and help take him to events. But when it came down to the important things—it would never work. Benjamin had to have his mom come home. He’d already lost his dad to an accident and was having to adapt to a new dad. If Sharon didn’t come home, Caroline feared Benjamin would withdraw into his shell and not let himself love anyone for fear he’d lose that person.

  Could Mark even go on with his life if Sharon was never found? How long did they search before making the painful decision to stop? How long would it be for the courts to consider Sharon dead, making Mark a widower by decree? Would he even stay in Benton or would the memories be so hard he’d take Benjamin to Atlanta to live? The sickness in her stomach grew acute. They couldn’t go there; they just couldn’t. Somehow they had to find Sharon.

  The phone rang inside. Not willing to take another call from a reporter and find herself quoted on the news, she listened to it ring until the machine picked it up.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Luke shifted the skillet onto the heat. “Benjamin, how do you want your eggs?”

  “Scrambled.”

  Luke cracked four eggs into the hot skillet, dumped in a bit of milk, and stirred hard. “Put in more toast for me, and find the grape jelly. Caroline prefers just toast and coffee for breakfast.”

  Mark came into the kitchen walking slowly. Luke recognized the signs of intense pain. “Rough night?”

  Mark just grimaced. “I want to go with you today.”

  “So do I,” Benjamin added.

  “Then you’ll both need a good breakfast.” Luke held up two eggs to Mark and got a nod. There was no way to talk his cousin out of going along, and Luke didn’t bother to even try. “You both want orange juice?”

  “Just milk for me,” Benjamin said.

  Luke shoveled eggs onto plates and pointed a spatula to the glass jar of chili peppers as Benjamin passed by him doing the toast. “You want to join me for some hot help this morning?”

  Benjamin laughed. “No way.”

  Luke tugged out two of the peppers to add to his plate. “Jackie, come grab a plate. You need to eat.”

  “I am.” His partner appeared from the dining room, carrying a carrot stick and half a bran muffin. “I brought mine along, remembering your cooking.” She poured herself a coffee refill. “The morning briefing got moved to the Benton sheriff’s office in forty minutes. Where’s Caroline?”

  “Sleeping in, hopefully. Her toast will keep.” Luke pulled out a chair for himself.

  “I hope Mom is getting a good breakfast.”

  Mark leaned over to his son, spoke quietly, and Benjamin nodded and dug into his eggs. “I’m taking Pop-Tarts along with me for Mom.”

  “Good idea,” Jackie concurred.

  Luke looked over at his partner and hoped for everyone’s sake they had a lead on Sharon’s location by nightfall.

  * * *

  Luke refilled his coffee and carried the mug into the dining room where Jackie was gathering up the area maps.

  “I’ll take Benjamin and Caroline with me this morning to do more flyer distributions, if you and Mark want to spend a few hours with the task force to brief them on what you found so far from Gary’s files,” Jackie offered.

  “I’ll take you up on that.” Luke looked at his watch. “I hate to wake Caroline up, but leaving without her isn’t worth the fireworks that would happen later.”

  “Call her.”

  He sighed. “Yeah.” If she was too tired and failed to set the alarm or had turned it off and was sleeping again—waking her with a phone call only to tell her he had no news wasn’t something he wanted to do. The day was going to be long and hard enough without starting it off with disappointment.

  “You loaned her your car last night. Walk over to her place. You can see how she’s really doing before she has to put on a steady face for Mark and Benjamin’s sake.”

  “Would you go ahead and take Mark and Benjamin in with you? We may be a few minutes behind you.”

  “Sure.” Jackie paused beside him and set her hand on his arm. “Are you doing okay?”

  Luke half smiled. “Remember that weekend when you shot me in the foot?”

  Jackie smiled. “I’m not likely to forget given you never will.”

  “True.” Luke’s smile faded. “I feel like I’m walking around with a gut wound right now. Are we missing something, Jackie?”

  “I spent the night wondering about that too. But what? I don’t know. Henry James doesn’t miss much. He’s got the task force exploring every idea folks have had.”

  “I know. I’ll go get Caroline and we’ll meet you shortly.”

  * * *

  Luke retrieved Caroline’s newspaper from the box at the foot of her driveway. He tucked it under his arm and walked toward the house.

  Luke saw his car parked off to one side; Caroline had parked so that she could still get to her own car in the garage. Officers had brought it back from Atlanta for her. Luke stepped up onto the porch. The wind had blown leaves into a pile before the front door. He shifted them aside with his foot and rang the doorbell. “Caroline, it’s Luke.”

  He slid off the rubber band from the newspaper. As he had expected, Sharon’s photo was prominent on the front page.

  Luke knocked a couple times on the door, then folded the paper and walked around the house. If she was up, the coffee would be started and she would have already spent some time out on the back patio. If he just woke her up, it would be a minute.

  He found the patio door unlocked. He slid it open and wiped his feet of wet leaves before stepping inside. The lights were off and the kitchen cool. “Caroline, you awake yet, darlin’? It’s Luke. You want me to start the coffee for you?”

  He tugged over the filters and the coffee can. There was an open aspirin bottle and a half-eaten microwaved dish of pasta on the counter. His car keys were on the counter next to her tin of after-dinner mints.

  Caroline didn’t answer his call. He didn’t hear the shower. He walked down the hall to the bottom of the stairs. “Caroline?”

  Luke took the stairs two
at a time.

  He looked toward Benjamin’s room since Caroline had slept there last time. Empty. He walked on. Her bedroom door was open, and one glance showed a made bed. “Caroline, answer me if you’re here.”

  His words echoed in the hall, unanswered.

  He pushed open doors to the bedrooms, the bathroom, and headed back downstairs. The alarm system had been off, the back patio door unlocked. His car was in the driveway. He scanned rooms on the main level and saw nothing out of place.

  Luke grabbed his keys and headed outside to the garage to check on her car. Caroline had been here last night, she’d eaten a bit, but either that bed was recently made or it had never been slept in.

  Luke pushed open her garage door.

  Caroline’s car was gone.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Luke shifted the phone in his hand so he could push in the alarm code sequence to get the time when the system had been shut off. The numbers flashed up in blue, and Luke searched his memory of last night to figure out when Caroline had called to tell him she was home. It had been before Jackie’s last update of the night. The time looked roughly the same. Caroline had shut off the alarm system a few minutes before she had called him last night. She hadn’t rearmed it as she normally did before she went to bed.

  “Caroline’s not at the community center,” Jackie relayed.

  Luke pushed buttons on the alarm system to reactivate it after a two-minute time delay. “I’m heading back to Mark’s house. How she could have passed us when you were heading out and I was walking over here—”

  “Luke, what’s going on?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Luke—”

  “Her purse is gone, her car is gone, and other than an unlocked back patio door and a deactivated alarm system, everything here is normal. She’s going to be at Mark’s right now, wondering where we are.”

  “Do you want me to alert the—?”

  “There’s no new problem, Jackie. Caroline and I just missed each other. I’ll call you back in a couple minutes.” Luke ended the call and hurried through the house.

  He headed toward his own car. His palms were sweaty as he turned the key in the ignition and put his car into reverse. There was something wrong. Something terribly, terribly wrong.

  * * *

  Mark pushed open the back door of his home so hard it hit the wall with a thud. “Still no word from Caroline?”

  Luke held up his hand, holding his cousin off. “I need to know where that number originates, and I need to know it now.” He covered the phone. “After she called me last night, Caroline got a call that she returned. That’s all I know so far. Sometime between then and this morning Caroline left her house, got in her car, and headed somewhere without any note or message indicating where she was going.”

  “I thought they had her phone line tapped.” Mark knelt to help Benjamin with his backpack.

  “They do, but she must have returned the call on the cell phone she had borrowed from Amy when the batteries went dead on hers.”

  “Were you able to get the number?”

  “Her home phone showed the last dozen incoming numbers.” He turned his attention back to his call. “Repeat that?” He scrawled down a location, and his hand shook as he wrote the final part of the message. “Thanks.” He closed the phone. “She got a call from a pay phone at a rest stop off I-20.”

  “Sharon?” Mark asked.

  Luke stared at the paper and then turned to share a quick look with Jackie even as he shook his head. “Caroline would have been over here in a heartbeat to get you. And she’s not one to go off on her own.”

  “She would,” Jackie corrected softly, “if she thought it necessary.”

  Luke forced himself not to ball the piece of paper in his fist as he too thought of the possibilities. “Or if she thought the call was a false lead, but one she had to check out for her peace of mind. Regardless, there’s no way she intended to be gone this long.”

  Caroline, I didn’t need you being brave today, not this way. He steadied himself and looked at his watch. “I’m heading out there.”

  “I want to go with you,” Mark said.

  Luke shook his head. “She’s not missing; she’s AWOL. There’s a difference. That call could have sent her anywhere, but I’ll start with checking out where it originated. I need you two to head back to the sheriff’s office and see what the task force has on phoned-in tips last night. See if any of the calls originated from this rest stop location. Someone was able to get Caroline’s home phone number; they may have been calling the tip line too. Caroline and I will join you at the sheriff’s office just as soon as we can.”

  * * *

  Caroline should have trusted him.

  Luke disregarded the speed limit and passed a trucker by using the right lane. Heavy traffic made him regret not requesting an air flight. The depth of fear he felt was different than anything he’d ever felt before. What was he going to say when he found her? If he reacted as he feared, his emotions would roil out, and he’d regret for years whatever came out of his mouth. You’ve scared me, Caroline—bad. And I don’t do scared very well.

  He hit the turn signal to pull into the rest stop. It looked nearly full with several trucks lined up before the restrooms and soda area. Luke chose not to park, but instead cruised through the rest stop slowly. He hoped to find Caroline sitting at one of the picnic tables or in her car, having chased a lead and come up with a bunch of nothing. He could deal with tears and the awful question of why someone would call her with false information, build up her hopes and then kill them. Luke could deal with her disappointment, but he couldn’t deal with her not being at this rest stop.

  He circled the parking lot twice, but there was no sign of Caroline’s car.

  Had she turned back for home? gone on with her quest? He should have insisted she stay at the house last night rather than let her return home. What had been said on the call? What had she come out here to find? Or had the call sent her somewhere else?

  There was nothing here to find.

  He left the rest stop and reentered traffic to take him back to Benton. Once she reappeared Caroline would be as apologetic as she could be for causing them to go through this. Two sisters—both missing. Luke wanted to pull to the side of the road and throw up.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The Benton sheriff had cleared two conference rooms and several desks for the task force. Luke paced in front of the time line on the display boards, past the flyers and photos and leads that had been followed. So much work, and so little to go on. “She’s not down at the volunteer center, the hospital, or with any of her friends we’ve been able to find.” He was coming up empty.

  Luke ran his hand through his hair. “He got to Caroline; that’s the only thing that makes sense. He has Sharon and he came back for Caroline. Who knows why, who knows what’s going on in this guy’s head. But at this point, if he’s still in the area, he won’t be for much longer. We find her car, we find where they met up, and maybe we figure out which interstate he’s using to get out of this area.”

  “Why didn’t Caroline leave a note or get word to us?” the sheriff asked.

  “I don’t know.” Luke looked over at Mark, wishing he had something to offer his cousin.

  Mark just shook his head. “This isn’t like Caroline.”

  Henry James hung up the phone. “The officers have finished their canvass around Caroline’s property. Her home, the surrounding grounds—they show no signs of foul play. The only tire tracks there appear to be your car and hers.”

  “I agree; I saw nothing at the house to indicate trouble,” Luke said. “She apparently left on her own. Show me again where the roadblocks are set up.”

  Jackie shifted the county map around for him to see the latest updates. Luke sat down to study the map.

  Henry ripped a fax off the machine. “Listen up, people.” The officers and FBI agents around the room quieted down and turned at his call. “Foren
sics just matched the bullets. Our three men dead in the camper—they were shot with a gun that traces back to Frank Hardin. So are we looking for Frank Hardin?”

  “If Frank shot those men, then why did he leave the money? That makes no sense,” Jackie said.

  “Maybe someone also killed Frank and took his gun?” one of the task force officers suggested.

  Luke shook his head. “We wouldn’t get that lucky.” He got up from the table to pace again. This was becoming impossible to sort out. Was he dealing with a kidnapping ring, a stalker, or both? “We suspect Frank was in this area to do a job. He was seen at the gas station Friday night after the snatch.” Luke looked at Jackie. “The one credible sighting after that put him heading west out of the state. But check me on this, the trail went cold within hours, correct?”

  “There were no more confirmed sightings.”

  “So Frank holed up and came back into this area, possibly to get paid? There’s a falling-out among the kidnappers, and Frank shoots his compatriots. Only that doesn’t explain the left behind cash or why Frank would take Sharon with him, let alone why he would want to get to Caroline . . .”

  “All we have so far on the three guys found shot is that Ronald Parks had the longest criminal record. The other two were support players in the past for car thefts and burglaries and probably had similar support jobs this time—drive the van, arrange the campsite. None of the three was the type to plan a kidnapping,” Henry added.

  “Frank isn’t the kind to plan such a crime either; he’s the guy who gets hired by someone to execute it.” Luke turned to look at the sheriff. “Has anyone else turned up murdered in the last two days around here? Did Frank shoot the guy who hired him too?”

  “We’ve had a couple shootings that look drug related over near Sandy Hill, and a domestic homicide south of Benton,” the sheriff offered. “No homicides that seem to match this.”