The guys hadn’t even got off their bikes but sat in full gear as they waited for me to join them. I nodded in acknowledgement before climbing onto my ride and heading out with them forming in line behind me.
We had already coordinated the night before so we all knew where we were going. Nate as the one most proficient with technology was staying back at the club to keep digging while the rest of us went hunting. Someone had brought in the dogs, we had helicopters scheduled to hit the air in a few hours and we’d organized our own search party separate from the cops.
Only my men knew that my focus was on this Paul person, I never let on to the cops that I had a suspect in mind. Why? Because I didn’t want them to catch him. If I believed for one minute that their resources were better I would’ve spilled in a New York minute. But I had no doubt that I could get to him first.
I saw a call from Deanna but ignored that shit. I was sure she wasn’t calling to tell me that she had my kid because the eyes in Holly’s room would’ve shown me if she were there. Anything else she had to say to me right now was of no interest. Fuck her.
We headed back to the school to pick up the scent which I knew cold be a crap shoot since I was pretty sure he’d left in a car and most trackers couldn’t pick up scents that easily in such cases. But supposedly this pair was trained specifically for that, so we’ll see.
No one was saying anything as we got to work which is the way we usually did this, only this time there was a sense of something in the air. This was one of ours, she wasn’t an unknown, not that we cared any less when we were trying to save a stranger. But the fact that this was Holly added a whole other element to what we were doing here.
Deke I knew was having a hard time and the set look on his face did not bode well. I knew if he caught up with this hump before any of us did things might get messy and I wanted to avoid that at all cost. Besides this was my kill plain and simple.
A call came in from Jake about an hour into it. “I’ve put out a BOLO on the car he’s driving.”
“How the fuck did you find that? My guy’s been looking all night with no luck.” That was good news, the first break we’ve had since this shit started. Last night the cops said they had nothing, the footage of the car that they suspected was too grainy to make out much of anything and besides they weren’t sure that that had been the correct car.
“I went into the database and saw what they have so far, which is shit, and worked backwards from there. There was only one unknown in the area at the time school was letting out. He had to move really fast to get to her before your ex showed up. That little strip mall before the turn off for the school has great camera coverage.”
“Wonder why the asshole cops didn’t think of that?”
“They don’t have the resources I do. You want the make and model? We didn’t get a shot of the plate but in a town this size it shouldn’t be too hard to find. Unless…”
Yeah, unless.
I took the information from him and passed it on to my guys before calling Nate and telling him to look for that car in the system. There was probably a good bet that the car had been stolen and somebody might’ve reported it by now. There were too many variables there so I didn’t put too much stock in it. Criminals were a sophisticated bunch these days.
I was going through the motions, but the reality was that I didn’t expect to find him this way. I had a strong hunch that he would contact me when he was ready. This was about me in some way; Me and what I do. Deanna had been sure that if Paul was the one behind it, he’d done it because I’d made her get rid of him. I wasn’t so sure about that. I had the feeling there was a shit load more going on here than met the eye.
Another day was almost at an end and still there was no word and no sightings. I’d made up a thousand flyers of Holly and had them plastered all over the place. Someone was working on a billboard and we had a call center set up, still it wasn’t enough. With each hour that went by I grew more and more frustrated. I also came up with a million and one ways to end this fucker on sight.
In the end it was Paul’s ex who came through. On a hunch I’d put out a sketch of the man and his many disguises as my men had captured during the weeks they’d snapped him going back and forth with Deanna.
She’d seen one that looked familiar and called into the center.
“What’s she saying Cassie?” Cass was one of the sisters working the phone lined who’d taken the call.
“She says that it looks like her ex, when I asked her where she thought he might be hiding out she gave me the location of an old hunting cabin in the woods in Derby. Says it belongs to his family but no one has used it in years as far as she knows. Blade, he has a history.”