The Doll Read online

  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  Bradford opened the doors and slid in behind the wheel, a hundred questions charging through his head, all of them superseded by guilt.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.

  FAR 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.

  Vanessa Michael Munroe was a killer with a predator’s natural instincts; she could take care of herself. What scared him—terrified him—was what would happen if she was pushed too far. He’d seen that place of destruction, had witnessed firsthand what the darkness could do to her mind, and if whoever had taken her had also taken Logan …

  Bradford let the thought die and cut off the murky places to which it led. He stood in place, deliberating, analyzing, then whispered, “Surveillance footage.”

  Walker’s head tipped up and around.

  He said, “Fiber optics.”

  They found the security system racked inside the kitchen’s closet, the miniature cooling fans still blowing and signs of hurried disturbance along the walls.

  The recording tray was empty.

  Bradford scanned behind the equipment, where clusters of wires fed to and from machines through the wall. He used the closet walls to brace himself and shimmied up to the faint outline of a cutaway. Pushed up, and the segment of ceiling lifted and slid away on rollers.

  The area above the kitchen was clean, had been decked, and the heating and cooling air vents redirected to include this small area—everything opposite what one might expect in an unused crawl space. A foot away from the opening were two servers and next to them a small rack of jacketed DVDs. He punched the button to open the recording tray, ejected an unmarked disk, slid it into a sleeve, and dropped it down to Walker.

  They moved from the kitchen back to the front area, where the computers had been destroyed and the hard drives removed. Hunted for logs, journals, notations on paper, anything that might direct them to Logan’s last visitor, but what they were searching for, if it had ever existed at all, had probably ended up on a scrap of paper tossed out with yesterday’s trash.

  They didn’t speak again until they were back inside the Explorer and Bradford had found a random pay phone from which he made an anonymous call to 911.

  “What’s the connection?” Walker asked. “Michael and Logan?”

  Bradford, eyes fixed on the road ahead, didn’t respond. He didn’t have the words to articulate the jumbled confusion of experience and history, the obscure paths Munroe had trod, from them the murky depths they were about to wade.

  Walker sighed and turned back to the window. Said, “You know things I don’t know and I can’t help solve this thing if you insist on playing the role of grieving boyfriend.”

  Bradford stole a glance in her direction. Said, “Whoever did this came after Michael and took Logan as collateral, as a hostage.” Paused. “Either that or they took him as a setup to a revenge killing—for Michael to witness before they kill her, too. One of those two.”

  A long, heavy silence filled the car and eventually Walker said, “Wow.”

  “It’s all just conjecture,” he said, “but you wanted to know.”

  She shifted in the seat so that she faced him. “I don’t understand. Logan races motorcycles for a living. Why the hell does he need his place wired like that?”

  “He races, he retools performance engines, but he’s also got a supply business that has nothing to do with his machine shop. Logan’s kind of a go-to guy. If you need something military-grade and difficult to get, he’ll do the getting.”

  “But no alarm system?”

  “Nothing that would bring law enforcement to his doorstep.”

  “And you don’t think what happened today might possibly be because of him and”—Walker air-quoted—“his supply business?”

  Bradford shot her another glance and turned back to the road. Whoever had done this had taken Munroe clean while Logan’s place was trashed and bloody. Even without knowing the history, it didn’t take a genius to follow the logic. He waited until he’d exited the freeway and stopped at a traffic light before answering. “It may be intertwined with his business somehow,” he said, “but ultimately this is about Michael.”

  “And you know this how? More gut instinct?”

  “Stop sniping at me,” he said. “I know you see it. Whoever did this grabbed Michael in public and in broad daylight, went through a hell of a lot of effort to create a diversion. This is not an amateur, so let’s just assume that if all he wanted was her dead, Logan would be here grieving over her body with us, but instead he’s missing, too. The only reason to take Logan is to control Michael.”

  “Fine for a theory,” she said, “but why take Logan specifically? Sure, he’s her friend, but if the idea is some sort of hostage situation, why not take you? Why not me for that matter, or some kid on the street?”

  Bradford waited again before speaking. How to explain who Logan was to Munroe? “Holding Logan hostage is the best weapon they could have come up with,” he said. “She’s tighter with him than with any blood bond.”

  “Someone knows this?”

  Bradford nodded. Someone knew. Who was the big fucking question.

  Down the hall and through the glass walls, Jahan shifted away from the monitors, watching their approach, swiveling the chair back and forth until Bradford entered the war room.

  Before Bradford spoke, Jahan said, “Confirmed the VIN numbers to the ambulance. Found the service depot and am working on tying in to Dallas Fire-Rescue records and GPS systems so we can figure out where it came from and where it’s been.” He paused. “News on Logan?”

  Bradford shook his head. “He’s missing, too.”

  Walker handed Jahan the disk. “Don’t know if it’s current, but we pulled a surveillance backup.”

  Jahan stared at it for a moment, then turned to the computer and inserted the disk into a DVD tray.

  Bradford and Walker leaned in closer.

  At their crowding, Jahan put his palms against the desk and rolled the chair backward. “Please,” he said.

  They both straightened, then took a step back. Jahan waved them on farther. “Go do what you do and let me do what I do.” When neither of them budged, he slid lower in the chair, stretched his legs, and tilted his head upward. “I’ve got all day.”

  Walker glanced at Bradford, and when he offered no reassurance, she took another step in retreat, headed for the hall, and paused in the door frame just long enough to lean back in. Said, “You’d better call me if there’s news, Jack—you leave me out of this and I swear I’ll find a way to make the rest of your
life fucking miserable.”

  The click of the wall segment followed a half-minute later.

  Jahan muttered under his breath, his right hand making a talking motion, “As if she doesn’t trust me!” When, after a long silence, Bradford didn’t move, Jahan glared up at him.

  “I need to watch,” Bradford said.

  “No, you don’t. I know you think it’ll help you feel better, keeping busy, being up-to-the-second on what’s going on, and all that. But standing there breathing in my ear while I pull this apart is only going to give you anxiety—is going to give me anxiety. There are new notes on the board and you have a business to run.” Jahan motioned across the room toward the whiteboards. “Go that way.”

  Bradford sighed, shifted away from the computer and everything he hoped, and fought against hoping, to find.

  Hope. The activity of the impotent. His was a world of action, of relying on his own wits and ability to create the luck that kept him alive, and yet here in a moment of weakness he was a mendicant hoping for alms.

  He turned away, a concession to a friendship with Jahan that went back far enough that privately they still called each other names earned during rougher and cruder times.

  Jahan’s career path had taken him from army intelligence into Bradford’s mercenary fold. At thirty-seven, he was a second-generation American, semi-attached to an extended family in Mumbai, and having spent the predominance of the last eight years working private security in the Middle East, he could now, at least on the surface, as easily pass for Pakistani, Saudi, Persian, or Syrian as he could Indian—sometimes Mexican or Colombian, depending on a person’s prejudice, and there always seemed to be plenty of prejudice to go around.

  Jahan had a snarky way of bringing bigotry to the fore, and as it wasn’t easy to argue with a smartass who had a penchant for mockery and an IQ of 152, his words often provoked blows. Dodging, mocking, he would laugh and taunt, claiming that jacking with intolerance was the best free entertainment around. It didn’t take long for the Capstone term of endearment to follow.