She sat in the truck with one cop beside her, hoping to get an explanation. She kept trying, but the words came out jumbled; then she would squeeze her son tight and burst into tears again. Kona sat near her and Danny, whining.
Finally the cop said, “Just relax. Relax,” he said. “You’ve got your son back.”
“I got my son back,” she said, “but no thanks to you guys. Somebody was standing guard, and he left,” she said. “This stalker-turned-kidnapper guy must have known somehow. He must have seen that they left.”
“Well, we are dealing with a staffing shortage,” he said apologetically.
She shook her head and rocked back and forth. “That’s no excuse, considering all the problems I’ve already had due to this one guy,” she said.
“But your ex-husband got the baby back,” he said.
“He’s not my—”
“So that’s the main thing. But I sure as hell wish he hadn’t gone off on a vigilante justice mission, looking for the guy.”
“Of course he did,” she said. “He knows perfectly well that if he doesn’t—”
“We can’t have him off pretending like he’s law enforcement.”
She glared at him, and the look must have gotten his attention. She was fed up with his constant interruptions. “I don’t think you understand,” she said. “First, he’s not my ex-husband. Second, Greyson is a friend. And I don’t know too much about his military background, but this is what he does. And you can count on the fact that, now he’s gone down this pathway, he’s not likely to stop.”
At that, Officer Winston suddenly looked interested and not in a good way, “Can you give us more details about him?”
She provided Greyson’s name and phone number. “Beyond that you’ll have to find out what you need to know on your own,” she said. “And please don’t leave me alone again.”
“I’m not leaving you,” he said. “I’ll stand right here and make some phone calls.”
She sat inside the truck’s cab and watched as the cop walked back and forth several times. Her heart and mind still couldn’t quite function on the same page. She held Danny close in her arms, but the problem was that there was no reason for him to be sleeping at this point. She noted the bruise on his temple. That asshole had knocked out her child.
If the kidnapper had woken up Danny when taking him, and Danny didn’t recognize where he was, he would have started screaming. A blow to the head would have taken care of any noise coming out of a toddler like this instantly. She wanted to get Danny checked out, but she also didn’t want to leave Greyson. At the same time, she wanted to get a hell of a long way from here. Like mainland USA sounded about far enough away.
While she sat here, gently rocking her son, waiting for an ambulance to provide immediate medical attention, her phone rang. She glanced down to see Unknown Caller once more. “Hello?”
She couldn’t believe that this guy had been so brazen as to come right into her home and steal her son. It still didn’t feel like it had anything to do with her ex-husband. It didn’t make any sense that her ex-husband would do this, except for the threatening words from this guy. So, if it wasn’t her ex-husband, who else would it be? She stared down at the phone. Nobody had answered. She hung up, and then it rang again. She opened the window to the cop who was just getting off the phone.
She held out her phone and said, “This is one of the prank calls I’ve been getting for the last few weeks. Nobody ever speaks at the other end of phone.”
“Put it on Speaker, and answer it so I can hear,” the officer said.
She did just that. There was nothing on the other end. He looked over at her and raised an eyebrow.
She shrugged and said, “By the way, George, your tactics failed, and I have my son again.” There was a weird sound, as if somebody were shocked. “Yes, you asshole,” she snapped. “The fact that you even thought something like this was cool just means I’ll happily watch as the jail cell door slams in your face,” she roared. And it seemed that once she got going she couldn’t stop. “How dare you try to steal my son from me after all this time! You made it perfectly clear you didn’t want anything to do with him.”
She didn’t know exactly what it was that she said, but somehow something must have triggered him because he snapped, “Shut the hell up, bitch.” And then the phone went dead. She took several long, slow breaths. Meanwhile, Kona growled. She patted the dog to calm her.
“Was that George?”
She looked at the stunned policeman and slowly nodded. “I think it was.”
“In that case,” he said, “I need everything you know about your ex-husband.”
She sagged back into the seat, her heart racing and her mind overwhelmed that it very easily could have been George on the phone just then. She shook her head and told the cop what little she knew. “I don’t know what else to tell you,” she said, when she finally fell silent.
“Well, I mean, some of his identifying information would help.”
“I don’t know his social security number,” she said with a frown. “Though I do have some old paperwork from his income taxes at home.”
“Any way to access it from here?”
She frowned, brought up her emails, and said, “I was asked that question by my accountant because it was missing on one of the forms.” She quickly sorted through her emails and finally brought up the email and handed it to him.
He grinned and said, “Okay, that’s great.” He wrote down the number. “Let’s see how we can track him. What about a vehicle?”
“Last I knew he drove a Mercedes,” she said, “a small sports convertible.” She frowned, thinking about it, and shrugged. “I don’t know what the model is or his license plate number.”
“That’s fine,” he said. “The DMV will give us something.”
She sat back just as Danny started to wiggle. Kona whimpered again. She held Danny close and whispered, “Mommy’s got you,” she said. “Mommy’s got you.” He shifted, whimpered a little bit, and she continued rocking him back to sleep. “I need to get his head checked out,” she told the cop.
“The ambulance should be here any minute now,” the cop said.
“I could have driven to the hospital myself,” she said. “It would have been much faster.”
“Maybe,” he said, “but we have to follow certain protocols.”
None of that made any sense to her. “It would be much easier and faster if I had just driven straight there.”
“Indulge me,” he said.
Kona growled at his tone.
“Okay, girl,” Jessica said, patting the dog. And she sank back and just held her son close. Of all the things that she was damn grateful for right now, besides this wonderful guard dog, Kona, was the fact that Greyson had found Danny. She didn’t know how, but she suspected that a whole lot of other people had stepped up to help Greyson than he could ever really clarify, but she was so damn grateful regardless. Her instincts had said she could trust him, and this just proved that not only was he a man to trust, but he was also a man who got things done. Now, if only he could find the asshole who had kidnapped her son in the first place.
Greyson did a quick sweep through the front offices of this chemical building, even as the woman at the reception desk protested. He shot her a hard look and said, “The cops are on their way. We’re looking for the kidnapper of a toddler. We’ve just rescued the child outside your loading bay.”
She immediately shut up, reaching for the phone.
“Good, call security,” he said. “We need to know who has been here.” He pulled up his phone and the photo he had of the stalker. “Do you recognize this man?”
Bewildered, she looked at it, shook her head, and said, “It’s a really terrible photo.”
“Maybe, but look at it,” he urged. “Do you recognize him?”
She took a second look, frowned, and said, “Maybe, but not really.”
“What does that mean?” he snapped.
“He kind of looks like one of the guys who works on the loading dock, but not really.”
“What about it is not really?”
“Dennis, who works in the loading dock, has blond hair,” she said. “This guy’s hair looks darker.”
“Where is Dennis right now?”
She shrugged. “He’s always down in the warehouse.”
“How do I get there?”
She pointed to the elevators. “Drop down to the lower level, the first floor, and head out,” she said.
But he was already gone. When the elevators wouldn’t open in time, he took the stairs. He made it down one floor and the stairs stopped at the first floor. He quickly hopped onto the elevator from there and headed down into the lower levels. When the elevator opened, he found a massive area with a small hallway and a couple offices down the side. He took a quick look in the offices. They were empty, so then he headed out to the warehouse. Whoever had driven Jessica’s car was still here. At least Greyson hoped so. Surely the cops had blocked the exit at the front gate, so he had to be somewhere in this compound.
As he stepped out, another man called out, “Hey, who are you?”
He turned to face a man very similar looking to the one who he’d been chasing. “You Dennis?”
“Sure am,” he said with a frown on his face.
“I think your brother is looking for you.”
Immediately a weary look came across his face. “What are you talking about?”
“Your brother,” Greyson said. “He arrived here in a stolen vehicle after kidnapping an toddler,” Greyson snapped in a hard voice. “We’ve recovered the child and the vehicle, but your brother is here, right now, trying to escape the authorities.”
Dennis looked stunned. His jaw dropped. “Are you serious?”
“He’s been stalking the child’s mother for days, possibly weeks to months. Hard to know when this started. Early this morning he assaulted two police officers and escaped their custody.”
“I haven’t seen Frank at all today.”
“That may be,” he said, “but, if that’s true, it’s only because he hasn’t managed to find you.”
“He knows I don’t want anything to do with him,” he said. “The last time he got me into so much shit that I couldn’t believe it.”
“Well, he’s likely to do it again,” he said, “because, if you look at your bay door number one,” he said, “you’ll see a little Pontiac. That’s the car he arrived in.”
Immediately Dennis walked over, opened up a big bay door, and took a look at the small car sitting there, and the cops all around. He immediately started swearing. “Jesus Christ! That damn kid,” he said.
“He didn’t look like too much of a kid to me,” Greyson snapped. He studied the man in front of him. He had a completely different build than the man he’d pinned to the ground last night.
“Yeah, well, I’m thirty, and he’s twenty-eight. He’ll always be a kid to me,” he snapped.
“He hasn’t left the compound, so where in here can he hide?”
“Everybody has to have an ID badge key card to get in,” he said, bewildered. “He knows that.”
“Yeah, and what did you arrive in?”
Dennis stared at him in shock and then swore again, racing outside, around the corner of the building. Greyson followed him, jumping down from the loading bay in front of the cops, two of them now running behind him. As Dennis got out to another parking lot, he swore even more, stomping his feet. “God dammit to hell. My truck is gone,” he said. He walked to the empty spot and said, “This is my space right here.”
“What kind of truck is it?”
He turned, pulled up his phone, and said, “This is my baby. It’s a blue Ford with lots of grillwork.”
“And how would he have started it?”
“The kid’s been stealing cars since grade school. He knows how to jump-start rigs,” Dennis said. “He could’ve taken any one of these.”
“But he took yours. Why?”
“Why the hell do you think? He’s my brother, so Frank probably thinks I wouldn’t report it stolen because I’d know he’s the one who took it.”
“Security cameras?” he barked, looking up at the side of the building.
“Not here, but in the front, yes.”
A cop immediately said, “We need to access it right now.”
“How else can you get out of here?” Greyson asked Dennis.
“Another gate’s on the far side,” Dennis said, pointing. “It lets you onto a different street.”
“God dammit.” Greyson turned to the cop and said, “I’ll leave you here while I track down Frank.” And, with that, he ran back to his truck. As soon as he got there, the cop who had been leaning against his grandpa’s truck straightened and stood. Greyson gave him an update. “Frank stole a truck and got out on the far side. He’s driving a blue F-150,” he said, as he passed over the license plate number. “It’s his brother’s truck. His brother, Dennis, works here. I’m going after Frank again.”
Without giving the cop a chance to argue, he hopped in and turned on the engine. Looking over at Jessica, he said, “Sorry, but you’re in for another ride.”
“Just don’t kill us,” she said.
“Actually you should probably sit here and wait,” he said. “The cop said that’s your ambulance.” She hesitated, and he shook his head. “No,” he said. “Go. Let’s make sure that your boy is okay.”
Obediently she hopped out and stood nearby, while he peeled out of the parking lot, headed to the back gate, the same place that Frank had taken his current stolen vehicle. Kona stayed with him, more than anxious to stay in the hunt.
Greyson didn’t realize it was a gate until he was almost upon it. It was still partially open. He hopped out, pulled it open, got back in, and took off, while getting his phone out. “Badger, we need Stone again. The asshole took his brother’s truck and went out the back way.”
“Interesting,” Badger said in a calm voice. “I’m patching it through. Just hang on.”
Next thing he knew, Stone was on the line. “He’s driving a blue F-150 with lots of grillwork,” Greyson told Stone, reading the license plate to him. “He’s alone. It’s his brother’s truck, and he’ll be on the run now.”
“We’ll find him,” Stone said. “Is the little boy okay?”
“He’s got some bruising to his temple area,” he said. “It’s quite likely that idiot hit Danny to knock him out. Right now, he and his mom stayed behind with the cops, waiting for the ambulance to check out the boy.”
“Good,” Stone said. “Let’s go find that bastard. We’re running air surveillance. Give us a minute.”
Minute after minute ticked by as they did a lot of searching, and Greyson drove around a lot of blocks doing random searches.
“I’m sorry, man. No sign of that truck,” Stone said.
“I can’t believe it,” Greyson replied. “What about traffic cameras?”
“That industrial section is a little slim on those,” he said, “so we’re running through some of the companies that have private property cameras running right now. Nothing so far, but—oh, wait—about twenty minutes after you left the place,” he said, “one of the cameras picked him up about four miles away. Hang on while we figure out where he’s gone from there.”
Greyson took a left back onto the freeway and headed back the other direction.
“So he just came here, dumped the kid, and grabbed a new set of wheels?”
“That’s quite possible,” Stone said. “Think about it. If he’s caught with a stolen vehicle and a kidnapped child, it’s a whole different story than if he’s just driving his brother’s truck without permission.”
“And he would have known the kid would be okay there. Eventually somebody would have surely come and checked out a car parked in front of the loading bay.”
“It’s quite possible and at least makes this guy seem a little bit more human,” Stone said. “Don’t worry. I still hate him though.”
“You and me both,” Greyson said. “Please tell me that you found where this guy went.”
“Yeah. He went ahead to the McDonald’s, parked the vehicle, and went inside, but that was over forty minutes ago.”
Greyson pulled into the McDonald’s lot ten minutes later. He slowly cruised past the parking lot full of vehicles and pulled up beside the blue F-150 with all the chrome. “I’m pretty damn sure he’s ditched it here,” he said, as he hopped out and walked around the vehicle.
“I would think so,” Stone replied. “I would. It’s pretty damn easy to pick up any other vehicle.”
“Even if he didn’t get another one right here,” he said, “a mall’s across the road, and a great big used car lot is on the next block. No shortage of choices here. His brother said Frank was pretty damn quick at hot-wiring vehicles, so he could be anywhere by now. Looks like we lost him.”