Cam leaned more of his weight onto his hand, and Nic gave him a supportive nudge. Harper was their guy; Cam knew it too. The end of all this was rushing up to meet them. But where?
“Do you have any idea as to his whereabouts?” Nic asked.
“No, I only ever saw him on jobs. I’m sorry I don’t know more.”
Nic believed that she was. “No, Becca, this is good. Thank you.”
“I hope you find her, Hot Stuff.”
She handed the phone back to the warden, and Nic negotiated for her to stay a few more days in local lockup. Maybe by then this would all be over, and he could file the paperwork to move her out of maximum security. By the time he finished with the warden, Cam had steadied himself and was headed back into the interrogation room.
“Does Timothy Harper have her?”
Reid froze. No squirming, no cute answers, no deflections. Just utterly still.
And ghostly pale.
“Does he have her?” Cam roared.
“I want a deal,” Reid squeaked.
Cam lunged across the table, grabbing Reid by the ragged collar of his T-shirt. “This is a girl’s life, you weaselly fuck!”
There was a traffic jam at the observation room door, Nic and Jamie both trying to rush out at once, but Jamie had the size advantage, which Nic needed right then for Cam’s sake. He let Jamie out first and followed him into the other room. Jamie and Matt wrestled Cam off Reid, who looked smug, like he thought he was getting off easy, Nic the smaller of the three men. He wasn’t so smug once Nic grabbed him by the arm, wrenched it behind him, and slammed him face down against the table.
“I can’t grant you a deal,” Nic growled.
“Then I’m not telling you shit,” Reid said, struggling.
Nic wrenched his arm higher. “If you don’t tell us where to find Harper, I can assure you this. I’ll make it so you go to Cedar Junction. Maximum security. Do you know what they do to people who hurt or help hurt little girls in places like that? And just think, how many people does your boss have up there? Think he’ll let you live? Will he trust a useless shit like you to keep his mouth shut? Or will he decide to shut you up permanently?”
With Cam wrapped up in Jamie’s arms, Matt crouched on the other side of the table, eye-level with Reid. “It’s in your best interest to cooperate, Porter. Where does Harper have Shannon?”
“At his grandparents’ old farmhouse. Out in Lincoln.”
Twenty
Cam wanted to move on the house in Lincoln as soon as they could suit up. But Matt showed him an aerial shot of the property, and he knew it would be sundown before they could move. A big old house in the middle of big open fields—dense forest two hundred yards behind the house, a two-lane state highway in front of it, then a thin buffer of trees on the other side of the road before the land opened up again into another field. No way they could get at the house from either direction without being seen in broad daylight.
Especially if Harper was on the lookout for them via the security cameras on each corner of the structure and on the door.
They mapped out the approach, moving in through the property across the street. Down the drive with its line of trees, thick with foliage from the summer, to the gully behind the copse of trees across the highway from Harper’s house. The backyard was a more direct route but converging from across the street provided the most cover and the least amount of exposure.
Less time for Harper to detect them, become desperate, and possibly injure himself or Shannon.
Mother Nature helped a little, bringing in a late afternoon storm that darkened the skies and poured down visibility-obscuring rain.
An hour ahead of schedule, Cam lay in the gully across the street, target in view.
“Lights on. No movement,” Matt said beside him. “No cars either.”
A surveillance drone dropped out of the low clouds right over the house, out of the range of the cameras. “Drone isn’t picking up any heat signatures,” Jamie reported through the comm in Cam’s ear. His visit to MIT had certainly paid off.
“Lights on in the subbasement too,” Nic said on his left side. He pointed at the half windows visible just above the ground.
“Drone can’t detect below grade,” Jamie said.
Rain pounded Cam’s back, pouring off the vest and FBI windbreaker, flowing under his arms and down his neck. It was a hot, suffocating, late summer rain, and he could barely get in a breath that didn’t weigh him down more.
