For the next ten minutes, I worried that we’d be too late, that I’d be too late, to save her. The worry ate an acidic hole in my gut as different images of a lifeless Peyton assaulted me. It couldn’t end like that, it just couldn’t.
A singular mission formed in my head. I would track down this strangler and make him pay for all that he’d put Peyton through. Mercy would not be in my vocabulary.
Constance came closer. “You know,” she said, joining me, leaning against Lucas’s Cayenne. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Her words broke my preoccupation with vengeance. “What?”
“He’s after her because she can identify him. That’s our theory, right?”
“Yeah.”
“He got into the office and knocked out O’Connor. Why didn’t he kill her when he had the chance?”
“You’re saying he needs her alive?”
She nodded. “Carrying somebody out of the building who’s either fighting, or knocked out, is super risky compared to just leaving the building before anybody knows there’s been a breach.”
Constance’s theory gave me hope. If he needed her alive, we had time, much more than I’d thought. “Let’s say that is the case. What does he need her for?”
“Just guessing,” she said. “He could want to know what she told the police. He might want to know if she was close enough to notice his bi-colored eyes. I mean that’s the only way we identified him here.”
I was chewing on that when Jordy’s voice came over the comms. “I’ve got a location.”
That jolted me upright. “Where?” Constance and I joined Lucas.
“I’m sending the location with an overhead satellite view. And you won’t believe who owns the building.”
“We’ll be en route as soon as we prep.” That was Lucas. “Get a drone in the air.”
“Roger that,” Jordy responded. “Don’t you want to know who the owner is?”
Lucas rolled his eyes. “Sure.”
I waved O’Connor over from his seat in the car. When he opened the door, I explained. “We’ve got a location.”
“His name begins with the letter F and he has an accent,” Jordy teased.
Lucas’s fist clenched. “I’m not in the mood, Jordy.”
“Okay,” the techie said. “The building is registered to a front company for Dmitri Yaroslavsky and his buddies.”
I didn’t recognize the name.
The sneer that took over Lucas’s face said he did. “I warned those assholes.”
“What’s going on?” O’Connor asked after he hoofed over.
I raised a finger to my lips to stop his chattering. “Who’s Yaroslavsky?”
“Sounds Russian,” O’Connor commented, ignoring my suggestion to be quiet.
“Dmitri took over the Russian mob after his father got arrested for taking part in Serena’s kidnapping. I’m going to make him regret getting involved in this. But that’s secondary.” He opened the back hatch of his Cayenne.
We gathered around as Lucas laid down his tablet and called Jordy on his phone, putting it on speaker. The picture on the tablet showed a series of large rectangular industrial buildings.
“It’s the middle building in the view I sent you,” Jordie said. “All three are warehouses, unused for at least a year as far as I can tell. Two other vehicles were parked in front of the middle building when the BMW arrived. The image isn’t the greatest quality, but two guys exited the BMW and carried a third person into the warehouse.”
“They drugged her again,” Lucas assured me before my mind could go to a worse alternative. “Jordy, how many other tangos?”
