Lila sags, head cocking to the side. “I already know about the messages with that woman. Romero told us.” She bunches her lips. “It doesn’t change anything for me. Whether she’s part of this or not, I don’t believe she orchestrated her abduction. After we save her, we can sort that out.”
I close my eyes, head falling. “Drake and his flapping trap.”
“Reed, get up,” Lila urges, pulsing my hand.
We meet eyes. Her tenderness and inner strength challenge me before she echoes it with spoken words.
I dip my chin in silent agreement.
“If you insist on preventing me from confronting that monster to save your sister, then you have work to do, dimples. Go find her.”
On the shortwalk to our team’s shared workspace, I take a few deep breaths to find my center.
Carson meets my eyes as I retake my seat at the table. “She good?”
“Yep. Any sign of Ginny’s car yet?”
“Still looking. Found it a few times but keep losing it when it leaves areas with cameras.”
Romero returns to his spot beside me with a fresh cup of coffee. “Am I the only one who finds it ironic that theShootto Kill Brotherhood is so fond of knives? All the bodies piling up, and only one of the vics was shot. Weird, right?”
Agent Fowler looks up briefly from his laptop, amusement perking up his exhausted features. “Maybe Carnage will change the name toSliceto Kill when he takes over. It would make branding seamless. No acronym change.”
“Solid business decision,” Romero quips.
With my patience in the toilet, I snap at them. “Will you please focus?Fucking hell.We’re running out of time.”
Catching me at my composed finest, SSA Chase strolls into our shared workspace.
After giving me a ball-shriveling glare, she plunks a report on the center of the table. “DNA results are in from the fingernails of the Tampa home invasion victim. It’s official. Ginny Lawrence is the female unsub. She was Bonnie to Hartley’s Clyde.”
She tips her chin at the stack of paper. “Those are copies of the ERT report from the follow-up search of Hartley’s house in there. I only skimmed it. Saw enough to know we’re locked in.”
I scramble over, swiping the pages to see it for myself.
Anything to help take my mind off the possibility ofsending Lila into the Lion’s Den. And that isn’t a metaphor. The Lion’s Den is a bar that closed last year after a fire destroyed the back half of the building. Carnage picked it as the meeting place for theexchange. Sounds like a terrific place to trade one life for another in the dark of night.
I skim the DNA report first.
The swabs taken from under Janet’s fingernails gave us three distinct DNA profiles. Her own, naturally. The second profile is a 99 percent match for Troy Hartley, while the third hit on the DNA sample we took from Ginny Lawrence’s water bottle the other night.
Andthat’sthe upstanding woman my sister has been secretly communicating with.
Fan-fucking-tastic.
Chase drags a chair to the table and opens her laptop.
Despite the circumstances, I can’t get over my hero worship of her. Not all SSAs would dig in this way. Chase is in the thick of it with us.
I tuck the DNA report behind the other pages and search for something ERT found that might lead us to Kenzie faster.
Also studying the findings, Romero calls something out I didn’t get to yet. “Hayes, wasn’t your sister’s photo taken with a Polaroid from the first abduction?”
I answer him without looking up from the report. “Yep.”
“Bottom of page two,” he says. “They found a Polaroid camera at Hartley’s house. Nobody was looking for that on their first pass.”
While a solid find for the larger case, it doesn’t help me with Kenzie.
