“I shouldn’t have even been on the case, but I was watching you break a little more each day. You stopped eating. You stopped sleeping. I couldn’t get through to you. I was losing you, and it scared me, Callen.” Her voice didn’t sound like her own. Distant and scratchy. Maeve licked her lips to buy herself time, but he was right about one thing. He deserved to know. “Agents aren’t permitted to work cases they might have a personal connection to. It’s a conflict of interest, and biases can creep up on you, but she was my best friend. She was your sister, and I couldn’t stand there and watch you destroy yourself trying to find her. So I convinced the special agent in charge in the Salt Lake office to let me drive down to assist local PD.”
It all felt like another lifetime, her life separating into two different phases. Before Lauren and After Lauren. “Nobody here knew my connection to Lauren, but once that notebook went missing, everything came out into the open. The special agent in charge immediately removed me from the case, and I was suspended. Within a week, the crime scene was released. A month later, the search teams and K9 units were called off. Nobody was looking for her, and I… I couldn’t leave her out here. By that time, we’d already split, and I transferred to the Las Vegas office. I had the resources, the anonymity and the proximity to keep searching. There wasn’t much to go on though. Until now.”
There was a softening in Callen’s shoulders. Not a significant amount to convince her he could forgive her for compromising his sister’s investigation but enough to tell her he understood what drove her to lie. “The container is making it impossible to access my surveillance feeds. I need to step out.” Lowering his phone to his side, he half turned toward the door. “Thank you. For not giving up on her.”
Maeve thought she might have nodded as he stepped free of the container. Turning her back to the door, she swiped at her face. She had to pull herself together. Emotion couldn’t take the lead in the case this time. Lauren and Iliana were counting on her, and somewhere in this damn freezing box was a clue as to who might’ve been involved in their disappearances.
Heavy metal hinges protested from behind. She turned in time to see the door swinging closed and rushed forward to stop it. Too slow. Her hands connected with cold steel as scraping sounded from the other side. “Callen!”
The fluorescent lights flickered. Then went out.
Chapter Thirteen
Callen jerked awake.
A splinter of pain rocketed from the back of his head and shot toward his eyes. His head hit something solid but soft, and another round of lightning surged behind his eyelids. Hell. His senses took their damn time coming around. Shadows spread out in front of him, only interrupted by the faint glow of the truck’s familiar dark blue control panel. He was sitting behind the wheel of his truck. The engine was running, headlights casting the rushing river through the windshield alight.
His skull lit up as he hit that tender spot against the headrest again, and Callen craned his gaze out the driver’s-side window, into the darkness. “What the hell?”
He knew this river. Knew the stretch of riverbank and the slight curve that would take him along the cliffs. He’d walked it so many times trying to find something—anything—to tell him where Lauren might’ve gone. Only thing he didn’t know was how he’d gotten here. The last thing he remembered…
Maeve.
“Oh, good. You’re awake.” The voice drew his attention to the passenger seat. To the masked man sitting there as though they’d prearranged this meeting in the middle of the night. At a crime scene. “Thought you might never wake up. There were a couple times you came around, but I must’ve hit you harder than I expected. My bad.”
Callen moved to go for the weapon stashed in his center console. Biting pain sang from his wrists, digging in deeper with every pull. He’d been zip-tied to the steering wheel.
“Did you really think I didn’t know where you stashed all your weapons?” The passenger leaned forward, popping open the glove compartment. The inside light wasn’t enough to highlight much, but Callen clocked the all-black attire as well as the man’s build as he extracted one of Callen’s tactical knives from within. Powering down the window, his abductor tossed the knife out. The thud registered a split second before the window powered up. The guy was tall. At least as tall as Callen, but not as muscular. The dim lighting and the ski mask placed just right guaranteed he wouldn’t be able to pick up on any identifying characteristics. Then again, physical features weren’t the only identifiers in Callen’s line of work. The way he moved, the way he dressed, even the fluctuations in the man’s voice told him this wasn’t the first time he’d assaulted someone. “I’ve been in this truck more times than I can count.”
There was no point in asking who the hell this guy was. It was a waste of time considering the mask guaranteed Callen couldn’t identify him, but it was obvious he believed he knew Callen. Had access to his vehicle, potentially even his home. Callen fisted both hands, ready to remove the entire steering column if necessary before he beat this guy over the head with it, but an unconscious suspect didn’t do him any good. He wanted answers. “What do you want?”
“The same thing I’ve always wanted, but you, sir, just keep getting in my way.” Leaning back in the seat, the man beside him was the definition of relaxed under pressure. How many times had he attacked someone from behind and zip-tied them to the steering wheel? “Well, you’re not the only one. Your sister, too. And that other lady. What was her name? Eliza? Isla? Indie?You’d think I’d know after how long I watched her, but they all just start to run together after a while.”
Callen’s blood went cold. He fisted his hands for an entirely different reason, fighting back the numbness in his fingertips. Lauren. This man had known Lauren. And Iliana. Dread pooled at the base of his spine, but Callen forced his hands to release. “How the hell do you know my sister?”
“Oh, that’s not the question you really want to ask, is it, Callen?” His abductor turned dark eyes on him, and Callen had the distinct impression the man was smiling from beneath the mask. “You want to know if I had anything to do with her disappearance. To make it clear, yes. You see, Lauren happened to figure out my little secret, and she threatened to tell on me. I couldn’t have that, so I asked her to meet me here. Right at the bank of this river. After that, it was just a matter of making her vanish into thin air. Gotta tell you, though, she was a fighter. More so than Iliana.”
Callen couldn’t contain the rage, and he threw his upper body across the center console to get to the suspect. “You son of a bitch! Where is she? Where is Lauren?”
“Now, now, Callen. You’ve got to learn to control that temper of yours. It’s always gotten you into trouble. Ever since you were a kid, right?” His attacker threw his hands up in surrender, though Callen doubted there was a single bone in the guy’s body that intended to give in so easily. “Your mommy and daddy got all those calls from the principal about you fighting the other kids. It was any wonder you went into such a violent job in security. Is that why you came all the way down here to be a ranger? Surround yourself with nature and quiet? ’Cause I got to say, it’s not working.”
Callen’s heart threatened to beat straight out of his chest. The words coming out of the bastard’s mouth made sense on a logical level, but there was no way the man in the passenger seat couldhave so much information on him. He sucked in a deep breath through his nose, but there was no calming the raging storm. “Is she alive?”
“Who? Lauren?” The bastard went back to pulling a handgun Callen had hidden beneath the passenger seat. That went out the window, too. Followed by a Taser identical to the one he’d gifted the women in his family all those years ago. No searching. As though he knew exactly where to look. Just pure disarming weapon by weapon. “What do you think?”
A flood of grief hit harder than he expected. He’d known the chances of recovering Lauren alive, but to have her death confirmed by the man seemingly responsible for her disappearance hurt. “I’m going to rip your spine out of your body. Vertebrae by vertebrae until you tell me what you did with her body.”
“Now, that’s not very nice. Here I am, giving you the information you want, and all you can think about is hurting me. I expected better of a man who claims to want to protect the people he cares about.” The slight uptick in the bastard’s voice told Callen he was smiling again. “Besides, you already know where she is.”
“What do you mean I already know? I’ve been looking for her for…” Callen froze. No. That hadn’t been his sister. He would’ve known the moment he’d set sights on those remains. Wouldn’t he? The mental image of those bones—bleached white—and left for anyone to find refused to budge. What had Maeve said? Caucasian woman in her late twenties or early thirties, who’d never had children or known obesity or malnutrition? “What did you do?”
The words barely strangled free of his throat as his entire body sank deeper into the seat. The dropping sensation sent the blood in his face and upper body fleeing.
“Nothing short of what she deserved, my friend.” Familiarity bled into the attacker’s voice. Like they’d met before. “So you see, I’m not such a bad guy. I gave you your sister back. Unfortunately for you, your reunion will be short. Because I have a very special agent waiting for me to rescue her from your locked storage unit.”
Maeve. The son of bitch had purposefully directed Callen’s attention from the woman who’d sacrificed her career to keep investigating Lauren’s disappearance. Who’d gotten his parents into therapy and been there for them when he couldn’t. All this time he’d thought he was keeping his family together, but it’d been her from the beginning. For no other reason than she cared about them. And she’d taken everything he’d thrown at her—the breakup, the eviction from their apartment, the no contact and cruel words about her character and ability to do her job—without a single word of protest. Without fighting back. Because he’d convinced her she deserved it. “Don’t even think about touching her.”
“Why not? You don’t want her anymore, do you? That’s why you broke up with her and threw her away like she never existed.” The masked asshole leaned forward. “Thankfully, I’m here to save her from your ornery ass.”
