The Doll (3 page)

Vanessa Michael Munroe was a killer with a predator’s natural instincts; she could take care of herself. What scared him—terrified him—was what would happen if she was pushed too far. He’d seen that place of destruction, had witnessed firsthand what the darkness could do to her mind, and if whoever had taken her had also taken Logan …

Bradford let the thought die and cut off the murky places to which it led. He stood in place, deliberating, analyzing, then whispered, “Surveillance footage.”

Walker’s head tipped up and around.

He said, “Fiber optics.”

They found the security system racked inside the kitchen’s closet, the miniature cooling fans still blowing and signs of hurried disturbance along the walls.

The recording tray was empty.

Bradford scanned behind the equipment, where clusters of wires fed to and from machines through the wall. He used the closet walls to brace himself and shimmied up to the faint outline of a cutaway. Pushed up, and the segment of ceiling lifted and slid away on rollers.

The area above the kitchen was clean, had been decked, and the heating and cooling air vents redirected to include this small area—everything opposite what one might expect in an unused crawl space. A foot away from the opening were two servers and next to them a small rack of jacketed DVDs. He punched the button to open the recording tray, ejected an unmarked disk, slid it into a sleeve, and dropped it down to Walker.

They moved from the kitchen back to the front area, where the computers had been destroyed and the hard drives removed. Hunted for logs, journals, notations on paper, anything that might direct them to Logan’s last visitor, but what they were searching for, if it had ever existed at all, had probably ended up on a scrap of paper tossed out with yesterday’s trash.

They didn’t speak again until they were back inside the Explorer and Bradford had found a random pay phone from which he made an anonymous call to 911.

“What’s the connection?” Walker asked. “Michael and Logan?”

Bradford, eyes fixed on the road ahead, didn’t respond. He didn’t have the words to articulate the jumbled confusion of experience and history, the obscure paths Munroe had trod, from them the murky depths they were about to wade.

Walker sighed and turned back to the window. Said, “You know things I don’t know and I can’t help solve this thing if you insist on playing the role of grieving boyfriend.”

Bradford stole a glance in her direction. Said, “Whoever did this came after Michael and took Logan as collateral, as a hostage.” Paused. “Either that or they took him as a setup to a revenge killing—for Michael to witness before they kill her, too. One of those two.”

A long, heavy silence filled the car and eventually Walker said, “Wow.”

“It’s all just conjecture,” he said, “but you wanted to know.”

She shifted in the seat so that she faced him. “I don’t understand. Logan races motorcycles for a living. Why the hell does he need his place wired like that?”

“He races, he retools performance engines, but he’s also got a supply business that has nothing to do with his machine shop. Logan’s kind of a go-to guy. If you need something military-grade and difficult to get, he’ll do the getting.”

“But no alarm system?”

“Nothing that would bring law enforcement to his doorstep.”

“And you don’t think what happened today might possibly be because of him and”—Walker air-quoted—“his supply business?”

Bradford shot her another glance and turned back to the road. Whoever had done this had taken Munroe clean while Logan’s place was trashed and bloody. Even without knowing the history, it didn’t take a genius to follow the logic. He waited until he’d exited the freeway and stopped at a traffic light before answering. “It may be intertwined with his business somehow,” he said, “but ultimately this is about Michael.”

“And you know this how? More gut instinct?”

“Stop sniping at me,” he said. “I know you see it. Whoever did this grabbed Michael in public and in broad daylight, went through a hell of a lot of effort to create a diversion. This is not an amateur, so let’s just assume that if all he wanted was her dead, Logan would be here grieving over her body with us, but instead he’s missing, too. The only reason to take Logan is to control Michael.”

“Fine for a theory,” she said, “but why take Logan specifically? Sure, he’s her friend, but if the idea is some sort of hostage situation, why not take you? Why not me for that matter, or some kid on the street?”

Bradford waited again before speaking. How to explain who
Logan was to Munroe? “Holding Logan hostage is the best weapon they could have come up with,” he said. “She’s tighter with him than with any blood bond.”

“Someone knows this?”

Bradford nodded. Someone knew.
Who
was the big fucking question.

Down the hall and through the glass walls, Jahan shifted away from the monitors, watching their approach, swiveling the chair back and forth until Bradford entered the war room.

Before Bradford spoke, Jahan said, “Confirmed the VIN numbers to the ambulance. Found the service depot and am working on tying in to Dallas Fire-Rescue records and GPS systems so we can figure out where it came from and where it’s been.” He paused. “News on Logan?”

Bradford shook his head. “He’s missing, too.”

Walker handed Jahan the disk. “Don’t know if it’s current, but we pulled a surveillance backup.”

Jahan stared at it for a moment, then turned to the computer and inserted the disk into a DVD tray.

Bradford and Walker leaned in closer.

At their crowding, Jahan put his palms against the desk and rolled the chair backward. “Please,” he said.

They both straightened, then took a step back. Jahan waved them on farther. “Go do what you do and let me do what I do.” When neither of them budged, he slid lower in the chair, stretched his legs, and tilted his head upward. “I’ve got all day.”

Walker glanced at Bradford, and when he offered no reassurance, she took another step in retreat, headed for the hall, and paused in the door frame just long enough to lean back in. Said, “You’d better call me if there’s news, Jack—you leave me out of this and I swear I’ll find a way to make the rest of your life fucking miserable.”

The click of the wall segment followed a half-minute later.

Jahan muttered under his breath, his right hand making a talking motion, “As if she doesn’t trust me!” When, after a long silence, Bradford didn’t move, Jahan glared up at him.

“I need to watch,” Bradford said.

“No, you don’t. I know you think it’ll help you feel better, keeping busy, being up-to-the-second on what’s going on, and all that. But standing there breathing in my ear while I pull this apart is only going to give you anxiety—is going to give
me
anxiety. There are new notes on the board and you have a business to run.” Jahan motioned across the room toward the whiteboards. “Go that way.”

Bradford sighed, shifted away from the computer and everything he hoped, and fought against hoping, to find.

Hope
. The activity of the impotent. His was a world of action, of relying on his own wits and ability to create the luck that kept him alive, and yet here in a moment of weakness he was a mendicant
hoping
for alms.

He turned away, a concession to a friendship with Jahan that went back far enough that privately they still called each other names earned during rougher and cruder times.

Jahan’s career path had taken him from army intelligence into Bradford’s mercenary fold. At thirty-seven, he was a second-generation American, semi-attached to an extended family in Mumbai, and having spent the predominance of the last eight years working private security in the Middle East, he could now, at least on the surface, as easily pass for Pakistani, Saudi, Persian, or Syrian as he could Indian—sometimes Mexican or Colombian, depending on a person’s prejudice, and there always seemed to be plenty of prejudice to go around.

Jahan had a snarky way of bringing bigotry to the fore, and as it wasn’t easy to argue with a smartass who had a penchant for mockery and an IQ of 152, his words often provoked blows. Dodging, mocking, he would laugh and taunt, claiming that jacking with
intolerance was the best free entertainment around. It didn’t take long for the Capstone term of endearment to follow.

B
RADFORD FACED THE
whiteboards and the diagram he’d put up this morning when the image of Munroe toppling off the motorcycle was still fresh and raw and hadn’t felt like two weeks of decay smothering his airway.

He rubbed out his previous words and replaced them simply with
Michael
. Then, as if on autopilot, filled in the blanks with what little he knew: They, whoever “they” were, knew Michael was in the country, knew where to find her, knew she was a woman, knew who Logan was to her, and knew how to find him and that his place was wired. In the heaviness of the unanswerable, Bradford’s eyes wandered along the boards to Jahan’s latest updates on the team in Peshawar. The satellite phone bill on that job alone was going to bankrupt him.

Seven of his core team were currently out on assignment—the two in Pakistan, plus four in Afghanistan and one in Sri Lanka. With the exception of himself, who as boss and owner got to cherry-pick for his own schedule, the overseas assignments were rotated with homebase operations and factored by time and expertise.

Home was nice, but the big money was in the hazard pay. It took a certain mentality to sign on for something that meant more time living rough in shithole situations than with hot water and clean sheets. The job was difficult on relationships, if you were lucky enough to have them, and it seemed at times that a good portion of running the business involved weeding out the lunatics.

Dozens of others worked under Capstone’s umbrella, foot soldiers who came and went, but like partners in a law firm, these nine—ten if you counted Munroe—were vested: they were Bradford’s people, tried and proven, a breed apart from polite, or even impolite, society. Their motives for staying with the company varied, but one thing was consistent: They were each very good at what they did because the incompetent didn’t live long.

V
IABLE FOOTAGE WAS
sparse, but not for the reasons Bradford had expected. Though the intruders had grabbed the original disk, they’d still taken precautions against being recognized. They
were a pack of three, with a leader who had let himself in with a key, followed by two accomplices with baseball bats, their faces shielded from the camera by caps and lowered heads. The fight, which had taken place in the kitchen, was off camera but had lasted a painful four minutes.

Three against one. For four minutes.

When they’d hauled Logan out, his right leg appeared to be broken. He was cut and bleeding, but so were two of his assailants, and he still fought, still took a beating, all the way out the front door.

The final scene was cued at 10:13
A.M.
, minutes after Munroe had arrived at Capstone, and for a long while the war room was cocooned in stunned silence. Almost simultaneously, Bradford let out a stream of expletives and Walker went off in Brazilian Portuguese. Jahan remained quiet, his fingers tap-tapping against the desk. Finally he said, “Did they take out Michael to get to Logan, or take out Logan to get to Michael?”

The question was more or less the same line of inquisition Walker had raised in the car and Bradford didn’t want to run through it all over again. “Put out a run for information,” he said. “See if Logan owes anyone money or if there are any jealous lovers in recent history. My bet is he’s clean. He’s got too much to lose, is too focused on living life and reconnecting with his daughter.”

Jahan said, “But—”

Bradford cut him off. Said, “Michael is the target, Logan is the collateral.”

“Collateral for what?”

Bradford closed his eyes. Pressed the base of his palm to his forehead. Another go through the same information. “Collateral to save their own lives. Protection. They just grabbed Michael,” he said. “Michael.” He paused for emphasis. “Assuming she’s tranquilized now, what happens when she wakes up? Logan is the cage, the shock collar, the shackles …” He stopped. This was pointless. A waste of time.

In his peripheral vision, he saw Walker shush Jahan. She’d tell him later. They would hash out reservations and alternate theories on their own. At the moment the motive didn’t matter half as much as moving quickly with what little they knew.

Bradford paused, waiting for argument, for contradiction, and
got nothing. Said, “Besides those of us here in this room, those on our team, how many people know the role Logan plays in her life?”

Walker shook her head. Jahan turned palms-up.

“There can’t be many,” Bradford said, “and that does us some pretty big favors in narrowing the playing field.”

Jahan stood and strode to the whiteboard. Added notations to Bradford’s scrawl. He turned to the others. “Where do we go with this?”

Bradford said, “Find Michael, find Logan,” and turned back to the screen, where the image of the intruders stood frozen in time, two heads down, the leader’s tilted up just enough that the side of his face showed to the camera. There was a look of youth in his posture, an arrogance that hadn’t yet dimmed through time and experience. “That son of a bitch knows it’s there,” Bradford said. “And he’s smirking.”