The Enemy Inside (38 page)

Jay’s mind felt fuzzy from lack of sleep just trying to keep up with their schedules. He hadn’t snatched more than three or four hours’ rest at a time since he started. But if he slept more than that, he wouldn’t make his fictitious deadlines, and he needed to stay under the radar if he was going to get any leads into Shipper at all.

The problem was he hadn’t got so much as a sniff of the suspect. He was considering phoning Cheney to call the whole thing off. Uncle Ted was long gone. His wandering thoughts were interrupted by the shrill of his cell. Picking it up off the seat beside him, he checked the caller ID and saw it was Berg.
 

He considered answering it for a moment and then let it go to voice mail. He wasn’t sure what to say to his soon-to-be ex-partner. He didn’t know how he was going to break it to her that he’d asked for a transfer. That she would not take it well was a raging understatement. He knew she might never speak to him again, and that would be after she beat the crap out of him.

It didn’t matter that he had to do it because he was in love with her, and that he hoped she would become his partner of a different, better kind. The woman had abandonment issues, and she wouldn’t care that it was the right thing to do, that the last thing they needed was to give defense attorneys any ammunition to use against the detectives at a criminal trial.
 

He knew she would be hurt and angry.

His voice mail was full with messages he had yet to listen to, many from Berg. But he just couldn’t face it.
 

Since their disastrous evening at her place, she had been distant and frosty. Her obvious concern when he left was the only recent sign that she gave a fuck about him at all.
 

He could only hope that eventually, if he was patient enough, she would open up to him again and they could be together. He even called one of his sisters, Elizabeth, for advice on what to do.
 

Ever the calm voice of reason, Elizabeth had been less than enthusiastic about his intentions toward Berg. Her words of a few days ago still rang in his muddled head like they had just been spoken.
 

“
Do you really want to be saddled with another lame duck, Jay?”
Elizabeth had asked.
“You’ve been down that road, and it didn’t work out for either of you, did it? You can’t fix them, no matter how much you might want to. Do yourself a favor and find yourself a nice, normal girl and settle down, have some kids. No one respects a penniless playboy in his forties.
”

Elizabeth had a point. Even Berg admitted he couldn’t fix her. But it was too late. Jay wanted to be with Berg more, he recognized, than he’d ever wanted anything or anyone—even Renee. He was even willing to wait to be with her until she’d finished the program. That was a first. The longest he’d ever had to wait to fuck a woman was the length of time it took to have dinner. And most of the time not even that long. Not when there were perfectly good restrooms just yards away from the table.

Jay shook his head, trying to wake up and clear it of thoughts of Berg. Back on the tollway, he spotted a hitchhiker way up ahead on the side of the road.
 

He shook his head. Despite all the publicity surrounding the hitchhikers who had gone missing, idiots were still trying to thumb a ride.
 

While he had decided to head home, it was still early in the morning and he figured she deserved a break. Working the many gears smoothly and lightly pressing the air compression brakes like Colt had shown him, he slowed down and pulled over next to the diminutive figure.

She was a tiny little Hispanic thing, he noticed, dressed in jeans and a shirt with a baseball cap pulled down low over her dark hair.
 

She kept her head down as she hauled herself into the cab, dragging what looked like a knapsack behind her.

“Where’re you headed?” Jay asked, putting the truck into first and preparing to take off.
 

She settled in the truck, pulling something out of her bag, before turning to Jay. As she turned, a flash of recognition hit Jay like a splash of freezing water. The woman looked just as surprised.
 

“Hey! Aren’t you—” That was all Jay managed to say before everything went black.

Chapter Forty

Berg, Smith, and Cheney sat tensely in the speeding police car. Rodriguez maneuvered the vehicle with a practiced touch, Berg and Smith sitting in the back, silent.
 

Hitting over one hundred miles per hour, they zoomed up the tollway, siren blaring, toward their target: a dead man on West Central Road.
 

The road ran parallel to the tollway out near the Paul Douglas Forest Preserve, which was almost the exact center point of where all the truckers’ bodies had been found. While the idea of another trucker murder was not relished, this call had a particular sting. A passing motorist who stopped to help and called 911 had discovered CPD identification on the body. So the detectives had no idea what, or who, to expect.

Berg sat huddled in a fog of fear as she stared out the back window, trying not to let herself be swept away by terror.
 

Please not Jay. Please not Jay
, she repeated in her head like a mantra, like if she said it enough it would make it true.
 

But she knew from bitter experience that no matter how much she wanted something not to be true, it didn’t make it so. How many times had she lain rigid on her pink ruffled bed as a young girl, praying fervently that her father would not open the door? Bargaining with God? It had never stopped him.

Jay’s cell was switched off.
 

What if he has been taken by Shipper? What if he is
 . . .
dead?
Not for the first time Berg cursed Jay’s refusal to fit a GPS tracking device to Colt’s rig. He had argued it wouldn’t be authentic, as the old man refused to have one fitted. But now they were blind.
 

What if he is being tortured for the past day and I’ve done nothing to save him?
 

Her panicked heart thumped in her chest so loud she was sure the other detectives could hear it over the whining siren.

“I’m sure Jay’s okay,” Smith muttered to Berg, patting her leg.
 

Unable to speak, she nodded, still searching the blurred terrain for any sign of Jay. Her colleagues’ chilly behavior had thawed following the emergency call. They were all now focused on what lay ahead and what it might mean for the case, not to mention to them personally.

Rodriguez slowed the car, the frantic flashing lights of emergency vehicles up ahead lighting the scene like a macabre carnival. Paramedics milled around, waiting for the police to arrive. They looked relieved at the appearance of the detectives and started loading their unused equipment back into two ambulances.
 

“We were too late,” one of them called to Cheney as they all climbed out of the car. “Guy was thrown clear out of his car. Massive injuries, nothing we could do.”

Cheney nodded grimly, and Berg felt relief wash over her rigid body like a warm waterfall. Her heart rate slowed slightly as she took what felt like her first breath in several minutes.
 

Not Jay
 . . .
just a car accident
 . . .
not Jay
.

The four walked toward the twisted pile of metal that had once been a white Toyota but now looked like a permanent, man-made limb of a huge, old oak tree on the side of the road.
 

Berg noticed a jagged hole in the safety glass of the windshield. The massive head-on impact had thrown the driver straight through, and he lay shrouded by a plastic sheet a full fifty yards clear of the car.
 

“Maybe the caller got it wrong about the ID,” Berg said as they walked toward the body.

“No,” Smith whispered, pale as he looked at the car’s license plate. “That’s Hamilton’s car . . .”

“Fuck!” Cheney yelled, as they all ran toward the body.
 

Being by far the fittest and arriving first, Berg yanked the sheet back, gasping in shock. “Oh, no . . .”

Covered in blood and gaping cuts from the impact and glass, Detective Hamilton lay dead, his eyes closed. His head was lying at an odd angle with his neck snapped.
 

Smith stifled a sob and walked a short distance away, his hand over his mouth. More sirens broke the solemn silence as highway patrol arrived, followed by the Cook County coroner’s van.
 

Berg walked over to Smith, wanting to offer soothing words, but unsure of what to say.
 

Smith saved her the worry. “I know this is not your fault, Berg, but I really can’t talk to you right now.”
 

Berg nodded and walked away, deciding instead to check out Hamilton’s car. She noticed a smashed handheld GPS unit lying on the ground near the body and wondered if the technophobic Hamilton had been trying to use it as he drove.
 

Reaching the car, it looked like the entire front end of the small sedan had disappeared into the tree. Leaning in through the shattered driver’s side window, she gently brushed away the safety glass, looking for Hamilton’s identification and any kind of indication of where he had been for the last twenty-four hours.
 

Giving up, she crossed to the other side of the car and poked her head through the missing window. Opening the glove compartment, she found Hamilton’s license and registration inside, along with his firearm. She held the Sig barrel to her nose, sniffing, trying to ascertain if it had been fired recently. There was no smell of gunpowder.
 

Putting it aside, she cleared away more glass from the seat and retrieved a folded piece of paper. Printed on it in ink were two sets of numbers to the seventh decimal place, separated by a comma. She had seen enough GPS coordinates to know what they were. The four-one latitude and the negative eight-seven longitude indicated the coordinates were in the Cook County area.
 

Berg stood. “Hey, anyone got a GPS?” she asked the detectives.
 

They shook their heads, walking over to the car.
 

“What you got?” Cheney asked.

“I found these GPS coordinates in Hamilton’s car, and the smashed unit near his body. It may be where he was headed, or where he’s been,” she replied.

Berg stabbed her finger at the end-call button on her cell furiously. “Turn on your fucking cell!” she screamed at the small device. She threw it down on the couch beside her so hard, it bounced off the cushion and landed on the floor with a clunk.
 

Why wasn’t Jay answering his cell?
Often, undercover cops went for weeks, sometimes months, without checking in. But Berg didn’t see any reason for that to be the case with Jay. She should’ve gotten him to check in daily.

Berg shoved down her fury and tried to concentrate on the case files in front of her. No evidence had been found linking Hamilton to the trucker murders yet, and she was hoping to find something they’d missed.
 

The ring of her cell interrupted her reading. Surprised, she picked it up quickly, hoping it was Jay. “Oh, hey, Cheney,” she said, disappointment evident in her voice.

“Gee, glad to hear your voice, too, Berg,” Cheney said.

“Have you heard from Jay today?”
 

“No, but he may not have had a chance to call in. Why?”

“No reason.” Berg sighed, knowing she would catch shit if it looked like she was unduly concerned about her undercover partner. The last thing she needed was for anyone else to know about her feelings—they were disturbing her enough as it was. “What’s happening?”

“We checked out those coordinates. Turns out they were in a remote part of the Spring Creek Valley Forest Preserve system. You and Jay were right. It looks like we just missed Shipper. Hamilton must have been going to meet him,” Cheney said.

Berg was impressed. That was as much of an apology as she’d ever got from a fellow detective. “If it’s any consolation, we didn’t want to be right. And we were the idiots who let him and Shipper go.”

“Yep, you’re morons. Anyway, there was evidence that someone had been camping there, but he was gone. There were a few skinned animal carcasses, so it’s a pretty good bet it’s our suspect. We’re canvassing the entire area; if he’s in that forest, we’ll find him eventually.”