“So he’s on some kind of Kumbaya self-discovery trip?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. The last time I talked to him, he only said there was something he needed to do and he’d be out of contact for a while.”
“Yeah, well, fuck that!” Jude exploded, and Libby pushed out of her chair to wrap her arms around his waist. He hugged her back with one arm, but it didn’t cool his anger. “Right now, we need him more. Cam’s in serious trouble.” He poked his desk with his pointer finger, punctuating each word: “Greer. Should. Be. Here.”
Reece held up his hands. “I’m not arguing with you, Jude. I’m just…making a point.”
“Yo, guys.” Marcus walked to the center of the room and held up his hands as if he was wrangling raptors. “C’mon, sniping at each other is not going to help.” He turned to Reece. “What do we know so far?”
Reece sighed and sat back. Rubbed his eyes under his glasses. “I’ve been going through Bellisario’s real estate holdings trying to determine the place he’d most likely hide Cam, but the list is extensive. It’ll take me hours to go through it all, if not days.”
“Time we don’t have,” Vaughn said.
Reece looked at him, features set in grim lines. “Exactly. And this list doesn’t include any real estate he has under aliases. That will take me even more time to dig up.”
“Okay.” Marcus nodded to the laptop. “Reece, you any good on that thing?”
“I know a trick or two.”
That was the understatement of the century. If it had a motherboard, Reece could make it his bitch.
“Good,” Marcus said. “Vaughn, give Reece your phone. Bellisario’s going to call with further instructions, and we need all the information we can get from the call when he does. It’s the best chance we have of tracking Cam.”
Vaughn dug the phone out of his pocket, slapped it into Reece’s hand. “Work your magic, bro.”
“Yeah, if only it was magic.” Reece scowled at the cracked screen. “What the hell did you do to this, use it as a hockey puck? It’s a beautiful piece of technology, and you abuse it like—”
Vaughn glowered at him.
Reece gave a pained sigh and connected the phone to his laptop with a cable. “When this is over, all of you are getting a lecture on how to take proper care of your phones. I’m tired of fixing them,” he muttered, then hunched over the keyboard and disappeared into his task in the way only a computer geek could—physically present, but mentally entrenched in the virtual world.
Eva finally stopped pacing. “So what happens once we know Cam’s location? We send in MPD? I can call my partner and have him mobilize—”
“No, we don’t want to involve the police.” A shadow crossed over Marcus’s expression. “Believe me, if Bellisario catches even the faintest whiff of MPD, he’ll cut his losses, and we’ll find Cam in the Potomac.”
“Then the bastard shouldn’t have abducted a former MPD detective who is married to a current one,” Eva snapped. “Bellisario had to know he’d have the whole of DC’s police force gunning for him.”
As she spoke, Vaughn watched Marcus’s jaw tighten. The shadow in his eyes got a little darker, a little deeper. Shit. Marcus wasn’t just talking hypotheticals here. “You’re speaking from experience.”
Marcus exhaled hard, and a weight seemed to settle around his shoulders, making them slump. “Yeah. Far more experience than I’d like. Trust me on this, Eva. We don’t want MPD involved.”
“Oh God.” She hugged herself, bent double. “I just want my husband back. Please. I just want him back.”
Under normal circumstances, Vaughn wasn’t much for hugging, but he couldn’t let her stand there, collapsing in on herself with grief and fear. He crossed to her, pulled her into his arms, and she clung like she needed the support more than she wanted to admit. Eva was a strong woman, but even the strongest had their breaking points, and she was getting close to the edge of hers. If Cam didn’t make it…
He immediately shut down that line of thought, refused to acknowledge it had even occurred to him. But in the deepest recesses of his mind, he knew the truth. If Cam died today, Eva wasn’t going to be the only one who broke.
“So what can we do?” Libby asked, finally breaking the heavy silence. She was sitting on her husband’s lap with Jude’s arms wrapped tightly, protectively around her. “I mean, if we can’t call the police and HORNET won’t get here in time to help, what do we do?”
“We need Bellisario to make contact again,” Marcus said, “and when he does, I’ll speak to him. Until then…” He met each of their gazes. “All we can do is wait.”
Chapter Eighteen
The waiting was going to drive him into a straightjacket.
Restless, Vaughn pushed out of his chair and paced several steps, then grabbed his phone and checked the screen again. Reece had worked his technological magic on the thing, and now they had the ability to record the conversation and track Bellisario in real time.