She places her hands against her head, trying to think about what happened. Had the ride-share guy abducted her as a crime of opportunity, or is this Alonzo’s doing? He’d said she had until Monday, dammit. And it’s still only…wait…she doesn’t know what day it is. She doesn’t even know what time it is. She could have been out for one hour, or fifty. But given how dehydrated she feels, she has to assume it’s been at least a couple hours. Could Alonzo have really pulled this off? When she met him a few months ago, he hadn’t seemed like someone who had these kinds of resources. But then again, she doesn’t know much about the man. Maybe the person she’d met was just a persona—something to throw people off.

  But the point is she hasn’t gone back on her part of the deal. Not yet. Did it matter that she’s considering going to the cops? Okay, maybe. But he had no way of knowing that. She’d only started thinking of it sitting there across from Margaret, knowing how disappointed she’d be if she knew what Hannah had gotten herself into. She doesn’t want to be that person anymore.

  Hannah returns to the bathroom, looking for anything she can use to break that door lock. The only things not nailed down are the cup and the toothbrush. Is the toothbrush for her? She’d assumed it was for whoever lived here, but it is slowly dawning on her now that this place has been set up for her. She is in a cell, and who knows for how long. Surely Alonzo won’t keep her in here forever, right? He’ll want to retrieve his goods. Even if he tears her apartment apart, he probably won’t find them.

  But what if he does? Then what use is she to him? Could he keep her here indefinitely? What would be the point? Unless he’s hoping to squeeze her parents for money.

  That has to be it. He’s gone back on his word—what else did she expect from a criminal—and instead decided to kidnap her to get a bigger payday from her parents. But how had he even known? It wasn’t like she went around announcing who she was. To him, she should have just been another customer, no one special. This was why she should have changed her last name once she was out of college.

  This had been nothing but a disaster from the beginning. How did she think she could ever get away with selling drugs? She’d promised Alonzo she could sell the entire bottle in a week, then gone home and hid it, too afraid to approach her coworkers and friends. Too afraid of what they would say or think about her. And despite her promising Alonzo access to a brand-new market, one that had lots of disposable income, she hadn’t even made one dollar yet. She suspected he had someone watching her, keeping tabs. He must have seen that she hadn’t made any progress and gotten nervous. She should have just returned his goods to him, telling him she was out, that it was too dangerous.

  But instead, she’d gone home every night, convinced she’d work up the courage the next day. And every morning she’d left for work without the pills, unable to bring herself to it. She just wasn’t that kind of person; despite the fact she desperately needed the money. But if she’d known a prison was in her future, she never would have even gotten involved with it. She’d rather be in jail than in here. At least her family would know where she was. Because now she is pretty sure this was an underground bunker of some kind, and she isn’t going to be getting out of here anytime soon, if at all.

  Hannah walks over to the locked door and begins banging on it, though it’s like hitting concrete. She isn’t even sure the sound is making its way through. What is she supposed to eat in this place? Maybe he won’t feed her, maybe she’ll just waste away in this place, with no one knowing where she is.

  Hannah hits the door until her hand is too sore to hit it any longer. Then she leans back against it, sliding down to the floor and wraps her arms around her knees. She just wants to go home. To explain what she is doing, even if it means going back to her parents. Right now even that seems preferrable to this.

  Hannah hears what sounds like a microwave beep and looks up. In the upper right corner of the room sits a small camera mounted to the ceiling, with a red light on. She blinks away her tears so she can see it more clearly. How had she missed that? So someone is watching her after all. Probably laughing as she nearly broke her hand on that door.

  “What do you want, Alonso?” she yells. “If you ever hope to get those pills back, you’ll have to let me out of here. You won’t find them without me!”

  There is no response. Of course not. Nothing she says in here will make a difference. She’ll just have to wait and see what his play is. In the meantime, she’ll have to try hard not to think about how small this room actually is. But when she looks up, there is an air vent, no larger than twelve inches by twenty inches on the ceiling. At least she won’t suffocate. But even if she could move the furniture, there would be no way she could fit through there. Not without dislocating half her body.

  “Not going to talk to me, huh?” she asks, taking a seat on the bed. “Fine.”

  “We can talk,” a modulated voice says. It seems to be coming from the walls themselves. But she can’t tell if it is male or female, the distortion is too great. Still. If she can communicate with him, maybe she can convince him to let her go. It’s the only chance she has.

  “First though,” the voice says. “Who’s Alonzo?”

  Hannah freezes. Fuck.

  Chapter Ten

  Leaving my documents from Parrish in the car, I head back to the office to meet up with Zara again. As soon as I get a chance, I’m going to upload the woman’s picture into the facial recognition database to see if I get a hit. Parrish’s words keep echoing in my head that I’m going off-book for this one, but I don’t care. Once I determine who this woman is and why she decided to murder our suspect, no one at the agency will question it. This is one of those situations where it’s better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission.

  It isn’t lost on me that I’m now searching for two missing women. But I’m not going to let this interfere with my search for Hannah Stewart anymore. My business with Parrish is done, which means I can handle everything from here on out by myself and on my own time.

  “Hey,” I call out to Zara as I pass back through the double doors that lead to our department. Now that Zara has been assigned field duty and been given the new title of Special Agent, she’s been placed up here with the big guns, meaning she has a new workstation. Back when she was an Intelligence Analyst she’d do her work from anywhere, home, the office, her car; wherever she could get a secure connection. Now, because of the nature of the job, she doesn’t have as much flexibility to work when and how she wants to. I think that’s probably the only thing that bothers her about this job. Otherwise she seems to love it.

  “Pick up your dry cleaning?” she asks.

  I hesitate a second, asking myself if she suspects. But then I have to remember not telling her is for her own good. If for some reason this all does go bad, I don’t want any of the backlash to land on her. “Yep, all taken care of,” I say. “Have you made any progress with finding those two men?”

  She shakes her head. “I’m still running them through NICS. But nothing so far. I decided instead to focus on our other friend.”

  “The ubiquitous Robert Aruz,” I say, taking my own station. Part of me wants to go back to my car just to retrieve those pictures so I can feed them into the system right now. It’s going to be hard to wait until I have a free minute, but I don’t have a choice. I made a promise and I have to stick to it. “Found anything on him yet?”

  “Not much, here.” She sends over what few files she’s pulled, and I go through the information. Aruz is only two years out of college, making him not even twenty-five yet. Not only did he build Ryde 4 Lyfe from the ground up, but he also runs most of it himself. It seems he has a small support staff, which may or may not still include Dana.

  He graduated top of his class from MIT, then moved down to D.C. to be close to his family, most of which live just north of the city. It seems he managed to start Ryde 4 Lyfe with a few angel investors and venture capitalists, all, no doubt, people who he met up in Boston. But the company seems to be performing well.

  “No arrests, no citations, not even a parking ticket,” I say, going back through his record. “He’s as clean as fresh snow.”

  “Has to make you wonder why he’s so opposed to us being there,” Zara says. She’s not wrong. Somewhere along the line this guy has had a bad experience with the police. Otherwise he’s just being an asshole, which, I suppose, is possible.

  “Maybe it’s not him,” I say. “Could be a family member or someone else who had a run-in with the law.”

  “Ohhh, good point,” Zara says and turns back to her computer, her fingers flying over the keys. “Here we go. He has an uncle in MCDC, and his father has been arrested twice.”

  “For what?” I ask.

  “Looks like petty larceny and this other one…reckless driving?” She looks into the screen more intently, her face less than two inches from the surface. “But it was thrown out. The judge said it was abuse of police power. Looks like they might have been profiling.”

  I lean back in my chair, netting my hands behind my head. “That makes sense.” No wonder he doesn’t want us there. He thinks we’re going to charge him with something he didn’t do. He’s probably grown up hearing horror stories about cops and how they can just bend the system to their own will. Which, I have to admit, is somewhat true. It’s crazy what some officers get away with. But I have to believe there are more good cops out there than bad. And hopefully some of these systems are changing, though that didn’t seem to be the case in a place like Stillwater, at least not until we got the current chief out. Places like D.C. are harder because they rely on a network of precincts that are run by the old guard: cops who have been around forever, or whose families have served since the early days. It makes it difficult to see systemic change when the people in charge won’t give up their power and let younger generations take over.

  Unfortunately, that extends to the FBI as well. Though I feel like things are getting better here. Twenty years ago I would have been fired for what happened four months ago. But because Janice is a senior agent, and the old boys club doesn’t have the power it once did, I can count on a fairer outcome. I just hope we can keep things moving in the right direction.

  “So what are you thinking? How do we get to him without trying to get a warrant?” she asks.

  I really don’t know. Without some kind of leverage we’re up shit creek. It’s unlikely we’d be able to get a judge to sign off on a warrant unless we can actually show Hannah used that app and at this point we don’t even know if she was their customer. It’s the classic chicken and the egg. We need one to prove the other.

  “Did you check all the rest of the ride-shares in the city? Even the tiny ones?”

  Zara nods. “She wasn’t registered with any of them. It’s this or nothing.”

  “That looked like a ride-share, on the video, right?” I ask. “I’m not imagining it.”

  “Yeah, unless she treats her friends like chauffeurs.” Zara pulls out what remains of the sandwich from Arnie’s, taking a bite into it. “So good,” she says, her mouth full of turkey. “We should make that a regular stop.”

  “Uh-huh,” I reply, not really paying attention. I’m trying to focus on how we can crack Robert Aruz. There has to be something. “There aren’t any other cameras along the route to her apartment are there?”

  Zara pinches her features together. “I’m not sure.” She works on the computer a bit longer. “Looks like one. At a stoplight at Campbell. It’s a cross street on the way.”

  “Can you pull the feeds from the city?”

  “Gimmie a sec,” she says. This is the good thing about Zara. She’s been in these systems so long she knows most of them by heart. And even the ones she doesn’t know, she knows who to talk to so she can get what she needs. It’s impressive. “Requisition…rushed…approved, and…here we go.”

  I get up and look over her shoulder. “You are too good.”

  “Don’t tell me, tell Janice. I want to make sure this isn’t a temporary thing. Being out with you is too much fun.”

  “You realize that you’ll probably be assigned your own cases, right? Most of us work alone.”

  She shrugs. “Yeah, I know. Still. It’ll be fun while it lasts.”

  The database pops up for Saturday night. Zara begins running through the files during the proper time code. “So she left the bar around eleven-ish…”

  “Eleven-oh-six, according to Arnie’s footage.”

  “Right, so we’ll start at eleven-oh-six and watch straight through. Shouldn’t be more than ten minutes, tops.” She brings the feed up and the timecode at the bottom of the camera shows the proper time. It looks out on to a desolate street, colored in all black and white. If we see the same style car, we can just get the license number and question the driver.

  “Quiet street,” I say after a few minutes have passed. Zara sped the feed up to 2X so we’re not waiting around. “No cars yet.”

  “No nothing,” she says. “No dog walkers, people heading home for the night, late-night pizza delivery. It’s like the most boring street in the city.”

  A few seconds later headlights indicate a car is approaching under the light. It stops, then proceeds down the street. But instead of a car, it’s a van. Definitely not the vehicle we saw.

  We wait until eleven-sixteen. No other cars have come past. “Hold on a few minutes. Let’s just make sure it’s not a slow driver.”

  We wait until the counter shows eleven-thirty-one. The only other car that came through was a supped-up pickup. Definitely not a sedan. “That’s not good,” I say.

  “So…what? The driver took her?” Zara asks. “How is that possible? The company would log if the driver deviated from his path…and that he didn’t drop off Hannah like he was supposed to.”

  I shoot her a glance. “I think we just figured out the real reason why Mr. Aruz is so nervous.”

  “Is this enough for a warrant?” she asks.

  I straighten up. “Screw the warrant. This is enough to nail the bastard. If he is knowingly covering up the fact one of his drivers may have acted improperly…not only is that a crime, he’s aiding and abetting Hannah’s kidnapping, whether he knows it or not. Trust me, we don’t need the warrant.”

  “I like the sound of that,” Zara says.

  “C’mon,” I say. “Let’s go put the fear of God in him.”

  Chapter Eleven

  I step out of Zara’s car and find myself staring at the façade of Ryde 4 Lyfe for the second time in the same day. It’s getting late in the afternoon, but the lights inside are still on and because of the illumination, I can see Dana still at her post. Which means there’s a good chance Aruz is still in there too.

  We make our way to the door, and I tug on it, thinking it’s going to be locked again. But surprisingly, it opens. Dana looks up when it does, a surprised expression on her face. She wasn’t expecting us back.

  “Oh,” she says. “Agents, I…um…did you already get the warrant?”

  “We need to see Aruz. Right now,” I say.

  She heads into the back. Less than a second later I can already hear Aruz berating her. I give Zara a look and she nods. We both head to the back. The way he’s carrying on it’s like someone cut off his leg.

  As soon as he sees us, he’s out of his chair, which happens to be in the middle of a large bank of monitors and servers, all crammed in the room here in the back. “No! I told you. No warrant, no access. Now get—”

  “Stop right there, Mr. Aruz,” I say, pulling my jacket back to reveal my weapon. I unclip it from the holster but leave it in place.

  He stops short, and his eyes flick from me to the weapon and back again. “You can’t shoot me. I didn’t do anything.”

  “Actually, you did,” Zara says. “You’ve participated in a coverup. We have the authority to arrest you and drag you down to headquarters. Have you ever been inside the building? On a tour maybe? We’ve got some nice, comfy cells there.”

  “Coverup, what coverup?” he says, his face burning red. This man has zero respect for authority, which makes him even more unpredictable. “You’re making this up. You’re just manufacturing evidence so you can get access to my proprietary algorithm.”

  “I don’t give two shits about your algorithm,” I tell him, my patience wearing thin. “What I do care about is a young woman who seems to have been picked up by one of your drivers and then abducted.”

  “Impossible,” he says, shaking his head. “We prioritize the safety of our customers above everything else. Every driver goes through an extensive background check and the program monitors every ride. Every client is delivered to their chosen destination. If someone deviated, I would know it in an instant. Do you realize what kind of liability risk this kind of business incurs? My insurance bills are insane.”

  “Did your program register any errors on Saturday night?” I ask. “We have a customer of yours who we think called your service, was picked up, and then just disappeared into thin air.”

  “You think? You barge in here to my place of business, threaten me with a weapon—”

  I hold my hand out. “No one has threatened you, Mr. Aruz.”

  He turns to Dana. “You saw it, she put her hand on her weapon.” Before she can answer he turns back to me pointing. “I have a witness. Unless you plan on killing us both.”

  I keep both of my hands up to show him I’m not a threat. Aruz is more erratic than I gave him credit for; he’s just looking for an excuse to blow all this up, and he wants to take us down in the process. If we keep up like this, we’re never going to get anything out of him. He’ll stonewall us until eternity. Especially since he’s right. We don’t know Hannah used his service. But we have a pretty good idea, having eliminated all the other services in the city. It’s obvious from the video evidence she used a ride-share.